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.<
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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 postpe
rformance 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.