Reluctantly, she got up from their breakfast spot and found the space between the pots where they could look down on the street, where normally they could drop their key to friends or call out to acquaintances.
“It's my father,” she said. “He's in a boat.”
“Is it a gondola?”
“A motorboat.”
“Ignore him. Come back here.”
“He's seen me already.”
“What's he selling? Has he got bananas? Ask him to sing some Verdi.
Bel canto,
Signor Lesniak. Ask him to dive for coins.” Lix
was in the best of moods. Their decision earlier that morning not to get on evacuation boats like every one of their neighbors from the more vulnerable lower floors of the building but to sit the crisis out had made him almost joyful. He and his wife would stay exactly where they were, at home, and watch the river from their windows and the roof, the entertainment of the unexpected regatta, the kayakers who'd waited all their lives for this, the uptown fishermen turned ferrymen who'd find that people were a better catch than perch, the firemen in their dinghies fighting water for a change, and looters with their craft tied up to balconies that now were jetties. They wouldn't miss such mayhem for the world.
Clinging to their own nest like breeding grebes was not the timid thing to do, Lix thought. Staying put was a risk, surely. His choice had been adventurous for once. No one could tell how long the floods and their supplies of food and clean water would last. No one could guarantee, indeed, that the river would not sweep the street away, like it had swept away the little houseboat and (as it had turned out, overnight) every strut and stay of the wrought-iron walkway where they'd chanced their lives the day before. Perhaps that's why Lix felt so weightless and alive.
“Ask him to call someone to have the flood removed within the hour.” Lix spoke in perfect Lesniak. “âDry streets are just a call away. I'll put some pressure on someone in Forecasting. I've got some favors I can cash in. I only have to whisper in a friendly ear and there'll be drought. I only have to say our name. Polish parents are the very best.'”
Alicja did not allow herself to laugh. Lix's imitations could be
wearying, she thought. She'd always thought. She did not like to hear her father so accurately mocked. “Stay out of it,” she said, in a voice that warned a steely afternoon if Lix did not comply, and felt guilty straightaway. When it suited herâshe never moved until it suited herâshe would apologize. First she had to see her father's back. She formed a tranquil face, leaned out into the street, and listened to his lecture and advice.
Mr. Lesniak, it seemed, had borrowed someone's launch and had come to evacuate his daughter, drawing up like a Venetian merchant against the balustrade of the second-floor apartment. He was determined to call out until she showed herself, and then stay until she did what he asked. He could not understand why the couple had not moved out of their apartment the night before, like everybody else with any sense. “You don't play games with water,” he said gnomically.
“We've made our minds up anyway,” Alicja shouted to him, cupping her hands around her mouth and trying to ignore her husband's running commentary. They'd considered all their choices when the hastily appointed flood wardens had directed them to leave and take their allocated places and their allocated camp beds in the Commerce Hall with all their neighbors, she explained. At least that would have been amusing and sociable, she thought but did not say out loud. More fun than moving out to the bone-dry suburbs and her parents' overfurnished house, where gated entry kept everything at bay, including the unruly river, probably. “No Floods Except by Appointment.”
No, their own home was best by far, she said. The floods would never reach their attic rooms, which were too high even
for the mosquitoes, she'd told the warden earlier that day and repeated to her father now. “That is not guaranteed,” the warden had said. “I'm not responsible for you if you don't come. You might not drown, but you'll be stuck indoors until the floods go down. We won't come back.” Her father said very much the same except he thought he was responsible for her. It was possible that he'd come back, again and again, until his daughter did as she was asked. “You think I'm going to let you starve?”
“How can we starve?” Even if their food ran out, she said, hoping to amuse her father and disarm him, they'd swim for bread like spaniels or dive for vegetables like ducks or hunt for fish with barbecue forks.
“That's being childish, Alicja.”
