Genesis

6

EVERY WOMAN he dares to sleep with bears his child. So now it is Mouetta’s turn. Whispering and smudging his ear with her lipstick, her breath a little sour from the garlic in her lunch, she confirms her first, his sixth, pregnancy. His sixth at least. She’s “passed the urine test,” she says — an unintended play on words which she acknowledges in the matinee darkness with half an optimistic smile. The doctor thinks she’s twelve or thirteen weeks. A baby’s due by May. It’s early days.

Mouetta feels, of course (before the morning sickness and the backaches start, before the lifetime of anxiety and love), that her pregnancy is a personal blessing. The raven of good fortune has chosen her. It has alighted in her yard and she’s been brushed by its great wing. No other adult explanation matters to her for the time being. She is the lucky one. This is her miracle.

They sit together in the cinema, that drafty art house cinema down on the wharf, their elbows touching and their jackets spread across their knees, to watch young lovers on the screen, young actors making love, or seeming to. She wishes Lix would speak to her, do something more than press her forearm with his own, a kiss perhaps. But he’s a film buff and an actor himself. “Silence for the colleagues,” he usually insists. He won’t ever speak, not once a movie has begun. Perhaps it’s just as well, this winterish afternoon, the perfect weather for the cinema, that he will make her wait until The End before he answers. He wants to say he feels besieged. Another child? He only has himself to blame. To be so fertile is a curse.

LIX COULD NEVER SAY exactly when the pregnancies began. They always took him by surprise. Mouetta’s pregnancy as well. Especially hers. He had been privy to her ovulation dates, those gaping opportunities when intercourse was ill advised for teeming alpha males like him. They’d not been careless, had they, at the wrong time of the month? Twelve weeks? He counted back the weeks and counted back the times they’d had sex. Still no clues. The days were fused and distant. How could he ever tell which time, which place, had fathered this new child? Mother Nature doesn’t ring a bell. Whatever other noises might be made, the egg is punctured silently. If only he could call on chemistry and then biology, unsentimental disciplines, calculating, tidy, and precise. They could pinpoint for him (had they the mind) that careless and productive day in his beleaguered, complicated life, could specify the hour, even.

Science has the answers every time: it was 2 a.m. or thereabouts on August 18—the week of the Banking Riots, three dead already, the city devalued and deranged, and interest rates “settled by decree” at a quarter of one percent — when Lix’s latest child was conceived. Conceived’s a charmless and misleading word, too immaculate and cerebral, too purposeful and too hygienic, to truly represent the headlong thoughtlessness, the selfishness — that night, especially — of making love. (Headlong for him at least.) It is a strangely cold and scientific word as well. No passion. You’d think some calm technician had been employed to fit a tiny battery of genes. Conceived suggests a meeting of like minds, dedication, diligence, technology, and not the rain-damp, springing seats in the front of Lix’s gray Panache where no two minds and no two thoughts achieved on that occasion even the briefest instant of concord or shared a common cause. That’s one of the reoccurring oddities of sex, where it falls short, again, again. Opposing poles attract when lovers magnetize. His north of lust, Mouetta’s south of love. Cross-purposes. And, surely, not a grand and proper way for children to begin. This child.

SOMETIMES OUR CITY, our once famous City of Kisses with its deep parks, its balconies, and its prolific and disrupting river, like any other city, seems to have a climate of its own, a window of clear sky, perhaps, unshiftable for days, or more commonly a random storm attracted to the concrete and the bricks while all the countryside around is calm. That August night was such a night. Vague summer winds till after ten, too many stars, oppressive in their multitude, but then the concentrated local rain, clearing the streets and sidewalk cafes, and breaking up the wayward, trouble-seeking crowds, few of whom had thought to arm themselves with hats or raincoats or umbrellas. Though folk rhymes promise us that Storms at night/Blow out the light/Conceal the killer/Blind the King, wet weather doesn’t truly favor assassins and Molotovs, or fires, or leafleting. The revolution likes it dry.

The theater had not been busy all summer. Times were hard and tickets, though subsidized, were still not cheap or fashionable. Molière’s Tartuffe, updated as a New Age satire, with songs, dance, and video, was not much of an attraction, either, even though the cast (including “Lix,” the celebrated Felix Dern, in the lead as l’Imposteur) was “glittering” by regional standards and all the notices — in magazines and newspapers that, against the logic of the age, had sponsored that summer’s Stage and Concert season — had been dutifully enthusiastic. For once, that Thursday evening, he could leave through the foyer without too much danger of being waylaid by an autograph bibber, a theater limpet, or — worse — an ancient friend or colleague it might be difficult to ignore. He was hoping for the sole company of his wife. It was their second anniversary.

As yet the rain was only light, drumming plugs of smoke and steam out of the coals of braziers at sidewalk stalls where kebabs and roasted beets were sold to retreating theatergoers, but making little impact yet on all the distant mayhem in the streets. The brick-trapped wind delivered its reports of chanting crowds, the sirens of what could be fire engines, ambulances, or the police, and, occasionally, the detonation of dispersal grenades or smoke bombs. But the protests had been restricted largely to the city boulevards on the east side of the river where many of the institutions had their offices and where, if you could trust as evidence the daily lines of chauffeured limousines, the savings of the townspeople had mostly disappeared. The narrower streets, known as the Hives, on this side of the river, near the market halls, had not been targeted. No one wants to burn down bars and restaurants these days (except the police). Yet the back ways near the theater were not their usual carefree selves. The army, armed and keen to start an argument, had been deployed to break up demonstrations. The surplus, unarmed militia, the bail conscripts (who’d chosen public service rather than jail), and the civic police, in and out of uniform, had set up barriers throughout the city to turn back traffic, check IDs, and generally put a stop to everything. The kind of people who seemed likely protesters or immigrants or undergraduates or bitter, newly minted bankrupts were lined up at the back of army buses with their hands on their heads, like kids, and — a recent police procedure to keep a suspect quiet — their identity documents held between their teeth. Try remonstrating with a booklet in your mouth. The best you’ll manage is ventriloquy.

Lix looked a likely candidate. Not bankrupt, obviously. And not a student. But artistic. Intellectual. Dressed like a writer or a lecturer, at once shabby and elegant. He was known to the militia and the police, from television work and films. Who’d fail to recognize that celebrated granite head, those expressively nervous beryl eyes, that cherry-sized, cherry-shaped, and cherry-colored birthmark on the ridge of the bone below his left eye? They waved him through. They cleared a way for him. He wished he’d brought a jacket. Then he’d turn its collar up, against the rain, and hide his famous face, his famous blemished face. It would be a change to go unrecognized, once in a while, not to be greeted on the street by strangers as if he were a neighbor or a cousin. For that, he had to go abroad these days, to theaters and studios in Britain, France, America, and Italy, where his success had not been shackled yet with any intrusive fame. He wanted the applause and the bouquets, the prizes and the statuettes, the fees, but he’d enjoy, as well, some public anonymity. For one so fertile and flamboyant, for one so arrogant in costume, Felix Dern, the showman, was — offstage — surprisingly shy and timid. That was, in rising middle age, his major flaw, his main regret — and also his saving grace.

He met Mouetta in the back room of the Habit Bar, the city’s best-kept secret — or so the newspapers and radio had been saying for a year or more. He was obliged to stop and be polite at one or two tables before he’d crossed the excited, overcrowded room to hers. The Habit Bar could always boast a celebrity or two, other than himself, particularly journalists and heroes of the left and particularly when there were protests and comrades to support across town by eating out in reckless solidarity. You’d never catch a politician there or someone ministerial or military, except in disguise, wired for gossip. Even the waiters and the chefs, it was claimed, were impeccably progressive. The meals were progressive, too. No boycott goods, no shed meat, no reactionary wines, no condescending sauces. The Habit was the place to come if you were on the left and indiscreet — and, incidentally, not hard up. Its motto should have been, according to the shanty boys who touted for scraps and coins on the terrace outside, “One meal for the price of six.” Its nickname was the Debit Bar. And so its clientele were Debitors and not Habituals.

Mouetta was not alone. Her cousin Freda was sitting opposite in Lix’s chair, her back against the room, but unmistakable — and dangerous. She shared an ancient, awkward history with Lix. Awkward for Mouetta, too. Her hair was up, of course, coiled and clipped in place by an ocher lavawood barrette. She had the longest neck — and the heaviest earrings — in the Debit, and that, for such a restaurant where short-necked diners were a rarity and jewelry was always immodest, was quite a boast.

Lix had been wondering all evening, even as he labored through the Molière, his thirty-eighth performance of the play, what Mouetta might be wearing for their anniversary. For him. A skirt or dress, not trousers, if there was a God. And buttons down the front. And musky, ancient perfume as a sign that she had not forgotten what the night might signify. But now, as he excused himself a passage past the backs of diners’ chairs, through smoke, through kitchen smells, through wine-induced curses against the army, banks, and church, he could not take his eyes off that long, cousin’s neck and when he did — he shamed himself with his disloyalty, with his nostalgia, perhaps — it was only to look down beyond her chest, her modest chest, into her lap where her fine hands were crossed and resting on, of course, what else? her uniform — a loose black skirt.

