Genesis

3

A HIGH APARTMENT with a river view would be ideal, they’d thought. Three or four rooms facing east, with a small balcony in the City of Balconies where they could taste the air. The water and the sunset seemed important then. So did remaining close to the city’s ancient, motivating heart, near neighbors to the bustle and the stir, of course, but also close to graduated couples like themselves who’d once been untroubled students and were now more compromised. Couples, that is to say, who wanted permanence but were not prepared quite yet to celebrate that fact. They were still young, but not so immature as to imagine as they’d once done that marriages could prosper in cramped, cheap rooms. They required somewhere they could stay until they were ready not for children but for a single child. Five more years, perhaps. Somewhere big enough and bright enough for privacy and rows and lovemaking.

Alicja and Lix had not been made of money when they’d moved in together. His meager, irregular fees from the stage and, more frequently, from busing in the local restaurants, and her low wages as a consultant-volunteer on the night shift at the Citizen’s Commission were not enough to rent a river view.

Their income wasn’t quite enough, even, to pay the rent on the more modest, unbalconied apartment they’d finally settled for, their two ill-kept low-ceilinged attic rooms on Anchorage Street, a busy neighborhood — too much bustle, too much stir — nine blocks from the grander embankment residences they’d aspired to. It was hardly larger, though more expensive, than Lix’s old fourth-floor student room-‘n’-kitchen near the wharf. They fell in love with it as soon as they pushed back the sloping door in the bedroom alcove and found that they could step out on the roof. Still no river view. But somewhere to smoke and drink a beer, their urban version of the rural stoop. Somewhere to grow their herbs and vegetables in pots. Somewhere to be expansive and look out across the city, through the pylons and the tower blocks, the aerials and radio masts, beyond the leaf-fresh suburbs and the new commercial parks, across the plains toward the faint, uncivil hills.

This “private roof patio” was the landlord’s justification for the scarcely manageable rent. They’d had to borrow from the bank and made do at first with thinly furnished rooms. They had a bed, an electric stove, two bamboo chairs, a pair of bicycles, a fly larder, and little else to make the first months of their marriage comfortable, except their books, their gramophone, and what Paul Knessen has called “the conciliating rigors of the flesh.” Well, they had love, of course, the most essential furnishing of all, especially when poverty and hardship share the home. It was a calmer and less threatening love than Lix had had for Freda, but a thorough love, nevertheless, and one that would not soon be ripped apart by passion.

They could have had a river view quite easily and a fully furnished apartment on the embankment. The Lesniaks were made of money Alicja’s parents, despite their mistrust of Lix (‘Actors never pay — and actors never stay!”), would have cleared the rent and swallowed all the decorating bills rather than have their daughter share a staircase with waiters and shop assistants on a street unfashionably “mixed.” They had a friend who ran an import/export enterprise and who, if leaned on not too gently, could sort out some stylish furniture. (“And no bamboo!”) A new business colleague, eager to impress, might well be happy to provide a television and a fridge. “You want a telephone and no delays with the connection?” her father asked. “For me a working telephone is just a call away. I only have to whisper in a friendly ear. I only have to say our name.”

The Lesniaks would pay to have Lix’s cheek “spruced up” as well. A fashionable surgeon was in their debt. How could their son-in-law expect to succeed on the stage when he was branded like that? Besides, a birthmark such as Lix’s spelled trouble and adversity for anyone who came too close. A Polish prejudice, perhaps, but never wrong. It seemed a pity that their pretty daughter had ended up with such a curiosity. Every problem could be fixed, however. Mrs. Lesniak would make the phone calls; Mr. Lesniak would write the checks. Alicja only had to nod and she could have an apartment and a husband, neither of which would offer much offense to the eye. Polish parents are the best.

Alicja, despite her husband’s counsel of caution, turned every coin down. “I like things as they are,” she said. She meant she loved the man she’d married, would not want to change a cell of him. More than that, she wanted freedom from the Lesniaks, a chance to flourish as herself and be resolute on her own account. Finding a husband such as Lix would set her on her way. Her married name, Alicja Dern, provided instant anonymity Anonymity was exactly the base upon which she was determined to construct her successes and achievements — for this was something hidden from the world: buried underneath her sweetness, her patience, and her eagerness to please, Alicja was driven by a need to climb and conquer a different, higher summit than her father had.

Lix’s ambitions, however, were not concealed. How could they be concealed? To be an actor, even one who’s not in work, is to declare a public dream and purpose. But he had not yet got his call from Hollywood. He’d not recorded his first album. He’d not been cast as Don Juan or hosted any television shows. In his late twenties now, he’d ended up a table singer, as dependent on tips as any waiter, and — no more the Renegade — a minor, disappointed stalwart of touring theaters and the city’s lesser ones, famous only in his dressing room. So Mrs. Dern could still be judged mostly by her own achievements and campaigns and by the impact she’d make on platforms of her own. She took up causes in the neighborhood, chased complaints, investigated failures of the city government, but never made a nuisance of herself. His sweet, plump, tireless wife, Lix said unkindly to her face when they’d been stopped once too often in the street by troubled locals, was “a problem magnet.” She’d be upset to know his nickname for her was the Quandry Queen. Yet she was more respected and well liked than any Lesniak had ever been. That was more important than a sunset and a river view — and harder to acquire than foreign furniture.

Now, only three months later, finally, they had a river view without the help of Lesniaks.

On the same day they gained their river view, they conceived their son as well. Five years ahead of time. Much sooner than they’d planned or wanted. We can be sure it was Alicja’s first child. She was a virgin when she first met Lix, a lapsed but well-trained Polish Catholic, fearful of the wrath not so much of God as of her all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful mother. It was true that Alicja had “sacrificed herself” to Lix, “surrendered herself immodestly” while the family was “dining” (her mother’s later version of events), before they’d married. But only a month before. She was hardly dissolute or precocious. Despite her hidden appetite for change, she would not consider sleeping with anyone apart from the man she married, for three more years at least.

Lix was not a virgin, as we know. Already he’d had sex, penetrative sex, with Freda (even if the penetration had only been a short P.S. on all but one occasion). Nineteen times, in their not-quite-a-month of passion, on and off the picket line. And twice with the nameless little clerk, who back then would have been about the age Lix was now, approaching thirty

This would not be his first child, or even his first son. It would be the timid actor’s third mistake. His first — his birthmarked daughter, Bel, the product of binoculars — was undiscovered still, undiscovered by Lix anyway, though very nearly nine years old already and full of life while Lix’s life, to tell the truth, was emptying. The vessel full of dreams and plans had sprung a leak — no wad of fame to plug it.

