Genesis

5

THEY’D NEVER TRULY KISSED before, Lix and An. It was undeniable, though — there were nine thousand witnesses so far — that their lips had touched, and had done so every night for fourteen weeks — in character, in costume, and onstage, abetted by their scripts. They were obedient professionals. The play demanded that they fall in love, so they obliged convincingly. They were old hands at that.

They’d been respectful colleagues, yes, cheerful and supportive. Yet nobody could claim that they were even friends offstage. If they ever coincided in the Players’ Lounge or in the bar behind the theater, they were polite with each other but uninvolved, the lively little actress, not so young and not so pretty anymore, and Mr. Taciturn, who’d led God knows what kind of life since his divorce and his success. The gossip columns couldn’t even guess, beyond the rumors circulating still that he was either egotistical in bed or impotent. The evidence was thin either way. Lix had no public life, no politics. Reclusive was the word the papers used these days to describe the actor. Or, better, secretive, because that suggested he was concealing something. You’d not expect a man like that to couple up with An, for whom concealment and reclusion were anathema. But this was the break of New Year’s Day, New Century’s Day, and both of them were lonely, and exhilarated by the date, 1/1/01. Conception Day for Rosa Dern.

THE THIRD MILLENNIUM for us started one year after everybody else’s, because some bored and playful speculators from the Tourist Bureau had decided and decreed that the City of Balconies and the City of Kisses could now be marketed for a lucrative month or so as the City of Mathematical Truth, the Capital of Calendar Authenticity, and would thereby reap and thresh the ripest crop of revelers from abroad who’d want a replay of the false new millennium they’d already celebrated so memorably, so profitably, one year before. We’d be the only place where you could observe the accurate millennium, they said. We’d be the only town where you could mark the Advent of the Future twice. Sudden fortunes would be made by hotels, restaurants, and breweries, normally closed down for the winter, and by the opportunists from the Tourist Bureau who’d put in place some subtle private deals.

So in expectation of fifteen thousand out-of-season visitors, all eager to procure a night of pleasure, the bunting and the streamers were prepared. The historic city center closed to traffic. The whole of Company Square was equipped with braziers and licensed for the sale of alcohol. The airport lobby was emblazoned with the banners THE TIME IS RIGHT (at last!) FOR HAVING FUN, and WELCOME TO THE CITY THAT TRULY COUNTS. Prostitutes took rooms downtown and women hoping to be wifed abroad bought new, provoking clothes and carried their final school grades in their evening bags as “proof.” And a midnight fireworks show which would be “visible from the moon” was readied on Navigation Island, in the mud.

The foreign revelers, regrettably, were sick of new millennia by then. The disappointment — and the hangovers — of the first would last them for a thousand years. One anticlimax was enough. Therefore they did not come to us in their expected droves. Instead, our hotels were half filled with math curmudgeons, mostly male, Dutchmen, Scandinavians, and Yanks, academics, intellectuals, and bachelors, who’d refused the year before to recognize the numerically premature end of the millennium but now had got an opportunity to demonstrate their bloody-mindedness and learning. Imagine it, on New Year’s Eve, our city full of nitpickers, hairsplitters, pedants, and rationalists, and local women dressed like queens scaring them to death, with their grade C’s in science, languages, and art. And what did these math curmudgeons want to do to celebrate the passing year? They wanted to avoid the crowds.

In fact, the streets were full enough that night. With citizens. We’ve always liked a fireworks show and alcohol and women in provoking clothes. “There is, indeed, good cause for all of us to celebrate,” Jupiter wrote in his Sunday column on New Year’s Eve. “Contrary to the evidence of our own eyes, we are making measurable progress in this city. Now we are only a year behind the rest of the world. Let’s see if we can close the gap by 3001.”

Lix had been onstage till ten in his revival of The Devotee, not the most testing of romantic comedies but an easy and welcome opportunity for him to sing and act and show his famous face before an uncritical audience that normally would not spend time or money in the theater. No need to exert himself. No need for nuances or subtlety. Just be certain, he reminded himself before each performance, that the laughter clears before the next amusing line, and that the next amusing line is timed to end before the laughter starts. “And don’t forget, of course,” his stage director said, “to beam and bounce.”

The audience did not want art at that time of the year or intellectual theater. They’d only come, that evening anyway, to pass the time before midnight by watching two luminaries make love onstage, and then to boast they’d seen the celebrated Lix in the flesh. They’d seen his birthmark and they’d seen his shaved and naked chest. What’s more, they’d watched their television star, the man who’d made a fortune from his songs about their city, kissing Anita Julius, the actress who was equally famous for her Channel Beta talent show, her range of tempers, and for her fleeting love affairs with older men, younger men, men with chauffeur-driven cars, and then the chauffeurs, too.

So when, finally, and as the curtains closed, An and Lix reached the moment of that much vaunted promised kiss — the one the theater posters reproduced, the one so many times reprinted in the magazines, the one that all the gossip columnists would use when the scandal broke on New Year’s Day — the otherwise inattentive audience grew tense and quiet. Opera glasses were lifted up. People shifted in their seats to gain the clearest view. Men licked their lips and cleared their throats, as if they believed their turn would come, that An would jump down off the stage to plant her lovely lips on theirs. Not one single person looked elsewhere. They watched through narrowed eyes. You’d think that Life magazine had got it wrong in 1979 when it recorded so much affection on the streets and that for us public kissing was still as exotic, rare, and disconcerting as a total eclipse. Miss it and it wouldn’t come again for years; stare too long and openly and you’d go blind.

It wasn’t only the actual kiss that mesmerized and silenced them. It was also the unexpected display of what they took — mistook — as privacy, the unembarrassed breaching of a hidden world which only chambermaids and paparazzi ever stumbled on. Four famous lips engaged in lovemaking while all the world, sunk and squirming in their seats, looked on and felt the pangs of exclusion. Here was a life denied to ticket holders in the audience, a life of cash and fame and sex and unself-consciousness. No wonder no one dared to breathe or be the first to clap.

The audience that night was witnessing something new and dangerous, however. In every performance until this one on New Year’s Eve, the lovers’ kissing had been a cleverly rehearsed sham. They were, to use the actors’ phrase, “kissing like puppets” or “dry-drinking,” their lips stitched shut, their mouths as passionate and hard as stones, their breaths held in until the kissing was completed.

It’s true, all the audiences so far had seen both Lix and An put out their tongues a little as their faces closed in, as their noses touched. A little strip of reflective mouth gel achieves that trick. The stage lights had caught the wet and fleshy tongue tips exactly as the stage director planned. It might have looked as if the actors’ mouths were busy with each other’s tongues; everyone would swear to that. But they’d been fooled. They wanted to believe, they wanted to be duped. What was rolling the actors’ cheeks, convincing the balcony and the orchestra seats that this was more than theater, was only the mockery of tongues. Lix and An were performing in the pockets of their own mouths with their own tongues—“playing solo trumpet” is the term — with no more sexual passion than they’d need to free a wedge of toffee from their teeth. That’s show business. It’s trickery and counterfeit. The actors have to seem to care when they do not.