IT WAS a photojournalist with Life magazine who, in 1979, when Lix was in his first term at the theater academy, came up with the phrase the City of Kisses to replace the more alluring, truer title given us by Rousseau, the City of Balconies. That was the year of khaki skirts and tunic tops, when all the brighter girls were feminist, and rudely militant in bed. The photographer was one of fifty sent to Fifty Cities of the World to record the flavor of the place on one particular Sunday. His picture essay concentrated on our city’s better-looking girls — and all of them were kissing. A boyfriend kissed, full on the mouth. A girlfriend chastely kissed in greeting from behind on the high loop of her ponytail. A grandma blessed by her granddaughter’s lips. A teenage mother with a child. A puppy kissed. A couple kissing at the swimming pool, their hair like weeds. It was a city doing little else but kissing, you’d think. In a way, that is exactly how it was that year. But famously, the photograph that truly caught the spirit of the place, so Life would claim, the photograph that sold countless posters and, for several years, was responsible for packed hotels and the resurrection of our red-light district, was taken at the Debit Bar. A woman in a Cuban beret applying lipstick to a glass of wine with her red mouth. Reflected in the glass, two men, their own mouths gaping and both encircled by the kiss.

Life could, of course, have photographed this essay anywhere. They kiss in Rome and Paris, too. They kiss in Tokyo. The whole world osculates. Yet this was public kissing, and unusual for us. That was the year the postwar ban on all public demonstrations of affection, even in the theater, was lifted. Using your lips became the simple evidence of progress. We all made up for those lost opportunities. We had the kisses that our parents missed. That was the year, indeed, when Lix first kissed in earnest — and inadvertently provided us with his first child.

There was still a framed copy of the original Lipstick poster in the lobby of the Debit on the night of Lix and Mouetta’s anniversary, the first evening of the riots when interest rates seemed so much more relevant than kissing. Lix did not perform his usual playful pout for it when, a minute after midnight, he left the bar. He was exasperated. His wife and her cousin had sabotaged their anniversary. He’d planned a little hand-holding, some eye contact, some drinks, a light exciting meal, no garlic certainly (actors and lovers should not be “cloven-mouthed”). He’d hoped that he and Mouetta would go home to bed quite soon. Well, not “to bed,” perhaps, but somewhere on the way to bed. The car. The hall. The study couch. The stairs? The stairs had always seemed a tantalizing possibility.

HIS EVENING on the stage had been, as usual, both stressful and arousing: the uncritically approving dimwit audience in their subsidized seats, the dressing up, the liberties that actors take, the swish and odor of the actresses had been a stimulant. The fear of “drying and dying” mid-speech provided the anxiety. As did (more recently) a shaking hand which, his doctor had assured him with the backing of some tests, was not early-onset Parkinson’s as he had feared (or “toper’s wobble” as one gossip columnist had suggested) but simply nerves. Late-onset stage fright.

That evening Lix’s tremor had been especially undermining. Tartuffe had held a very shaky book, and then had spilled a glass of wine. Lix was infuriated with himself. He needed to unwind. He was, of course, still partly in character even though the shaking had disappeared the moment the curtains closed. An immersion actor such as Lix cannot shuck off the emotional raiments of a play as easily as he can shed the costume. Performance always leaves its mark, for an hour or two at least. Indeed, the remains of Tartuffe’s florid Pan Stik pink makeup could be seen, if you were close enough, in his eyebrows and his sideburns.

As usual, he’d had to kiss his leading lady twice onstage that night: Tartuffe seducing sweet Elmire within the text but also Lix playacting with a colleague unjustly famous for her love affairs. Stage-kissing, obviously. Dry lips. He always relished it, however, the smell and taste of her (makeup, brandy, perspiration, cigarettes, cologne), the enticing possibility that one night their kisses might turn wet. Lix had seduction in mind. So already he had fixed his hopes on Mouetta and on stairs, the view they offered as his wife preceded him, the urgent discomfort they promised any couple mad enough, inflamed enough, to pause and kiss. He’d spent the evening scheming their impromptu, corrugated sex.

Freda, though, had other plans for him, for them. One of her students at the Human Science Academy (“an activist and very, very dear to me”) had been “listed” in the morning papers, alongside a photograph and phone numbers to contact with “rewardable” information on his whereabouts. He was, they claimed, “a firebrand leader of the SNRM, already known to the civil authorities.”

“He’s such a little innocent,” she said, delighted with her protégé, a young man younger even than her own son, George. “He printed up some leaflets and some posters, that’s all. And damaged cars. Perhaps he’s been a little wild. He’s hardly broken any laws, but still …” The police would find him if he went back to his lodgings, she explained, and, depending on the level of their “vicious inefficiency,” would either teach him manners there and then or take him to the barracks yard where bright and pretty faces such as his were routinely “spoiled.” Both Mouetta and her cousin stole a glance at Lix’s cherry stain.

“He’s in my office now. He’s hiding underneath my desk, poor little man,” Freda said. She could not stop the sudden smile, the crossing and uncrossing of her legs. “But obviously he can’t stay there.” She put her slender hand on Mouetta’s arm and sighed. Bad theater.

Lix did his best to avoid Freda’s eye. He hadn’t looked her in the eye for years, and with good cause. He did not want to nod, or laugh, or match her sigh with a more ironic one of his own. He was just hoping that he could avoid the implications of the “little man” hiding underneath her desk. That phrase, “But obviously he can’t stay there,” could ruin everything. Freda’s always organizing her revenge, he thought. She still distrusted, even hated, him — and with good cause again. He acted sudden, ironic interest in the wine label, a scene he’d played before to great effect in his third film, Full Swing. He was not as calm as he appeared. What actor ever is? Unless he got lucky, his anniversary — just like the student’s face — would be “spoiled,” no doubt of it.

Lix should, he knew, speak up at once, or all was lost. Freda frightened him. Too tough and beautiful and challenging. His cock never failed to stir itself for her. Even now, with Mouetta’s hand across his shoulder, he could not contemplate the student hiding underneath Freda’s desk without his cock lengthening, without jealously recasting the scene with himself, his younger self, as the protagonist: an armed policeman standing at the open office door, a seated Freda blushing, innocent, her elbows resting on her desk, her earrings swinging, catching lights, the listed student (Felix Dern, as ever, in the leading role) bunched up in the many folds of her black skirt, the audience not knowing whether this was comedy or tragedy or when the kissing — or the beatings — might begin. Good theater.

Avoiding eye contact, however, and dreaming the impossible provided no escape. “My little firebrand needs your help,” Freda had already told Mouetta during Molière and Lix’s final act. And Mouetta had already agreed to offer the sanctuary of their study couch for a week or so, until it was safe to drive the student out of town, until … No one knew the sequel to “until” in those extraordinary times.

“What’s wrong with your place, Freda?” Lix asked finally. “You’ve got a couch to spare while George is in America, I’m sure. He can even sleep underneath your bed, with the cats.” Now he was looking at her, his leading lady for this scene, looking at her piled-up hair, her speckled throat, the clothy, hammock neckline of her top, imagining how he might stage a kiss with her. “This fellow’s very, very dear to you, you say.” His mimicry was faultless.

Freda, though, would not respond. She had no sympathy for Lix. How dare he even mention George? Was he inviting trouble? She smiled at him, an icy smile that said, Do as I want. Otherwise Mouetta will be reminded yet again of what she has so determinedly forgotten or ignored, exactly what went on between us, twenty-five years ago when we were undergraduates ourselves. When I was carrying your child. When you were truly dangerous to know.

She stretched her neck away from him. She’d let him talk. She’d let him huff and puff. She only paid attention once he’d dutifully proclaimed his list of predictable objections — the risk (for him), the inconvenience (for him) — and was prepared to accept what had already been agreed behind his back. There was no need to repeat herself for Lix. He was a spouter nowadays, not a sympathetic listener. Not an activist. She’d already explained herself to her cousin, how her own office and apartment at the academy were “always” being visited by police. Unlike Mouetta, a newcomer who’d “married in” two years before, she’d been a citizen of this “infuriating” town since her own student days. She was a well-known dissident, “a bit of a firebrand” herself. While Lix, born in the town forty-seven years before, despite his posturing, was not — not now, at least — a threat to anyone. The celebrated Lix would not be visited by police, not in a thousand years. His study couch would be the safest refuge in the town. Saving this brave “boy” (Lix winced at her transparent use of words: a cut, an edit, please!) would be a simple matter, then. They’d drive in to the campus, pick the hero up, and take him home to share their anniversary.

So Lix, defeated, left the Debit Bar, not hand in hand with Mouetta as he had planned, but as one of an ill-at-ease threesome and without a suggestion of any intimacy between them. They could be mistaken for little more than casual, frosty friends. The actor, naturally, looked grander and crosser and more thwarted than the other two, but then men always do, actors or not. They are Pierrots by nature. Smiling is for Columbines.

