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 con
tact 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.