She kissed her fingertipsâthat resurrected little girl again, that Natalie!âand touched the bone behind his ear. A damp caress and an apology.
“You okay?” she asked, feeling more physically excited as the minutes ticked away.
She felt him smile and nod his head.
“I'm fine,” he said, though had he the choice, he would gladly start the engine of the van and drive away from what they had arranged to do. Lix only had himself to blame. Again. After all, it was his plan, his entertainment, that would go so oddly wrong that afternoon. Three prospects frightened him: the kidnapping, the Street Beat premiere, the lovemaking. He'd need to navigate the city streets for her, then be an impresario, then steer their risky course to bed. He would have to be uncharacteristically calm and strong.
Marin Scholla's limousine had surely reached the campus gates by now Lix concentrated on settling his nerves by breathing through his nose and focusing on the woman in his rearview mirror, the shrunk and silvered planes and facets of her shaded and reflected face. He was mesmerized by her but almost queasy with misgivings at the certain prospect of the ardor and the kissing that were promised him. He practiced breathing, his feet braced against the floor of the van. He bedded Weather Report into the radio-cassette. He checked the ignition on the vanâthis must not turn into a farce. The engine turned and purred at once. The gas tank was full.
“Not long now,” Freda said. Again she leaned forward, reached across his shoulder to stroke the side of his cheek. Not long for what? Not long before they'd trade the chairman for an orgasm?
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THEY COULD HAVE WAITED there for three more months before the chairman showed his face. His foundation stone was finally laid in March 1982, when the Laxity had ended, the city
streets were calmer and predictable, and once again we truly had good cause to demonstrate if only we could demonstrate. But Marin Scholla never crossed the river to the campuses that December afternoon. He did this duty at MeisterCorps's new central offices and then flew out, in his own jet, ahead of any snow, to Rome.
Lix and Freda concentrated on the exit door for forty minutes. It owed its only movement to the wind. Of course, they feared the worst: kidnappers arrested and a bungled afternoon, their comrades spilling all the beans, their future ruined by their foolishness.
Finally, more than an hour after their appointment and not a sign of Marin Scholla, Freda got out of the van, fiercely angry with herself and everyone, and walked around the campus blocks to hunt for their three accomplices and to check if anything was happening. It was. The Poles.
Alicja Lesniakâso much to answer forâhad wrecked RoCoCo's plans. That very morning in Gdansk, troops had opened fire on demonstrating workers. Seven dead. At General Jaruzelski's hands. The news had reached the small clutch of demonstrators, plump Alicja included, who gathered every afternoon outside the Polish trade mission opposite the campus gate to protest against their country's martial law. And some mad Pole, who'd never been to Poland once, as it turned out, had fired a hunting gun and chipped the paintwork on the mission's door. The streets around the mission were closed at once. Armed police moved in, with snipers, horses, and armored vans. The Pole was shot in the leg and then bitten by a police dog. Military bullets
chipped a lot more paint and shattered windows in the mission as police “secured” its safety for the afternoon. Anyone who looked remotely Polish was rounded up, including the building's employees and the head of mission himself. Alicja Lesniak was shoved into a cell and kept there until midnight, when her father phoned his “good friend” in the ministry and she was chauffeur-driven home in the snow.
The two shaven anarchists and the tidy lesbian, bizarrely dressed and late for their appointment anyway, were trapped behind the barriers, two hundred meters from their Scholla ambush site. What could they do (but thank their lucky stars)? And MeisterCorps (which had considerable shipbuilding interests in Gdansk) had been advised to keep their chairman safely in the quiet parts of the town. The campuses were undisturbed.
“That fat-witted idiot,” Freda said as she and Lix drove off in their rental van in the last light of the day. She held Alicja Lesniak, her bourgeois rival for Lix's heart, entirely responsible for the failings of the afternoon. She meant to, had to, settle scores immediately, revenge herself on both the woman and the farce. She wanted 1968.
