Genesis

4

ALICJA MUST HAVE known as soon as she opened her mouth that risking such a joke in front of her husband’s most recent friends might be an error — and a costly one, because, as any Lesniak could tell you, “for every pair of ears, there is a set of teeth.” In other words, if anyone can hear what you say, then anyone can repeat it, and anyone can sharpen up the most blameless banter to give it a damaging bite, especially if the object of the joke was an as yet unrevealed public figure.

So despite the ingenuousness of Alicja’s blunder, the word went around that Lix, for all his money and success, was not much good in bed. That would always be the sweetest rumor of them all, to hear that even a celebrity could fail between the sheets. Not fail to procreate, of course, he’d not failed that, but fail to please. The word spread fast. By midnight all the dogs were barking it and all the owls were hooting it.

Alicja by now was not the woman of the roof, a little overweight, ill dressed, too eager to comply, dismissive of her parents’ wealth, in love with Lix. She had become the woman that she’d planned, free at last of her lesser, deferential self, impatient to move on. She was a working mother, hardly slimmer than she’d always been, but grand and smart enough these days to “carry it.” Mrs. Lesniak-Dern was the new director of the Citizens’ Commission and also a district senator, elected by the waitresses and office workers of the Anchorage quarter because three years before she’d done so much — without success — to fight for flood repairs and compensation for the neighborhood. Her little kindnesses had paid big dividends for her, exactly as she’d thought they might. The Quandary Queen had been the local heroine for several months, long enough to offer herself in the elections — and to win.

It didn’t seem to matter to the Anchorage voters that nowadays their senator mostly lived elsewhere. In Polish luxury, Beyond. What mattered was that she and Lix had kept the little apartment-without-a-river-view as their city center pied-a-terre, no longer their rented rooftop happiness, perhaps, but somewhere for Lix to sleep after a late curtain, somewhere for Alicja to meet with her constituents — and with her lover. So — democracy! — their homely representative could sometimes be caught walking in their streets with her little son in his stroller and could be greeted by her Christian name. Alicja could still be thought of as a neighbor and a fixer, the ear to whisper in. She was their woman to admire and claim to be their own. Though her husband, Lix, was not so patient when they greeted him, just the presence of his familiar face was further evidence that even people who had once inhabited cramped apartment rooms, even people who’d been marked at birth, could make successes of themselves. Though two successful people in one household, as everybody knew, was one too many. Successful people are too busy, as the saying goes, to take care of the chickens. So it was with Lix and Alicja. They hardly seemed to meet these days. Even their photographs appeared in separate sections of the newspaper. They lived in different and divergent worlds.

To celebrate his first contract with Paramount in Hollywood (he’d co-costar with Pacino in The Girder Man) and the outstanding reviews and ticket sales for his Don Juan Amongst the Feminists, Lix had decided to blow some of the profits from the album sales of Hand Baggage, the “travelogue of songs” he had tested out so many times in restaurants and bars when he was still unknown and hungry for loose change and cheap applause, by hosting an Obligation Feast to prove his gratitude to thirty or so good friends. These were the actor colleagues, musicians, journalists, and slighter celebrities with time to spare who clung to him now that he was recognized and famous in the city. He could not expect them to drive out to his and Alicja’s new village-style house in Beyond (as the New Extensions on the east side of the city were known dismissively by those who did not have young children or money and did not value privacy, security, and lawns). These men and women were either too busy or too grand to make the forty-minute trek. Anyway, he’d rather keep his private house — with its seven private trees — secure and secret even from them. He’d not been truly happy there. Beyond had ruined everything. Besides, he did not want his name to turn up in a tittletattle diary piece in the newspaper, ridiculed for having — what? — the wrong-shaped bath, a bourgeois sofa set, last year’s shrubs, or mocked for having in-laws like the Lesniaks who could both buy, then give away to their daughter, such a fine and current building.

Beyond was not only beyond the old suburbs but beyond the means and wildest dreams of anyone in Lix’s lunch party. “Grand and busy” is not the same as rich, not in the Arts. It was never wise to make your comrades jealous or resentful or scornful. Best that they were kept away and not invited to inspect what tainted Polish cash could buy. Childless people never understood how costly — to your purse and principles — parenthood could be. “Blood before Ink” was Roesenthaler’s mocking phrase for it. Nor do they understand — the never married ones, at least — how quickly love gets washed ashore and beached. They’d see the evidence themselves if they came out to Beyond: the shallowness, the elegance, and the formality.

So Lix had rented the Hesitation Room (as the windowless private cellar beneath the Debit’s public areas was known). Perhaps it was the lack of natural light on this aggressively bright spring day that caused the diners to behave more drunkenly and less cautiously than they should have done at lunchtime. Once that baize door — with the high flood mark of May 1989 recorded just a centimeter below the lintel — was closed and all the meals had been served, it must have seemed like night down there, late night, with hardly any traffic noise and just occasionally digestive rumbles from the nightmare streetcars reminding them of city life. Time, then, to pop a pile of corks and throw discretion to the many cellar rats, even though, out in the world, the sun had hardly passed its highest point.