Several times the girl had been within a hundred meters of her father. This city isn’t all that large. You meet and pass and meet again. They’d shared a crowd, a streetcar, a shopping street, a flu virus, they’d strolled the same catalpa avenue in Navigation Park one Sunday afternoon, bought nutcake from the same vendor. And recently, when she’d been in the Play Zone by the zoo, her mother had seen Lix walking past, beyond the roses. Unmistakable. Not a face she could forget. If it hadn’t been for the roundfaced woman on his arm, she would have found the courage to go up — for Bel, for her daughter’s sake. A blemished child has a right to meet the author of her blemishes — and introduce the pair of them, acquaint their family nevuses.

His second grand mistake — Freda’s six-year-old son, George — was still an awkward and rancid secret that Lix had kept from Alicja. What was the point in telling her? He never saw the child himself, had not even been identified as its father by anyone other than its mother. Alicja had hated Freda, anyway, and Freda despised her, “Lix’s dreary compromise.” A little clear-skinned boy, especially if he had his mother’s neck and hair, would not appeal to his wife, nor would it delight any of the Lesniaks. So Lix was happy to keep his past secret and resigned to being not so much an absentee parent as an evicted one. It had been Freda actually, when she was six months pregnant and her relationship with Lix was long dead, who’d commanded him to stay away: “The child is mine, not yours. My pregnancy My body. My responsibility My private life. My kid!” she’d said, rapping out her arguments on the palm of her hand with knuckles that had once shown love for him. “You understand?”

“Five very eloquent mys,” he’d said as mordantly as he dared. Her throat and earrings tortured him. This had been the dream once — to be with Freda and his son, a sort of neofamily. “Consider me as good as dead.”

And that had been it — at least for the time being, anyway. Fredalix split in two. Then three. They went their separate ways. She had — and raised — his unacknowledged son.

COULD LIX HAVE any idea yet that there was a curse on him, a more insistent version of the happy curse that falls on almost everyone, that if they persevere with sex, then chances are — not quite as sure as eggs is eggs, but close — a pregnancy will follow? Certainly that one mistake he knew about had freighted all his fantasies and practices of sex with Cargo Consequence. Had he become afraid of making love because of Freda and her son? Before Alicja, he’d not had intercourse with anyone since he and Freda split up in 1981. That was seven years. Key years for young men in their twenties. His month with her had been a costly farce and a disaster from which he’d not recovered yet. How pleased Freda would be if she discovered how she’d blighted him and all the women in her wake, even — especially — Alicja.

Certainly, Lix had been slow on the night a month before they’d married to respond to Alicja’s un-Lesniak initiatives. She’d never been that intimate before or so daring. She’d seemed excited that her parents were downstairs with dinner guests and hired staff, immediately below, separated only by a rug, the ceiling joists, and plaster. The wine they’d smuggled into her room had helped. As had the cannabis. She locked her bedroom door and put on music as a sound track and to disguise the noise they might make. The actors always made a lot of noise in films.

He’d not encouraged her. Because he understood the dangers better than she did? Because he feared the consequences? Because she was not Freda? Because there wasn’t a single condom in the house? No, actually, because he had not yet succeeded with an erection. Nervousness was playing havoc with his potency Fear dispatches its adrenaline to the lungs, the muscles, and the heart, and undermines the blood flow to the genitals.

Alicja, however, had thought his reluctance considerate and endearing but had surprised herself by pressing forward with inflamed resolve and — always the ones you remember — inexperienced but persuasive hands. Finally, Alicja was “graduated,” as they say. She and Lix had made the light shade swing above her parents’ table. She liked to think she’d peppered everybody’s soup with ceiling plaster. But Lix’s imagination had almost let him down that night, and let her down as well. His fear of those five mys was not an aphrodisiac.

THIS WAS the season of his third mistake.

Although their marriage was already three months old, he and Alicja still had no table, or any reason to join the city’s morning rush hour. Lix had no rehearsals at that time, and it would be another year before his fortunes changed so magically, and so disruptively. So neither of them needed to leave the apartment until the afternoon.

In those days, their marriage was an embarrassment of time and poverty and self. In other words, if it was free or very cheap, then they could do it all day long. So they would take their breakfasts and their books out onto the roof during that late spring and sunbathe with their backs against the slates in their nightclothes, the matching pair of long fake-granddad shirts she’d bought from Parafanalia and which he hated. These were beloved times, in fact, despite the shirts. They had the whole apartment building to themselves. By the time they’d settled on the roof, all their neighbors were already sitting at their desks or standing at their tills or setting tables for lunch, “earning corns.”

Alicja had planted up some heavy gray pots — to match the roof tiles — with mints, marjorams, and balms and four or five fessandra shrubs. They flourished there, with the help of coffee dregs, abandoned cereal, and bowls of used soapy water, and — once in a while, when Lix was on his own and too idle to go indoors — urine. Otherwise they had the sweetest-smelling roof in town. The foliage provided a civilizing fringe of green along the roof parapet, muffling much of the traffic thrum from the Circular but still allowing Lix with his binoculars — the householder at last, the lord of everything in sight — to study the hats and shoulders of passersby, the roofs of streetcars and automobiles, the shadows and the silhouettes in adjacent attic rooms, the ornamented summit of Marin’s finger, and anything that moved between the city and the hills.

Except he could not see the hills in early May.

Rain had fallen on the prosperous and slanting plains that embraced the city in a semicircle of shale-on-clay-on-sand and the grand estates of manacs, vines, and tournesols which kept the owners rich and their tenants busy. Rain had fallen in the far-flung hills and stripped the valleys of their oaten topsoil and their undergrowth. The fields were silver and the rivers bronze. Nine days of it. Rain had fallen everywhere, it seemed, except on us. We had blue skies. The whole of May was mocking blue for us, disdainful of the countryside. The city’s blessed, we told ourselves, in shirtsleeves, eating out in sidewalk cafes, getting tanned, getting overconfident. We have the nation’s summer to ourselves.