The fact was this, however it appeared onstage: until the final act on New Year’s Eve, their tongues had never touched. An did not truly fancy Lix, no matter what the gossips and the posters might imply, no matter what they did onstage. He did not truly fancy her. Yet if theater was powerful and could transform an audience, then how could it not affect the principals themselves, eventually? How could their nightly kissing on the stage not spill over into life — particularly on New Year’s Eve when all the cast and all the staff, including Lix and An (especially), had oiled the way by drinking to one another’s health before the show? It isn’t love that’s blind, it’s alcohol.

The twenty minutes he’d spent sharing wine with his costar in the Players’ Lounge that evening had left Lix — who never had a head for drink — a little off balance and even more bewildered than usual by his offstage feelings for his irritating little colleague, so lively and so noisy, so “unstitched.” On the one hand, anyone could see — to use the idiotic jargon of our city’s most expensive psychoanalyst, a man whom An had “couched” herself on more than one occasion—“their compasses were pointing at a different north.” She might be only a couple of years younger than Lix, but she was the product of a different age. You’d think her only gods were clothiers and coiffeurs. She liked a man in uniform, she claimed. She liked him even better out of uniform. She’d never voted, never would. She dined and dieted instead. She held strong views but only about the sounds and fashions of the day, whose singing voice was sexiest, what went with mauve, how best to get away with hats. She’d told a journalist that if the Mother Nature Beauty Clinic had intended her to stay at home with a good book on a Saturday night, it wouldn’t have equipped her with such high heels, such long fingernails, and “plastic breasts that didn’t jiggle when she danced.” Lix had read the press releases before The Devotee had opened, and they had made him blush. Bring back the Street Beat Renegades.

On the other hand, it had to be admitted that the little featherhead could act. It had to be admitted, too, that as each day and each performance had passed, his dismissal of and disdain for An had ebbed. Now when he was reminded what she’d said about her bulky plastic chest, he was more curious and amused than irritated. She certainly had pluck. She certainly was fun. She certainly was beddable. Whereas during rehearsals and the first few days of performance their stage kissing, dry though it was, had been an embarrassment and an ordeal for him — fencing and wearing weight bags were the only things he hated more — he had since become resigned to it, and then addicted. Some things are inevitable. Once again, the old refrain, “Such is the nature of the beast.”

Lix had discovered as each night passed in this long season of The Devotee that truly not wanting a woman, not in his head, not in his heart of hearts, not in his Perfect Future, was not a logic that the lower body valued much. Anita Julius might not be the kind of partner he dreamed of waking up with in his own bed or — horror at the thought of it — engaging in a conversation over breakfast cups on his expensive balcony, but lately, as the final curtain cut the audience away on their supposedly unfeeling kiss, he had felt increasingly perturbed. His face was numb, perhaps. His lips were little more than bruised by her hard mouth. The insides of his cheeks were tender from too much “trumpeting.” But elsewhere Lix was suffering what actors call “an impromptu,” that is to say an unexpected intervention by an unpredictable performer. His cock was enlarged. His “rubbery zucchini” was ripe.

It stirred a little more each evening, a little earlier in the plot, a little more insistently. It could not help itself (the truest and the weakest excuse you’ll ever hear in life). It responded to his costar as unjudgmentally, it seemed, as mushrooms react to light.

By late December, Lix had become wearied by his performance, its drudgery and duplication, and only became truly involved in the closing moments of the play, when finally An’s body crossed the boards to hold her Devotee. He was not nervous around his costar anymore. He trusted her. Her skin and hair now smelled familiar, like family. They were becoming intimates. He enjoyed the laundered and rustling contact of their costumes, the comic stiffness of her breasts, the gelid perspiration on his fingertips from her back and neck, like offstage lovers do. He prized and cursed the audience. Without the audience, he thought, his cock would not stir for her. They were a love triangle, the star, the costar, and the crowd.

It would be ingenuously optimistic — the stuff of theater — to hope that An herself had not become aware of Lix’s extra contribution to the play. There could be no disguising what was going on from her. Their costumes were too thin and flexible. The stage directions said, “They hold each other tightly and they kiss. The curtain slowly falls.” She would have felt the difference up against her abdomen. That’s not to say that his erection was abnormally large and resolute. It was a meekly modest one, like most men’s are, most of the time.

Nevertheless, An would have known exactly what it was and who was causing it. After all, it couldn’t be edema or a hernia. It came and went too readily. For her, a woman used to provoking men, the explanation would have been a simple one. Her charms were irresistible. After all, she could deliver erections to half a theater. She’d made a living out of it. Usherettes at other shows had told her several times about the witless stiffening of men standing at the back of the gallery, thirty meters from the stage — and out of range, you would have thought. And during her brief appearance in Regina Vagina before it was raided and banned, she had heard reports of husbands who had to squirm and rearrange their trousers while their wives preferred to concentrate elsewhere. The “members of the audience,” some wit had said at the time, “stood up for Anita Julius.”

It would be unusual, then, and perhaps a little disappointing, if Lix, a youngish, active, divorced man and not a homosexual, so far as anybody knew, did not respond to her, especially when her body was so close, especially when her long nails were digging through his shirt.

Lix, really, was not as active as An imagined, not as busy with the women as anyone with his celebrity and power ought to be. Perhaps that’s why he’d lost control with her so easily and why his penis had informed on him as incautiously as an untrained boy’s. He was the celibate celebrity, unused to having women in his arms.

Lix had been divorced now since 1993. He’d been physically apart from Alicja since he’d taken flight to Hollywood and Nevada. His wife had gone. His anchor was pulled up. He was entirely—free is not the word — at liberty. Yet here’s a truth that’s hard to credit, given what we hear about the opportunities of fame, but more common than you’d think in men who are divorced and past their prime: he’d not had any full sex or any romance since then, not since that afternoon of burglary in fact when Karol was conceived. That’s more than seven years on his own. That’s more than seven years’ losing confidence. You’d never guess it from the way he spoke and walked, the city’s movie star, the celebrated Lix. You’d think a man like him, with distinguished looks, a mighty income, and acclaim, could have as many women in his bed as he wanted, and any way he wanted. You’d think, you’d hope, he had so much passion that he wearied of it.

Well, that’s the daydream. But even if the opportunities were manifold, Lix like many actors did not trust strangers even in the dressing room. He’d not invite the audience to watch the shedding of his costume and his makeup, the stowing of his wig and sword. He’d not disarm himself in public. That’s the point. That’s what he studied for, pretense and privacy. So certainly he could not have much appetite for being the naked animal in bed with someone he hardly knew, that chance encounter in a bar who recognized his face and didn’t want to waste the opportunity, that theater student intent on ways of furthering her own career, or that waitress who’s only there, in bed with him — oh, there’d been offers many times for Lix from waitresses — because she’d like, just once, to squeeze up close to fame’s gold ribs.