More often than not Alicja would have used their son, Lech, as an excuse for not attending Lix’s “self-celebrating” meal. Lech had to be collected from his sitter. Lech had to be delivered to his grandparents. Lech had to be adored and fussed and indulged on any day that Lix would like Alicja to be his public wife. There were other useful excuses, of course. Her public duties were the perfect alibi. Sometimes she simply said that it would not be politic to be at his side at this event or that occasion. The company was not discreet, there were too many journalists, her presence might be misinterpreted politically, et cetera. It wasn’t hard to fake an alibi. She and her husband led their own lives, neither one of any interest to the other. The senate and the theater were ancient enemies.

There were no convincing reasons, though, not to join his private gathering in the Hesitation Room. It was taking place in daytime after all. Lech was at the Polish kindergarten until late afternoon and then he had a toddler party to attend. The district senate was not due to meet for two more days. The Citizens’ Commission provided an income but, since its appropriation, few responsibilities. And Lix would take offense — quite reasonably — and sulk like a carp if his wife was absent from the Feast. My God, the man could sulk the juice out of a lemon. In less than a week he would be leaving for L.A. and then the film set in Nevada and not returning home for two sweet months. Surely Alicja, he had said, could make the effort just this once and smile upon his friends.

So she’d dressed up in her ComPoneau suit, determined to enjoy herself despite the immodest and undiplomatic company of Lix’s “limpets.” Luckily, there was one of his newly minted friends she was keen to share a table with — and the Debit food was always interesting, even in the Hesitation Room, where the lighting was so blunt.

Alicja had seemed, Lix thought, almost enthusiastic at the prospect of spending lunchtime with her husband for a change. She’d had her hair styled early in the morning and had then spent an hour at home on clothes and makeup. Lix had been a spectator, more disarmed by watching her than usual. He’d always liked to watch his wife prepare herself, a homely version of the many times he’d spent in theater dressing rooms talking to half-dressed actresses in mirrors, addressing their bare backs, their pins and zippers and straps.

Yet in the past few months his and his wife’s physical intimacies, the social glue of lovemaking, had become so infrequent and fraught, and so inconclusive, that even watching her dress had become a bitter pleasure, especially as recently — and this was pitiless — Alicja seemed to have discovered a new interest in her appearance to match her status in the senate and on the street. She’d never dressed so sexily before. She’d always thought his occasional gifts of clothes hilarious and “fussy.” Now she’d taken to wearing skirts and well-cut suits and shoes with just a tiny heel and did not seem impatient as she once had at the mindless waste of time of putting on makeup and coordinating her colors and fabrics and jewelry. Clothes, at last, were fun for her, it seemed. Her mother’s influence, possibly. Mrs. Lesniak had always thought her daughter dressed “like an English dumpling,” just to prove herself a rebel. This was one rebellion that even Lix — ashamed of all the other compromises they had made — was glad to see the end of. What happened to the plump, quiescent girl, he asked himself, the woman eager to appease and please? He blamed the Lesniaks. He blamed the stultifying culture of Beyond. He blamed Democracy for voting his Alicja away from home. He faulted himself as well — and he was justified — for letting his ambitions on the stage become more vital and consuming than his marriage. His wife could not be blamed for seeking spotlights of her own. He’d mend his ways.

Alicja’s more yielding attitude to clothes, Lix understood, was just a happy product of her age, but he also hoped that she was doing what she could to rescue their relationship as well from its ever present anxiety and its heartless determination to be civilized. She wanted to display a livelier, more seductive version of herself because — the Poles, as ever, had a mordant phrase for it—“a dab of rouge resuscitates the dead.”

Relations between Alicja and Lix—dealings might be a better word, these days — had become, if not quite corpselike, then stiffly formal. Not just in bed, where, truth be told, stiffness was not always guaranteed. No, out of bed as well. They had turned into little more than domestic colleagues, starched and polite but unengaged. A child and sitter in the house did not encourage intimacy. Neither did the late nights they both kept nowadays. Nor the increasing number of occasions when they slept apart, whether divided by an angry hollow in the bed or marooned in separate rooms, in different parts of town, the Anchorage apartment or the family house Beyond. She told her mother that Lix snored. That’s why she ended up so often in a different bed. He never snored. Nor was he a restless night companion. Much worse. Her husband sighed while he was sleeping, as if even his dreams were flat and saddening. To share a bed with Lix was to wrap yourself in sheets of woe. How had the man become so wounded by success? Alicja’s dreams were livelier and full of hope and opportunity. She’d dreamed, just the night before his Obligation Feast, that he was in the flood-tossed houseboat, and lost downstream amongst the missing crocodiles and koi. She understood her dream to mean their marriage was, well, waterlogged, too swept away to save, and that this was an opportunity for her to be an adult finally, liberated from the Lesniaks and Derns.

Lix himself knew no such thing. He thought the new blouse she was putting on for him that day suggested a rapprochement of a sort, a signifier that there could be (before he fled to Hollywood) a renewed alliance between old friends. When she’d returned from the hairdresser looking like a mature bride, Lix had sat in the wicker rocking chair on the bedroom balcony with his coffee and a playscript he had to consider and witnessed her undress, throw her clothes over the back of a chair — so many layers, so many unexpected and alerting loops — and then bedeck herself before the mirror in recent purchases. A woman is renewed by clothes. Perhaps a marriage could be, too.

