The ornamented metalwork on the window by the entryway
had been chiseled out of the holding mortar and bent back enough to let a small man, hardly bigger than Lech, it seemed, clamber through the broken glass. That was the only damage. Thank goodness the thieves had been professional. There was no soiling and no gratuitous mess apart from the contents of the fridge and freezer, which had been tumbled onto the kitchen floor and were already weeping icy water. There was, though, evidence of disregard. Lech's toys, always neatly kept in boxes, had been tipped out on the rugs and pushed about the floor either by somebody who believed that toys were hiding places for jewelry and cash or else was young enough himself not to resist the invitation of a plastic car, with a friction engine and flashing lights.
One of the faucets was running in Alicja's bathroom. Someone had used the toiletâthe seat was upâand rinsed their hands: the soap was wet. The upstairs curtains had been drawn halfway across their windows. The burglars had not wiped their shoes between each trip out to their van. Nor had they, thankfully, paid much attention to the cupboards and the drawers. A wallet was missing from the mantel but their passports and the family papers had not been touched, and Lix's acting memorabilia had been ignored. Nothing had been spoiled or damaged out of spite. The thieves had not been desecrators, just hasty businessmen.
“It doesn't matter, does it?” Alicja said. “It's only machines. No one's hurt.” She didn't say, as she was tempted to, “I'll not be hugging my washing machine today.” Another joke would not be wise. Nor did she say, “We'll get new stuff within a week or two. My father only has to say his name in certain ears.” She didn't say
it, because in fact she thought, We won't get new stuff, actually. There'll be no need. The cargo of their marriage was already shipping out, and though she was not exactly pleased, the burglary seemed meaningful. Beyond the shock and sense of violation, there was a sliver of elation as they toured their perfect and expensive house, noting all the spaces. Rid yourself of chattels first, and then the man.
The man was by now almost in tears again.
“What should we do?” She had to put her arm around his waist. Today was not the day, she realized, for admitting her affair. It would have to wait until he got back from America.
“What can we do? They've taken everything and gone.”
“We ought to call the police. We'd better not touch anything. I'll telephone my father ⦔
“Call the police? Call the police on what? They didn't leave a telephone,” he said. “Let's leave your father out of it.”
“Go to the neighbor's house and call from there.”
Lix did not want more invaders yet, tramping through the house, unnerving him with questions. And Alicja preferred to deal with problems in the order in which they arose. So they did not tell the police or call for help for twenty minutes more. Instead, she suffered him. She had first to restore at least one of the orgasms she had denied in front of all his friends downstairs below the Debit Bar. She had to make amends and reassure her failing husband. That was only fair. A marriage should be straightened out before it's pulled apart.
Â
Â
HE MADE HER pregnant again, of course. The contraceptives, not much used in recent months, were kept in Lix's missing wallet. Thanks to burglars perhaps, their second son was taking shape. Thanks to the purchase of a blouse. Thanks to the risky game of Never. Thanks to the guilty fondness that endures, survives the breakup of a marriage, she would have a second son.
By ill fortune and good luck, Lix had done as much as any man could do in natural history to see his scoundrel rival slink away, his tail and nothing else between his legs. Vasectomized Jupiter, the columnist, would speedily lose interest in the senator when he discovered she was pregnant. So Lix would never have to hear the truth about his lunch pal Joopâbecause by the time he got back from Nevada, his wife's new relationship would be over and she'd be two months pregnant.
We should not, though, expect a reconciliation, for this would be the last occasion Lix and his Alicja, his plump and much improving wife, would ever kiss, embrace, make love. For it was love, this final time. Not perfect sex. Not orgasms and passion such as she would have with Joop and with the fellow after Joop or with the man who'd be her second husband and the father of her only daughter, but tender love nevertheless, two bodies being thoughtful, being kind and fond, and being slightly desperate, because at moments such as these the truth is always on display.
Alicja had not admitted anything just yet, and Lix had not dared to ask. His cowardice was without boundaries. Besides, her beryl blouse was lying on the bed, and her indented body was so engaged with his that he could hardly think or grieve. Perhaps it was just as well that when the sex was over and before they called
the police they could lie in bed and not feel obliged to talk. Talk at that time was dangerous.
Then Lix was in the car again, the smell of her not quite removed by showering, not quite hidden by his spray cologne. He'd have to be
Don Juan Amongst the Feminists
at eight o'clock that night, and if he didn't hurry he'd arrive too late for staging notes and makeup calls. It was as dark by now as it had seemed when they were dining in the Hesitation Room. He was heading into town while traffic from the offices and shops was heading out. The actor's face was flecked and flashed by lights and indicators, profile, profile, then full on.