Lix had been tempted, naturally. The magnetic force of casual sex is almost irresistible, like gravity. In those seven years, he had almost succumbed half a dozen times at most, but he always managed to avoid true intimacy. He did it Freda’s way. No penetration, that is to say, and therefore hardly any chance of pregnancy. Heavy petting was the best he could offer. Initially his sexual reticence baffled his admirers. Then — once they had realized that here was a man unable to yield himself — it angered them. They did not persevere with him.

But mostly Lix did not engage at all. He was fearful — and, as ever, timid. Fearful of the body in the mirror. What would these conquests think when he took off his clothes to show the gray hairs on his arms, the raised veins on his legs, his paunch, his meagerness, his tremor, the telltale addition of purple tints to his skin’s pale palette? Fearful also of the future and the past. He dared not expose himself again to that cruel battleground. He was ashamed of his near celibacy as well, as if it were a character flaw and proof that he was insufficiently advanced for love. He’d never been — not even once, he judged — much good with love or sex, except onstage. (And in photographs, of course. Freda and Alicja were always smiling for him in the photos that he kept.) Certainly he’d not impressed the three women he’d slept with so far: one had only stayed the night, one had only stayed a month, and one had told the world she’d never had an orgasm, so packed her bags and left. His was a history of love rebutted and love devalued. Besides, the poor man felt the force of his unfortunate fertility. Three children was enough, he judged: two children whom he rarely saw, a son he’d never loved or met, and more calamities attending in the wings, no doubt. He was, he understood too well, best left alone: the unshared frying pan, the undivided loaf. He’d turned into a reluctant kind of man, disconcerted, hesitant, persuaded that he had little future as a lover, except the futures he dreamed up alone, and hardly any past.

Yet Lix had gained contentment of a sort. Desire was like a plant, he’d found. The more you watered it, the bigger and the thirstier it became, the more demanding and dissatisfied. When he’d had a woman in his life, then Lix’s sexual frustration had not diminished. Rather it had escalated. To have removed himself from the cycle of demand was for Lix a release into a long, flat period of calm.

Yet an understanding of oneself, a well-earned dread of strangers, children, love, is no defense against the concentrated moment in the arms of someone of the other sex; her textures and her odors and her voice are old and powerful. There comes a point where everything is lost, where self-control becomes abandonment, and man becomes — it’s glib to say but nothing else is true — as mindlessly and helplessly fixated as a beast.

Lix, then, can be excused by his biology? Well, yes. So can An. Biology’s the victor every time. It’s only natural that she would want to fool around with Lix, provoke him more and more. She could not help devising ways to fit her body just a shade more snugly into his when they embraced before the spellbound ticket holders any more than a bee could fly away from honey. My God, the play was tedious, she thought, but new distractions such as this at least added spice to their performances.

As the days passed and their stage kisses multiplied, she began to choose her underclothes and body scent more carefully, and even to make her bed before she left her studio for the theater each evening and to spray her mouth with TobaGo if she’d smoked in the interval before the final act. She understood ahead of Lix that it would only be a matter of time before the two of them were having sex, and so she might as well prepare for it — and so they might as well get on with it. Let’s eat the porridge while it’s hot.

On New Year’s Eve, the last performance of the year and stoked up by the wine she’d drunk a little earlier and by a lack of partners for the Night of the Mathematical Millennium and by the evidence that pressed against her abdomen, An ditched the usual protocol and when they kissed, the scripted Widow and her Devotee, she popped her tongue into his mouth, just for a second, a warm and playful sortie into perilous domains. She dipped it in and out so swiftly that his own tongue did not have the chance to mate with it, although it tried, instinctively. Both tongues briefly caught the lights and for half a second a string of glistening saliva unified their lips.

Now everybody in the theater could swear that absolutely they were making love. The only one in any doubt was Lix himself. All An had to do, she knew, was wait. Do nothing more, she told herself. Act normal during the curtain calls. Be cool. Enjoy the moment while it lasts. If he was as weak and predictable as all the other men she’d poked her tongue into, then he’d come running to her dressing room with some excuse or else he’d hang around outside the theater for her, and she could celebrate her New Year’s Eve in company.

NOT-SO-LITTLE GEORGE had witnessed all of this. He was sitting in an aisle seat on row H on New Year’s Eve, next to his mother, Freda, and her cousin Mouetta, when he encountered Lix for the second time. Was this the weirdest evening of his life? His mother had promised him four months before, on his eighteenth birthday — but only after years of secrecy and cussedness and argument — that she would “set up” a meeting with his father, “if you really have to persevere with this.” He was prepared. He’d always thought and hoped his father was the bare-chested man whose picture his mother kept in her wallet. The Czech. They would go to Prague and meet the hero in a gaslit restaurant. Freda had only laughed at the idea. “Your father’s not a hero, that’s for sure.”

“Just give me his name and his address and leave it to me,” George had said. “It’s time! You don’t even have to be involved.”

But she had always insisted, “If we have to do it at all, we’ll do it my way. You owe me that. He hasn’t shown a hint of interest in you, by the way, in eighteen years. He hasn’t contributed one single bean. So don’t expect some paragon. But still I want to make it memorable.”

“Memorable for whom?”

“For him and for you.”

She’d kept her word.

George had waited for the “setup” that she planned with (his genetic inheritance from Lix) timidity and fear. His mother’s setups always took an age to organize and, usually, another age to disentangle. Perhaps his father would prove to be less militant and complicating, and there’d be explanations, too, for why he’d never tried to get in touch himself.

Then, finally, a week before the end of the millennium, she’d said, “We’ll take a look at him on New Year’s Eve,” and handed over tickets to The Devotee, a play that normally she’d mock as bourgeois and offensive.

George knew better than to spoil her plans by asking for some details in advance. Had she arranged for him to sit next to the man, perhaps? That seemed like the likeliest. Was there some lobby rendezvous designed? Was he an actor, maybe, or one of the musicians? The possibilities at least had narrowed from the thousands he’d considered all his life: his missing father was a foreigner, a gigolo, a member of the government, an anarchist, a colleague at the university, a criminal, a beggar on the streets, a lunatic, a priest, a man too dull to care about, a man she’d hired to fill a tube with sperm. There’d always been a silence and a mystery. The only clue was that once or twice she’d described the man, dismissively, as Smudge. Then, on New Year’s Eve itself, when George, Freda, and Mouetta had been sitting in their seats, before the curtain rose, his mother had taken out a marker and ringed a name on the cast list. A famous name he recognized but could not yet quite put a face to. “That’s him,” she said. “Starring Felix Dern.”

The play itself, he thought, was a bag of feathers. What interest could it hold for anybody there who’d not come to be united with a parent? The music was ill balanced and predictable. The script was far too nudging. The female lead, an actress almost as old as his own mother, appeared a little drunk. But everybody in the audience, including Freda — and especially Freda — seemed amused, vindicated even. His mother’s was the loudest laugh, and not a mocking one.