The blouse was beryl green, short-sleeved and halter-cut. It seemed to make her nakeder. Alicja’s spine, so girlish and inexpressive when innocently unclothed, was not removed from sight when thinly covered by the blouse and underclothes, but, rather, emphasized and sexualized by new and displaced vertebrae, where the clasps and buckles of her brassiere showed up as petite bony studs against the cloth. Her back became a pattern of raised signs.

Lix considered getting up at once to read the message of her braille. Yet again — the story of his life — he lacked the courage and he lacked the confidence. He knew that if he stood and moved toward his wife, then she would close herself to him. A woman dressing does not welcome damp fingers or damp lips. Lix would be left — as ever when he took chances, in love, in business, on the stage — standing, swaying in a fug of vertigo, that familiar nausea and loss of balance that had always made him take descending steps away from risk.

So he stayed where he was, behind his playscript, making marks on the page and imprinting marks into his own back, from the pressure of the wicker chair. He’d wait for a better opportunity. Patience is a dignified form of cowardice, that’s all.

If he waited till the evening, Lix thought, there would be other marks for him to ponder and enjoy. Throughout the day, her underclothes, mediating between the naked and the dressed, the hidden and the visible, would press their tender traceries not only on her outer garments but on her naked body too. When she undressed again, then he would find — if she allowed it, if she came home with him and did not spend the night on Anchorage Street — indentations and elastic imprints across her back and shoulders, around her waist, around her upper thighs.

The very thought of these brief nevuses which could not last beyond the hour, which were so innocent and yet so rousing, made his throat go dry. A hint of vertigo. It was not only fear of contact with Alicja but also the opposite, the shocking prospect of his fingers never touching her again. For a man who no longer had the habit or the self-belief to cross the room and hold his wife, there was something heart-wrenchingly tender, too, about the vestigial rectangles of ridge and furrow from her pressing and her folding of the blouse. Those creases and impressions were eloquent and sad, and so domestically nostalgic. They were the marks of married life — a shelf of clothes, a cupboard and a room, an ironing board, the smell of bodies and cologne and steam.

Alicja, unexpectedly, was not in the least discomforted that her husband was watching her and that — she knew the man of old; men were so visual—he was sexually aroused. She was aroused herself, but not aroused by him. Not making love to him empowered her. It was satisfying. She watched herself pull on her tights. She did not think that she was showing off, although she knew she would have dressed herself more hurriedly if Lix had not been watching from the balcony, behind his cursed script. The man was always buried in a script. It seemed that everything she’d ever said to him had been filtered through a script or blocked by one. The pages of dialogue were the shield with which her husband rebuffed conversation, consigned her to the wings. He’d lost the knack of being normal and offstage. Alicja was coming around to her father’s view of theater.

Once she was fully clad in shoes and skirt, her suit jacket folded across her arm, she pirouetted for the mirror’s sake, but also for the audience of one. Now that she was dressed and safe, she didn’t mind that Lix had got up from his chair and was standing at the balcony door, openly admiring her, with that weasel expression on his face.

“Smart,” he said. A safe remark.

Her shorter, razored hair was indeed smart and flattering, Lix thought, flattering to him as well because there is nothing more supportive of a vain and famous man than to have a wife who merits the admiration and desire of friends, a head turner. The new cut made the most of Alicja’s Polish cheeks. Her hair seemed mischievously springy and boyish once the gel had been applied. Surely Lix could reach out and feel. Surely he could touch his wife.

Sadness made Lix almost brave. He had the pretext of his empty coffee cup, which needed putting on the breakfast tray by the bedroom door. He squeezed between his wife, the mirror, and the bed and, as lightheartedly and as drained of meaning as possible, ruffled her hair as he might ruffle little Lech’s head except that he was careful not to dishevel hers. That’s all it was, a manly reassuring touch, no threat to her. Her responding smile emboldened him. What other manly, reassuring contact could he make, drained of meaning, now that he was standing by her back?

He spotted his pretext almost at once, the blouse’s white label showing at her razored neck, both a spillage and an encroachment, something public, manufactured, but meant to be concealed. He’d not resist just dipping a finger below her collar to push the label back in place and steal his second touch that day. It should have taken just a moment, but he left his finger tucked inside her collar, freeze-frame, enjoying both the fabric and the skin. He was too bold, perhaps, and certainly too obvious, but he leaned forward over his much shorter wife to kiss the nape of her neck, his lips brushing both her newly shortened hair and his own fingertips. Her perfume almost made him weep.

It didn’t matter that she pushed his hand away and said, “Not now.” Not now, indeed. Later, later was implied. He could proceed with his used cup and take the loaded tray downstairs. She had invited him to live in hope.