So the hills were virtually invisible to Lix and to Alicja from their high and costly patio. A heavy mass of slaty clouds had gathered discreetly in the first few days of the month like a sieging army, patient and bullying, softening the countryside with rain, but still just far enough away from the outer suburbs not to appear too menacing. No wind. The clouds just seemed to darken, breed amongst themselves, and fatten on the washed-loose produce of the plains, reluctant to depart, unwilling to invade the determined patch of urban blue that kept our weather fine and caused the Dern rooftop to snap and crack unseasonably with heat. Their true horizon had been smudged away by clouds, and so even in the rain-free city, untouched it seemed at first, the days were shorter than they should have been. The dawns were late and dusk was early. A sweating wintertime in May. The rising and the setting sun, to use the finest phrase of a newspaper columnist, was “smothered by a black-brown shawl and swathed in widow’s cloth.” Wet wool!

These were dramatic days for Lix and for Alicja. The weather made them feel grandiloquently loving. The fitful romance and the ecstasy of early married life can only benefit from breakfasting amongst the rooftop pots under such sensual, operatic skies. By chance, they’d rented happiness. Their midmorning light was startling that May, low and sharp enough to give the clouds — especially in the photographs they took — their own ravines and cols and peaks and scarps that seemed as permanent and sculpted as the granite ones which they’d obscured. These were clouds you could trek in, ski down, climb. You’d think that you could mine in them for tin and silver, sink great shafts through fissures, plates, and strata to haul up spoils of solid oxygen and fossil rain.

The clouds were full of riches and rewards.

Lix and Alicja watched an aircraft fly too close to that great granite cliff of wet suspended atmosphere. They watched it disappear, illogically intact. They watched through his binoculars the flocks of geese and plovers, displaced by rain, the jazz quintets of buzzards extemporizing on the thermals against the backdrop, blackdrop of the clouds, the laboring of herons, and, closer, with the naked eye, they watched the resigned and stoic flight of crows, forced into town for once. They were puffed up themselves like clouds, puffed up with massive confidence, with everything-is-possible, with an affection that Lix at least had never felt before. The weather was a prelude, so they thought with all the arrogance of newlyweds, to something grand and memorable for them.

Lix was mightily relieved to find that three months after their hasty and impulsive marriage — no church, no Lesniaks, no honeymoon, just three good friends as witnesses, a short civil ceremony, two shaky signatures, and a bottle of spacchi — he was growing more attracted to his wife. More sexually attracted, that is, less fearful of the lovemaking. He’d always liked, then loved, her gentleness, of course, her quiet efficiency, her many skills, her pluckiness, her company. His fixed vision of happiness had encompassed her. Her mood was not tempestuous. She was not cruel. But he had doubted in those early days whether he was truly passionate about her. He’d found with Freda, all those years before — and barely for a month, it’s true! — that they’d possessed a kind of private ideology, beyond the politics, a set of common condescending principles and prejudices, a shared vocabulary of phrases and signs that they regarded as superior to anybody else’s. Oh, pity everybody else; those diminished, longing looks when he and she walked past, those dull and compromising lives. Not so with Alicja. She did not make Lix feel superior. She might love him more than Freda ever had, if such a thing were measurable, but somehow, so far, all her love seemed lesser than the passion he had felt in 1981.

It worried him at first, of course. Love minus true sexual desire is little more than friendship, he had thought. It’s a lager without gas. Preferable in a marriage to true desire without the friendship, of course — a marriage such as that could not survive the honeymoon. But it was still not total love, still not quite the brimming liter. He understood only too well whose fault it was. He dared not say this even to himself — but his new wife was not his type. Not the type he’d dreamed of sleeping with, still dreamed of sleeping with. In those days he liked a woman who was tall, bony, small-breasted, unconventional, and slightly and capriciously cruel. A woman just like Freda actually. Alicja was none of these things. That made her good and chastely lovable, of course. But not desirable. Not arousing. He did not feel like a hero in her company. Her qualities, he sometimes felt, especially her homeliness, her coziness, her patience, were sexual liabilities. They blunted his desire. She was not the actress he would cast to play his wife in his stage fantasies. That part belonged elsewhere.

She’d surprised him, though. She might not turn as many heads as Freda on the street. She dressed too casually and too timidly, neither elegant nor bohemian, neither striking nor mysterious, and wary of adornments such as jewelry or hats. Her underclothes were functional. She wore amusing T-shirts — perhaps the only way in summer that she could draw attention to her breasts. Lix was not amused. An entertaining T-shirt was not a flattering accessory, in his precise opinion. Also, she was too plump and healthy to be anything other than agreeable to the eye.

But naked she was beautiful. Plump’s only plump in clothes. Released from her unexceptional garments, her serviceable shoes, her sensible pants, Alicja was curved and silky and irresistible. Solid, comely, yes — but not unpleasingly overweight at all. If only everybody knew how beautiful she was with nothing on, and how substantial.

Naked she was unpredictable. What greater stimulation can there be than that?

THE ONLY PROBLEM with the weather and the outlying storms was a pretty one, at first. Within a day or two, the city’s river was engorged. It heaved itself out of its bed. It didn’t break its banks exactly. It merely ventured here and there into a waterside parking lot, cleaning tires, activating litter, or nosed across the running track to show its idle interest in the bird pavilion and the children’s jungle gym.

Alicja and Lix, like almost everybody there, enjoyed the city’s altered forms. At lunchtime, when the roof and their apartment were too hot for comfort, they would cycle down to the wharfside market for their vegetables and bread, then sit out on one of the commemorative benches in the Navy Gardens to watch the river’s latest exploits. They were amused at first to see the ducks and water doves quite at home in gentle shallows where just the day before there’d been a lawn and shrubbery

The pedestrian underpasses were unusable as well. Nobody would attempt to wade through their wet history, the discarded bottles and cans, the antique, subterranean, water-activated smells of urine, cardboard, and tobacco. (But nobody used the underpasses anyway, wet or dry, except prostitutes and drunks — and men with urgent bladders.) So city shoes and socks were not yet getting wet. Except children’s shoes and socks, that is. The children went out of their way to paddle home from school. The placid flooding was a treat they’d remember till they died.

The city center was more humid than it should have been, and smellier, and tempers were more frayed than usual. Trade and business are impatient with the slightest inconvenience. No one likes to break routines. But still it felt, in places, as if the countryside had come into the city with no intention more malign than to lap affectionately against our margins for a day or two, provide some gentler contours to the overmanaged waterside, and then subside with no harm done.

One or two of the lowest streets down on the wharf and behind the boat and ferry yards were ankle deep in river by the third day of the rains, but who minds that? You seek such places out. It’s fun to carve up water with your bike. It’s fun to wear your boots in town and splash about, dispersing all your troubles and anxieties with whooping loops of water. It’s better fun than Dry and Safe and Unremarkable. Odd weather stimulates. Such days are dancing lessons from the gods.

