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 entirelyâ
free
is not the wordâat 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 himâoh, there'd been offers many times for Lix from waitressesâbecause 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. Thenâonce they had realized that here was a man unable to yield himselfâit angered them. They did not persevere with him.
But mostly Lix did not engage at all. He was fearfulâand, 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 beenânot even once, he judgedâmuch 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 becomesâit's glib to say but nothing else is trueâas 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 itâand 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.
Â
Â
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 birthdayâbut only after years of secrecy and cussedness and argumentâthat 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 Fredaâand especially Fredaâseemed 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
beforeâhe racked his brains but couldn't say exactly whenâbut 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!”