Her skin was turning red. Blood was pumping to the surface of her face and chest. Blood congested in her lips and nose, her earlobes and nipples, her breasts and genitals. The arteries were working faster than her veins. Her pulse had passed the hundred mark. Her blood pressure was up. Her lungs seemed hardly capable of reaching for breath. She was sweating visibly. You’d think the woman was not well, and that she should be hooked to sugar drips and heart machines and monitors.
Alicja was concentrating now. She had to draw the moment in. She stood a little straighter to allow the released odor to reach her nose directly. Her legs were buckling. She had to rest her hands on Lix’s shoulders for support. “Fessandra,” she said, as if this were an identification test. Lix took her comment as a cue. He snapped off leaves from balm, much damper leaves, more succulent and ticklish, and rolled them once again on Alicja’s lower leg. This time the odor was much fruitier and clogged, the smell of bed and sweat and oranges, as pungent as a potpourri and heavier than the fessandra perfume. It didn’t float as readily, but gathered in the curtains of her shirt. “I can’t smell that.” Again an invitation to move up. Again he pushed her shirt aside and tested out the balm on the softer, plumper skin between her bottom and her waist. And then some marjoram. “It’s balm,” she said, a little late.
Lix still had one hand free to pluck some mint for her. But he’d stood at last and now was pressing against her back, a little buckle-kneed himself. If anyone naive, some passing boatman or a marooned neighbor on another roof, had seen them there, they might just pass for a couple looking virtuously at their flooded street, as innocent as pigeons, but only if you took their swaying and their twining, their sudden shakes, to be a childish, clinging dance and their contorted faces—their mouths agape, their nostrils flared—to be a game of Visages.
When they had finished and were able to stand tall again, Lix rubbed the mint into the nape of her neck, a freshener, a waking tonic for the nose. It was a smell she’d associate forever with the advent of their son. Mint would remind her, too, of proper love, because their midday breeding on the roof (that’s what it was), their mating in the time of floods, had also been an act of fondness and affection. Everything they’d done and seen in those nine days of rain had led as surely as water runs downhill to lovemaking. Everything had proved to be a prelude to the kisses and embraces, and the child. There’d be no grander day than this.
This couple, these rooftop newlyweds, shipwrecked above the flooded streets, had done two things at once, two things connected and discrete: Had sex. Made love. What better way to start a life? What better way to start an afternoon?
A CHILDISH QUESTION now. What happened to the clouds? What happened to the clouds once they’d peeled off to give us back our hills, their scalped-to-the-bone maturity? They’d spread out as evenly as oil. The blue skies lost their pure edge as well. The wind picked up. By June, it was another summer just like all the others we endure in this safe city on the water’s edge. Not fine, not wet, but hazy and exhausting and unkind. Our world regained its shape. If we were hawks, if only we were hawks once in a while, we’d recognize that city patterns had returned to normal, the river flowing in its place, observing man-made banks, the traffic moving freely in the dried-out streets and on the mended bridges, no sheeny parks or squares to paddle in, the bipeds as busy as they ever were, observing sidewalk rules.
And, as hawks, we’d spot an unexpected confluence one afternoon in July, beyond glass roofs. Not such a rare coincidence. For cities like ours where people move around on tracks, meetings such as this are inevitable:
Alicja and Lix have gone down to the Palm & Orchid for a late Saturday afternoon treat. They’ve something to celebrate and think about. Something both pleasing and unnerving for Lix: his children stretch behind him and they stretch ahead. Her pregnancy’s confirmed.
Unluckily, for this should be a blissful, undiluted time, Freda’s already in the Palm & Orchid Coffee House with her small boy. She’s sitting almost hidden by a plant, facing out across the room disdainfully and being watched by half the men. When she sees her ex-lover, her very best RoCoCo Renegade and the father of her son, with his fat Polish wife at the entrance desk pleading with the maître d’ for an unshared table, she’s tempted first to stay where she is and ignore them, loftily. He’d not dare bother her.
They are being led to a table far too close to hers. So she gets up from her seat, brushes all the crumbs off her black skirt, and hurries out without a glance, but only once she’s sure that Lix has noticed her, seen not only how grand and beautiful she is but also how she’s still concerned, involved, engaged (and if she still is beautiful, then that’s a beauty that stems not from her genes but from her seriousness). She wants the man whom she possessed for more than thirty days to take the blame for everything, the child, the kidnapping, the ever growing problems of the city and the world.
George had not been pleased to be there in the first place, in such a disappointing restaurant. Now he is furious to be dragged away before he’s even dispatched his cake or had a chance to feed the finches with his mother’s crumbs. He drags behind his mother’s arm, afraid to make a fuss, and as he drags, he catches for an instant the eye of a man he cannot recognize but knows, a hypnotized and startled man who’s staring at him with an open mouth.
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 t
oo 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 d
reams 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.