By the fifth day, a Sunday, the river had grown more impudent and menacing. Lix and Alicja could finally see water from their rooftop patio. Not moving water yet. Not quite a river view A sheet. The great cobbled Company Square where the old town market halls and narrow Hives abutted the theater district was oddly brilliant with color from the reflected buildings and reflected sky. A rectangular expanse of water, hardly more than ten centimeters deep, architect-designed, it seemed, had turned the square brown-blue, with undulating fringes of marble gray, brick red, and stucco white. The sun, for once, was mirrored and disintegrated on the surface of the city, an idle, rippling shoal of golden fish.

The flooding was an unexpected wonder, too rare and beautiful to miss.

Alicja and Lix hurried out of their apartment to join the paddlers and the watching crowds, and to enjoy the latest dispositions of the streets. You’d only need a pair of skates and freezing temperatures, Alicja said, once they had waded to the dry, raised stand in the middle of the square where once there’d been a statue, already crammed with willing castaways, and “this could be a Dutch masterpiece.”

“Except for the hills,” somebody said. “No hills in Holland.”

“There are no hills here, either. The hills have disappeared.”

She felt absurdly privileged to know so much. Nobody else amongst that crowd could boast such thrilling rooftop views. She felt absurdly privileged as well to be the wife of Lix. She stood behind him on the plinth, her arms wrapped around his waist, her thumbs tucked in beneath his belt, her cheek pressed up against his back. Love is enacted by small things. Love is what you do with what you’ve got.

Lix was admitting to himself with some relief that he had at last become seduced by her. While Freda really had only wanted pseudo-Lix, the fearless and obliging activist — and only for a month! — Alicja provided her husband with moments of true value and true grace as they walked arm in arm around and through the floods. It wasn’t that her every pat and tap, like Freda’s every touch, seemed to settle with a fingertip the riddles of existence. It was rather that his uncruel wife was generous with her caresses, conferring unsolicited gifts and not simply taking pleasure for herself. Her embraces acknowledged Lix’s bloated self-image but recognized as well his hidden but more plausible self, his shortfalls and inadequacies. She welcomed all of it, it seemed, and wanted all of him, peel to core.

On Monday, it was far too deep to paddle in the square. By lunchtime, when Lix and Alicja finally went down to the old town, only a handful of young men had been conceited and foolish enough to wade in up to their knees to reach the central stand, their office trousers ruined but their senses of self enhanced. The sheet had spread beyond the square and was lapping at the rising ground around the narrow medieval side lanes. Basements had been lost already to floodwater, but none of these were residential streets. Only storage spaces had been breached. Cellars full of laundered sheets and laundered banknotes, clamps of vegetables, catering cans, and imported wine below the many restaurants and tourist hotels were underwater. Expensive labels had peeled off. Good unidentifiable wines, which would only sell off cheaply now, were bobbing free just centimeters from the ceiling in the democratic company of tonic water, lemonade, and Coke.

One of the little brasseries, the Fencing Shed, where Lix performed his unaccompanied songs on those evenings, such as now, when he was not working in the theater, was unreachable by anyone who wanted to keep his toes dry.

The Debit Bar just around the corner, another of Lix’s occasional venues, was already closed. It would be on the rising shoreline soon, a waterfront cafe. The day-shift Debit waiters were stacking chairs and lining all the entrances with makeshift flood barriers. Short-tempered policemen, armed with batons and whistles, were turning vehicles away. The ancient drains were overwhelmed. Instead of swallowing the floods, they were regurgitating. For the first time since the rains began, nerves were being lost in our normally lackluster city. The mounting waters were now regarded not with smiles but with shaking heads, and everybody had begun to calculate the cost.

That evening, when Alicja returned from her late shift a little before midnight, she and Lix almost made love. It would have been the first time they’d made love since the weather changed. She wanted to. Making love had been implicit in their holding hands all day as they’d splashed through the town. A flirting conversation she’d had that evening with an older colleague had made her feel desirable, something she was too often missing in her marriage but which was essential for her self-esteem. Lix had had a flirting conversation with himself that night as well when he’d come back much earlier than usual from his shrinking, drowning round of busking venues. Performing, singing, had always made him sexually provoked. Onstage he was a Casanovan balladeer — love songs and songs of loss, intended to arouse. He’d masturbated in their tiny bathroom, dreaming first of one or two of the well-dressed women who’d come into the restaurant in cocktail dresses and knee-high rubber boots, then of Freda, then of a new waitress, scarcely seventeen, and then — a triumph of the married will — of his own wife. It made no sense, to climax thinking of his wife, bringing to mind a body that was not wholly present when she’d be home and completely tangible within the hour. He was impatient, though, and tense. Uncertain anyway if she would share his mood when she returned. He had not been strong enough to stop himself.

So by the time his wife walked through the door, kicked off her shoes, and put her arms around his waist, her thumbs again beneath his belt, his appetite for her or anyone was blunted. He’d make amends, he told himself. He’d truly make amends, some other day. For marriages are rich in other days. He made excuses for himself, sat on the toilet for a while, busied himself preparing coffee, talked too little and too much, and only joined her on the bed when he was sure that he was irritating her, that he had driven her away. Chatter is the cheapest contraceptive.

Instead of making love, then, they lay apart in their twin shirts, not even holding hands, and listened to the radio — the midnight news, the weather report, and “music from the studio”—in their dark attic room. Between a polka for accordions, some jailhouse jazz, a French chanson, and music from Alfredo Busi’s Tamborina, the weather pundits and one of the city senators warned that people ought to stay away from the floods (and from the riverside especially). Matters would get a little worse, perhaps, before they could get better. We should not panic, though. Talk of cholera was wildly mischievous. No one would drown if everyone was sensible. The easterly winds would soon dislodge the distant rain.

Anyway, according to an expert from the university, the worst would pass us by. The towns and villages downstream might soon be underwater, though, she said. Floods always find the lowest ground. The farmers could expect widespread waterlogging in their fields, a decimated harvest, and costly winter vegetables for us. “Everything invades the wallet.”