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FREDA AND LIX SHOULD, of course, have gone first to the Arts Laboratory on the wharfside where their four edgy andâby nowâbaffled actor comrades would be killing time waiting for their audience and for the curtain to go up. Lix, unquestionably, should at least have phoned them. He was almost a professional actor himself and a tense one. He must have discovered in his
two-plus years of training how intolerable first-night nerves could be, even when the expected audience was only one old man, dragooned and obedient. He must have recognized how jittery they would be feeling, not fearing critics exactly but more the unpredictable attentions of the police, especially when they would have heard the sirens from across the river and the thrumming whir of helicopters, and finally the crack of gunfire.
Yet by the time he and Freda had traversed Navigation Island, in brewing silence, and crossed Deliverance Bridge into the old part of the city, they were focused only on themselves, their personal distress, their unreadiness for admitting yet to anyoneâeven to each other, indeedâthat they had made themselves a laughingstock. They could not, would not, show themselves to the Street Beat Renegades without the chairman in tow. It would be humiliating, for Freda because she would dread acknowledging so farcical a failure, and for Lix because he would not want to expose his immense relief. They'd let their comrades simmer for a while.
Besides, who could guarantee that one of the other three farceurs from RoCoCo had not already made the call or even dropped in at the ArtsLab with their narration of events that afternoon, how seven dead Poles had robbed the chairman of the Fat Man and the Cat, how one plump girl had ruined everything. So Freda and Lix felt if not exactly
free
, then at least
excused
to turn their backs on the blemished afternoon and indulge the moment and the still-unblemished prospects for the night.
The chairman had eluded them, but all their other plans and passions were in place. They needed shriving, urgently, spreadeagled
like two crosses on the bed, to rid themselves with body sins of all the punctured virtues of their politics. Their blood was up. There were more urgent things to do than hunt a telephone. More urgent than the minor needs of friends.
They hardly spoke, of course. The vibration of the van, the parabolic headlights of the passing cars, the blare of people going home, the very first snowflakes provided all the commentary and all the stimulation they required. Everything's symphonic and arousing when the object of your journey is a body and a bed. Sometimes in matters of the heart words are not required. Are ill advised, in fact. A misjudged word deflates. She'd only had to say, “Take me somewhere,” and push her fingers underneath his linen kerchief and touch his earlobe once for Lix to be in no doubt what was required of him. These were the clearest stage directions he could hope for.
So let the acting comrades wait. The lovers had to hurry first to Lix's roomsâand then when they were finished with each other, they could perhaps drive down to the theater with their disappointing news but fortified and rescued from humiliation by their lovemaking.
Not telling their comrades sooner about the shambles on the campuses, having them waiting with their stilts and their accordions, was part of the excitement. For Freda anyway It made her irresponsible and negligent when her more public attempts at being irresponsible had so recently been aborted by “that idiotic Pole.” She liked to keep men waiting and men guessing, anyway. She liked to see their lungs dilate, their nostrils flare, their vocabularies shrink just because she'd passed extremely close to them.
It showed their weakness and her strength. How mystified and paralyzed they seemed to be by her. Perhaps that's why she'd chosen harmless Lix in the first place, because her choice would mystify the waiting men, the self-satisfied, better-looking ones who'd done their best for the past seven terms to sleep with herâand failed.
By choosing slightly blemished Lix she had confounded all the rules. She was declaring what she truly felt about the mass confusion that seemed to value looks above the hidden virtues. Of course, she'd been a victim but also, she knew, a beneficiary of the confusion. Still, it was satisfying to think that when she'd make love to Lix that afternoon, she'd not be making love to all the other suitors in her life, the other handsomer men whom she'd imagined making love to her, whom she'd rebuffed in dreams. She'd wanted them, but they'd been turned away. The corridor was crowded with these men. Only she and unexpected Lix were in the room. Not making love to many men was what made making love to one so flavorsome.