Lix was too irritated — and alarmed (for he was no longer an adventurous man) — even to acknowledge the greetings and congratulations from a couple who had seen his performance, onstage, that evening, a couple who had witnessed his dry kissing and his tremor from the balcony. He contemplated having Freda’s callow lodger, callow lover, in his house. Her “boy.” A week or so, she’d said. That meant three months, minimum. A stranger in the frying pan. His egg with theirs. The staircase always busy with the sound of running feet, the sound of running taps. Worse even than the alternate weekends when his acknowledged children came to stay, descended on his house and his routines, his two adolescent boys, Lech and Karol (the products of his first marriage), and four-year-old Rosa (the unplanned fruit of a short, bizarre, and punishing liaison not quite before he’d met Mouetta). At least their running feet were known and loved. For, yes, despite the evidence so far, the selfishness, the sexual jealousy, the lack of courage, the peevishness on this night of their anniversary, theirs was a house of love. Lix, for all his faults, for all his fickleness, was capable of love. He had been thwarted, though, on this occasion, by the unforgiving first love, second conquest of his life.

As it happened luck was on his side.

The rain was heavy now, disabling and hostile. It beat out its cacophonies on cars and roofs. The police had had to set up shop beneath the water-sagging canopies on the bar’s terrace and were painstakingly checking the identities of anyone who dared to enter or to leave. Their mood was volatile, resentful, tired. They’d welcome the chance — were it not for the journalists present — to burst inside to tip some tables over and to crack some heads. The Debit’s clientele was just the sort they hated most. Toffee-nosed and smart-arsed liberals with cash to spare, their lives ring-fenced by bank accounts abroad and properties at home. Provocative women with skin like confirmation cups and catwalk clothes. Men who never had to take the streetcar, or wear a shirt for three shifts in a row, or work — as they themselves were working now — after midnight, in the rain, for wages that were “held up” by the bank. A daylight robbery. Imagine how the Debitors’ blood would decorate the fancy tablecloths, or how dramatically those clever, brittle heads would bruise and crack if only someone with a bit of spirit and imagination in the government would give permission for the patriots to Proceed. They wanted their revenge for having to be dutiful when everyone else was having fun, for having to be young and unimportant, for being dull and out of place.

Their corporal, a townie boy though not this town, made a corridor of tables through which Debitors must pass. His comrades crowded around to take offense. Now here was someone that they recognized and did not like. Not Lix. They hadn’t seen him yet. But Freda. “Freedom Freda.” The firebrand lecturer whose rants they’d had to endure at far too many public meetings, in far too many television interviews. A critic of the army and the police, indeed. There was no mistaking this giraffe. She was a handsome woman, tall and set, to use the current phrase. Frisking her and requiring her to stretch her arms above her head, her fine teeth biting on her documents, was a duty and a luxury. Even Lix could see what satisfaction it was providing them, could sympathize with their wide eyes, their gaping mouths, caused just as much by how she looked as by what she was saying (for she could still create a din, could shout and curse, through her clenched teeth). They’d never heard such legal threats, such posturing, such statements of intent, such growls. They’d never detained such hair before, such long and capable arms, so willowy a neck, such arrogance, such heavy fabric in the dress, so hectoring a voice. And what good luck! The woman was not carrying an up-to-date ID with her. She’d not renewed. On a point of principle, she said. Well, on another point of principle, a legal principle, the corporal had no alternative but to send her to the barracks for some questioning. If only she would show a little more respect and quiet down, then possibly they would allow her to be taken there “without handcuffs.” The policemen looked — and smiled — at Freda’s narrow wrists, her bangles and her amulets. A pair of extra cuffs would finish her.

What none of the policemen or Lix had spotted was the sudden transfer, just before Freda’s hands were raised, of her shoulder bag to Mouetta. So he was baffled and relieved when, rather than arguing for her cousin’s immediate release, as he expected, as she was prone to do, his normally plucky wife simply took his arm and, without a glance back or a word of farewell, steered him through the uniforms, across the terrace, and out into the driving rain. No one tried to stop him, obviously. Too familiar. He was starring every Tuesday night in Doctor D on Channel V&N. He was in the ad for Boulevard Liqueur. He’d won a celebrated Masters Medal for his solo version of Don Juan. He’d gone to Hollywood, appeared in several films, and come back almost undefiled. He’d even had success as a singer: his Hand Baggage: A Travelogue of Songs, recorded fourteen years before, was selling still. He was, as Freda had made clear ten minutes earlier, a threat to nobody.

The car — their large but unpretentious gray Panache sedan, perfect for the family with adolescents — was parked behind the theater, a leisurely five-minute walk on any other night. But it was far too wet for leisure and they were far too fearful. Fearful for Freda, of course, but also for themselves. Her shoulder bag was dangerous. What might it hold? And fractious men in uniform are always frightening. Any second now and they might hear beyond the clatter of the rain the sound of running boots, the cliché call for them to stop and raise their hands. So Lix and Mouetta didn’t speak as they hurried through the rain, encountering what everybody knows but needs reminding of, that speed is no protection from a storm. He ran ahead of her to open up the car but both of them were sopping and sobered by the time they’d slammed shut the doors. For a few moments, the smell of drenched clothes was stronger than the seat leather, even, richer than the perfume and the gasoline.

Mouetta — wet — looked flushed and beautiful, Lix thought. Why hadn’t he noticed before how much trouble she had gone to, to be attractive for him on their anniversary? A bluish calf-length skirt, a favorite blouse he had brought her from L.A., front buttons even, that pretty necklace a child might wear. Cousin Freda, the radical, had blinded him, had shouldered out his wife. She always did. She always had. There’s something deadening about the vivacious company of prettier and older cousins. Mouetta was a sort of beauty too, although a quieter sort, not theatrical but … well, homely was an unfair word. Unaffected, perhaps. Contained. She was the kind — and this was cruel — whose company was supportive rather than flattering. She’d only turn the heads of wiser men. But now that she was wet and dramatized by their short run, her beauty seemed enhanced, her perfumes activated by the rain, her hair shining like someone found soaked and streaming in the shower room, her blouse and skin a clinging unity. He should have been thinking of Freda, her arrest, what they should do for her release, their duties as citizens and their obligations as radicals. But he was not.

“What now?” he asked. They hadn’t had sex in the car for months.

“We’ve got the keys to Freda’s office,” she replied. She held up the shoulder bag. “We’ll get the guy. And then we’ll have to find Freda a lawyer …”

“Don’t worry about Freda. They’ll let her out in the morning. She’ll dine off this for years. ‘My night in chains,’ et cetera!”

“Don’t be small-minded, Lix. What’s done is done.” She meant that both of them should always do their best to bury the embarrassment of George’s provenance. “What would the world be like without its Fredas?”

“A lot less complicated.” Lix was blushing, not inexplicably. This was not a good time for an argument.

“We still have to get her guy,” Mouetta said.

“Forget the guy!” He touched her wrist. He had the sense, though, not to put his hand on her leg and not to ask for what he wanted most, a kiss. Not heroism, but a kiss. A kiss inebriated by the rain. A wet, wet kiss. “Can’t we just forget the guy?”

“Just drive,” she said. She never knew — or, at least, she preferred not to know — when Lix was being serious. Or when her irritation with her husband was unreasonable.

The streets, of course, were busier than you’d expect on such a night, at such an hour. In addition to the men in uniform, causing trouble where they could, and the remaining groups of demonstators, there were civilians sheltering in the arcades and the bars, unable to get home or prevented by the road and sidewalk blocks and by the weather from reaching their cars. The streetcars and transit buses were not running: services suspended by order of the civic police. Taxis were not allowed into the Central Zones. You either had to walk or shelter from the rain or beg a bed from someone you knew downtown or end up as a bludgeoned passenger inside an army bus. Even those who’d reached their cars were being turned back at the Circular and were obliged to park for the night until restrictions had been lifted. For once, the city was not dull. It was dangerous. Young men are always dangerous.

Lix crossed the river by the only open route, Deliverance Bridge, and drove around the park on Navigation Island through stands of tarbony trees and ornamental shrubs, through puddles, ankle deep, which dramatically accessorized his car with arched silver spoilers of rainwater, until he reached the second bridge, which still allowed some access to the river’s eastern banks. Beyond the bridge, the traffic was at a standstill. Even those drivers who had tried to reverse onto the sidewalks or turn back toward the old town’s center were gridlocked. Beyond the traffic were the academy and Freda’s office and Freda’s sanctuary desk.

“We’ll not get home, you realize,” Lix said. “They’re not letting anybody through.”

“They always let you through.”