The city itself, however, was not vulnerable, she added. No need to construct an ark or walk about with flotation jackets on. Or drag your mats and furniture upstairs. No call for goggles yet. The streets would not be jammed with snorklers or bathyspheres instead of cyclists and streetcars. We’d not have ducks indoors. The dictates and principles of urban geography would keep us almost dry. If you build a city on a river’s floodplain and then defend yourself with embankments, as our ancestors had, as the local governments had continued to do for the past four hundred years, replacing, adding, and extending until the only open ground was parks, she explained, then the floods would be rebuffed by “solid surfaces” and hurried off elsewhere by drains and conduits and canals. These were the benefits of cobblestones, asphalt, and cement, especially in gently sloping cities such as ours. The rushing river always rushes to the sinks and basins of the fields where the hospitality is softer and the waters more at home.

Alicja and Lix, though, were young and free enough not to be discouraged from an adventure by the advice of senators, geographers, and forecasters. The next morning, they did not feel intimate enough to breakfast on the roof. Indeed, Alicja was beginning to fear that Lix was not the moodless paragon she had hoped. Instead, they walked in silence down to the river’s edge, soon after eight o’clock, turned their trousers up above their knees, and, carrying their shoes in knapsacks, waded through the thigh-deep and now traffic-free streets — streets where the Lesniaks had wanted their daughter to rent some rooms — six blocks below their own apartment building to reach the stairs of the flimsy wrought-iron walkway that ran alongside Deliverance Bridge onto Navigation Island and then across the farther stream into the campuses. They had to see for themselves what all the excitement was about and walk off their ill tempers.

There was excitement. A city’s seldom livelier than when things are clearly going wrong. At dawn, all five of the east-west bridges across the river had been closed to traffic. Some brickwork on a single central pier had been dislodged by the force of the flooding. The mortar pointing in the stonework of the oldest bridge below the wharf was being washed away. The engineers detected shifting in the wider spans. So there was very little choice but to put up traffic barricades until the floods retreated and repairs could be carried out.

Half of the city’s drivers couldn’t get to work, unless they were prepared to travel out of town up to the high suspension bridge and its high tolls. Or else they’d have to dump their cars and walk between the eastern and the western banks by joining Lix and Alicja on the wrought-iron walkway, which, as yet, had not been closed. Anyone with any sense — that’s everyone not desperate to work — would see this as the perfect opportunity to shrug their shoulders, phone the boss, and thank the gods of mischief that dangerous bridges stood between their workplace and their home, and that the sun was shining in a kind blue sky.

Here was an unexpected holiday. They could take pleasure in the drama of the streets with all the other addicts and devotees of the flood, with Lix and his Alicja, with all the ne’er-do-wells who’d never done a decent hour’s work but saved their energies for days like this. With good advice to be ignored (“Stay away from water. It is dangerous”) and nothing else to do till after dark except to witness the more expensive parts of their hometown submerge, how could they not enjoy themselves?

As Lix had suspected, though, the warnings on the radio that they should stay away from the river itself had been alarmist. Appeared so, anyway. The flooding waters, viewed from above on the walkway, did not seem so threatening. They were more beautiful than threatening. The crowds of pedestrians trying to get to work were much more dangerous and unpredictable. The two impatient counterflows made it almost impossible to progress on the walkway except by taking risks, except by leaning out, and squeezing past, and shoving. But the progress of the swollen currents speeding only meters below their feet seemed unstoppable and satisfying. So, despite the urgency, the atmosphere was festive on the footbridge. There was good reason to rejoice. It seemed as if the problems of the world were riverborne and would be swept away and out of view. Any true disasters would only manifest themselves in someone else’s neighborhood, too far away to count, everybody said, repeating the good news from the radio. No cost to us. Besides, the river was far too spirited and glorious that day to seem anything other than a brief and welcome visitor. It was the placid uncle who’d suddenly turned hilarious and boisterous with drink. How could anybody — in this regular and regulated city, suppressed by laws and protocols — not enjoy the drama of the freshly sinewed river, its inflammation, its chalky, swept-up smell, its shots of clay-red coloring and the unexpected noise it made, thunder rendered into skeins, a din made muscly and physical?

By eleven o’clock, Alicja and Lix had crossed to the east side, bought breakfast at the campus cafe as they’d done so often as students, attended an exhibition at MeCCA, and started on the journey back to their apartment. Not touching yet. Not holding hands. The great panicking throng of workers had dispersed to work. The pedestrian bridge was still busy, though. The walkway was a perfect gallery for the city’s enfants du paradis to observe the drama, feel the spray even, watch the rare and disconcerting spectacle of traffic-free bridges. These were images of old. Premotorcar. The walkway’s ironwork, which earlier had groaned almost silently from the burden of so many workers, now creaked and grumbled out loud as it shrugged itself back into shape. It had never carried such a weight before or hosted such a cheerful party of sightseers.

No one was glad to hear the bullhorn of the police instructing everybody on the wrought-iron bridge to “come ashore,” an inappropriate but thrilling phrase. The walkway was “unstable” and would be closed. Anyone who’d walked to work that morning would not get home that night. So, finally, the city had been sliced in two, disunified by water.

“Evacuate. Evacuate,” the bullhorn said. But no one wants to be the first to leave the spectacle. A fire, a crash, a flood — we want to be the last to stay and watch the world go wrong. The crowd of gawkers on the bridge slowed down and might have taken all morning to disperse. Except there was a little accident, a loss, which made their vantage point seem unreliable and fragile. A woman’s hat fell in. Her immediate cry gave everybody time to spot it tumbling, halfway down between her stretched hand and the flood. Its fall seemed glacial, a lifeless flight of peaked denim. Its disappearance in the water, though, was instantaneous. It vanished like a slug in a frog, as they say. Then, seconds later, fifty meters downstream, it showed itself again, blue cloth against the white-gray-green.

“It makes you want to jump in yourself,” said Lix. “Or give someone a push.” Alicja held him firmly by the arm at last. She felt the pull of drowning, too.

Before they’d seen the disappearing hat, Lix and Alicja had not noticed all the detritus. What city dweller ever does? You close your mind to it, or else you have to walk with fury as a constant at your side, offended by the woman and her discarded can, the small child and his lollipop, the thoughtless driver cleaning out his car, the tissues and the cigarettes, the paper bags. But finally, as everybody pushed and pressed to reach their own side of the river, Lix and Alicja took refuge on an observation deck and leaned out over the water to let the more impatient and the more fearful squeeze by. Then they could not help but notice what the muscle of the river had swept up. The sticks and paper first, the evidence of living rooms and kitchens, the tossed-up hanks of hay and rope, the bottles and cans, the sheets of farming polyethylene and plastic bags. A book. A hollowed grapefruit half. A little wooden figurine. A smashed and empty produce box. Vine canes. Bamboo. Nothing large.