When Lix returned five minutes later, already anxious that they would be late for his Obligation Feast, Alicja was sitting at their dressing table. “Just touching up,” she said. She leaned toward the mirror, pouted her mouth, and coated the pink-blue of her naked lips with fashionable and less alarming plum red lipstick. She cleaned away the residue with the edge of a tissue. Sprayed a little extra perfume on her throat and wrists. Then, despite herself, or else because at last she approved this risky, finished version of herself, she air-smacked a kiss toward the mirror and her husband’s reflection. He smacked one back, with sound effects, an actor’s mwa. They routed smiles into the glass.

Did Lix have reason for some optimism, then? Certainly their drive to town was comfortable, their conversation affectionate. She wanted him to have a successful lunch. Their sexual drought was coming to an end, perhaps, Lix thought, although he was not mad enough to stretch his hand and grasp her leg. The drought might end that day, if they survived the company of friends. Fortified by alcohol and panicked by the prospect of two months apart, on different continents, once they got home and in the hour or so before Lix had to leave again for that evening’s performance, they could perhaps begin to mend some fallen bridges.

“We’re running short of time,” Lix commented out loud, not wanting to explain, or needing to.

Alicja just raised a brow.

AT FIRST THERE HAD BEEN too many of her husband’s crew crowded around the bank of tables in the rented cellar, too many for concentrated conversation, too many for any indiscretions or any intimacy. The ordering, the serving, and the eating had been intrusive and disruptive. But by three o’clock only the dregs were left, the dregs of wines and spirits, that is to say, and the dregs of Lix’s new acquaintances, those who had no desks or families to return to, no stories to file, and no higher priorities than to keep the party going till the waiters chucked them out. The Debit waiters never chucked you out. The only time the Debit Bar was closed to customers was when the police or the river took charge.

There was the little dancer from Don Juan, intense and talkative in a way that Alicja could not admire, despite the woman’s obvious desire to draw attention to herself and despite the dancer’s admiration, many times repeated, for people such as “District Senator Lesniak-Dern” who’d invested so much of their energy in civic life.

“Dance never, never does a bit of good,” she insisted, and Alicja had felt obliged to disagree, saying — lying — that politics was not as good at bettering the world as politicians wanted everyone to believe, and that dance, at least, provided uncomplicated joy.

“Perhaps you’re right,” the dancer said, “in both respects.”

To Alicja’s left — ignoring her — there was the fussy trumpeter from Lix’s recording group whose flattened mouth and hamster cheeks, especially when flushed with drink and two desserts, made him look like a cheery doll. A cheery doll that liked an argument.

Farther up the table, engaged by a cigar that would not draw, there was an actress who had once been as celebrated as Lix but had lost her passion for theater and had turned instead to poetry, which she had published at her own expense while neglecting to renew her wardrobe or her anecdotes. To Alicja’s right, beyond the dancer, there was the undernourished couple who owned the studio where Lix had recorded his LP/cassette; the disheveled husband scarcely able to survive three minutes without tobacco or a cough; the wife scarcely twenty-two years old and drunk and bored and sitting next to Lix with her hand on his shoulder and her chair turned sideways to the table so that she need only talk to him and no one else could talk to her.

On Lix’s other side was “Joop the Scoop,” Jupiter the columnist, a man who would never give his proper name but whom everybody knew to be the embarrassed but untouchable younger brother of the garrison commander who more than any dancer or district senator at that time, the spring of 1992, controlled the city’s destiny, controlled the bettering, controlled the joy. Alicja would have much preferred Joop as a neighbor at the table, of course. Any woman would. He had the chiseled Roman face to match his name, though on the evidence of his own newspaper column he was hardly the celestial Guardian of Honor or the God of Oaths, Treaties, and Marriages. His pen was cruel and snobbish, perhaps, his politics unworthy of a citizen his age, but in person he had shown himself to be attentive and a little shy, a man who was not disposed to flirting openly, who hardly raised his voice, who rationed and so enhanced the value of his studiedly melancholy smile. He seemed exactly the opposite of Lix and not a bit like Mr. Lesniak.

Alicja had wondered when she first encountered Joop while waiting for Lix in the lobby of the theater some months before if he was a homosexual, besotted with her husband. She’d asked. She had to know at once. No, not homosexual, he’d said. He was simply so self-conscious about his early baldness that he thought it best not to bother bright and pretty women such as her. He had no reason to be self-conscious, actually, she’d told him, touching him for the first time on his forearm. The baldness made a handsome, intellectual monk of him.

“Your skull is sculptural,” she said, longing not so much to touch it as to smell it.

“I’ll have it cast in bronze, Senator, and give it to the city. I’m sure that you can find a plinth for it. The empty plinth in Company Square, perhaps.”

“Amongst the cobblestones, yes.”

They had embarked on an affair. Alicja and Jupiter.

So now she listened to the dancer’s anecdote about Swan Lake, Nureyev, and the bearded French ambassador and watched her lover paying polite attention to his host. Any moment he would catch her eye, and she would smile for him, the risky smile that says, I’m Yours, the risky smile that can’t suppress the showing of the tongue.