He parked his car behind the theater, depressed, elated, but relieved to have the pressure of the sex removed. The anger was reduced as well. He'd been a fool. He was resigned to what the future held if it held anything. He was content to be back in the ancient town, amongst the places that he loved. The buildings seemed to shimmer in the shifting lights, as offices winked off their lamps and bars and restaurants and clubs sprang to life.
Lix waited for a bus to pass, its windows full of backs and coats, before he crossed to the theater and made it to his dressing room without needing to exchange a word with anyone. He closed the door and he was Don Juan.
An hour later, costumed and made up, he stood at the window with his playscript looking out on the heads of the first arrivals at the theater, his captive audience. The building shook a little to the digestive rumbling once again of the nightmare streetcars that didn't suspend their timetables for mere theater. Instead they did their best to remind his audience every night that they were
watching an artifice and that only one street away the city's aged transit system labored on, taking uninvented people to their uninvented homes.
There was a point in Don Juan's last speech each night when Lix could almost guarantee a streetcar. Some of the audience would laugh. Such incongruity, a streetcar. Others, though, would look alarmed as the auditorium amplified the rattle of the carriages into something that might be the distant and approaching earthquake the city had been promised by geophysicists “within a hundred years.” Then the theater would shake with nervousness and they would ask themselves, Will we survive? What will survive? Uncannily, the answer came from the stage. “Of all the edifices in our town,” Don Juan explained as streetcars passed by, “no one can doubt, not anyone who's lived at least, that love's the frailest tower of them all, meant to tumble, built to fall.”
THEY'D NEVER TRULY KISSED before, Lix and An. It was undeniable, thoughâthere were nine thousand witnesses so farâthat their lips had touched, and had done so every night for fourteen weeksâin character, in costume, and onstage, abetted by their scripts. They were obedient professionals. The play demanded that they fall in love, so they obliged convincingly. They were old hands at that.
They'd been respectful colleagues, yes, cheerful and supportive. Yet nobody could claim that they were even friends offstage. If they ever coincided in the Players' Lounge or in the bar behind the theater, they were polite with each other but uninvolved, the lively little actress, not so young and not so pretty anymore, and Mr. Taciturn, who'd led God knows what kind of life since his divorce and his success. The gossip columns couldn't even guess,
beyond the rumors circulating still that he was either egotistical in bed or impotent. The evidence was thin either way. Lix had no public life, no politics.
Reclusive
was the word the papers used these days to describe the actor. Or, better,
secretive
, because that suggested he was concealing something. You'd not expect a man like that to couple up with An, for whom concealment and reclusion were anathema. But this was the break of New Year's Day, New Century's Day, and both of them were lonely, and exhilarated by the date, 1/1/01. Conception Day for Rosa Dern.
Â
Â
THE THIRD MILLENNIUM for us started one year after everybody else's, because some bored and playful speculators from the Tourist Bureau had decided and decreed that the City of Balconies and the City of Kisses could now be marketed for a lucrative month or so as the City of Mathematical Truth, the Capital of Calendar Authenticity, and would thereby reap and thresh the ripest crop of revelers from abroad who'd want a replay of the false new millennium they'd already celebrated so memorably, so profitably, one year before. We'd be the only place where you could observe the accurate millennium, they said. We'd be the only town where you could mark the Advent of the Future twice. Sudden fortunes would be made by hotels, restaurants, and breweries, normally closed down for the winter, and by the opportunists from the Tourist Bureau who'd put in place some subtle private deals.
So in expectation of fifteen thousand out-of-season visitors, all eager to procure a night of pleasure, the bunting and the streamers
were prepared. The historic city center closed to traffic. The whole of Company Square was equipped with braziers and licensed for the sale of alcohol. The airport lobby was emblazoned with the banners THE TIME IS RIGHT
(at last!)
FOR HAVING FUN, and WELCOME TO THE CITY THAT TRULY COUNTS. Prostitutes took rooms downtown and women hoping to be wifed abroad bought new, provoking clothes and carried their final school grades in their evening bags as “proof.” And a midnight fireworks show which would be “visible from the moon” was readied on Navigation Island, in the mud.
The foreign revelers, regrettably, were sick of new millennia by then. The disappointmentâand the hangoversâof the first would last them for a thousand years. One anticlimax was enough. Therefore they did not come to us in their expected droves. Instead, our hotels were half filled with math curmudgeons, mostly male, Dutchmen, Scandinavians, and Yanks, academics, intellectuals, and bachelors, who'd refused the year before to recognize the numerically premature end of the millennium but now had got an opportunity to demonstrate their bloody-mindedness and learning. Imagine it, on New Year's Eve, our city full of nitpickers, hairsplitters, pedants, and rationalists, and local women dressed like queens scaring them to death, with their grade C's in science, languages, and art. And what did these math curmudgeons want to do to celebrate the passing year? They wanted to avoid the crowds.