As it happened Mouetta was wrong, or so it appeared. All the city campuses were closed to traffic, even to the stars of stage and television, it seemed. Militia volunteers, always the last to be deployed and the most unyielding, were squeezing through the traffic, ordering drivers from their cars and searching them, both the drivers and the cars. No permissions asked, no explanations given, no patience or civility. They were determined to enjoy themselves. You had either to stand and lose your dignity or to argue and lose your liberty — that mischievous predicament, as old as humankind. You had to count yourself lucky, as bags were emptied onto seats and trunks were opened for evidence of insurrection — a box of matches, say, a couple of leaflets, a fruit knife — that on this occasion the men had not been issued with their electric cattle prods. Pedestrians, mostly students trying to return to their dorms, were being turned back. They could either spend the night outside or, if they protested or seemed too smart and arrogant, a wooden bed could be arranged for them in some dark cell. A thorough drenching would be good for them, as would a taste of prison life. Then they’d be “graduates” indeed! They had the choice: Clear off or they’d matriculate in Practical Cell Studies.

Lix raised and stretched his arms as he was instructed and let two of the young men search his pockets and his waistband and check his ID card. Unlike the other women travelers, Mouetta had not been summoned from the car. She took this as a promising sign that yet again her husband’s public gift was making life easy for them. She hated it, this privilege, but she was grateful as well. She watched her husband through the hand-jive of the windshield wipers, waiting for the look of recognition on the volunteers’ faces and the invitation to go ahead.

The man who asked Lix to raise his hands did not proceed with his interrogation for very long. Nor was their car searched. Nor were they required to unlock the tailgate. This, then, this rescue bid, thought Mouetta, would be a simple matter, though alarming in ways that she found inexplicably stirring. Her heart was jumping like a pan-fried pea. Yes, she was stimulated by the thought of having a young man about the house, a young man needing to be saved. This would be her contribution to the night, her solidarity — to steal a “wild and innocent” suspect, “known to the authorities,” from underneath the very snobbish, starstruck noses of the police.

Indeed, her husband had been recognized. She could tell by the way he stood, by the laughter, by the parting handshake, by the way a route was being cleared for them. There was no danger, then. They’d not be caught. They could simply drive into the parking lot underneath the academy, take the elevator to the seventh floor where Freda’s office was, and do their good deed for the night. She could imagine the young man — painfully idealistic, sweet to look at, awkward, grateful, very scared. They could curl him up beneath the car rugs in the back and drive home through all the blocks and barricades, untouched and undelayed, because her Lix, her acting man, would have the passport of a famous face, would have the visa of a celebrated birthmark stamped on his cheek.

Then, when they were home, in their quiet cul-de-sac with its unprying neighbors, she’d make a fuss over that young man. Find towels, a spare toothbrush, some underwear. She’d cook for him at night, while Lix was at the theater. She’d let him have the run of the house. She had to smile. The very thought of it. She could provide a sanctuary for both of them.

Mouetta was hospitable and motherly, two undervalued attributes these days. Taking care of people was her public gift. One day, please God, she’d have a child. At thirty-nine she wanted very much to have a child. She’d soon be passing through the Great Stone Gate of forty, beyond which were towns and villages without babies. Stepmothering was not enough for her. Though she was very fond of George and Lix’s children from his first marriage and the “intervening” four-year-old (she loved all but one of them, in fact), they were not hers, not flesh and blood and bone. As anyone with half an eye could tell. Neither was the student hers, of course. But then he wasn’t Lix’s either, and that made a difference. She’d drive this student mad with care as soon as her husband returned to the car and they were summoned to proceed.

So she was baffled and surprised when Lix slid back into his driver’s seat and said, “There’s no way through. We have to turn around.”

“They wouldn’t let you through?”

“No. So it seems.”

“Not even you?”

“Those numskys don’t know me. You think they’re theatergoers? We have to turn around.”

“Not recognized?”

“Not on this occasion. Evidently.”

“So what do we do about Freda’s student?”

“What can we do? Nothing! It’s not my fault. I don’t think it would be sensible to argue with those guys. You want to try?”

Already he was turning the car into the space they had cleared for him and was nosing through a crowd of appalled, thrilled students standing in the rain with nowhere to spend the night except the streetcar shelters and underneath the bushes in the park. What awful fun.

“Why don’t you tell them who you are?”

“I promise you it wouldn’t count.”

“What now?” Her turn to ask.

“Back home.” A home without houseguests! He stretched a hand across and rested it, palm up, in her lap. Still damp.

“You’re trembling,” she said.

They’d not get home that night. There’d be no copulating on the stairs. The Circular was still cordoned off and already flooding, anyway, on the uptown highway, and all the other routes out to the hilltop suburbs where Lix and Mouetta and many of the rich and famous had their houses were blocked. There’d been a rumor that these houses where the guilty bankers and civic bosses lived would be targeted if things got out of hand down in the city. There were incendiarists about and anarchists, expert in breaching cordons. So the police protection of their home would stop Lix and Mouetta from getting home. Safety at the price of freedom? Another awkward, ancient choice. Besides, here was an unexpected bonus for the uniformed defenders of the city. They could turn the rich and famous into the homeless for the night.

Lix and Mouetta had traveled twice across the two bridges of Navigation Island, annoyed and arguing, before they decided what to do. Past one o’clock already. It was a little too late and far too early to wake friends and ask for refuge, too late to phone a lawyer for Freda, naive to think they’d find a hotel still with beds to spare. They had the keys to Freda’s flat as well as her office, but that was on the campus, too, and almost certainly unreachable. And possibly unsafe. And there were cats inside and awful litter smells which only Freda had grown used to. They could, of course, return to the theater and rouse the janitor. Lix had done exactly that one New Year’s Eve, at this same theater. They could, in a pinch, sleep in Lix’s dressing room or even onstage. The Molière demanded three chaise longues. But the chances of the janitor still being awake himself at that hour, let alone responding to someone hammering at the doors on this of all nights, were pretty thin. They did what many other people had been forced to do. They drove the car again onto the island and took the first gate into Deliverance Park, looking for a parking space or turnout. Or Lix looked at least; Mouetta, disappointed, tired, had fallen asleep already, suddenly, her body falling, as he drove, against the webbing of the seat belt.

There were no parking spaces in the park or room for their long Panache in the already overcrowded turnouts. The park had turned into a dormitory of cars. So Lix bumped up onto the grass, careful not to wake his wife. He could have parked right there, just on the corner of the lawns, next to the road, illuminated by the headlights and the streetlamps. Safe. But he had other plans for their anniversary. He headed for the clump of ornamental pines, the darkest planted corner of the park, a place he had spotted as a possibility many times before but never used.

At first the grass, immersed by the rain, was soft and muddy. He had to drive slowly, in the lowest gear. He churned up ruts and wakes of earth and water. He damaged tended grass. Soon the formal grasses gave way to raised picnic squares and cindered ball fields which were hard and gravelly. He switched the headlights off and bumped forward toward the shielding canopy of trees with the help only of his side lamps. And then — heroically — he switched the side lamps off. The gray Panache had disappeared from view. He knew that he was breaking Rules. That he’d be fined if caught. Imagine what the gossip columnists would say. He also knew that he was taking greater risks. The river had been known to swell and break its banks. In 1989, as he could testify, Navigation Island had been entirely submerged. No resident mammal had survived. But he was determined not to waste the opportunity. The sudden looming darkness and the frieze of foliage and the possibility of floods were thrilling. He’d found a spot where, even if the storm abated and there was moonlight, they’d be completely hidden from the road. Here was another chance to fix that oversight he had failed to fix just an hour earlier: they had not had sex in the car for months, not since their Sunday drive down to the lakes that spring when Mouetta — midcycle and ovulating, according to her charts and her thermometer — had tried to stop him from using any contraception and what had started out as love had ended up as argument. He would not take the risk of having one more mouth to feed (even on alternate weekends). He’d pulled the comic condom on and Mouetta had reluctantly allowed him to continue. To be so fertile was a curse.

To be so timid was a curse as well.

Here was a predicament, then, tricky and elaborate, but so familiar to men, especially that night with so many couples unexpectedly accommodated in their cars and keen to make the most of it. Lix’s wife, already irked by him, was sleeping, snoring slightly even. Making love to her right then would require a degree of subtlety and patience that, obviously, at pressing times like these, he did not have. Sod’s Law. Catch-22. The mocking Science of Perversity.

Like other men with complex and attractive wives, he’d fantasized, of course, so many times, so many tense and sleepless times, of waking in the middle of the night, Mouetta dead asleep, as innocent as a cat curled up on her side of the bed, and simply helping himself to her. Helping himself in both the sense of rescuing and the sense of stealing. Just reaching out and piling up his plate with her, as if she were as ready and quiescent as a slice of cake. Her body, almost naked underneath the rucked and pushed-up nightclothes, would wake before she did, as he imagined it. Or perhaps she’d wake only after he’d pushed into her, alarmed and shuddering and animated by the wet and warm conjunction of their limbs. She’d wake aroused. This would be arousal in both senses of the word for her. She had to wake aroused. That was the whole point of his dream.

Or then again, perhaps she’d persevere with sleep despite his unignorable embraces, and he would have to penetrate her dreams, so that the husband would become a sleeper’s chimera and only prove himself as flesh again within her slumber and her reveries. Fat chance of that. Because, of course, that was the stuff and nonsense of a dream, his dream, not hers. (Well, that’s a sham. Not dream. This never was a dream. In men, these fantasies are conscious and contrived. They are the product of a concentrated mind, not slumber.)