Once the crowd had cleared and they’d reached the west side of the bridge, though, where the river was at its (so far) mightiest, the detritus was weightier. Stripped trunks of trees, their branches knocked off by the journey from the hills. Container pallets, lifting up and ducking in the torrent. Sides of boathouses and sheds. A roof. And borne along, as blithe and cheerful as a child’s toy tossed blissfully into a stream, what seemed at first to be a bungalow. It was, in fact, a houseboat still afloat but desperate, its curtains more like flags than sails.

That houseboat silenced everyone. It even silenced the policemen’s bullhorn for a moment. “Evacuate” and “Come ashore” would be no help to anyone. The houseboat seemed alive with possibilities. You could not help but people it. You could not help but think of children sleeping in its only bed, restless with nightmares that could never be as terrible or hopeless as what awaited them when they woke up. You could imagine making love in it, in that sweet wooden house, and never knowing that your moorings had come loose. You’d think the world was twisting just for you. Or, perhaps, you could enliven the houseboat with one old man, too frail and rheumatoid to get up from his deep and ancient chair to save himself. He’d feel the helpless flight of his frail home. He’d see the landscape hurtling by. Perhaps he’d even spot the enfants on the bridge and think the world was coming to an end.

Just as the houseboat swept away, quite disappeared below the swell, just as the call to “come ashore” resumed, somebody said, a lie perhaps, an honest error, or the truth maybe, we’ll never know for sure, “I think I saw a cat on board.” They all turned around to face downstream and hope to catch a final glimpse of the children and the lovemakers, the old man and his cat, in their houseboat on its mad and bundling emigration to the sea.

ON THURSDAY MORNING, no one was surprised to wake to havoc on our streets and the din of rescue boats and helicopters, winching busy people from their penthouses and from their balconies. Flood depths downtown had almost trebled overnight. It was the city’s turn to be submerged. The waters had ignored the basic dictates of geography. Although the distant mocking clouds had finally dispersed, the widow had tossed off her shawl to reveal the sodden, sunbaked shoulders of the hills, Navigation Island was now invisible. Only the tops of tarbonies and pines bending in the flows and disrupted by the weight of squirrels, the green clay roof of the bandstand with half its tiles removed, streetlamps, still lit and sending orange streaks of light downstream, and sodden flags on three-quarters-submerged poles, revealed that this had once — a day ago — been land and home to weasels, rats, and foxes, all long since drowned because they’d never learned to swim or climb or fly.

The campuses across the bridges were standing in a glistening lake. The MeisterCorps Creative Center for the Arts was closed. The utility corridor where once a Lix-in-love had planned a kidnapping was little more than a cloudy sump. A brown-gray river ran where they had waited in their rental van. It ran and spread into the banking district and beyond, into the army barracks even, and the zoo. The one hundred famous green koi carp in the open pool escaped. One ended up — or so the story goes — in an eel trap ninety miles downstream. The zoo’s three missing Nile crocodiles, four meters long and volatile, were never found, however, although they gave the city much to talk about. As did the mosquitoes.

On the west side, all the old parts of the city, the valued and expensive parts, the tourist sights, the markets and the galleries, the narrow medieval squints, were flooded and cut off, and blocked by tumbled and abandoned cars. Even Anchorage Street was under four meters of water.

Alicja and Lix had river views at last.

It was approaching midday and they were on the rooftop, still in their granddad shirts and nothing else when they heard the shouting from the street — the new canal — below. A voice they recognized. Her father’s voice. A voice they did not want to hear, not when they were almost making love, nothing spoken yet but certainly implied when Alicja had dropped her head on Lix’s shoulder, the misunderstandings of two nights before forgiven, and pulled her shirt up above her knees to sun herself. He’d said she had attractive legs.

Reluctantly, she got up from their breakfast spot and found the space between the pots where they could look down on the street, where normally they could drop their key to friends or call out to acquaintances.

“It’s my father,” she said. “He’s in a boat.”

“Is it a gondola?”

“A motorboat.”

“Ignore him. Come back here.”

“He’s seen me already.”

“What’s he selling? Has he got bananas? Ask him to sing some Verdi. Bel canto, Signor Lesniak. Ask him to dive for coins.” Lix was in the best of moods. Their decision earlier that morning not to get on evacuation boats like every one of their neighbors from the more vulnerable lower floors of the building but to sit the crisis out had made him almost joyful. He and his wife would stay exactly where they were, at home, and watch the river from their windows and the roof, the entertainment of the unexpected regatta, the kayakers who’d waited all their lives for this, the uptown fishermen turned ferrymen who’d find that people were a better catch than perch, the firemen in their dinghies fighting water for a change, and looters with their craft tied up to balconies that now were jetties. They wouldn’t miss such mayhem for the world.

Clinging to their own nest like breeding grebes was not the timid thing to do, Lix thought. Staying put was a risk, surely. His choice had been adventurous for once. No one could tell how long the floods and their supplies of food and clean water would last. No one could guarantee, indeed, that the river would not sweep the street away, like it had swept away the little houseboat and (as it had turned out, overnight) every strut and stay of the wrought-iron walkway where they’d chanced their lives the day before. Perhaps that’s why Lix felt so weightless and alive.

“Ask him to call someone to have the flood removed within the hour.” Lix spoke in perfect Lesniak. “‘Dry streets are just a call away. I’ll put some pressure on someone in Forecasting. I’ve got some favors I can cash in. I only have to whisper in a friendly ear and there’ll be drought. I only have to say our name. Polish parents are the very best.’”

Alicja did not allow herself to laugh. Lix’s imitations could be wearying, she thought. She’d always thought. She did not like to hear her father so accurately mocked. “Stay out of it,” she said, in a voice that warned a steely afternoon if Lix did not comply, and felt guilty straightaway. When it suited her — she never moved until it suited her — she would apologize. First she had to see her father’s back. She formed a tranquil face, leaned out into the street, and listened to his lecture and advice.

Mr. Lesniak, it seemed, had borrowed someone’s launch and had come to evacuate his daughter, drawing up like a Venetian merchant against the balustrade of the second-floor apartment. He was determined to call out until she showed herself, and then stay until she did what he asked. He could not understand why the couple had not moved out of their apartment the night before, like everybody else with any sense. “You don’t play games with water,” he said gnomically.