When, halfway through the opening act, his father first appeared onstage and the spontaneous applause of recognition had abated, George himself burst into tears, which, luckily, he could disguise as laughter. That face was so familiar, of course. The celebrated Felix Dern. The photo in the magazines. The birthmark on the cheek. Now that he saw the actor in the flesh, animated, George was not only sure he’d already met the man some years before — he racked his brains but couldn’t say exactly when — but also he was certain that he’d seen him, a younger version, a thousand times, in mirrors every day. George had his hair. George had his walk. George had his father’s mouth.

If George had hoped The Devotee would offer hidden messages to Lost Boys in the audience, then he was disappointed. The drama was not relevant. Or only relevant to simple and romantic souls. George was mesmerized nevertheless, but as the evening progressed and as he weathered the two intermissions, preferring not to join his mother and her cousin in the bar, but rather to remain exactly where he was, in row H, studying that one name on the cast list, his exhilaration at being George Dern turned into embarrassment. Watching a father you have never known playing the part of someone who’s never existed, and speaking his invented lines, was bound to be a disconcerting experience for an awkward eighteen-year-old. In the last few moments of the final act, the boy’s embarrassment was total. Even Freda had been silenced by the kiss.

“Now do you remember where you saw him once before?” his mother asked after the final curtain call, when everybody else was hurrying off to start their celebrations for Millennium Eve.

George did not want to say, “The mirror.” He said, “His face rings bells. But no …” His shook his head.

“The Palm and Orchid,” his mother said. “When you were a kid. You saw him there. Do you remember it? I wouldn’t let you finish your cake.”

He shook his head again.

“Well, then, so now you know,” she said. “Your father is revealed. Exposed! You even look like him a bit. I’d never thought of it before. Don’t be like him, that’s all I ask.”

Mouetta raised her eyebrows, shook her head. She seemed, as usual, slightly shocked, and disapproving of Freda’s modern motherhood. Jealousy, Freda always thought. Her cousin hadn’t got a lover or a son. “Well, we have an hour or so before the fireworks,” she continued. “What shall we do? You want to eat? Go to a bar?” More shaking heads. “Or do you want to wait and say hello to the star?” No nods. Not quite. Freda was only teasing, anyway. She knew that meeting his father, offstage, was inescapably what George would want to do.

We must consider Freda’s smile, and judge if it was cruel or only happy for her son. To tell the truth, she didn’t know the answer herself. She only knew that she could not contain the smile. It took possession of her face and would not shift, although she tried to shift it. She was less handsome when she smiled. Partly she was glad to have Lix off her conscience, finally. Partly she was excited by the date and by the promise of a long, amusing night. Also she could not dismiss the compelling prospect of Lix’s face when they ensnared him in the theater lobby and finally he understood that this young man who’d seen his bloodless play was blood itself. She wasn’t truly cruel or vengeful, just certain of herself and unafraid. Whatever her more tender cousin Mouetta may believe, Freda always wanted what was best for George, despite herself. She loved dramatic times. She thought they made the world a grander place. That’s why she smiled and smiled. “I’ve come to introduce you to your son,” she’d say. He’d never dare reply, “The child is yours, not mine. Your pregnancy. Your body. Your responsibility. Your private life. Your kid!”

So this was how Lix met his second wife.

AFTER WARD, Lix did not have the nerve or even the desire to go to Anita Julius’s dressing room, where, surely, she’d be waiting for him, if what she’d done onstage meant anything, if that warm tongue had been an honest messenger. He was shaking badly, for a start, and feeling old. He was the father of a fully grown man. How could he concentrate on casual sex when every chamber of his head was crowded with sons?

Nor had he the heart to go back to the too-neat bachelor apartment on the embankment as he had originally intended. For true Millennium Eve, he’d planned to sit out on the enclosed balcony, with a glass of good red wine and something comforting on the stereo, and watch the fireworks. On his own. For Lix was not a man with many friends. He might not have a glamorous life offstage but at least he had the best view in town that money could rent, directly across the river to Navigation Island and then beyond into the proliferating towers of the campuses. He had to count himself as blessed, that whatever might be wrong with his first years of middle age, his isolation and his longing, he was living exactly where he wanted to, had always wanted to. Not Beyond, where everything was new and compromised, but in the city’s ancient heart of squares and stone, and narrow streets and balconies.

On sunny days, with his binoculars, he could watch the couples walking on the island amongst the tarbonies and candy trees, the tantalizing world of hand-in-hand; the cyclists, the picnickers, the teenagers in noisy groups around the lido. Scenes out of Seurat and Renoir. Even on busy days the only traffic he could see was on the bridges heading to or fleeing from the eastern side. At night, when all the bars were closed and all the lights were off, he could lie in bed and listen to the scheming of the wind and the sleepless shifting of the river, a lonely sound that sometimes made him glad to be alone.

His encounter in the theater lobby had shocked and shaken him. Of course it had. Shame and embarrassment had been delivered publicly and unexpectedly. It didn’t help to tell himself that he had merely been a victim of one of Freda’s vengeful schemes. As he’d expect from her, the whole ambush had been meanly staged, he thought, and damaging for everyone involved, except, of course, for the Lovely Neck herself.

Lix had played this scene one time before, for film, in a policier, The Reckoning. He’d been a politician, newly elected and, of course, corrupt. It’s still available on video. In the final scene, he comes out of his offices, surrounded by a clamor of supporters. He shakes a hundred hands. He issues platitudes and thanks, and smiles his practiced smile toward the ranks of cameramen, so many more than he had ever dreamed of. Out of the corner of his eye, while he is being loud and false with everyone, he spots his peasant father, and the police inspector. Behind them, waiting on the far side of his limousine, is the widow of the brother he has cheated. The cameramen move in. The screen goes white with flash. Then the sound track becomes silent. Regrets are deafening. All you can see, as the credits start to roll, are his admirers, clamoring.

It appeared to him, this night of the millennium, that he had strayed into a mocking version of that bad film — except this time the formula was not the Unmasking of the False Prophet but the cliché of the Lost Child. Once he’d shed his costume and removed his paint, Lix had, as usual and despite the lure of An, come down into the lobby of the theater to meet his more clinging admirers. It’s duty, he always told himself, not vanity.

So it was duty that made him pause on the bottom stair and patronize the gathered crowd of twenty or so with his best beam so that anyone with cameras could get a decent shot and anybody wanting autographs could form a line. Quite soon, out of the corner of his actor’s eye, he would spot the tall young man, blond-haired but unmistakably a Dern, a perfect specimen that any mother, any father, should be proud to have, a young man not quite knowing how to shake his fear off with a smile.

However, it wasn’t George whom Lix noticed first, or even Freda, though heaven knows Freda was immensely noticeable that night. She’d pulled out all the stops for this encounter. She’d piled her hair with careful randomness, as unignorable as a wedding cake. God help the man who’d sat behind her in the theater, though he might be glad to miss the play but have the opportunity, instead, to study Freda’s nape and neck, her swinging silver earrings, the tender intersection of her hair and skin, the golden zipper slide peeking from the collar of her fine black dress.