Now, in this muddy and secluded place, their privacy protected by the darkness and rain, there was a chance at last — he seemed to have waited all his life for this — to make the fiction real. Except he dared not touch. He dared not seize the opportunity — though he thought of touch, he contemplated it, while Mouetta slept. He dared not even put his finger on her leg, let alone invade her skirt or slip a hand beneath the wide lapels of her cocktail jacket to pick at gaps and buttons on her blouse. He knew, of course, he was a disappointment to his wife, that waking her would wake her irritation, too. He understood. It was his fault, his never-ending fault, that Freda’s student would not be saved by them, that if he always had his way, then nothing brave would ever happen in their world. If only this were on the stage, a semblance of a car parked, tilted, and spotlit on the boards where all the audience could see inside, then he’d have the nerve to act. He’d have the script. He’d be rehearsed. He wouldn’t hesitate. He’d know no fear — although he’d have the tremors, possibly. That was the bitter joy of acting. It was the business of not being yourself, but knowing you could only be your best when you were being someone else.

Lix got out of the car as quietly, meekly, as he could — he was ashamed — and hurried behind the nearest tree, beneath its canopy of rain-drummed leaves, to urinate onto the piles of peeling bark. It would, of course, be considerate, quick, and wise to masturbate. Then Mouetta could continue sleeping. He could join her, easily. He was immensely tired — and angry, too. Angry with his wife that she was not like him, not “passionate,” not idolizing flesh, not ruled and motivated by a husband’s cock like women in the cinema.

His cock, indeed, was full and stiff by now. His urine, steered by his erection, made a confident and steaming two-streamed arc. He pulled his foreskin back and shook himself. It was a tempting moment, difficult to navigate. To masturbate would only rob a minute from their lives. To masturbate would make good sense. To masturbate would not annoy or wake his wife or spoil their disappointing anniversary. But masturbation never is enough. Our populations would be decimated if it were. The joyless pleasure we can give ourselves is only dancing for the mirror. It’s air guitar. It’s sending flowers to yourself without the validation of a grateful kiss.

Lix required some courage in his life. He’d “let the student down.” Betrayed the boy. He’d confirmed his lack of fortitude, his recent, growing fear of taking risks, of giving any offense. “Dear cousin Freda” had defeated him again. He’d lied to Mouetta and he’d disappointed her. Masturbation would not help him make amends. Besides, the rain was soaking him again. He licked the water from his upper lip. He took deep breaths. He tried to draw some daring from the air.

No one who knew him could say that Lix was bold or unpredictable. He was, as you’d expect, rehearsed and hesitant in everything, including sex. Now, for once, he was an activist. What he was doing was a risk. He tucked his penis in his pants, zipped up his trousers, not without difficulty, fixed his belt, squelched through mud and water yet again, and got back in the car as noisily as he could. He turned the interior light on. He banged about. He almost hit the buttons of the radio, to fill the car with jazz and rock.

Mouetta was still sleeping, though she’d swung her body around, away from him, and was still making a pillow from the tightly stretched webbing of the seat belt. Her back was arched, her jacket high, her blouse pulled free of its moorings at her waist, two vertebrae and the top centimeter of her underpants adding to Lix’s resolve.

His plan was adolescent and barefaced. He would wrap his arms around his wife to wake her, an innocent embrace, then he would say — a worthless promise, as he well knew — that he had decided they should, at first light, return to the campus to collect her cousin’s student. That was their duty as progressive, decent citizens. The militia would surely have dispersed by then, and in any case, he was certain he could bluff his way through, flaunt his name maybe, offer a bribe. Signed photographs of Lix were almost currency. He’d kiss her face, perhaps. Remark how beautiful she was. Remind her that the third year of their marriage had begun. Apologize for being grumpy in the restaurant. Indeed, he’d use apologies to make her twist her body back to his.

Actually he need not have slammed the door, turned on the light, or persevered with this duplicity with such juvenile clumsiness. Mouetta had been dreaming, not sexual dreams, but something frightening. Her cousin Freda had been tortured, killed; Mouetta had been handcuffed, too, and they — the police, the waiters in the Debit restaurant, her aunts and uncles, long since dead — were kicking her and tugging at her clothes. Freda’s purse was pulled apart. Her body was a sack, changing shape as every toe cap struck. She herself was kicking Freda, harder than the rest, kicking her for George. It was a dream too real to face alone. Lix only had to touch her lightly on the back, between the jacket and the belt, on her cool flesh, for Mouetta to respond to him. She wanted hugs and kisses anyway, to save her from the nightmare. So when her husband’s hand insinuated itself underneath her blouse and held her breasts, she was quite happy to be touched. It seemed like tenderness. He’d rescued her. She turned her face to his and they were kissing before she had a chance to say a word about her cousin Freda and the horrors they had shared.

She was hospitable and motherly at first. Her usual expertise. She welcomed him. She catered for his hands. She gave encouragement. Soon the enterprise engulfed her, too. Her heart was thunderous and beating on her ribs, as loudly and passionately as the rain was drumming on the Panache’s glass and metal roof. She had been quickly comforted, but there was something else to satisfy. The drama of the banking riots and the drive across the wayward city to save the student crouching underneath the desk had animated her. How good it was to have survived the dream, to be alive and sensitive to tongues and fingertips. Her hand had reached for him, his urinous and rain-soaked lap, before he’d even dared to touch and lift the hem of her skirt. She wanted him, or somebody, at once. It wasn’t long before she was in charge. She imagined she’d started this herself and was delighted and blushing. She liked herself when she was powerful. This was the way cousin Freda must behave with men.

Mouetta was unstoppable, but she was shocked as well, shocked by the suddenness. And possibly she recognized her own opportunity, subconsciously. The chance of pregnancy. She drove her husband forward, hardly wanting him to think. Although Lix was normally the most careful and responsible of men, “with good cause” he always said, given his already proven fertility, he would not on this occasion give much thought to condoms, although he had a packet in his trousers’ back pocket, although there was a single Lubricated Shadow in Freda’s shoulder bag that surely, on this night of incarceration, she could spare. So when Mouetta said, “It’s safe. It’s safe,” he hurtled on. He took the risk. He gambled on the moon and on her honesty.

We are not animals — not simple monkeys, certainly — although, of all the apes, we are the luckiest, if it is good fortune and not a calamity to take such pleasure in the passions of the flesh. We fornicate in private (if we want), and that’s a blessing, isn’t it? We can simply mate for fun, at any time and any season we choose, no matter if the woman’s already pregnant, menstruating, ovulating, or in the middle of her lunch. The lesser apes, of course, don’t suffer from the jealousy and pain or lose control.

Now they were truly clumsy in the car. She had to get her underpants off, his trousers down, the two front seats reclined, while still attending to his kisses and his urgencies and still accommodating seat belts, steering wheels, and the gear shift. Sex in a car is never dignified or comfortable. The cinematic shot would edit out the jump and jerk of it, the gracelessness. There’d be a gently rhythmic car, the rain, the night, the shifting latticework of shadows from the branches of the trees, the heartfelt throbbing of the sound track symphony fast turning music into light, fast turning tear gas smoke (for let us not forget what brought them to the park) into unoffending mist, fast turning darkness into a grainy dawn.

The truth of Lix and Mouetta, this night of riots and anniversaries, was even grainier. Their lovemaking, if that is what it was, was speedy and uncomfortable and somewhat disappointing for them both, though mostly for Mouetta. Human biology is unequal in its distributions and rewards. Haste cannot often satisfy any more than it can dodge the rain. It can impregnate, though. The sperm do not require sincerity before they can proceed. The eggs are not judgmental. They do not even favor love.

A dangerous ejaculation, then, for Lix. Deep in the park. Deliverance Park. Three hundred million tempest-tossed sperm, the wretched refuse of his teeming shore — and no contraception to impede them. Three hundred million! More than the total population of the United States of America, as the Planned Parenthood posters with their Statue of Liberty photograph so often remind us. There has to be a god of mischief to overcater so dramatically. That’s why, of course, an ejaculation is known in this City of Kisses as “a huddled mass.” A tribute to America, the land of opportunity and sex. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,” the torch-bearing lady says as she succumbs to suitors. Three hundred million. Oh, what a prospect, all those newcomers, each time a man dares lift his lamp beside her golden door.

It was not long before Mou (as Lix had called her in his throes, rather than the more usual diminutive, ’Etta) and her husband were left to disunite their limbs and clothing, to clean themselves with tissues dampened by rain wiped from the side panels of the car, and to at least pretend that their embraces should and could outlive the sex.

Mouetta turned her back against her husband once again. Lix wrapped himself around his wife. Her mouth was bruised. She had not been compensated with an orgasm. Yet she was contented, unaccountably. Her husband had surprised her for a change. She had surprised herself. “That’s not like you,” she said, not facing him. She’d only meant to tease him, say how glad she was to have him to herself for this third year. Yet it was also an accusation, in a way.

