“Hardly. I've never had sex with a hamster either. And absolutely never will.”
The actress-poet's contribution was “I've never smoked a cigarette, not one. Only my cigars.”
“Not even after you've made love?”
“When I've made love I always take a shot of peppermint liqueur. To take away the taste.” Their laughter bounced around the room.
Now Lix's turn. He lied. He lied because he wanted Alicja to challenge him and be reminded of their early married days. He claimed, “I've never had sex standing up.” No challenges from anyone. Surprisingly, he went through to the second round unopposed, even by his wife.
“Too drunk to stand up, Lix?”
“Or wasn't the goat tall enough?”
Lix had chanced a glance in Alicja's direction and he could not mistake the look of embarrassment on her face. He'd meant the
claim as a joke, a challenge, a hasty response to the raised sexual playfulness of the twenty-two-year-old's boast never to have had sex with a younger person and the actress-poet's unexpected indiscretion. It was only an invitation for his wife to contribute some mordant reply of her own and to remind her of a happy afternoon with river views.
He'd also expected Alicja to say either, “Well, if he's not had it standing up, then I've not either, of course. So he's out of the game.” Or better, she might say the truth, “He's lying actually. We had sex standing up during the floods. On the roof of our apartment. At least, I think it was Lix. I couldn't see his face. I was looking in the wrong direction. Disqualified!” Then his trap, his joke, would be pleasingly rounded off by her.
She should, as well, have challenged and matched the earlier winning claim “never to have had sex with someone younger than myself,” he realized. Lix was eight months older than his wife. She'd been a virgin almost to their wedding day. She'd said nothing then, and she said nothing now. She only frowned and reddened and let her fingers gallop on the tabletop. She evidently didn't want to enter into the spirit of the game. Because, he thought, matters sexual were not to be discussed at table with people she hardly knew. It wasn't “politic.” It wouldn't do for Madame Senator L.-D. to let her hair down for a change amongst his friends. Oh well, her loss. The Lesniaks were famous for their prudery and fear of fun. The Papal Stain. “Your turn,” he said to her.
Alicja was annoyed with her husband, but mostly not for the reasons he suspected. Social proprieties and reticence, especially
with a newspaper columnist at the table, should be sensibly observed, she'd always thought. But she was more embarrassed than irritated. He should not have reminded her of their lovemaking on the roof in such a crude and clumsy way. She remembered most the massage of the herb leaves and the blessing of her pregnancy. He remembered best the unromantic standing up. Men were the enemies of romance. The sex gets in the way of loving.
Joop had said that “absolute truth” was essential to the playing of Never. Well, her husband had not been absolutely truthful. Then neither would she. She could not ratify or challenge Lix's Neverness without betraying herself. For within the last three weeks, Alicja had also had perpendicular sexâquick sexâwith Joop more than once while she was standing. In the vestibule of his apartment house; leaning on the sink with the water running in the Anchorage Street apartment; at his office desk one evening, her back to him, her nose pressed up against the window blinds. She'd smudged her lipstick on the blinds. Here was a lover who always took his time, who never let her off lightly. The absolute truth? Well, now was not the moment to tell her husband that she'd been sleepingâstandingâwith another man. The truth would have to wait.
“Come on,” he said again, an impatient, disappointed edge to his voice. He panicked her. Otherwise she'd not have made her great mistake. The consequences of this moment were immense. She was suddenly the center of attention for the first time that day. She'd show them she could be as mischievous as anyone. She shelved her boast that she had never learned to swim. Too dull.
The dancer, probably, had never learned to swim either. She pushed aside the claims that she had never once been drunk, had never worn high heels, had not so far attended the ballet or a soccer match, had never had a filling in her teeth, could not remember ever having had the hiccups, even as a child, had swallowed oysters but never semen so couldn't be put off by the smell. Her shocking, teasing boast was shouting at her from a poster twenty meters high: “Take risks. Surprise them all. Be truly mischievous.” Bring back the roguish grin to Joop's fine face. She only meant it as a private joke. It wasn't absolutely true. She said, “I've never had an orgasm.”
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THAT AFTERNOON when they got home, they saw at once that there'd been burglars. Their house looked out of sorts, as if it had been caught cheating on its owners. The outer gate was open, upstairs lights were on, someone had dropped a duster and rope on the drive, no one had bothered to wipe their dirty feet on the porch mat, and there was a dry rectangle of driveway by the front door where something large had parked but which the recent rain had not yet had a chance to wet.
Had Alicja and Lix arrived back in Beyond just a few minutes earlier they would have caught the three young men in overalls loading everything expensive, imported, and electric into their van: the two television sets, the VCR, the emptied refrigerator, the new computer system and printer, not yet even installed, the hi-fi tower, the three telephones, the answering machine, the radio
alarm clock, the Italian stove, the PowerChef, the washing machine, even the vacuum cleaner and Lech's game console. Trading debts and import taxes had turned anything foreign with plugs into liquid currency and anyone too impatient to endure low wages and late pay into an Appliance Bandit. Only last weekend there had been a cartoon in a newspaper showing someone in a mask paying for a tube of toothpaste with an electric toothbrush and getting a socket plug by way of exchange.
It was a near escape that stayed with Lix and haunted him for many months, how close they'd been that afternoon to driving through the garage gates, into the shadow of their private trees, before the men in overalls had driven off to deliver that day's “imports” to their clientele. Then what? What kind of heroism would have been required of him, the man who'd never satisfied his wife, to rescue their appliances?
The Lix we know would not have challenged any burglars. He might have hovered at the shoulder of his braver wife, muttering his cautions, if she'd been mad enough to get out of the car and battle with the thieves. He might have locked the car doors and blared his horn at them, the car hovering in reverse gear. He might have driven off at once, fled the scene, to call the police from the nearest bar. On this day of anger and resentment, however, there was another possibility. A murderous one.