Exactly so. The prospect of having the building all to themselves for a few days seemed irresistible, a private island where they could be kids again. Juveniles had all the fun. The trick for adults, then, was to act like juveniles. “Walk naked if we want to,” Lix had said. That was a more appealing prospect, to him at least, than eating and sleeping in a hall with ninety other refugees or living with the Lesniaks. What could be safer than their Private Patio?
Alicja called out to her father, trying to suppress her irritation with the man, all men. “Stop fidgeting. We'll take good care of ourselves,” she said again. “I'm twenty-nine, for heaven's sake!”
“I'm sixty-nine, for heaven's sake. You think I don't know best by now?”
Lix listened to his wife discussing safety with her father, three stories below, occasionally lapsing into Polish when Mr. Lesniak
was irritated or baffled. “We'll be all right,” she said again, leaning forward over the balustrade. “Go home. Don't worry. We'll not drown, you know. We'll not even catch a chill.” And then a daughter's tease, exasperated, though. “I'm a married woman. I do not need the inshore lifeboat, thank you very much, Captain Lesniak.”
Her sensible and knee-length granddad shirt had ridden some way up her thigh as she leaned forward to shout down to her father. Lix shuffled forward on his haunches, ducking down below the balustrade, and sat amongst the pots beside his wife. He did not want to be seen by Mr. Lesniak. Being charming and polite was wearying. And Mr. Lesniak was more successful at bullying his son-in-law than his daughter. Before they knew it Lix would have agreed to pack a bag and climb out the window on the second floor into their rescue boat. The flood would be an opportunity lost.
So he hid himself and concentrated on his wife. He concentrated on the naked contours of her legs, the dimpled hollows behind her knee, the flexing ligaments, the moles and veins and creases. She liked caressesâwho doesn't like to be caressed?âeven when her father was standing in a rocking boat and talking to her as if she were still a teenager. “Be sensible,” et cetera, when she was anything but sensibleâand hoping never to be sensible again.
This was not yet a sexual act between the two of them. They'd often lain together on the bed, tweaking toes or massaging the other's neck and back, without it ending as intercourse. Marriages would combust if every touch was sexual. Caresses of
fondness and affection are only little passing gifts, the fleshly version of a word which gives reassurance to your partner that everything is going well, that no one's cross. The fingertips convey no message other than the whispered tenderness of skin on skin.
For the moment Lix's fingertips were restricted to her middle leg, the knee, the calf, the upper shin. Alicja welcomed this as just a simple intimacy, an unspoken symbol of support in the war amongst the Lesniaks. But tender touching never lasts quite long enough with men. They seek possession. They want to occupy the land and harvest it. They want to plunder it. They have to stretch and reachâas Lix was doing nowâout of the realms of charity, beyond the zones of tenderness.
He pushed a hand under her nightshirt and began caressing her behind, a tactic that had succeeded several times before. He pushed her shirttail up to her waist and she could feel him breathing on her naked skin, could feel his face too close to her. She did not like that quite as much as massages. A parent's presence made her feel unwomanly. If she allowed her husband to proceed, she understood he'd slip his finger into her while she was talking to her father. That was something she did not want. Not yet. Her head said no. Indeed, she shook her head. Yet instinctively her body, her grander, baser biological self, was already preparing for the possibility of sex, the likelihood that her husband would not despair of her, not give her any guilt-free peace until they had made love. Her vagina had already softened and lengthened for his stiffening erection.
Alicja knew what was expected of young wives, that she was
expected to feel excited beyond recall. Those were the footnotes to Lix's scriptâand she was cast to be the active and obliging star, being intimately touched by a lover crouching in the hems and shadows of her clothes, with nothing on underneath, but seeming to the world below the apartment as if she were simply chatting like a less than sensible daughter but with an inexplicably thickening voice.
Alicja would not accept the role. She pushed her husband's hand away, coughed, and persevered with her assurances until her father gave the order for the engines to be started and for the launch to go back where it came from. She felt infuriated with the pair of themâher father for his bullying, her husband for his fickleness. Two nights before he'd been too distracted even to notice that she wanted to make love. Now, because he'd changed his mind, she was expected to respond to him like some trained horse. She shook her legs until he moved his hand away.