What if Lix looked up and caught her eye? Well, let it be. That evening, when they were home, or preferably as they were driving home protected by the darkness in the car, while he was trapped behind the wheel, she’d find the courage to talk to him. She owed it to the man who’d been her husband for more than three years, the father of her child, the first who’d ever earned her love, to be direct with him, to send him off to Hollywood understanding that everything would be rearranged while he was gone. More than that, she owed it to herself. She’d got a career. She’d got constituents. She’d got the promise, if she watched her step for a year or two, of joining the Executive and making history. No other woman in the city had ever gone so far. She’d got a well-connected lover, too, whose appeal included a vasectomy. What she didn’t want was a husband or another child to hold her back. The time had come, the time was good, for the city senator and the celebrated Lix to separate.

So Alicja can surely be forgiven for her nervousness at lunch, the shrill and wine-fueled conversations that she held, her unexpected gaiety, her robust appetite, her pleasure in the word games that were passing around the table, and then the risque games of Truth or Dare and Ultimatum.

Perhaps it was because playing Never was her lover’s suggestion, his way of flirting with her across the table, she imagined, that Alicja joined in too readily and so incautiously. The game was this: each diner at the table had to admit to something they’d never done that everybody else there most certainly would have done. If it proved that you were not alone in your humiliation, then you were out of the game and could not join the second round, when further admissions of inexperience were required. “You have to use the word never in your confession. And lying’s absolutely not allowed,” said Joop. “This isn’t journalism.” It was an invitation to disclose failings, cowardice, defeat, and limited horizons. The prize? “The mocking disrespect of all your friends.”

“It’s your idea. You first,” Alicja said to Joop. Already she had persuaded herself — or else his roguish grin persuaded her — that his own contribution would convey a private message. Almost everything he said turned out to be a tease. He kept her on her toes. “I’ve only ever loved one person in my life,” he’d say. “I’ve never loved another.” Or (a confirmation of a trip they’d planned), “I’ve never shared a hotel room. Not yet.” Instead he disappointed her. He said, “I’ve never been on a motorcycle or scooter. The very idea terrifies me.” But he was out of the game at once, because it seemed that the dancer had never risked a motorcycle either.

So now the dancer’s go. She claimed for herself that she had never seen the sea. No one could rival that. How was it possible to reach your thirties and not have seen the sea, especially when travel was so easy during the Big Melt?

“Not even from an airplane?” Lix asked.

“I’ve never been on an airplane,” she replied. Three goes in one. No motorcycles, no airplanes, no sea.

The trumpeter went through to the second round with his “mortified” claim never to have swallowed an oyster, an embarrassing and squeamish admission, he said, because he’d spat one out one evening in New York when his bass player had drawn attention to an oyster’s semen smell.

“Tasted, yes, but never stomached one, never passed one through.”

The twenty-two-year-old had never had sex with a person younger than herself, she claimed. “And never will.”

“So I’m in with a chance,” the trumpeter said, parping out his cheeks.

“Hardly. I’ve never had sex with a hamster either. And absolutely never will.”

The actress-poet’s contribution was “I’ve never smoked a cigarette, not one. Only my cigars.”

“Not even after you’ve made love?”

“When I’ve made love I always take a shot of peppermint liqueur. To take away the taste.” Their laughter bounced around the room.

Now Lix’s turn. He lied. He lied because he wanted Alicja to challenge him and be reminded of their early married days. He claimed, “I’ve never had sex standing up.” No challenges from anyone. Surprisingly, he went through to the second round unopposed, even by his wife.

“Too drunk to stand up, Lix?”

“Or wasn’t the goat tall enough?”

Lix had chanced a glance in Alicja’s direction and he could not mistake the look of embarrassment on her face. He’d meant the claim as a joke, a challenge, a hasty response to the raised sexual playfulness of the twenty-two-year-old’s boast never to have had sex with a younger person and the actress-poet’s unexpected indiscretion. It was only an invitation for his wife to contribute some mordant reply of her own and to remind her of a happy afternoon with river views.

He’d also expected Alicja to say either, “Well, if he’s not had it standing up, then I’ve not either, of course. So he’s out of the game.” Or better, she might say the truth, “He’s lying actually. We had sex standing up during the floods. On the roof of our apartment. At least, I think it was Lix. I couldn’t see his face. I was looking in the wrong direction. Disqualified!” Then his trap, his joke, would be pleasingly rounded off by her.

She should, as well, have challenged and matched the earlier winning claim “never to have had sex with someone younger than myself,” he realized. Lix was eight months older than his wife. She’d been a virgin almost to their wedding day. She’d said nothing then, and she said nothing now. She only frowned and reddened and let her fingers gallop on the tabletop. She evidently didn’t want to enter into the spirit of the game. Because, he thought, matters sexual were not to be discussed at table with people she hardly knew. It wasn’t “politic.” It wouldn’t do for Madame Senator L.-D. to let her hair down for a change amongst his friends. Oh well, her loss. The Lesniaks were famous for their prudery and fear of fun. The Papal Stain. “Your turn,” he said to her.

Alicja was annoyed with her husband, but mostly not for the reasons he suspected. Social proprieties and reticence, especially with a newspaper columnist at the table, should be sensibly observed, she’d always thought. But she was more embarrassed than irritated. He should not have reminded her of their lovemaking on the roof in such a crude and clumsy way. She remembered most the massage of the herb leaves and the blessing of her pregnancy. He remembered best the unromantic standing up. Men were the enemies of romance. The sex gets in the way of loving.