In fact, the streets were full enough that night. With citizens. We've always liked a fireworks show and alcohol and women in provoking clothes. “There is, indeed, good cause for all of us to celebrate,” Jupiter wrote in his Sunday column on New Year's
Eve. “Contrary to the evidence of our own eyes, we are making measurable progress in this city. Now we are only a year behind the rest of the world. Let's see if we can close the gap by 3001.”
Lix had been onstage till ten in his revival of
The Devotee
, not the most testing of romantic comedies but an easy and welcome opportunity for him to sing and act and show his famous face before an uncritical audience that normally would not spend time or money in the theater. No need to exert himself. No need for nuances or subtlety. Just be certain, he reminded himself before each performance, that the laughter clears before the next amusing line, and that the next amusing line is timed to end before the laughter starts. “And don't forget, of course,” his stage director said, “to beam and bounce.”
The audience did not want art at that time of the year or intellectual theater. They'd only come, that evening anyway, to pass the time before midnight by watching two luminaries make love onstage, and then to boast they'd seen the celebrated Lix in the flesh. They'd seen his birthmark and they'd seen his shaved and naked chest. What's more, they'd watched their television star, the man who'd made a fortune from his songs about their city, kissing Anita Julius, the actress who was equally famous for her Channel Beta talent show, her range of tempers, and for her fleeting love affairs with older men, younger men, men with chauffeur-driven cars, and then the chauffeurs, too.
So when, finally, and as the curtains closed, An and Lix reached the moment of that much vaunted promised kissâthe one the theater posters reproduced, the one so many times reprinted in
the magazines, the one that all the gossip columnists would use when the scandal broke on New Year's Dayâthe otherwise inattentive audience grew tense and quiet. Opera glasses were lifted up. People shifted in their seats to gain the clearest view. Men licked their lips and cleared their throats, as if they believed their turn would come, that An would jump down off the stage to plant her lovely lips on theirs. Not one single person looked elsewhere. They watched through narrowed eyes. You'd think that
Life
magazine had got it wrong in 1979 when it recorded so much affection on the streets and that for us public kissing was still as exotic, rare, and disconcerting as a total eclipse. Miss it and it wouldn't come again for years; stare too long and openly and you'd go blind.
It wasn't only the actual kiss that mesmerized and silenced them. It was also the unexpected display of what they tookâmistookâas privacy, the unembarrassed breaching of a hidden world which only chambermaids and paparazzi ever stumbled on. Four famous lips engaged in lovemaking while all the world, sunk and squirming in their seats, looked on and felt the pangs of exclusion. Here was a life denied to ticket holders in the audience, a life of cash and fame and sex and unself-consciousness. No wonder no one dared to breathe or be the first to clap.
The audience that night was witnessing something new and dangerous, however. In every performance until this one on New Year's Eve, the lovers' kissing had been a cleverly rehearsed sham. They were, to use the actors' phrase, “kissing like puppets” or “dry-drinking,” their lips stitched shut, their mouths as passionate
and hard as stones, their breaths held in until the kissing was completed.
It's true, all the audiences so far had seen both Lix and An put out their tongues a little as their faces closed in, as their noses touched. A little strip of reflective mouth gel achieves that trick. The stage lights had caught the wet and fleshy tongue tips exactly as the stage director planned. It might have looked as if the actors' mouths were busy with each other's tongues; everyone would swear to that. But they'd been fooled. They wanted to believe, they wanted to be duped. What was rolling the actors' cheeks, convincing the balcony and the orchestra seats that this was more than theater, was only the mockery of tongues. Lix and An were performing in the pockets of their own mouths with their own tonguesâ“playing solo trumpet” is the termâwith no more sexual passion than they'd need to free a wedge of toffee from their teeth. That's show business. It's trickery and counterfeit. The actors have to seem to care when they do not.
The fact was this, however it appeared onstage: until the final act on New Year's Eve, their tongues had never touched. An did not truly fancy Lix, no matter what the gossips and the posters might imply, no matter what they did onstage. He did not truly fancy her. Yet if theater was powerful and could transform an audience, then how could it not affect the principals themselves, eventually? How could their nightly kissing on the stage not spill over into lifeâparticularly on New Year's Eve when all the cast and all the staff, including Lix and An (especially), had oiled the way by drinking to one another's health before the show? It isn't love that's blind, it's alcohol.