Both of them were too tired to take offense for long and both of them had earned the right to fold up in the cushions of the car and fall asleep. Untroubled dreams. Untroubled by the activist, himself curled up but hardly sleeping underneath the desk in Freda’s office, while down the fourth-floor corridor the caretaker with master keys and soldiers at his heels (tipped off by Lix when he was being questioned by the roadblock volunteers) was heading for the student’s hiding place. They’d flush out all the troublemakers who’d thought they might find refuge in their rooms.

Untroubled, too, by Freda, sharing her strange cell with eleven other women, five blankets, and two beds, already bruised, traduced, and undermined, fearful of the day ahead, determined, though, and proud. And so relieved that her young student lover would be saved and would by now be sleeping on her cousin’s study couch.

Untroubled by those three fresh bodies in the city morgue, the youthful and impatient victims of the truncheons and the gas, the careless armored jeep, the interest rates, the gulf between the ruling and the ruled.

Untroubled, even, by the thought of Lix’s five offspring (yes, five. There’s one who’s undiscovered yet), now sleeping somewhere in the world, produced by the only four women, other than Mouetta, he’d ever slept with. A jackpot of a sort.

So this is our opportunity to welcome Mouetta’s first and Lix’s sixth child into the corridor. Whom should we thank, and what, for this chance winner of the lottery? Those things that made the night so bad for everybody else? The riots possibly. The traffic barriers. The idiotic militiamen who (or so Lix falsely claimed) were not bright enough to recognize the actor in their midst? The rain with its own three hundred million random pellets, the fertile, unforgiving rain that still was beating on their car? The shame Lix felt? These were the settings for this single conception, the only cast and scenery and props that could produce this child. Change anything and you change everything. Another place, another time, produces someone else.

“CHOOSE ONE,” Mouetta said. “Choose one. If you could go to bed with anybody here, which one?”

This was a question she’d posed to Lix a dozen times before, in public places, very often as a postscript — and not, despite her husband’s best endeavors, as a prologue — to their lovemaking.

It was hardly 8:30 in the morning, Friday, not seven hours since their close encounter in the car. The early hours of her undiscovered pregnancy.

That coming night, revitalized by the drier weather, there’d be new disturbances, better organized and more venomous than Thursday’s. Nine dead, this time, including three cadets trapped in a burning transporter. And, dramatically, the firebombing of the Bursary Chambers Club where — wrongly — it was thought some bankers and some military were dining. The wounded victims were, in fact, two waitresses, a cloakroom clerk, a fireman, and fourteen members of an investment club who hadn’t had the lungs or legs to get away from their third-story dining suite.

For the moment everything was quiet. Apart from the parked police vans and the helicopters, the city, still in debt and shock, still riotous at heart, had — physically, at least — returned to normal. Sunshine, traffic jams, shopping and commuter crowds, and floods. Floods are normal here: the usual flooded passages and streets along the riverbanks, the flooded underpasses and the flooded gutters where, as usual, the drains had let us down. The city had been overwhelmed by rain.

Mouetta and Lix had stopped for breakfast at the Palm & Orchid Coffee House on their way back home. She held his arm across the tabletop. She pinched his hand. She wanted to inflict some gentle pain. “Come on,” she said. “The truth.” The coffeehouse — a converted botanic conservatory — was chockablock with unsuspecting women for her husband to choose from.

Lix, as usual, misread her mood. He took her question as a kind of erotic afterplay, a sign that she was still stimulated by their recent lovemaking and wanted to continue it, not physically perhaps, but somewhere else inside her head, some secret fold. A female thing. Men recovered after sex more speedily. For women — he had said as much onstage (a play by Palladino) — intercourse was just the overture. But for a man an orgasm was — the playwright’s metaphor again—“the final, rushing note.” The music stopped — and now he could embrace the wider world again. For men (another common metaphor) lovemaking pops the champagne cork. The captive gases dissipate. The pressure is released. The pressure he was feeling now was of a different kind.

Here, for breakfast, Lix was happy to indulge his wife. He liked her question. It also made him wonder if, on their return back home, the as yet untested stairs might earn themselves a second chance. “You really want the honest truth?” Again she dug her nails into his palm.

Lix thought he understood the boundaries and rituals of her now familiar game. He’d made mistakes before — thinking, possibly, that her invitation to search the restaurant, the bar, the hotel lobby, the departure lounge, the cast of a film, and, on a couple of occasions, the pages of magazines, for someone he would like to make love to was her way of testing his fidelity. In which case, the only answer was the reassuring, diplomatic one, that out of all the women he could see Mouetta was the only one for him. That was clearly not the answer she was seeking, though. He’d tried it out before — and it had irritated her. She truly wanted him to look around. And choose. And tell the truth.

“Come on! Which one, if you were free?”

“But I’m not free.”

“You’re free to choose. You’re just not free to act.”

“I see. I am your prisoner, then. At liberty to think and look but not to move.”

“Exactly so. Like through binoculars.”

“And no parole.”

“Not till I’m dead. And, anyway, wives nearly always outlive the men. So I’ll be free before you are.”

There was another lesson Lix had learned, through his mistakes. Mouetta would not welcome it if he showed too much ardor in his choice. He should not seem aroused. He should not lick his mouth or breathe too heavily. He should not need to touch himself or rearrange his trousers. She would not welcome any vulgarity either, though he was always tempted by vulgarity. He had to be dispassionate and analytical, but not too coldly scientific. “It’s just my private chemistry,” he’d said on one occasion previously, when he’d been free to choose amongst the women at a reception they’d attended and had selected someone Mouetta had dismissed as “short and plain.” By chemistry, he’d meant a little more than just the dopamine and oxytocin, or any other agents of libido. He’d meant the chance and random fusions that could occur in the test tubes of two strangers. She’d been disappointed and upset — and evidently baffled — for reasons that he never really understood. From then, he’d always found it wisest to start off with a wary, playful joke. A decoy, as it were. Then he could judge how serious she was, how easy to offend.

Lix looked around the crowded coffeehouse, packed with breakfasting commuters. Here were the city’s office staff, mostly women dressed for desk work and warm weather — although the Palm & Orchid boasted that its “atmosphere” was always semi-temperate — their makeup as yet unsmudged, their skirts and tops fresh from hangers and drawers. Still crisp and fragrant. He’d sleep with fifty women there, if life were simpler.

“The little waitress, obviously,” he said at last.

Mouetta pinched his hand again. “Be serious.”

“I’m being serious. I like my women old and gray. And wearing sandals. I like a lived-in face with lots of chins. And I’m especially fond of bunions. You should be pleased.”

“Oh, yes? My pleasure knows no boundaries. I can get some gray highlights put in today, if that’s your preference.”

“I’m joking but I’m serious. Old’s fine by me. Up to a point. It means I’m not the sort to dump you for some frisky pony as soon as you begin to …” He hesitated, searching for a further equine metaphor. “ … refuse the jumps.” He had to laugh, despite the warning tilt of Mouetta’s face. “The truth is, I can’t wait till you’re sixty — and serving me with your tray and apron. Naked otherwise, of course. Bare bunions.” Lix made his lecher’s face. “I’ll have a double latte please. And honey cake. Give me the little waitress anytime.”

“Why am I less than thrilled with that good news?” she said.

Mouetta could not find it in herself to be pleased with anything that morning. She wasn’t still mentally stimulated by their lovemaking in the car, as he’d imagined. Far from it. She felt, illogically, as if he’d poisoned her. She was in toxic shock. Her temperature was wrong. Her stomach ached. The seat belt strap, her pillow for the night, had left a ridge across her cheek that had not yet repaired itself. Her head and heart were dulled by something out of her control. She could not, dare not, put a name to it. A woman of her age and hopes who has no children yet is always nervous of an early menopause. She’d not slept well, of course. Who does, in cars? But there was something else that bothered her, something undermining and elusive that she’d squeeze out of her husband’s palms with her fingernails, an answer she could only draw with blood.

It was, of course, mostly the onset of her pregnancy that had disrupted her, the gelling of the early cells, the hormone parties striking out to colonize new settlements, the stiffening of glands. How could she know at this precocious stage? How could she yet understand her sudden listlessness, the unusual and overwhelming irritation that she felt for Lix, the nagging private voice that seemed to say her world had changed? Mouetta was a morning person, normally. Only moody after dark, when she was tired. So this was worrying.

SHE’D WOKEN UP in their Panache, aching and perspiring, soon after dawn. The leather front seats of a car are disappointing mattresses. Her body felt precarious, subjected to confinements and contortions for too long. She checked the dashboard clock. Five-forty-six. The only sounds inside the car came from her husband’s nose.

The celebrated Lix had not looked handsome with his great head lolling on one side. The angle rucked up folds of fat around his chin. His hair was unkempt and the infuriating vestiges of his Tartuffe makeup — so oddly stimulating when they were making love — were smeared from his lashes and his eyebrows across his cheek and on his shirt collar. It looked as if his cherry birthmark had been leaking its pale juice.