No, it was Mouetta whom Lix first noticed, an unembarrassed woman, not too young, her raincoat collar up, simply standing by the farthest exit door and staring at him blatantly as one might stare at the photo on a playbill or a film poster. She was clearly not the usual shy but awestruck fan. He’d always say he fell in love with her at once. But he felt next to nothing at the time, except uneasiness. He took the woman’s stare as evidence of something that he’d learned to run away from: the colonizing attentions of a stranger who — wrongly — thought that actors were as interesting in themselves as they seemed onstage, the sort who would never settle for a signature and a handshake or a photograph but wanted to be taken home and wanted to be listened to and loved, the sort who never joined the noisy line but waited at the exit door to join him as he fled the theater. He’d steer well clear of her, he thought, until she smiled at him, returned his stagy beam with something much more genuine. And he was lost. And so were any plans he might have had for meeting up with An.

He’d understand later that the smile was only meant to offer a little sympathy. Mouetta knew her lovely cousin’s ways. She knew that Freda had been selfish with the boy, and secretive. She knew that Lix would be appalled, discomfited, by what was planned for him. Most of all she smiled because she loved her second cousin George as if he were a younger brother and she wanted this first encounter with his father to be memorable. A pleasant memory. Her smile for Lix could only help to pave the way.

Lix stayed on the bottom step and stopped to do his duty. He thanked his fans, signed the last few programs and a couple of CDs, made his final practiced quips, turned up his collar too, like her, the woman at the door, and glanced again across the room to take a second look at that nice smile. He wouldn’t mind it, actually, if the woman fell in beside him in the street, if she came back to share his good red wine, his balcony, his fireworks view, his life. He’d be better off with her, surely, than with the waiting tongue upstairs. So many opportunities.

Finally he spotted Freda standing at the woman’s side, clearly not a fan of his, not wanting autographs or photographs, but smiling too in his direction and nodding her hellos. And then the young man he knew at once to be his son. Real life, at last: the curtain down; the clamor and the silence and the flash. “You’ve dined, old man — and now it’s time to face the waiter and the bill.”

THAT FRIENDLESS DRINK he’d planned on his veranda, with his privileged outlook over the island and his prime view of the fireworks, was not now, Lix realized at once, the wisest way to pass the first few moments of the new, true, mathematical millennium. He was too excited, overwhelmed, and horrified to be alone. He had intended to be calm and almost sober, and waiting by the phone at midnight, ready for the dutiful calls from Alicja and the boys.

There was no afternoon performance of The Devotee on New Year’s Day and he’d arranged for the children to make their weekly visit. He had the perfect set of treats for them. At ten and eight, Lech and Karol were the age when days out with their father at the zoo with its newly opened river aquarium and its camel rides were still appealing, despite the cold, especially if they were accompanied, as he had promised on this occasion, by a vedette ride upstream to the Mechanical Fair and permission, if they passed the height test, to ride the watercoaster, the Yankee Tidal Wave.

He wondered now if it had been a rash mistake to ask this stranger, George, to join them on the trip. “Meet your brothers,” he had said, a foolish suggestion, and many years too late. By now he should be taking George to brothels, not to zoos and amusement parks. The moment had been panicky. Freda could not have staged the meeting to be more disconcerting: the fans, the lobby, the postperformance frenzy, the bustle of the exit doors, the terror that she knew the very sight of her would visit on her ancient lover.

Why had she not just brought the boy up to his dressing room? Why hadn’t she just phoned to say that George, to her dismay, had reached the age when identifying his father was essential? Why, indeed, had she brought the boy to see him act in this dimwitted and untesting comedy, out of all the plays he’d been in? Revenge was not her only motivation, surely. She wanted rather to embarrass him as much as possible, to make him seem at once as weak and feeble as she would already have described him. “He’ll try to bluff it out,” she would have said. “He’ll do some actor stuff. He’ll carry on as if meeting a magnificent son like you was something that he’d performed a hundred times. To mad applause, of course. Your blood father only does it for applause.”

So Lix’s “Come to the zoo!” had been a comically ill-judged suggestion. Lix had seen the smirking triumph on Freda’s face. He’d also seen the look of hope and panic in the young man’s eyes, and had tried to claw the offer back.

“Perhaps. We’ll let you know. We’ll phone,” Freda had said, evidently unable to control her smile. We’ll let you know. We’ll phone. The we was wounding, as she must have known, as she must have intended.

Lix should, of course, have been more spontaneous. A hug, perhaps. A firm handshake. Some tears. Or an apology. But there was still audience about. A couple of persistent girls with unsigned programs were waiting in the theater lobby, within hearing distance of anything their hero said. He had to be controlled, he had to be wary, at least until he could escape into the street, his collar up against the weather and the fans, when there would be an opportunity to try again, to ask this George to join him in a bar, perhaps, to be more passionate and brave, to sob and kiss and laugh with fearful joy. At once.

By the time he’d reached the street and had dispatched the two impatient girls with his worst of signatures and shaken one or two more hands, George and his mother and his mother’s cousin whose name he did not catch, their duty done, were already walking off, down one of the crowded Hives toward the riverfront. Were almost out of sight, in fact. Were almost lost to him.

Lix followed them, of course. He needed time to think, and time to study this new son. If he hung on to them but kept his distance, then he could decide a further strategy, and one that left him looking wise and fine instead of stumbling and foolish. He could go up at any time while they were in the street and say … well, say whatever he’d rehearsed while he was dogging them, say something that would wipe away the wasted eighteen years, quickly find that fine line that scriptwriters might take a week to perfect. Oh, yes, he was ashamed. How had he let the moment pass those many years ago? He should have said, “Your pregnancy. Your body, yes. Your private life. But this is not your private kid! I have responsibilities, and needs.”

How had he also let that second moment pass, when he had first encountered George, his mouth made clownlike by the castor sugar of his unfinished cake, as Freda fled the Palm & Orchid, their son in tow? Some restitution had to happen in the next few minutes. Lix could not squander this last chance.

The city was not on his side, not on the side of courage and fine lines. The old millennium had only twenty minutes left to run, and everybody was anxious to reach the embankment sidewalk for the light and fireworks display. Revelers, dressed both for warmth and for ostentation, a comic combination, shared cannabis and wine with strangers. Whole families were holding hands in comfort chains lest anyone got swept away by the crowds. Old couples from the neighborhood, decked out in their best suits, last used for funerals, did their best despite their bones to be young and contemporary, yet had not dared to venture outside into these unruly streets without their good-luck pebbles in their pockets to frighten off misfortune. Perhaps the foreign math curmudgeons had been sensible to stay away from crowds. The multitude was hazardous. The Hives were one-way streets of pedestrians, too crowded for Lix to catch up with anyone. He simply had to fix his eye on Freda’s unmistakable hair and follow from a distance, separated from his son by a shuffling and unnegotiable throng.