Joop had said that “absolute truth” was essential to the playing of Never. Well, her husband had not been absolutely truthful. Then neither would she. She could not ratify or challenge Lix’s Neverness without betraying herself. For within the last three weeks, Alicja had also had perpendicular sex — quick sex — with Joop more than once while she was standing. In the vestibule of his apartment house; leaning on the sink with the water running in the Anchorage Street apartment; at his office desk one evening, her back to him, her nose pressed up against the window blinds. She’d smudged her lipstick on the blinds. Here was a lover who always took his time, who never let her off lightly. The absolute truth? Well, now was not the moment to tell her husband that she’d been sleeping — standing — with another man. The truth would have to wait.

“Come on,” he said again, an impatient, disappointed edge to his voice. He panicked her. Otherwise she’d not have made her great mistake. The consequences of this moment were immense. She was suddenly the center of attention for the first time that day. She’d show them she could be as mischievous as anyone. She shelved her boast that she had never learned to swim. Too dull. The dancer, probably, had never learned to swim either. She pushed aside the claims that she had never once been drunk, had never worn high heels, had not so far attended the ballet or a soccer match, had never had a filling in her teeth, could not remember ever having had the hiccups, even as a child, had swallowed oysters but never semen so couldn’t be put off by the smell. Her shocking, teasing boast was shouting at her from a poster twenty meters high: “Take risks. Surprise them all. Be truly mischievous.” Bring back the roguish grin to Joop’s fine face. She only meant it as a private joke. It wasn’t absolutely true. She said, “I’ve never had an orgasm.”

THAT AFTERNOON when they got home, they saw at once that there’d been burglars. Their house looked out of sorts, as if it had been caught cheating on its owners. The outer gate was open, upstairs lights were on, someone had dropped a duster and rope on the drive, no one had bothered to wipe their dirty feet on the porch mat, and there was a dry rectangle of driveway by the front door where something large had parked but which the recent rain had not yet had a chance to wet.

Had Alicja and Lix arrived back in Beyond just a few minutes earlier they would have caught the three young men in overalls loading everything expensive, imported, and electric into their van: the two television sets, the VCR, the emptied refrigerator, the new computer system and printer, not yet even installed, the hi-fi tower, the three telephones, the answering machine, the radio alarm clock, the Italian stove, the PowerChef, the washing machine, even the vacuum cleaner and Lech’s game console. Trading debts and import taxes had turned anything foreign with plugs into liquid currency and anyone too impatient to endure low wages and late pay into an Appliance Bandit. Only last weekend there had been a cartoon in a newspaper showing someone in a mask paying for a tube of toothpaste with an electric toothbrush and getting a socket plug by way of exchange.

It was a near escape that stayed with Lix and haunted him for many months, how close they’d been that afternoon to driving through the garage gates, into the shadow of their private trees, before the men in overalls had driven off to deliver that day’s “imports” to their clientele. Then what? What kind of heroism would have been required of him, the man who’d never satisfied his wife, to rescue their appliances?

The Lix we know would not have challenged any burglars. He might have hovered at the shoulder of his braver wife, muttering his cautions, if she’d been mad enough to get out of the car and battle with the thieves. He might have locked the car doors and blared his horn at them, the car hovering in reverse gear. He might have driven off at once, fled the scene, to call the police from the nearest bar. On this day of anger and resentment, however, there was another possibility. A murderous one.

It was, then, just as well, perhaps, that Lix would never have the chance to find out if his anger was more brutal than his fear. The traffic had been stalled across the bridges to the city’s eastern banks since midafternoon and so their drive out to Beyond had taken more than an hour, an hour in which the weather changed to drizzle and the dusk set in. What began in sunlight ended in darkness and in rain.

FOR AN ACTOR, trained in faces, Lix was surprisingly readable when he was in a temper. His muscles tightened and his eyes went watery. Anger, was it? Embarrassment? Hurt? During their journey home he needed to identify the exact nature of his distress, then he’d know what his reaction ought to be to what Alicja had claimed. Never is the cruellest word, beyond negotiation. He understood that he was the resentful victim of a joke, the rough-and-tumble of the tablecloth, and that his rage would appear — had appeared — paranoid and feeble to outsiders. But there was also something dark behind his wife’s disclosure at the Feast that needled him and panicked him. It had left him cold and cruel.

The driving home was difficult. Lix squinted back the sunlight and the tears, and then he had to peer through heavy rain — two films of water then — which made the road seem remote and hazardous. Lix had imagined earlier that day that they’d be heading home for sex. Now he wanted to get home only to shout at his infuriating wife, if he could find the pluck to shout. Lix, to tell the truth, the shy and celebrated Lix who’d never done much harm to anyone despite his curse, despite his fame, was in the suburbs of a breakdown.