That might have been the end of it. Another moment lost. No unplanned pregnancy. No ill-timed son. But Alicja was more dutiful by temperament than resentful. She got her way by giving way. Besides, the weather was disarming and liberating and the circumstances of the flood so bizarre and stimulating that it would be a shame to punish the whole day by not responding to her husband, a husband who could sulk for a week if he so chose.
She watched her father's launch proceed along the street, sending wakes of water up against the windows of the second-floor rooms and rocking all the floating debris that had surfaced in the night, the plastic dustbins and the furniture, while Lix sat at her feet and persevered.
Finally, of course, she warmed to him. She put her hand back on his head and gripped his hair. “No need to stop,” she said, in case he thought she was rebuffing him again. Actually her first rebuff had quieted him, reminded him how single-minded she could be, and how resistant to his bullying. He tried to be more tender and more circumspect. He pulled a leaf off one of the fessandra bushes and ran it down the back of her right knee. He'd never really paid much attention to the smell of fessandras before, but the pressure of his forefinger and thumb had bruised the leaf and let the odor out. It was oddly pungent, like cough lozenges with lemon undertones, bittersweet and cloying like a teenager's perfume. He smelled his fingertips and was aroused by what he smelled. Physically aroused, that is, andâunlike an animalâimaginatively aroused as well because it was not hard to imply and to anticipate what might ensue, this moment rushing forward to the next at his behest but out of his control. The busy fingertips, at first, but then the lips and tongue. The gentleness, at first, but then the gripping and the biting, the fingernails. The man, at first, and then the beast.
Let's not forget that Lix, indeed, was just an animal, compelled by base impulses to spread his seed in his selected mate so that his species could, in principle anyway, negotiate from eighty thousand genes an offspring more efficient than themselves. He was content to be “just an animal” on these occasions in his married life, to be instinctive and unambiguous in ways he couldn't be when not aroused, to be unembarrassed by his irrational self, to be unself-consciously brave, patient, and cunning.
So Lix, the mating mammal, folded the fessandra leaf and
rolled it up and down her leg, perfuming her, a ruminating little courtship play that would not ill suit gorillas or baboons. His wife stayed at the balustrade and let her husband put his leaf to work. She knew the smell, of course. She often rubbed the shrubs and brushed up against them, and she'd always found the odor stimulating, half kitchen and half dressing table. Someone ought to bottle it, she thought. An aphrodisiac. An aphrodisiac that at this moment truly worked. She felt her flood of irritation seep away, and then the swooning shift of mood that tossed her inhibitions to the far side of the roof. She felt intensely physical, exactly as she should, for her body was in free fall, in a kind of benign but toxic shock.
Her skin was turning red. Blood was pumping to the surface of her face and chest. Blood congested in her lips and nose, her earlobes and nipples, her breasts and genitals. The arteries were working faster than her veins. Her pulse had passed the hundred mark. Her blood pressure was up. Her lungs seemed hardly capable of reaching for breath. She was sweating visibly. You'd think the woman was not well, and that she should be hooked to sugar drips and heart machines and monitors.
Alicja was concentrating now. She had to draw the moment in. She stood a little straighter to allow the released odor to reach her nose directly. Her legs were buckling. She had to rest her hands on Lix's shoulders for support. “Fessandra,” she said, as if this were an identification test. Lix took her comment as a cue. He snapped off leaves from balm, much damper leaves, more succulent and ticklish, and rolled them once again on Alicja's lower leg. This time the odor was much fruitier and clogged, the smell
of bed and sweat and oranges, as pungent as a potpourri and heavier than the fessandra perfume. It didn't float as readily, but gathered in the curtains of her shirt. “I can't smell that.” Again an invitation to move up. Again he pushed her shirt aside and tested out the balm on the softer, plumper skin between her bottom and her waist. And then some marjoram. “It's balm,” she said, a little late.