He did not entirely lose sight of George and Freda and the cousin. He lost sight of his resolve. He found a place where he could stand on the embankment steps and watch the three of them from behind. At first, of course, he stared and stared at George’s hair and ears, waiting for the boy to turn his face and offer him a profile. Then, inevitably, he turned his attentions to Freda, seeing how she’d aged — not much — and whether being forty suited her. It did. She’d broadened slightly, and her hair was peppery. Otherwise she was still young and eye-catching, still dangerous, of course, but sexier than he remembered her. If he hadn’t made her pregnant, was it possible that they would still be together, he wondered. Fertility’s a curse. He could imagine taking off her clothes and lying underneath her on a bed while she pressed down onto his wrists and made him do as he was told.

Thank goodness for the fireworks and the midnight bells. 1/1/01. The first cascade of light exploded like a drum solo. Everybody’s chin went up. All the revelers, children to the core, let out a whoop a sigh a wow. Everybody smiled at once. That’s what we come to cities for.

Even Lix was animated now and happy in a complicated way. Whatever his personal turmoil, the turmoil of the old town was for the moment more insistent and exuberant. Being there amongst the crowd was more cheering than any Best View from a private balcony. No one bothered him. Nobody seemed to recognize his muffled face. Nobody asked for signatures. If anybody shook his hand, and many did, it was just the greeting of another wine-fueled celebrant who’d shake the devil’s hand and not care less. Goodwill to everyone for this New Year. A fine beginning. Not a curse. Lix would start the new millennium with an extra son. (An extra daughter, too.)

Then the oddest thing occurred, a piece of choreography, perfect and synchronous. Lix had dropped his chin an instant down from the fireworks just to check that his son George was seeming as happy as his father truly felt. But it was the cousin who turned her face to his and recognized that telltale birthmark on his cheek, and smiled the briefest, perfect smile again, as if she had expected him to be there, watching them. Perhaps this was the moment he truly fell in love with her, not in the lobby of the theater but underneath the cracking skies amongst the populace. Hers was a smile which promised that she’d let him stay undiscovered if that was what he wanted. She’d not embarrass him. She’d not say, “See who’s followed us.” It was a smile that blessed her face, that transformed her plainness into something more lasting than beauty.

And as he offered up a smile himself, secure that there would be no betrayal, he felt a pair of arms wrap around him from behind. A pair of stage-trained hands, with digging fingernails, a scent he recognized. A chest that couldn’t jiggle when it danced pressed against his back.

“I’ve caught you now,” she said. Here was an invitation for the second time that night to be An’s Devotee.

BOTH LIX AND AN understood at once that these were kisses for a lonely New Year’s Eve, a small gift for the coming century, and not the start of anything. So a visit home to her strange rooms or his high river-view apartment was not in the cards. This encounter would be short and desperate, a fireworks show. They’d not repeat themselves on other nights. They’d not refer to it before their next performance, when, no doubt, their kisses would once again be chaste onstage. The only wagging tongues would be the gossip columnists.

Once they had toured the trestle bars in Company Square and lowered inhibitions around the scorching braziers with shots of aquavit, they went back to the theater. Where else? They hammered on the Actors’ Gate, relieved to be a little drunk, until the night man came and tucked their proffered banknote in the pocket of his linen coat as routinely as somebody who must have done this very thing before, and, possibly, for An.

“I’m in my room if you want letting out,” he said. “You know your way about.”

Indeed, they knew their way about. They ran up to the Players’ Lounge, where there were chairs and couches, and some unfinished bottles of wine and piles of unlaundered costumes from that evening’s show. They pulled the curtains open so that the only light was coming from outside, from moon and stars and motorcars, and from the empty-office lights across the street.

“We have to do it in our clothes,” An said. She meant the costumes they wore each night, the clothes they acted in when they pretended love. “Let’s do it like we’d like to do it, in the play.”

“Onstage?”

She hadn’t thought of that herself. But, “Yes, onstage. In costume.”

They’d never truly kissed before, but now they truly kissed, onstage and in and out of character in their stage uniforms, with nothing but the borrowed light of corridors to break the darkness of the auditorium. Their tongues engaged. Alone at last — and ready to yield. An actor and an actress are most confident when they are not themselves and can inhabit places where the sound and light are trimmed and flattering, where there might always be applause, and where no matter what they do, no matter what their curses are, there’d be no price to pay, no consequences when the curtain falls, no child to bear and rear and feed forevermore, amen.

THERE WAS a message on his answering machine when Lix got home a little after one o’clock, already fearful of the big mistake he’d made that night, the big mistakes he’d made for forty years. The message was from Freda, not from An, as he had feared at first. She was being pleasant for a change, he thought. Her voice was light and genuine. He could hear her bangles shake. She wished him all the best for the millennium. She said how much she had responded to the play. And, by the way, oh yes, George was “prepared” to see his father on New Year’s Day, but he was shy and just a little angry and more than normally stressed by the prospect of making contact after all this time, as surely Lix could understand. So George would not go to the zoo with his two half brothers unaccompanied. He’d need a friendly face. So Freda’s cousin Mouetta had volunteered to “chaperone.”

“Good night, then, Comrade Felix Dern,” Freda said on the answering machine.

“It was a good night,” Lix replied out loud, standing at the window high above the loyal river while the tape played on through undeleted messages until it hit the high-pitched discord of a broken line.

6

SO NOW it is Mouetta’s turn. She’s had one hundred minutes in the city’s dampest cinema, hardly bothering to focus on the film, certainly not paying attention to the subtitles, to think about her pregnancy. She doesn’t much enjoy the cinema, to tell the truth. She’s only there for Lix. She’s been grateful for the darkness and the opportunity to rest. She’s waited for The End quite happily, but concentrated only on herself, her unexpected joy, her hands clasped in her lap where soon there’ll be no lap, she hopes. Her growing child will spill across her knees, expanding like warm dough. Her hands have formed and cupped the shape a hundred times. She’s let herself imagine it: she’ll never be alone, she’ll never be unloved.

It’s only in the last ten minutes of the film, and after the brief appearance of an actor colleague her husband says he met and shared a cognac with in Cannes twelve years ago, that finally he is relaxed enough to take her hand in his and rub her thumb with his. Her pregnant thumb, her hand that’s quick with child, does not respond to him. She’ll make him wait, like he has made her wait. Mouetta feels as if she has become untouchable, beyond her husband’s reach, but also untouchable in a grander sense, beyond mortality. A baby’s due in May.

It no longer bothers her that Lix has yet to speak. She understands his caginess. She’s used to it. She married it. Her husband’s feelings do not really matter anymore. His purpose has been served, she thinks. Biology has overtaken him. Now he can either be a swan and stay, or be a dog and run from this, his sixth and final child.

