Jim Crace - Genesis

She was surprised to see how deep into the park Lix had driven her the night before. The car wheels had churned up ugly and irresponsible ruts across the grass. The service road was almost out of sight, but anyone could find them there — and issue reprimands. Their tracks were deep and almost unbroken. She stretched her arms and legs. She tried to warm herself, loading up on early sun. It would serve her husband right if he got caught and fined for Damage and for Reckless Parking. The celebrated Lix.

Now that her bladder had been emptied and her limbs untangled, Mouetta felt refreshed and comfortable enough to concentrate on her ill temper. It was the product of their anniversary, that much she knew. Was it their failings — well, Lix’s failings — with the student that bothered her? Perhaps, to some extent. She’d set her heart on that “sweet boy.” On having him at home. On taking him from Freda. And, yes, her husband had been feeble, as he usually was when there was any challenge to be faced, or any risk, or any threat to his good name. Actually, the firebrand student had almost faded from her memory. What then? The night of damp discomfort in the car? Her husband’s hurried lovemaking, the sudden sated ease with which he’d dropped asleep? Not that. A woman’s used to that.

Freda, then? Was she to blame? Was her arrest the cause of this uneasiness? No, that was an ancient memory as well, surprisingly. She ought to, she knew, collect her cell phone from the car at once and scroll through her contacts for a sympathetic and earlyrising lawyer. She ought, at least, to let her cousin know that the student had not been rescued yet. The poor boy would want feeding. But Freda’s predicament had lost its urgency overnight. The detainee would have to wait, Mouetta felt, till she and Lix got home and she had showered, changed her clothes, and settled into a less disgruntled mood. Besides, what Lix had said the night before was true. Her cousin would probably be freed in time for breakfast, with or without lawyers. She’d welcome the celebrity, her “night in chains”! Freda was too well known and well attached to stay in custody for long. As soon as they got home, they’d find a message from her winking on the answering machine, her piping, fruity voice, undulled by its experience, with her usual slogans and her provocations, her infuriating “Ciao.” Sweet, slender cousin Freda, oh so brave and beautiful! And oh so undermining.

So now — she only had to listen to her inner voice — Mouetta recognized the truth. Freda was the problem she had woken to. Not the night locked up, or the student trapped beneath the desk. It was more personal — and not a problem to be fixed by lawyers. It was the certainty that she, Mouetta, was second best to her tall cousin yet again. Second best even with her husband still, even on their wedding anniversary. The small rejections of the evening before, in the Debit Bar, which normally she’d shrug away as meaningless, now seemed insufferably huge, inflated by the disappointments of the night. She could not readily forget how Lix had stared into Freda’s lap — goddammit, yes, her cousin’s magnetizing lap — when he’d approached their dining table after his performance. And, yes, of course, how jealous and how sulky he had been when it was clear the student firebrand in Freda’s office was her cousin’s lover. She’d noticed how he’d blushed and could not look either of them in the eye while they were eating, and how oddly exasperated he had seemed when they left the bar.

Mouetta felt defeated suddenly, defeated by the body and the face of someone else, defeated by her not so groundless jealousy and by the past, defeated by her childlessness (while her cousin had already proved herself with Lix in that regard, of course, so many years before. Freda could boast The Lovely George, their lovely George, whom she had raised and trained all on her own, without — she always liked to claim—“a sniff or glance” from Lix).

Mouetta could not bring herself, despite the damp, despite the early morning cold, her lack of underwear, to get back in the car, to join her sleeping, disappointing husband. The moment she’d married him, she’d married jealousy. She drummed her fists against the windows and the roof of the Panache. His morning call. What must she do, who should she be, to be more certain of her husband’s love? The whole thing was a mystery. What urged and motivated men? Who would he truly go to bed with if he had the choice? Was it the undefeated cousin or the wife? In those first sunlit minutes of the day, she’d kicked up loops of water high across the grass with her bare feet.

So now, in shoes but still no underwear, Mouetta waited for her answer amongst the foliage and the breakfasters, her husband easily within her reach, across the teas and pastries in the Palm & Orchid Coffee House. Coffee fixes everything. She did not feel defeated anymore, just baffled and impatient for his choice. She looked around the room herself. It seemed that there were beauties everywhere. “What about the one in blue?” She tilted her head toward a group of office colleagues two noisy tables to her right. “She’s pretty, isn’t she?”

“Which one?”

“You know which one. I saw you staring at her earlier. Stop playing games.” She sighed at him, her lower lip stuck out. A famous warning sign. Mouetta sighs with that shaped mouth, and there’ll be arguments.

“I mean, which one in blue? I’d sleep with anyone in blue. You’re dressed in sort of blue yourself. I’d go to bed with you. When we get home.”

“You’d not choose me before all these others.” She was ashamed to set so transparent a trap.

“Of course I would.”

“Of course you would.”

They let their conversation simmer for a while and pretended to concentrate, in practiced and contented silence, on their breakfasts, the Aztec coffee in the paysanne cups, the glace fruits, the local — and expensive — savories, the honey slice. The Palm & Orchid was a place where it was easy not to talk. The talkers missed the beauty of the place, the filtered shafts of colored light, refracted and intensified by the patchwork of stained Portino glass in the conservatory roof, the somber rhomboids of shade from the woven kites of green rattan suspended from the rafters, the massive earthenware pots of fessandra bushes, hugging crotons, lace trees, and tiger palms.

Then there was the entertainment of the birds. They roosted in the kites and in the plants at night, but during the day they gleaned vacated tables for their crumbs. Tea sparrows, they were called colloquially. But they were urban finches, actually, reluctantly tolerated by the owner because his customers appeared to like their noisy cabaret. So Lix and Mouetta, glad not to be talking for the moment, turned slightly in their seats and looked beyond their coffee cups, across the breakfasters, into the foliage. Had anybody looked at them — a well-known actor such as Lix must always expect to be looked at — they’d see only surface harmony.

“Don’t lie,” she said finally. Out of the blue, “Don’t lie.”

Her husband didn’t dare or bother to reply, just yet. He knew this already expensive breakfast might get costlier unless he was prudent.

Lix indeed had spotted the red-haired woman dressed entirely in Picasso blue, a crisp belted linen dress with matching shoes and bag and eyes. All the best coordinates. Who could miss her? She was a beacon of high taste, and beautiful, amongst the otherwise unremarkable possibilities. And the woman in the blue, Lix knew, had spotted him as well, had recognized his birthmarked face though, possibly, she had not yet recalled his famous name. He’d silenced her by staring back at her, and even smiling, once. Now she’d lost the knack of being natural in company. She’d be dreaming already, Lix was sure, of being lovely in a film.