Mouetta let him sleep (if he was truly sleeping) and stepped out of the car in her bare feet, without her underwear, her own short hair flattened and unflattering. The ground was sodden still. Silver sheets of water spread across the park, low-lit and shadowy. The mud pressed up between her toes. She wanted shelter, privacy, a pee. And then some breakfast at the Palm & Orchid Coffee House. She’d earned it, hadn’t she?

Already there were signs that this could be a fine, dry day. Retreating clouds, hugging the roofs of office blocks. A clearing wind. The skies prematurely busy with geese, commuter jets, and bees. No army helicopters yet above Deliverance Park, but she could hear their chudder from across the river and — something she could not recognize at first — the drum-‘n’-bass of flood machines, already pumping out the rain from underpasses, cellars, and low roads.

Mouetta half stood, half crouched behind the car, her legs spread like an outfielder’s. She held her skirt up around her waist and looked about both nervously and recklessly. Perhaps there’d be somebody walking their dog, or a jogger, or someone else who’d slept out in the park. Well, then, hard luck. They must have seen a woman passing water before. And if they hadn’t, let them look — and learn how everyday it was. How pleasurable, in fact.

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.

Lix watched her, dreamt of casting her. She’d look good through a lens. No doubt of it. She’d be no intellectual, of course. No theorist. She had the body, not the mind, for cinema. She had the looks but not the conversation. Her silence suited her. It flattered her, in fact.

It obviously didn’t matter to her friends that the woman had fallen silent so suddenly and that her interest in their conversation had evidently ended. She held her council amongst her colleagues at their noisy table, as only lovely women can, barely smiling, barely speaking, and barely audible when she did speak. No taking part. No looking up. No grimaces. She was auditioning. She smoked. That was not a blemish in Lix’s estimation. Not when the smoker smoked so stylishly. Not when the smoker lizarded the corners of her mouth after every inhalation and seemed to love the smoke so much.

She was a study in provocation. Just like a woman in a Manet bar.

Lix could imagine making love to her, Mouetta’s choice. It would not be hard to make a fool of himself with this starlet. He could — it only took a moment’s contemplation — place her easily across the table in a hotel restaurant, a lucky bedroom waiting on the lucky seventh floor. He would be talking. She’d be smoking, her tongue a constant incitement. She’d kiss him in the elevator, her lips on his, no more than that. She’d not want her makeup smudged, not publicly, not while there was a chance that someone else might join them in the elevator. Lix would behave himself, as they sped through the floors, though he’d be shaking for the opportunity to lift her dress, to see if there was blue beneath the blue. In moments — once his shaking hand had got the shaking key into the lock — he’d see the room, the bed, the swift disposal of the dress, the tissues on her face, removing blusher and mascara, her showering, their double nakedness, the mirrors and the steam. Not hard at all to see himself with her. A body of that quality was rare and overpowering.

However, Lix could not truly desire the woman in Picasso blue. She was too young, for a start. Too fresh and new. Lix liked contemporaries. She was too beautiful for him as well. And dull. As dull as hotel restaurants and hotel suites. Expensive, formalized, homogeneous, and dull. He could not imagine such a woman saying anything to make him laugh or startle him, or holding an opinion. Her smoking was her only conversation. Her only talent was with clothes and makeup. And with hair.

Her perfect body was a disincentive: that’s something few women ever understand. It was not eloquent, not in itself, not even in the prospect of its nakedness. The body tells you nothing. It’s not the body but a woman’s ever undressed face that most men find enticing, the undefended and arousing glance that betrays exactly what the glancer sees in you, exactly what she’s found. The glance is more arousing than plain nakedness because the glance betrays its promises and pledges. The glance precipitates the futures that you share. A body can’t do that.

But this young woman’s face was still expressionless. There was more evidence in her fine face of self-regarding display than sexual consciousness. If Lix had sex with her, Madame Picasso in the blue, there’d be no mischief nor any joyful, human grubbiness. He’d snub his nose, his lips, his cock on her proprieties. The smells would all be bottled and the noises hushed and mannered. He would be making love but not receiving it. Her sexiness was all about herself. For sure, they’d not be having sex inside his car, beneath a stand of peering, rain-soaked pines. She was the Princess of Clean Sheets.

Madame Picasso’s colleague, though, the little woman sitting to her left, unwisely — given her plumpness — enjoying a tall creamed coffee and a plate of brandy toasts, was much more to Lix’s taste. And closer to his age. What? Late thirties, surely, at the very least. Mouetta’s age. Glasses, hair dye, lines, a sunburnmottled throat, experience. Married, but determined to enjoy herself, he judged.

Lix liked her all-black outfit — jeans, jacket, tight and nippled T-shirt — and the one dramatic statement of the shoulder-mounted silver brooch — a dragonfly, its drama somewhat spoiled by four or five white hairs, too long to be her own or even human. She was an animated talker — but a smoker, too. No niceties. Her thumb and index finger had been stained with nicotine. She laughed out loud — too loud, perhaps — given half a chance.

On those few occasions when she was not contributing to the conversation, not spilling over with her stories and her opinions, she was a goading listener with darting eyes, a touch theatrical. She reminded Lix of a character actress he had worked with — but not much liked — on a couple of occasions. Only this woman at the table was, unlike the actress, entirely without self-consciousness and not completely drunk by breakfast time! Oh, what a partner she would make. How uninhibited and amused she would be, how eager to discover something new in anyone she met and liked.

Lix could not think of her inside a hotel room. Or any room. Instead, he placed her in a forest with her dogs. Three longhaired, silvered spaniels. (There’s no accounting for the stories men weave themselves.) And in this fairy tale, the passing stranger, Lix, has stopped to pay attention to her dogs. He fondles them, their parchment ears, their wet and probing snouts. Soon, of course (the constant daydream of a man), the fondling of the dogs becomes the fondling of the woman, too. She’s keen, he thinks. She’s bored at home. Her marriage is in bits. I’m harming nobody.

He has her tearing at his trousers and his belt. The forest’s large and tiny all at once, and noisy with the breathlessness of five impatient animals. The foliage closes in as they sink down into the cushions of the undergrowth, the almost matching smells of bracken and of sex.

It was a third woman at the table, though, who truly fascinated Lix. She was what Frenchmen call une jolie laide but in this city is more cruelly known as a Prickly Pear. A fruit that’s ugly, hard to handle, but once peeled and stripped is addictively sweet and juicy beyond measure. This colleague was a woman in her fifties even, skinny and black-haired, dressed a little oddly for the office — plastic beach boots (she’d had to wade to get to work that day), white trousers, and a cardigan, half buttoned up.

Her mouth was unusually large but, sensibly, her lips were not made up and so seemed sensuous and not promiscuous. Her hair, already slightly dulled by age, was cut to within a half centimeter of her skull all over. It seemed she wanted space to emphasize her good strong bones, her solid cranium, and show her earrings off: hand-tooled silver shields.

Ugly wasn’t quite the word for her. It was certain, though, had she had the chance, had she been keen to fit the mold, she would have traded every feature on her face for something else. The too large nose, the long demanding jaw, the slightly protruding eyes too greedy for their sockets, the Apache cheekbones, the manly ears might all have benefited from some costly surgery. Everything about her except her breasts needed taming and reduction.

Whereas Lix could not imagine walking down the street with Madame Picasso on his arm or even catching her without makeup, let alone yawning, sneezing, smelling of anything other than gardenia, this Prickly Pear with her expressive features seemed to be a woman of irresistible, seductive disarray. That touch of coffee on her upper lip, the unembarrassed action of her jaw as she dispatched her breakfast fruit without the help of her plate or the fruit knife or the modesty shield of a raised hand, suggested a person eager to devour the day.

A fantasy, perhaps. How could he tell anything for certain? Her seeming eagerness might just be shallowness, an undiscerning vacancy of mind. She might be a simpleton. Still, the visual fantasy was strong and logical. From the much loved bobbled cardigan to the sea-salt residue on her beach boots, she was dressed for action, not for show. She had the footwear and the trousers for an unexpected climb, a dash to catch her streetcar, a supermarket trip, a river crossing. She was, in fact, the woman in the room who most resembled in everything but looks his now frowning wife.

Lix could not help but smile while he imagined how the beautiful Madame Picasso would get on if they turned up one blustery afternoon, say, at the Cougar’s Promenade on the cliffs above the long California beach where he and Mouetta had rented a house for their honeymoon. She wouldn’t be able to expose her outfit and her makeup to the rain-laced wind. Her hairdo would not tolerate the weather. Her skin would not enjoy the light. Her dress would flap and wrap around her knees. Her heels would sink into the rippled sand and topple her. She would not even be able to seek the solace of a cigarette. The wind would snatch her flame away and steal the smoke. No chance either that she would agree to cut off up the beach into one of the secluded bays where they might lie down on the sand and carelessly make love.