They are the last to leave the matinee. As usual, they’ve been the only ones to stay and watch the credits until the logo of the studio and the final bars of the sound track have given their permission to depart. Then Mouetta tucks her fingers under Lix’s arm — the married grip that’s far more comfortable than holding hands — and steers him into the street, past the box office manager who always loves to talk with him, past the taxi stand and the taxi touts. It has rained and stopped raining while they were in the cinema. The streets are glossy and greasy. The early evening air is washed and fresh. She wants to walk and build an appetite, Mouetta says.

You do not notice them, in this half-light, a couple almost middle-aged, not smart, not purposeful, but simply grazing on the streets with time to spare. The city’s full of couples like them at this time of the evening, too late to work or shop, too soon to eat or drink, too restless to go home. They follow the streetcar route which leads up from Deliverance Bridge into the ancient city, crossing Anchorage Street and Cargo Street, old haunts of his, two high and fertile rooms with no views of the river, until they reach the last remaining stretch of the city wall and the medieval gate. They could go straight to the cafe district. Instead they negotiate the puddles and turn into the narrow Hives to window-shop for Turkish carpets, hand-built furniture, unlikely children’s clothes. Just like the cinema, the dream is lit and organized, a row of plate-glass screens. They pass a shop that only deals in cutlery, a framing store, a potter’s workshop, an antiques studio, until they reach the cobblestones of the great, cold square where commerce becomes history and where the odor of the rain is overlaid by kitchen smells and the early, flaring coals of braziers as the beet and kebab vendors set up their stalls.

Mouetta wants to try a new bistro she’s read about, the Commerce Supper House, on the east side of the square behind the Debit Bar. It’s quiet enough for them to talk, for Lix to eat unrecognized. He usually leaves the choice of restaurant to her. He chooses films; she chooses what to eat. But they have reached the terrace of the Debit Bar and the maître d’ is standing underneath the canopy, smoking his cigar and curling smiles at everyone who passes. Mouetta grips her husband’s arm more tightly, but as soon as Lix has stooped to say hello she knows her choice of restaurant is lost.

It isn’t comfortable to admit it to herself, but Mouetta is resigned to sacrificing the Commerce Supper House with its advantages because she’s almost certain that her cousin will not be inside the Debit, waiting to deride her pregnancy and Lix’s gift of parenthood. There’d be no risk of Freda, for a while at least.

Mouetta is ashamed to feel such comfort at her cousin’s continuing misfortune: she’s been in jail since that wet and riotous night in August, charged that she’d abused her public duties as an employee of the university, that contrary to Conduct Codes she’d had intercourse with a student in her charge, that she possessed a canister of mace and documents belonging to the state, that she’d received dollars from her son in America without declaring them, that she had out-of-date IDs, and two passports, and cannabis. These are only trifling charges, peccadilloes hardly worth a fine, although already she’s been fired from her faculty and lost her campus rooms. The charge that threatens her with more imprisonment is that she’d assaulted a militiaman outside the Debit Bar, exactly where the maître d’ was at that moment shaking Lix’s hand.

Lix and Mouetta had witnessed Freda’s arrest themselves, and knew she hadn’t laid a hand on any militiaman. Lix had said they ought to contact Freda’s lawyers, to act as witnesses, but hadn’t done so yet. Two waiters at the Debit Bar had already put themselves forward, so perhaps there wasn’t any point in stepping into the spotlight. He cannot say how fearful he’s become that if he speaks for Freda at her trial, then all will be revealed about how he’d tipped off the militia that they’d find the student activist in Freda’s room that night. Such information never disappears. It bides its time behind the scenes. So Lix gave his practiced, helpless smile as his excuse for hanging back. And now he gives the smile again, to say how sorry he is that his wife’s choice of restaurant will be deferred until another night. Mouetta shrugs. The Debit Bar is home-away-from-home for him.

The maître d’ rests his cigar on a dry sill to smoke itself for a few moments, and leads the couple to their preferred corner table, away from mirrors and doors. Lix takes the seat that lets him set his back against the room, as usual. They are, so far, the only customers. Mouetta thinks she has felt the first of many thousand kicks.

THE OWLS, the hawks, and the peregrines come to the city in the colder months, as do the gulls these days, drawn in by thermal banks and easy pickings. The temperature is slightly higher here — our cozy, gas-warmed rooms, the car exhaust, the street lighting, the millions of breaths exhaled each hour keep frosts at bay — and so the rodents and the beetles can earn their living for a month or so longer than their country cousins and provide the raptors with their winter meals. The daytime birds of prey prefer the riverbanks, the highway shoulders, and the parks, but most of all they love Navigation Island with its cover of trees and its grasses rich in food. The gulls raid dumps and garbage cans.

The owls, though, like the nighttime hunting grounds of yards and roofs and patios where they can treat themselves to household tidbits such as tile roaches, hearth crickets, larder mice and rats.

It is a larder mouse that Rosa sees tonight. She’s lined her dolls up by the sliding window to the balcony, already bored, but keen to do what her mother, An, has told her to — keep out of the bedroom for half an hour — because she’ll be rewarded if she does. Her mother keeps a jar of chocolates. And so with the great unconscious gravity of a five-year-old, Rosa makes the minutes pass. She rearranges all her dolls, by favorites, by size, by age. She has them sitting in a group. She has them with their noses pressed against the window. She presses her own nose up against the window to see what they can see. They can see a little animal amongst the pots, a little cuddly toy no longer than her mother’s thumb gnawing at a loaf of rye bread that they’ve thrown out for the birds. It’s made a cavern for itself so that only its gray tail hangs free. Rosa thinks she’ll bring the mouse indoors and play with it. She’ll introduce it to her dolls. Too late. A dark reflection on the glass, a great wide bird, flat-faced and ghostlike, hits the bread and hits the glass with its spoon wing. The noise it makes is hardly louder than a falling piece of cloth. But — a heartbeat later — the bird has disappeared, the cave of bread has rolled across the balcony, a pot is lying on its side and spilling soil.

Rosa gathers up her dolls and puts them safely on the far side of the room. She knows she’s witnessed something memorable and frightening, much more important than the chocolate jar and its rewards. She doesn’t know the proper words. She only knows “a great big bird,” “a little animal.” Still, she hurries to the bedroom door, where her mother’s friend has dropped his vast black shoes, and goes in. They’re on the bed. Her mother is not dressed. Nor is the man. They seem to be characters from television plays, entwined and shivering and damp. But nothing Rosa can see in there, and nothing that her mother says, could be more startling or sad than what has happened on the balcony. She is in tears. Her mother has to let her into the bed, amid the odd and disconcerting smells, and fake belief in what she takes as Rosa’s jealous lie.

The man is leaving anyway. He’s slept enough. He’s getting dressed. Rosa has to tell him where he’s left his shoes and where the toilet is. “Can I still have a chocolate?” she asks her mother, and then, “Can I phone Lech and Karol?” She’s sure her half brothers will want to know at once about the death scene on the balcony.