“We’ve made our minds up anyway,” Alicja shouted to him, cupping her hands around her mouth and trying to ignore her husband’s running commentary. They’d considered all their choices when the hastily appointed flood wardens had directed them to leave and take their allocated places and their allocated camp beds in the Commerce Hall with all their neighbors, she explained. At least that would have been amusing and sociable, she thought but did not say out loud. More fun than moving out to the bone-dry suburbs and her parents’ overfurnished house, where gated entry kept everything at bay, including the unruly river, probably. “No Floods Except by Appointment.”

No, their own home was best by far, she said. The floods would never reach their attic rooms, which were too high even for the mosquitoes, she’d told the warden earlier that day and repeated to her father now. “That is not guaranteed,” the warden had said. “I’m not responsible for you if you don’t come. You might not drown, but you’ll be stuck indoors until the floods go down. We won’t come back.” Her father said very much the same except he thought he was responsible for her. It was possible that he’d come back, again and again, until his daughter did as she was asked. “You think I’m going to let you starve?”

“How can we starve?” Even if their food ran out, she said, hoping to amuse her father and disarm him, they’d swim for bread like spaniels or dive for vegetables like ducks or hunt for fish with barbecue forks.

“That’s being childish, Alicja.”

Exactly so. The prospect of having the building all to themselves for a few days seemed irresistible, a private island where they could be kids again. Juveniles had all the fun. The trick for adults, then, was to act like juveniles. “Walk naked if we want to,” Lix had said. That was a more appealing prospect, to him at least, than eating and sleeping in a hall with ninety other refugees or living with the Lesniaks. What could be safer than their Private Patio?

Alicja called out to her father, trying to suppress her irritation with the man, all men. “Stop fidgeting. We’ll take good care of ourselves,” she said again. “I’m twenty-nine, for heaven’s sake!”

“I’m sixty-nine, for heaven’s sake. You think I don’t know best by now?”

Lix listened to his wife discussing safety with her father, three stories below, occasionally lapsing into Polish when Mr. Lesniak was irritated or baffled. “We’ll be all right,” she said again, leaning forward over the balustrade. “Go home. Don’t worry. We’ll not drown, you know. We’ll not even catch a chill.” And then a daughter’s tease, exasperated, though. “I’m a married woman. I do not need the inshore lifeboat, thank you very much, Captain Lesniak.”

Her sensible and knee-length granddad shirt had ridden some way up her thigh as she leaned forward to shout down to her father. Lix shuffled forward on his haunches, ducking down below the balustrade, and sat amongst the pots beside his wife. He did not want to be seen by Mr. Lesniak. Being charming and polite was wearying. And Mr. Lesniak was more successful at bullying his son-in-law than his daughter. Before they knew it Lix would have agreed to pack a bag and climb out the window on the second floor into their rescue boat. The flood would be an opportunity lost.

So he hid himself and concentrated on his wife. He concentrated on the naked contours of her legs, the dimpled hollows behind her knee, the flexing ligaments, the moles and veins and creases. She liked caresses — who doesn’t like to be caressed? — even when her father was standing in a rocking boat and talking to her as if she were still a teenager. “Be sensible,” et cetera, when she was anything but sensible — and hoping never to be sensible again.

This was not yet a sexual act between the two of them. They’d often lain together on the bed, tweaking toes or massaging the other’s neck and back, without it ending as intercourse. Marriages would combust if every touch was sexual. Caresses of fondness and affection are only little passing gifts, the fleshly version of a word which gives reassurance to your partner that everything is going well, that no one’s cross. The fingertips convey no message other than the whispered tenderness of skin on skin.

For the moment Lix’s fingertips were restricted to her middle leg, the knee, the calf, the upper shin. Alicja welcomed this as just a simple intimacy, an unspoken symbol of support in the war amongst the Lesniaks. But tender touching never lasts quite long enough with men. They seek possession. They want to occupy the land and harvest it. They want to plunder it. They have to stretch and reach — as Lix was doing now — out of the realms of charity, beyond the zones of tenderness.

He pushed a hand under her nightshirt and began caressing her behind, a tactic that had succeeded several times before. He pushed her shirttail up to her waist and she could feel him breathing on her naked skin, could feel his face too close to her. She did not like that quite as much as massages. A parent’s presence made her feel unwomanly. If she allowed her husband to proceed, she understood he’d slip his finger into her while she was talking to her father. That was something she did not want. Not yet. Her head said no. Indeed, she shook her head. Yet instinctively her body, her grander, baser biological self, was already preparing for the possibility of sex, the likelihood that her husband would not despair of her, not give her any guilt-free peace until they had made love. Her vagina had already softened and lengthened for his stiffening erection.

Alicja knew what was expected of young wives, that she was expected to feel excited beyond recall. Those were the footnotes to Lix’s script — and she was cast to be the active and obliging star, being intimately touched by a lover crouching in the hems and shadows of her clothes, with nothing on underneath, but seeming to the world below the apartment as if she were simply chatting like a less than sensible daughter but with an inexplicably thickening voice.

Alicja would not accept the role. She pushed her husband’s hand away, coughed, and persevered with her assurances until her father gave the order for the engines to be started and for the launch to go back where it came from. She felt infuriated with the pair of them — her father for his bullying, her husband for his fickleness. Two nights before he’d been too distracted even to notice that she wanted to make love. Now, because he’d changed his mind, she was expected to respond to him like some trained horse. She shook her legs until he moved his hand away.

That might have been the end of it. Another moment lost. No unplanned pregnancy. No ill-timed son. But Alicja was more dutiful by temperament than resentful. She got her way by giving way. Besides, the weather was disarming and liberating and the circumstances of the flood so bizarre and stimulating that it would be a shame to punish the whole day by not responding to her husband, a husband who could sulk for a week if he so chose.

She watched her father’s launch proceed along the street, sending wakes of water up against the windows of the second-floor rooms and rocking all the floating debris that had surfaced in the night, the plastic dustbins and the furniture, while Lix sat at her feet and persevered.