It was, then, just as well, perhaps, that Lix would never have the chance to find out if his anger was more brutal than his fear. The traffic had been stalled across the bridges to the city's eastern banks since midafternoon and so their drive out to Beyond had taken more than an hour, an hour in which the weather changed
to drizzle and the dusk set in. What began in sunlight ended in darkness and in rain.
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FOR AN ACTOR, trained in faces, Lix was surprisingly readable when he was in a temper. His muscles tightened and his eyes went watery. Anger, was it? Embarrassment? Hurt? During their journey home he needed to identify the exact nature of his distress, then he'd know what his reaction ought to be to what Alicja had claimed. Never is the cruellest word, beyond negotiation. He understood that he was the resentful victim of a joke, the rough-and-tumble of the tablecloth, and that his rage would appearâhad appearedâparanoid and feeble to outsiders. But there was also something dark behind his wife's disclosure at the Feast that needled him and panicked him. It had left him cold and cruel.
The driving home was difficult. Lix squinted back the sunlight and the tears, and then he had to peer through heavy rainâtwo films of water thenâwhich made the road seem remote and hazardous. Lix had imagined earlier that day that they'd be heading home for sex. Now he wanted to get home only to shout at his infuriating wife, if he could find the pluck to shout. Lix, to tell the truth, the shy and celebrated Lix who'd never done much harm to anyone despite his curse, despite his fame, was in the suburbs of a breakdown.
So, trapped in the traffic in the inner parts of the city, he set his jaw against the world. He would not speak to Alicja. He would not even look at her until his mind had cleared and he had formulated sentences that would repay her, punish her, match her
indiscretion with some bruising indiscretion of his own. He would not grant her a single nod or shake of the head, not even when she tried to thaw him out with her calm voice and then her tough one. He silenced her with his own heavy breathing and exasperated sighs, and then with music. He put on a maddening jazz cassette, a tinkling trio of New Yorkersâstring, skin, and ivoryâchatting amongst themselves through their fingertips. He added the percussion of the windshield wipers. He banged his hand impatiently on the steering wheel, pretending to enjoy the jazz. He drove the car erratically, on purpose.
Even that could not shake off his irritation. The last ten minutes of their meal, before the sulky settling of the bill and the awkward farewells, played through his mind in an uninterruptible loop: the malice of everybody laughing, the grateful gape of pleasure on Joop the Scoop's normally disdainful face as the scandalous material for his next Diary piece dropped into his lap, the clumsy comment from the owner of his record company that “Never Had an Orgasm” would be the perfect title for a song.
“What, never, Alicja? Not even almost? Not even on your own?” the actress-poet had asked. Then everybody elseâhis colleagues and his friends, so-calledâhad felt obliged to add their ridicule.
“Not even on an airplane?”
“Try riding a scooter or a motorcycle. That ought to do the trick.”
“Go home and hug the washing machine. Super spin cycle.”
“Poor Lix.”
“No, poor Alicja! We ought to order her a plate of oysters. Waiter! Bring on the aphrodisiacs.”
“One for me, one for you, and one for the chicken.”
Lix's Obligation Feast had been humiliating.
Alicja had been humiliated, too, of course. But she was used to it. Her husband's friends had never been the subtle sort, especially after so much wine. She shrugged their comments off. What she could not shrug off was Lix's hurt. She had not meant to hurt him; she did not want him to be hurt. It was inconvenient. What she had plannedâa tender, loving telling of the truth to a man for whom she still had feelingsâwas now impossible. He was bound to ask, Is the sex better with Joop? So the orgasm quip had been a big mistake, because it would appear that the affair was only about sex. Then Lix would think that better sex would rescue it. Sex with Joop was better, as a matter of fact. Your neighbor's fruit is always sweeter than your own. But it wasn't about sex entirely. It was about marriage and freedom. Making love to Lix, between the household chores and work and being a responsible senator and taking care of constituents and finding time for Lech, had come to feel like just more wifework.
She'd meant the passion of their marriage to endure, of course. No one's to blame, but passion is not intended to endure. The overture is short or else it's not the overture. Nor is marriage meant to be perfect. It has to toughen on its blemishes. It has to morph and change its shape and turn its insides out and move beyond the passion that is its architect. Falling in love is not being in love. Waiting for the perfect partner is self-sabotage. Alicja knew all these things. She still wanted, though, to be womanly, not wifely. Lix had failed her in that regard. Yet saying so was difficult and cruel. She'd spent the month since she'd accepted that their
marriage was in ruins running her wedding ring up and down her finger and practicing how she should phrase the uncomfortable news of her infidelity. Now, as they crawled through the traffic in the suburbs and the rain, all she had to practice was an explanation and an apology.
Lix had not been such a dreadful lover, mostly. He'd been attentive, regular, prepared to act on her advice. What more could any woman want? Nobody could expect a faultless performance every time. This was not the theater. She had no grievances. But repetition takes its toll, she supposed, as does parenthood. Habituation dulls the soul. She would not have been the first woman who had become bored after three years of well-rehearsed routines or who had lately much preferred those tender contacts that were neither sexual nor time-consuming. To want your husband as an undemanding friend and a reliable relative but not a lover, was that the first sign that love was lost? She'd been a fool to let him think she'd never had an orgasm with him. She'd undermined their three not unhappy years together. Marriages consist of more than orgasms, of graver spasms and contractions. She'd had a child with him for heaven's sake! As soon as they were home, she thought, she'd sit him down and make him talk.
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THEY WENT THROUGH the house from room to room, tiptoeing almost, careful not to make a noise. Lix's fists were clenched and his toes were rolled inside his shoes ready to run or kick if anybody was still inside their home. Alicja was trembling.