LECH AND KAROL are not home. Alicja, their mother, has a Lesniak Trading creditors meeting to attend. Now that her father has retired she is in charge. So she has driven her two sons by Lix out of Beyond and into town for tennis coaching at the new floodlit courts on Navigation Island. Karol is the natural sportsman of the two and already taller. He’s on his college football team, has diving ribbons and vaulting cups, but most excels at racket sports. He will be fourteen in a month and then eligible to represent the city in the junior tennis leagues. His elder brother, Lech, does not excel at anything, except the competitions of the tongue.

The tennis courts are not playable. Clay is an unreliable surface in the best of times. The afternoon rain has left its puddles on the serving lines and made the courts too slippery. Their mother has arranged to pick them up at ten. Now they have the evening to themselves, in town, and not one single Lesniak around to stop them from having fun.

Lech has the matches and the cigarettes. A girl from their tennis group has money they can spend. Her friend has tokens for the streetcar. The four of them walk across the river on the reconstructed pedestrian bridge, coughing from the cigarette smoke which, oddly, makes the boys’ cocks go hard. They’ve never been alone with girls like these before. In point of fact, it’s not the girls who make them hard, but nicotine. Tobacco is an aphrodisiac when you’re their age.

Karol hasn’t much to say. He is good with rackets, not with words. Yet Lech has found his expertise. Before the evening’s out, he thinks, if he can lose his brother and the other girl, then he can try his luck with the one who has the tokens for the streetcar. She’s prettier than anyone he’s ever seen before. If he cannot steal a kiss from her before ten o’clock, then, he fears, his nose will bleed, his heart will burst out of his chest. He lights another cigarette. They cough like foxes in the night.

IT’S ONLY AFTERNOON in Queens. George is cruising in a cab along the Van Wyck Expressway on the way to JFK for his early evening flight back home. His pregnant girlfriend, Katherine, is at his side. She’ll see his mother for the first time at the trial, and meet his famous father, too. She’s seen the videos. She recognizes George in Lix’s craggy head.

She’s nervous, nervous of the flying, nervous about her pregnancy, nervous of Freda, but currently most nervous of the New York cab. The driver has a brutal head. He’s brutal with the brakes. She holds on to her boyfriend’s arm and braces her feet against the cab floor, expecting the worst. She wishes she hadn’t volunteered to go.

“Think of it as a holiday,” George says. He sounds American. He has the vowels. “There won’t be proper holidays, not when the baby’s small. So make the most of this.”

He tells her how they’ll spend their time, the walks along the old embankment to the medieval square, a visit to the island and the MeCCA galleries, a cake and coffee at the Palm & Orchid Coffee House, free seats to the theater “if Father’s doing anything.” My God, he thinks, there isn’t much to do if they’re reduced to sitting through another disaster like The Devotee. His city’s only worth a two-day trip and they’ll be there for ten. His mother’s trial will surely only last an afternoon. Then what? “We could go to the zoo,” he adds, and then looks out to count the avenues of Ozone Park as JFK draws close. The zoo, in fact, is quite a good idea, he thinks. He hasn’t seen the city zoo since he was eighteen, New Year’s Day 2001, when he met his father and his two half brothers for the first time, and Father missed an opportunity by courting Mouetta instead of courting him. A disappointment, like the play.

George puts his hand on Katherine’s so that three hands are resting on her swelling stomach, and says again, “We could go to the zoo by riverboat. We’ll take the baby to the zoo.”

BEL KNOWS EXACTLY who her father is. Her version of his birthmark makes him unmistakable. She is twenty-six already and has not been greatly tempted to turn up at blood’s front door to claim her heritage. Her mother is embarrassed by the very thought of it. It would not be fair or just to rock the life of someone who’d been little more than shy and innocent and careless all those many years ago, she says. “I’m sure he won’t remember it. He didn’t even ask my name when we …” She doesn’t want to say “had sex.” She doesn’t want to say “made love.”

Bel adores her mother fiercely, without reservation, like many only children of single parents do, and so will not pick up the phone to call Lix until her mother finally succumbs to the lymphoma that has plagued her for the past six years. Bel has a daughter herself, a one-year-old called Cade. A child needs grandparents. So possibly, with her mother gone, there’ll be good cause to show the child to Felix Dern. Bel has prayed that that day will never come.

Her streetcar, as luck would have it on this evening, is almost empty. She has space enough to leave the stroller uncollapsed on the wooden-slatted floor, its wheels wedged in the grooves to keep the sleeping baby safe. Bel likes the smell and polish of an almost empty streetcar, the loving details of the ironwork, and the heave and judder of their progress through the town. The city senate must be mad to try to phase them out, and build instead a rapid transit system underground. What if the city flooded again? What were the views from underground?

She hopes her husband’s at her stop when they arrive. He often comes to meet them if he gets off work in time, and then they go together to the shops, then go together to the local eatery where there are baby chairs and simple food and friends with children of their own, then go together — yes, the three of them — to bed. Bel puts her finger in her mouth for luck. She lets it hang across her lower lip like a coat hanger. The longer she leaves it there, the more likely it will be that her husband is waiting. What sweeter prospect can there be than having someone meet you from your streetcar?

The few other passengers have other homes to think about, but one young man — the sort who wonders what the stories are that occupy the other benches of his streetcar, especially the stories of young women his own age — is keen to catch Bel’s eye and smile at her. She’s pretty in an interesting way. The smudge of birthmark on her cheek is kissable. Otherwise her face is like her baby’s face, as still and innocent as sleep. She’s like a little girl herself, he thinks — that girlish finger in her mouth, that girlish look of love uncompromised — and hardly old enough to be a mother. She does not look at him. She looks ahead, into the quickly gobbled streets. The streetcar counts off its rosary of stops. The baby sleeps.

The details of our lives are undramatic, if we’re lucky, and a little dull. We hear the streetcar, but we have not yet heard the helicopter sweeping through the sky above, amongst the thermals that we have made with all our efforts and our industries all day. The helicopter’s payload is a photographer and cameras, keen to strip us to the bone, keen to catch us at our best, at our most mesmerizing, from above at night, with all the detail washed away by distance and by darkness. It’s Fifty Cities of the World again, but for international Geo magazine this time. Life has folded long ago. Our City of Kisses will become, in this aerial depiction, the City of a Million Lights, a two-page spread with staples in the sky. Our celebrated city is being photographed to be a shirt of light with its black tie of river.

Then everyone will see our slo-mo shift of moon and stars in Geo magazine. They’ll see a thin and shaking glow, unspecified, of early evening smudged. They’ll see the colored mesh of still and moving lights, enhanced by rain — a half a million windows laying out their rhomboids of reflected brilliance, five thousand cars, ten thousand headlights peeping at the world, a hundred bright and heated streetcars, six floodlit tennis courts unused, two pinprick glowing cigarettes not quite ashore. No kissing this time. No flesh and blood. No lips. Such things cannot be spotted from afar. Still, the streaks and pricks of light are eloquent. They tell of people going home. They tell of love and lovemaking, of children, marriages, and lives. You think, But this could happen anywhere. It does.