So, trapped in the traffic in the inner parts of the city, he set his jaw against the world. He would not speak to Alicja. He would not even look at her until his mind had cleared and he had formulated sentences that would repay her, punish her, match her indiscretion with some bruising indiscretion of his own. He would not grant her a single nod or shake of the head, not even when she tried to thaw him out with her calm voice and then her tough one. He silenced her with his own heavy breathing and exasperated sighs, and then with music. He put on a maddening jazz cassette, a tinkling trio of New Yorkers — string, skin, and ivory — chatting amongst themselves through their fingertips. He added the percussion of the windshield wipers. He banged his hand impatiently on the steering wheel, pretending to enjoy the jazz. He drove the car erratically, on purpose.

Even that could not shake off his irritation. The last ten minutes of their meal, before the sulky settling of the bill and the awkward farewells, played through his mind in an uninterruptible loop: the malice of everybody laughing, the grateful gape of pleasure on Joop the Scoop’s normally disdainful face as the scandalous material for his next Diary piece dropped into his lap, the clumsy comment from the owner of his record company that “Never Had an Orgasm” would be the perfect title for a song.

“What, never, Alicja? Not even almost? Not even on your own?” the actress-poet had asked. Then everybody else — his colleagues and his friends, so-called — had felt obliged to add their ridicule.

“Not even on an airplane?”

“Try riding a scooter or a motorcycle. That ought to do the trick.”

“Go home and hug the washing machine. Super spin cycle.”

“Poor Lix.”

“No, poor Alicja! We ought to order her a plate of oysters. Waiter! Bring on the aphrodisiacs.”

“One for me, one for you, and one for the chicken.”

Lix’s Obligation Feast had been humiliating.

Alicja had been humiliated, too, of course. But she was used to it. Her husband’s friends had never been the subtle sort, especially after so much wine. She shrugged their comments off. What she could not shrug off was Lix’s hurt. She had not meant to hurt him; she did not want him to be hurt. It was inconvenient. What she had planned — a tender, loving telling of the truth to a man for whom she still had feelings — was now impossible. He was bound to ask, Is the sex better with Joop? So the orgasm quip had been a big mistake, because it would appear that the affair was only about sex. Then Lix would think that better sex would rescue it. Sex with Joop was better, as a matter of fact. Your neighbor’s fruit is always sweeter than your own. But it wasn’t about sex entirely. It was about marriage and freedom. Making love to Lix, between the household chores and work and being a responsible senator and taking care of constituents and finding time for Lech, had come to feel like just more wifework.

She’d meant the passion of their marriage to endure, of course. No one’s to blame, but passion is not intended to endure. The overture is short or else it’s not the overture. Nor is marriage meant to be perfect. It has to toughen on its blemishes. It has to morph and change its shape and turn its insides out and move beyond the passion that is its architect. Falling in love is not being in love. Waiting for the perfect partner is self-sabotage. Alicja knew all these things. She still wanted, though, to be womanly, not wifely. Lix had failed her in that regard. Yet saying so was difficult and cruel. She’d spent the month since she’d accepted that their marriage was in ruins running her wedding ring up and down her finger and practicing how she should phrase the uncomfortable news of her infidelity. Now, as they crawled through the traffic in the suburbs and the rain, all she had to practice was an explanation and an apology.

Lix had not been such a dreadful lover, mostly. He’d been attentive, regular, prepared to act on her advice. What more could any woman want? Nobody could expect a faultless performance every time. This was not the theater. She had no grievances. But repetition takes its toll, she supposed, as does parenthood. Habituation dulls the soul. She would not have been the first woman who had become bored after three years of well-rehearsed routines or who had lately much preferred those tender contacts that were neither sexual nor time-consuming. To want your husband as an undemanding friend and a reliable relative but not a lover, was that the first sign that love was lost? She’d been a fool to let him think she’d never had an orgasm with him. She’d undermined their three not unhappy years together. Marriages consist of more than orgasms, of graver spasms and contractions. She’d had a child with him for heaven’s sake! As soon as they were home, she thought, she’d sit him down and make him talk.

THEY WENT THROUGH the house from room to room, tiptoeing almost, careful not to make a noise. Lix’s fists were clenched and his toes were rolled inside his shoes ready to run or kick if anybody was still inside their home. Alicja was trembling.

The ornamented metalwork on the window by the entryway had been chiseled out of the holding mortar and bent back enough to let a small man, hardly bigger than Lech, it seemed, clamber through the broken glass. That was the only damage. Thank goodness the thieves had been professional. There was no soiling and no gratuitous mess apart from the contents of the fridge and freezer, which had been tumbled onto the kitchen floor and were already weeping icy water. There was, though, evidence of disregard. Lech’s toys, always neatly kept in boxes, had been tipped out on the rugs and pushed about the floor either by somebody who believed that toys were hiding places for jewelry and cash or else was young enough himself not to resist the invitation of a plastic car, with a friction engine and flashing lights.

One of the faucets was running in Alicja’s bathroom. Someone had used the toilet — the seat was up — and rinsed their hands: the soap was wet. The upstairs curtains had been drawn halfway across their windows. The burglars had not wiped their shoes between each trip out to their van. Nor had they, thankfully, paid much attention to the cupboards and the drawers. A wallet was missing from the mantel but their passports and the family papers had not been touched, and Lix’s acting memorabilia had been ignored. Nothing had been spoiled or damaged out of spite. The thieves had not been desecrators, just hasty businessmen.