Finally, of course, she warmed to him. She put her hand back on his head and gripped his hair. “No need to stop,” she said, in case he thought she was rebuffing him again. Actually her first rebuff had quieted him, reminded him how single-minded she could be, and how resistant to his bullying. He tried to be more tender and more circumspect. He pulled a leaf off one of the fessandra bushes and ran it down the back of her right knee. He’d never really paid much attention to the smell of fessandras before, but the pressure of his forefinger and thumb had bruised the leaf and let the odor out. It was oddly pungent, like cough lozenges with lemon undertones, bittersweet and cloying like a teenager’s perfume. He smelled his fingertips and was aroused by what he smelled. Physically aroused, that is, and — unlike an animal — imaginatively aroused as well because it was not hard to imply and to anticipate what might ensue, this moment rushing forward to the next at his behest but out of his control. The busy fingertips, at first, but then the lips and tongue. The gentleness, at first, but then the gripping and the biting, the fingernails. The man, at first, and then the beast.

Let’s not forget that Lix, indeed, was just an animal, compelled by base impulses to spread his seed in his selected mate so that his species could, in principle anyway, negotiate from eighty thousand genes an offspring more efficient than themselves. He was content to be “just an animal” on these occasions in his married life, to be instinctive and unambiguous in ways he couldn’t be when not aroused, to be unembarrassed by his irrational self, to be unself-consciously brave, patient, and cunning.

So Lix, the mating mammal, folded the fessandra leaf and rolled it up and down her leg, perfuming her, a ruminating little courtship play that would not ill suit gorillas or baboons. His wife stayed at the balustrade and let her husband put his leaf to work. She knew the smell, of course. She often rubbed the shrubs and brushed up against them, and she’d always found the odor stimulating, half kitchen and half dressing table. Someone ought to bottle it, she thought. An aphrodisiac. An aphrodisiac that at this moment truly worked. She felt her flood of irritation seep away, and then the swooning shift of mood that tossed her inhibitions to the far side of the roof. She felt intensely physical, exactly as she should, for her body was in free fall, in a kind of benign but toxic shock.

Her skin was turning red. Blood was pumping to the surface of her face and chest. Blood congested in her lips and nose, her earlobes and nipples, her breasts and genitals. The arteries were working faster than her veins. Her pulse had passed the hundred mark. Her blood pressure was up. Her lungs seemed hardly capable of reaching for breath. She was sweating visibly. You’d think the woman was not well, and that she should be hooked to sugar drips and heart machines and monitors.

Alicja was concentrating now. She had to draw the moment in. She stood a little straighter to allow the released odor to reach her nose directly. Her legs were buckling. She had to rest her hands on Lix’s shoulders for support. “Fessandra,” she said, as if this were an identification test. Lix took her comment as a cue. He snapped off leaves from balm, much damper leaves, more succulent and ticklish, and rolled them once again on Alicja’s lower leg. This time the odor was much fruitier and clogged, the smell of bed and sweat and oranges, as pungent as a potpourri and heavier than the fessandra perfume. It didn’t float as readily, but gathered in the curtains of her shirt. “I can’t smell that.” Again an invitation to move up. Again he pushed her shirt aside and tested out the balm on the softer, plumper skin between her bottom and her waist. And then some marjoram. “It’s balm,” she said, a little late.

Lix still had one hand free to pluck some mint for her. But he’d stood at last and now was pressing against her back, a little buckle-kneed himself. If anyone naive, some passing boatman or a marooned neighbor on another roof, had seen them there, they might just pass for a couple looking virtuously at their flooded street, as innocent as pigeons, but only if you took their swaying and their twining, their sudden shakes, to be a childish, clinging dance and their contorted faces — their mouths agape, their nostrils flared — to be a game of Visages.

When they had finished and were able to stand tall again, Lix rubbed the mint into the nape of her neck, a freshener, a waking tonic for the nose. It was a smell she’d associate forever with the advent of their son. Mint would remind her, too, of proper love, because their midday breeding on the roof (that’s what it was), their mating in the time of floods, had also been an act of fondness and affection. Everything they’d done and seen in those nine days of rain had led as surely as water runs downhill to lovemaking. Everything had proved to be a prelude to the kisses and embraces, and the child. There’d be no grander day than this.

This couple, these rooftop newlyweds, shipwrecked above the flooded streets, had done two things at once, two things connected and discrete: Had sex. Made love. What better way to start a life? What better way to start an afternoon?

A CHILDISH QUESTION now. What happened to the clouds? What happened to the clouds once they’d peeled off to give us back our hills, their scalped-to-the-bone maturity? They’d spread out as evenly as oil. The blue skies lost their pure edge as well. The wind picked up. By June, it was another summer just like all the others we endure in this safe city on the water’s edge. Not fine, not wet, but hazy and exhausting and unkind. Our world regained its shape. If we were hawks, if only we were hawks once in a while, we’d recognize that city patterns had returned to normal, the river flowing in its place, observing man-made banks, the traffic moving freely in the dried-out streets and on the mended bridges, no sheeny parks or squares to paddle in, the bipeds as busy as they ever were, observing sidewalk rules.

And, as hawks, we’d spot an unexpected confluence one afternoon in July, beyond glass roofs. Not such a rare coincidence. For cities like ours where people move around on tracks, meetings such as this are inevitable:

Alicja and Lix have gone down to the Palm & Orchid for a late Saturday afternoon treat. They’ve something to celebrate and think about. Something both pleasing and unnerving for Lix: his children stretch behind him and they stretch ahead. Her pregnancy’s confirmed.

Unluckily, for this should be a blissful, undiluted time, Freda’s already in the Palm & Orchid Coffee House with her small boy. She’s sitting almost hidden by a plant, facing out across the room disdainfully and being watched by half the men. When she sees her ex-lover, her very best RoCoCo Renegade and the father of her son, with his fat Polish wife at the entrance desk pleading with the maître d’ for an unshared table, she’s tempted first to stay where she is and ignore them, loftily. He’d not dare bother her.

They are being led to a table far too close to hers. So she gets up from her seat, brushes all the crumbs off her black skirt, and hurries out without a glance, but only once she’s sure that Lix has noticed her, seen not only how grand and beautiful she is but also how she’s still concerned, involved, engaged (and if she still is beautiful, then that’s a beauty that stems not from her genes but from her seriousness). She wants the man whom she possessed for more than thirty days to take the blame for everything, the child, the kidnapping, the ever growing problems of the city and the world.

George had not been pleased to be there in the first place, in such a disappointing restaurant. Now he is furious to be dragged away before he’s even dispatched his cake or had a chance to feed the finches with his mother’s crumbs. He drags behind his mother’s arm, afraid to make a fuss, and as he drags, he catches for an instant the eye of a man he cannot recognize but knows, a hypnotized and startled man who’s staring at him with an open mouth.