The plumper one in black, the woman with the dragonfly brooch, might well be game in such a circumstance. But she would not belong on his imagined beach, so far from bars and restaurants. She was a woman who was determined to enjoy herself — just watch her laugh and smoke — but all her pleasures would be city ones. She’d not be agile on a beach. Too heavy, obviously, and possibly — the smoking and her weight — too short of breath to much enjoy a hike. Even Mouetta when she’d had the chance to walk with her new husband on that beach in nothing worse than misty rain had preferred to stay inside their hired car to watch the sea in comfort.

But place the Prickly Pear on the Cougar’s Promenade, suggest to her they get out of the car to brave the wind and spray, and there could be no doubt that she would soon be running down the steps, across the pebble line and tidal sand, to reach the sea. Lix could place her with her beach boots in her hand, her trousers rolled up to her knees, the waves around her calves, her short hair ruffling. She’d be convincing there. No doubt of it.

Wade in yourself, he thought. Stand next to her and feel the shingle shifting underfoot. No matter that the sea is unpredictable. Suggest to her, to that large open face, deprived too long of flattery and kisses, that they should find a quieter spot up in the rocks. Lix was certain she would readily agree.

Two images: the pair of them embracing in the middle of the sand, her hand pushed down beyond the waistband of his trousers, his hand pushed up into the warmer regions of her cardigan, reaching around to find the soft underarm anticipations of her breasts; and then the two of them, invisible amongst the rocks, fettered at the ankles by their fallen clothes, their mouths engaged, their hands employed between each other’s legs. And for the sound track? In the film? Gulls, of course. A crashing sea. In the distance, cries for help. Madame Picasso stranded by her footwear and the tides, her blue dress lost against the perfect sky, and no one wading out to rescue her.

“WHAT’S SO AMUSING?” Mouetta tapped him sharply on the hand with her coffee spoon. “I said I’m going to the restroom, Lix. You’re grinning like a little boy. Were you dreaming or dozing?”

“Pretty much both. I didn’t get enough sleep last night.”

“Whose fault is that?”

“I only need a nap, that’s all.”

“Well, that makes two of us.”

She left the table and made her way across the room toward the toilets, even smiling at the woman in blue as she passed. His wife looked disheveled from behind, as well she might. She’d slept in what she wore, her once smart skirt and favorite blouse. Made love in them. Inside a car, deep in the park. She hadn’t had a chance to wash or even brush her teeth that morning. So far she’d only used a comb, a touch of cologne, and a couple of tissues. No wonder she was the least crisp woman in the room.

Mouetta’s absence was an opportunity, but not to contemplate his undermining shame at trading in the firebrand student for six minutes’ pleasure in the car. He had to bury that at once. Rather it allowed him to concentrate unambiguously on all the women in the room. Lix could not help himself. Besides, Mouetta wanted his reply on her return. Again he studied the three attractive possibilities over the rim of his lifted cup. He tried them out. He was auditioning. He placed them in Mouetta’s seat across the table in the Palm & Orchid, imagined how they’d look and what he’d say to them if they’d been married for two years, what might occur when they drove home, how they’d react to his determined ambush on the stairs. Again the oldest woman won the day.

He had his answer then. The Prickly Pear. She was the one he chose, out of all the women in the room. She was the likeliest. She was the one that he’d prefer if he could take just one to bed. He wondered what his wife would make of that when she came back from freshening herself. Would she believe him when he pointed to the older woman, oddly dressed, boy-haired, and overdrawn as a cartoon, and said, She is the one that I desire the most?

Lix felt his cock fattening at the very prospect of it, the conversation he and Mouetta would enjoy about the woman’s face and body and clothes, how that might lead, must certainly lead, to more lovemaking when they got back home.

For surely this was Mouetta’s project, to find some sexual stimulation in the answer Lix would give, whatever it might be, while still fully retaining Lix. His passions might well drift beyond recall. His body never would. Mouetta was the only one allowed. Her question, “If you could go to bed with anybody here, which one?” was her foreplay, a scheme to get her husband talking about having sex with someone else, encouraging his imaginary couplings, his unreal consummations, so that she herself could play the role of that new woman, give herself to Lix as someone new, an actress in a fresher part. That’s why she’d set him loose and left him to indulge these unrequitable but animating fantasies amongst the female colleagues at the table in the city’s chicest coffee shop. She wanted him to test his dreams with her.

Isn’t that what men and women did? Men and women who had shared a marriage berth for two years and a day? They’d want some shore leave, wouldn’t they, to visit — in their hearts, at least — the beds of other lovers, other spouses? We need to flirt and covet strangers for the health and spirit of our marriages. They would be wearying otherwise. There’d be no love. Oh, to begin the day, each day, with fresh desires and still stay true.

Lix could quite easily, with Mouetta safely out of sight for a few minutes, catch any of the women’s eyes, make profiles of his famous face for them, engage one in a conversation, flirt, arrange to meet her in a bar one evening, seduce her with some tickets to his show. That’s exactly what his colleagues would do, given half a chance. An actor’s touring life is cut out for adultery, affairs, the weekend fling. What harm in that? And what — if he were truly someone who would cheat on his wife, other than inside his never faithful, ever scheming head — if he were to go up to the likeliest? If he were to step across and what? Invite her to abandon her workmates and come with him onto the long-imagined beach? What harm in that?

The harm in that for him was the misfortune — was it truly a misfortune? — that every kiss produced a child. Remember? Fertile Lix had never slept with anyone without — eventually — a pregnancy. There always was an aftermath for him.

So then: How dare he take Madame Picasso from the hotel restaurant into the kissing elevator and up into his room, the bed, the mirrors and the steam? There’d be a child, impatient at the door. A boy, he thought. A mother’s boy. Well dressed for one so small — and too obedient. The little violin case in his hand told all of it, as he stood in the corridor amid the uncollected trays, patiently waiting for his parents as they created him inside the hired room. He’d do his practice every time, be quite the little fiddler though not quite good enough to win the prizes that his mother wanted so much — and which his celebrated father would be jealous of.

How dare he be the passing stranger for the plumper woman in the forest with her dogs. How dare he fondle them and her. There’d be a child. A pretty, well-built girl, her face distinguished awfully by the cherry mark inherited from Lix, but plucky and adventurous.

How dare the overfertile Lix take his jolie laide down to the beach …? Well, to all intents and purposes, that was not so problematic, he realized at once. Her age. Of course! He studied her again. Yes, in her fifties, certainly. Her fertile years long gone. Here was a woman he could safely cheat with, if he were the cheating kind. Perhaps that’s why he’d felt so free in his imagination in her company. Whatever they might do, there’d be no child. It could be his first and only nonproductive affair. Inconsequential sex!

His heart was racing suddenly. Here was his certain risk-free, vindicated choice, ready for when Mouetta returned. He favored someone who could never bear his child.

Yet when she came back to the table, washed, refreshed, and recologned, her hair brushed back and neatened, her skirt and blouse hand-smoothed, entirely more desirable than she had been five minutes earlier, she did not sit down to pursue the answer to her question.

“Let’s go,” she said.

He recognized that tone of voice. Something troubled her. She wanted to get on. There’d be an argument. He feared that somehow she had heard that her student had been arrested — and that she’d guess the reason why. She’d hate him for such wickedness. She’d be right to do so.

It was only once they’d crossed the busy Circular that his wife even spoke. She had another unexpected question for her husband: “Which of my cousins would you like to sleep with most?”

Lix laughed. Uneasily. He was naturally relieved that nothing worse was upsetting his wife. “Ah, cousin Gracia,” he said. He’d named the oldest one, a woman already in her sixties with thick gray hair and as tall and bony as an ostrich.

“Be serious.”

“Your cousins? There’s not a serious answer. I wouldn’t sleep with any one of them. Particularly the women.”

“And Freda, then? I’m sure you’d like to sleep with her again. She’s lovely, isn’t she. More lovely than before. She dresses so beautifully. Imagine if you’d never even met me that dreadful New Year’s Eve, but Freda … well, you’d make love to her again, wouldn’t you? I’m sure of it.”

“Ha ha.”

“You can tell the truth. I promise I won’t mind.”

“Of course you’ll mind. You’ve minded all along about Freda and George.” He wouldn’t add his own name to the list. “The mystery is, why do you still arrange to see the woman? Why do we still put up with her?”

“Because we must. She’s George’s mother, anyway. She’s family.”

“She’s not my family.”

They drove in silence to the house, the house where they would spend the third year of their marriage, where their child — now smaller than a fingertip — would take its first uncertain steps, the house where they would love and live and row, the house where nearly all his children came to stay on weekends, for the holidays, their empty house with no firebrands asleep in their spare room.

Mouetta followed Lix through the shrubs and pots of their front yard. “You still fancy Freda, don’t you, honestly? After all these years. You fancy cousin Freda.” More than me. She said it to his back.

“Not in the least,” Lix said, though there’d been moments in the car the night before and in the Debit Bar when he’d hardly been thinking of his wife. And there were bound to be some moments in the coming days, the coming months and years, indeed, as there’d been many moments in the past, when he would dwell on Freda for a while and what they’d almost, should have, shared, their George, their lost son in America, now twenty-four years old. He’d always think of her as someone he desired. Mouetta was the woman he required. This is the nature of the beast.