By the time they had finally found a place to park their empty, unproductive van and walkedânot even holding handsâthe half a kilometer against the homeward-rushing crowd and chilly winds through narrowing streets and climbed the stairs to Lix's rented room, Freda had already formed a plan for their lovemaking. Her nerves were shot by all the waiting in the parking bay behind the campuses, but not so shot that the sexual subtext that had always underscored their plans to kidnap Marin Scholla had been wiped out. Embracing tension as she did in politics was her pathway to arousal. To be so purposeful and incorruptible on the
picket line or in the ruck of demonstrators or up against the chests and chins of police was to dance the tango of pressure and release.
By nowâthey'd reached the shabby, postered door to Lix's roomâit seemed as if the kidnapping was history, successful history, airbrushed, rewritten, and perfected. They'd caught / released the chairman, nudged the tiller of the world, and now could celebrate amongst and with themselves. Their fear and bravery had only been a prelude, an act of preparation, for the sex. Passion of the soul, and passion of the genitals.
Therefore, a frigid woman (“fat-witted” Alicja Lesniak) could never make a true and unbowed revolutionary, in Freda's view, any more than a timid leafleteer (“that idiotic Pole” again) could prove to be convincing in the sack. You had to feel it big to give it big, in other words.
So then she had decided, by the time her Lix's shaking hand had got the key into the lock, that their lovemaking would be a little reassuring drama of a sort, two comrades pumping courage into each other once they had pumped some courage into the world. Her usual mantra, then? “I am in charge.” She knew exactly what she wanted from her comrade on the far side of the door. He must not change his clothes, undress, when they got into the room, for a start. He must not take his kerchief off. She'd break his fingers if he tried to loosen it. The jaunty knot was part of what she wanted from the man. Nor must he slip into some open-throated bourgeois sentimentality, dutifully whispering sweet platitudes, proclaiming love instead of solidarity. She wanted camaraderie of spirit, not romance of the soul. Romance
was for life. Romance was too soft and feeble to truly satisfy. She wanted the drama of the streets relocated in between the sheets. They'd be two partisans and they'd be making love between the detonation and the bomb. It didn't matter what he wanted out of her. She was in charge. This was her needy afternoon.
His room was tidier than she remembered it, a disappointment of a sort. The sort of tidiness to mark a mother's visit or an inspection by the concierge. The bed was made up like a dormitory bed. Lix tried to put the light on, but Freda held his hand. “We have to hurry up,” she said. “Come on.” She fantasized the clatter of militia boots, fast running up the stairs. “I want you now.” The you was not quite Lix and not quite nobody. The Czech was trapped between her legs, wild-haired and beautiful. She straddled him, and pushed his shoulders back onto the bed and pushed his shirt up onto his shoulders, and kissed the bare and perfect rack of ribs, her lips as urgent as a Russian gun.
She was too fast for him. He held her head and tried to kiss her on the lips. She turned away. Too intimate. It was not intimacy that she required. The opposite. She wanted urgency and alienation, the meeting of two strangers united only by a single cause. For once his instant penetration was required, allowed, demanded. She put her hand between his legs and felt through the cloth for that part of him that could convey the whole of him. “No kissing, Comrade Lix. It's counterrevolutionary.” A joke of sorts, of course, but one intended to inform her lover what her desires truly were. He was quick to understand. He was an actor, after all, well versed and trained in improvisation and picking up on what a partner hinted at with her ad-libs. He said,
“The Rebel
and the Mutineer,”
the title of a film he'd long admired. “Too insubordinate to kiss.”
He tried to pull her coat off her arms but she shoved back his hands. “Today,” she said, “the woman is in charge.”
Again, he let her be in charge.
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WHERE HAD IT all gone wrong, this briefest love affair? It had gone wrong that afternoon. He knew that much. Marin Scholla flew with it to Rome. General Jaruzelski gunned it down. It couldn't last beyond that afternoon. It was as if that afternoon had been the only destination for their love. Thereafter, they were in decline.