“It doesn’t matter, does it?” Alicja said. “It’s only machines. No one’s hurt.” She didn’t say, as she was tempted to, “I’ll not be hugging my washing machine today.” Another joke would not be wise. Nor did she say, “We’ll get new stuff within a week or two. My father only has to say his name in certain ears.” She didn’t say it, because in fact she thought, We won’t get new stuff, actually. There’ll be no need. The cargo of their marriage was already shipping out, and though she was not exactly pleased, the burglary seemed meaningful. Beyond the shock and sense of violation, there was a sliver of elation as they toured their perfect and expensive house, noting all the spaces. Rid yourself of chattels first, and then the man.

The man was by now almost in tears again.

“What should we do?” She had to put her arm around his waist. Today was not the day, she realized, for admitting her affair. It would have to wait until he got back from America.

“What can we do? They’ve taken everything and gone.”

“We ought to call the police. We’d better not touch anything. I’ll telephone my father …”

“Call the police? Call the police on what? They didn’t leave a telephone,” he said. “Let’s leave your father out of it.”

“Go to the neighbor’s house and call from there.”

Lix did not want more invaders yet, tramping through the house, unnerving him with questions. And Alicja preferred to deal with problems in the order in which they arose. So they did not tell the police or call for help for twenty minutes more. Instead, she suffered him. She had first to restore at least one of the orgasms she had denied in front of all his friends downstairs below the Debit Bar. She had to make amends and reassure her failing husband. That was only fair. A marriage should be straightened out before it’s pulled apart.

HE MADE HER pregnant again, of course. The contraceptives, not much used in recent months, were kept in Lix’s missing wallet. Thanks to burglars perhaps, their second son was taking shape. Thanks to the purchase of a blouse. Thanks to the risky game of Never. Thanks to the guilty fondness that endures, survives the breakup of a marriage, she would have a second son.

By ill fortune and good luck, Lix had done as much as any man could do in natural history to see his scoundrel rival slink away, his tail and nothing else between his legs. Vasectomized Jupiter, the columnist, would speedily lose interest in the senator when he discovered she was pregnant. So Lix would never have to hear the truth about his lunch pal Joop — because by the time he got back from Nevada, his wife’s new relationship would be over and she’d be two months pregnant.

We should not, though, expect a reconciliation, for this would be the last occasion Lix and his Alicja, his plump and much improving wife, would ever kiss, embrace, make love. For it was love, this final time. Not perfect sex. Not orgasms and passion such as she would have with Joop and with the fellow after Joop or with the man who’d be her second husband and the father of her only daughter, but tender love nevertheless, two bodies being thoughtful, being kind and fond, and being slightly desperate, because at moments such as these the truth is always on display.

Alicja had not admitted anything just yet, and Lix had not dared to ask. His cowardice was without boundaries. Besides, her beryl blouse was lying on the bed, and her indented body was so engaged with his that he could hardly think or grieve. Perhaps it was just as well that when the sex was over and before they called the police they could lie in bed and not feel obliged to talk. Talk at that time was dangerous.

Then Lix was in the car again, the smell of her not quite removed by showering, not quite hidden by his spray cologne. He’d have to be Don Juan Amongst the Feminists at eight o’clock that night, and if he didn’t hurry he’d arrive too late for staging notes and makeup calls. It was as dark by now as it had seemed when they were dining in the Hesitation Room. He was heading into town while traffic from the offices and shops was heading out. The actor’s face was flecked and flashed by lights and indicators, profile, profile, then full on.

He parked his car behind the theater, depressed, elated, but relieved to have the pressure of the sex removed. The anger was reduced as well. He’d been a fool. He was resigned to what the future held if it held anything. He was content to be back in the ancient town, amongst the places that he loved. The buildings seemed to shimmer in the shifting lights, as offices winked off their lamps and bars and restaurants and clubs sprang to life.

Lix waited for a bus to pass, its windows full of backs and coats, before he crossed to the theater and made it to his dressing room without needing to exchange a word with anyone. He closed the door and he was Don Juan.

An hour later, costumed and made up, he stood at the window with his playscript looking out on the heads of the first arrivals at the theater, his captive audience. The building shook a little to the digestive rumbling once again of the nightmare streetcars that didn’t suspend their timetables for mere theater. Instead they did their best to remind his audience every night that they were watching an artifice and that only one street away the city’s aged transit system labored on, taking uninvented people to their uninvented homes.

There was a point in Don Juan’s last speech each night when Lix could almost guarantee a streetcar. Some of the audience would laugh. Such incongruity, a streetcar. Others, though, would look alarmed as the auditorium amplified the rattle of the carriages into something that might be the distant and approaching earthquake the city had been promised by geophysicists “within a hundred years.” Then the theater would shake with nervousness and they would ask themselves, Will we survive? What will survive? Uncannily, the answer came from the stage. “Of all the edifices in our town,” Don Juan explained as streetcars passed by, “no one can doubt, not anyone who’s lived at least, that love’s the frailest tower of them all, meant to tumble, built to fall.”