The twenty minutes he'd spent sharing wine with his costar in the Players' Lounge that evening had left Lixâwho never had a head for drinkâa little off balance and even more bewildered than usual by his offstage feelings for his irritating little colleague, so lively and so noisy, so “unstitched.” On the one hand, anyone could seeâto use the idiotic jargon of our city's most expensive psychoanalyst, a man whom An had “couched” herself on more than one occasionâ“their compasses were pointing at a different north.” She might be only a couple of years younger than Lix, but she was the product of a different age. You'd think her only gods were clothiers and coiffeurs. She liked a man in uniform, she claimed. She liked him even better out of uniform. She'd never voted, never would. She dined and dieted instead. She held strong views but only about the sounds and fashions of the day, whose singing voice was sexiest, what went with mauve, how best to get away with hats. She'd told a journalist that if the Mother Nature Beauty Clinic had intended her to stay at home with a good book on a Saturday night, it wouldn't have equipped her with such high heels, such long fingernails, and “plastic breasts that didn't jiggle when she danced.” Lix had read the press releases before
The
Devotee
had opened, and they had made him blush. Bring back the Street Beat Renegades.
On the other hand, it had to be admitted that the little featherhead could act. It had to be admitted, too, that as each day and each performance had passed, his dismissal of and disdain for An had ebbed. Now when he was reminded what she'd said about her bulky plastic chest, he was more curious and amused than irritated. She certainly had pluck. She certainly was fun. She certainly
was beddable. Whereas during rehearsals and the first few days of performance their stage kissing, dry though it was, had been an embarrassment and an ordeal for himâfencing and wearing weight bags were the only things he hated moreâhe had since become resigned to it, and then addicted. Some things are inevitable. Once again, the old refrain, “Such is the nature of the beast.”
Lix had discovered as each night passed in this long season of
The Devotee
that truly not wanting a woman, not in his head, not in his heart of hearts, not in his Perfect Future, was not a logic that the lower body valued much. Anita Julius might not be the kind of partner he dreamed of waking up with in his own bed orâhorror at the thought of itâengaging in a conversation over breakfast cups on his expensive balcony, but lately, as the final curtain cut the audience away on their supposedly unfeeling kiss, he had felt increasingly perturbed. His face was numb, perhaps. His lips were little more than bruised by her hard mouth. The insides of his cheeks were tender from too much “trumpeting.” But elsewhere Lix was suffering what actors call “an impromptu,” that is to say an unexpected intervention by an unpredictable performer. His cock was enlarged. His “rubbery zucchini” was ripe.
It stirred a little more each evening, a little earlier in the plot, a little more insistently. It could not help itself (the truest and the weakest excuse you'll ever hear in life). It responded to his costar as unjudgmentally, it seemed, as mushrooms react to light.
By late December, Lix had become wearied by his performance, its drudgery and duplication, and only became truly involved in the closing moments of the play, when finally An's body
crossed the boards to hold her Devotee. He was not nervous around his costar anymore. He trusted her. Her skin and hair now smelled familiar, like family. They were becoming intimates. He enjoyed the laundered and rustling contact of their costumes, the comic stiffness of her breasts, the gelid perspiration on his fingertips from her back and neck, like offstage lovers do. He prized and cursed the audience. Without the audience, he thought, his cock would not stir for her. They were a love triangle, the star, the costar, and the crowd.
It would be ingenuously optimisticâthe stuff of theaterâto hope that An herself had not become aware of Lix's extra contribution to the play. There could be no disguising what was going on from her. Their costumes were too thin and flexible. The stage directions said, “They hold each other tightly and they kiss. The curtain slowly falls.” She would have felt the difference up against her abdomen. That's not to say that his erection was abnormally large and resolute. It was a meekly modest one, like most men's are, most of the time.
Nevertheless, An would have known exactly what it was and who was causing it. After all, it couldn't be edema or a hernia. It came and went too readily. For her, a woman used to provoking men, the explanation would have been a simple one. Her charms were irresistible. After all, she could deliver erections to half a theater. She'd made a living out of it. Usherettes at other shows had told her several times about the witless stiffening of men standing at the back of the gallery, thirty meters from the stageâand out of range, you would have thought. And during her brief appearance in
Regina Vagina
before it was raided and banned, she
had heard reports of husbands who had to squirm and rearrange their trousers while their wives preferred to concentrate elsewhere. The “members of the audience,” some wit had said at the time, “stood up for Anita Julius.”