“What now?” he asked. They hadn't had sex in the car for months.
“We've got the keys to Freda's office,” she replied. She held up the shoulder bag. “We'll get the guy. And then we'll have to find Freda a lawyer ⦔
“Don't worry about Freda. They'll let her out in the morning. She'll dine off this for years. âMy night in chains,' et cetera!”
“Don't be small-minded, Lix. What's done is done.” She meant that both of them should always do their best to bury the embarrassment
of George's provenance. “What would the world be like without its Fredas?”
“A lot less complicated.” Lix was blushing, not inexplicably. This was not a good time for an argument.
“We still have to get her guy,” Mouetta said.
“Forget the guy!” He touched her wrist. He had the sense, though, not to put his hand on her leg and not to ask for what he wanted most, a kiss. Not heroism, but a kiss. A kiss inebriated by the rain. A wet, wet kiss. “Can't we just forget the guy?”
“Just drive,” she said. She never knewâor, at least, she preferred not to knowâwhen Lix was being serious. Or when her irritation with her husband was unreasonable.
The streets, of course, were busier than you'd expect on such a night, at such an hour. In addition to the men in uniform, causing trouble where they could, and the remaining groups of demonstators, there were civilians sheltering in the arcades and the bars, unable to get home or prevented by the road and sidewalk blocks and by the weather from reaching their cars. The streetcars and transit buses were not running: services suspended by order of the civic police. Taxis were not allowed into the Central Zones. You either had to walk or shelter from the rain or beg a bed from someone you knew downtown or end up as a bludgeoned passenger inside an army bus. Even those who'd reached their cars were being turned back at the Circular and were obliged to park for the night until restrictions had been lifted. For once, the city was not dull. It was dangerous. Young men are always dangerous.
Lix crossed the river by the only open route, Deliverance Bridge, and drove around the park on Navigation Island through
stands of tarbony trees and ornamental shrubs, through puddles, ankle deep, which dramatically accessorized his car with arched silver spoilers of rainwater, until he reached the second bridge, which still allowed some access to the river's eastern banks. Beyond the bridge, the traffic was at a standstill. Even those drivers who had tried to reverse onto the sidewalks or turn back toward the old town's center were gridlocked. Beyond the traffic were the academy and Freda's office and Freda's sanctuary desk.
“We'll not get home, you realize,” Lix said. “They're not letting anybody through.”
“They always let
you
through.”
As it happened Mouetta was wrong, or so it appeared. All the city campuses were closed to traffic, even to the stars of stage and television, it seemed. Militia volunteers, always the last to be deployed and the most unyielding, were squeezing through the traffic, ordering drivers from their cars and searching them, both the drivers and the cars. No permissions asked, no explanations given, no patience or civility. They were determined to enjoy themselves. You had either to stand and lose your dignity or to argue and lose your libertyâthat mischievous predicament, as old as humankind. You had to count yourself lucky, as bags were emptied onto seats and trunks were opened for evidence of insurrectionâa box of matches, say, a couple of leaflets, a fruit knifeâthat on this occasion the men had not been issued with their electric cattle prods. Pedestrians, mostly students trying to return to their dorms, were being turned back. They could either spend the night outside or, if they protested or seemed too smart and arrogant, a wooden bed could be arranged for them in some
dark cell. A thorough drenching would be good for them, as would a taste of prison life. Then they'd be “graduates” indeed! They had the choice: Clear off or they'd matriculate in Practical Cell Studies.
Lix raised and stretched his arms as he was instructed and let two of the young men search his pockets and his waistband and check his ID card. Unlike the other women travelers, Mouetta had not been summoned from the car. She took this as a promising sign that yet again her husband's public gift was making life easy for them. She hated it, this privilege, but she was grateful as well. She watched her husband through the hand-jive of the windshield wipers, waiting for the look of recognition on the volunteers' faces and the invitation to go ahead.
The man who asked Lix to raise his hands did not proceed with his interrogation for very long. Nor was their car searched. Nor were they required to unlock the tailgate. This, then, this rescue bid, thought Mouetta, would be a simple matter, though alarming in ways that she found inexplicably stirring. Her heart was jumping like a pan-fried pea. Yes, she was stimulated by the thought of having a young man about the house, a young man needing to be saved. This would be her contribution to the night, her solidarityâto steal a “wild and innocent” suspect, “known to the authorities,” from underneath the very snobbish, starstruck noses of the police.
Indeed, her husband had been recognized. She could tell by the way he stood, by the laughter, by the parting handshake, by the way a route was being cleared for them. There was no danger, then. They'd not be caught. They could simply drive into the
parking lot underneath the academy, take the elevator to the seventh floor where Freda's office was, and do their good deed for the night. She could imagine the young manâpainfully idealistic, sweet to look at, awkward, grateful, very scared. They could curl him up beneath the car rugs in the back and drive home through all the blocks and barricades, untouched and undelayed, because her Lix, her acting man, would have the passport of a famous face, would have the visa of a celebrated birthmark stamped on his cheek.
Then, when they were home, in their quiet cul-de-sac with its unprying neighbors, she'd make a fuss over that young man. Find towels, a spare toothbrush, some underwear. She'd cook for him at night, while Lix was at the theater. She'd let him have the run of the house. She had to smile. The very thought of it. She could provide a sanctuary for both of them.
Mouetta was hospitable and motherly, two undervalued attributes these days. Taking care of people was her public gift. One day, please God, she'd have a child. At thirty-nine she wanted very much to have a child. She'd soon be passing through the Great Stone Gate of forty, beyond which were towns and villages without babies. Stepmothering was not enough for her. Though she was very fond of George and Lix's children from his first marriage and the “intervening” four-year-old (she
loved
all but one of them, in fact), they were not hers, not flesh and blood and bone. As anyone with half an eye could tell. Neither was the student
hers,
of course. But then he wasn't Lix's either, and that made a difference. She'd drive this student mad with care as soon as her husband returned to the car and they were summoned to proceed.
So she was baffled and surprised when Lix slid back into his driver's seat and said, “There's no way through. We have to turn around.”
“They wouldn't let you through?”
“No. So it seems.”
“Not even you?”
“Those numskys don't know me. You think they're theatergoers? We have to turn around.”
“Not recognized?”
“Not on this occasion. Evidently.”
“So what do we do about Freda's student?”
“What can we do? Nothing! It's not my fault. I don't think it would be sensible to argue with those guys. You want to try?”
Already he was turning the car into the space they had cleared for him and was nosing through a crowd of appalled, thrilled students standing in the rain with nowhere to spend the night except the streetcar shelters and underneath the bushes in the park. What awful fun.
“Why don't you tell them who you are?”
“I promise you it wouldn't count.”
“What now?” Her turn to ask.
“Back home.” A home without houseguests! He stretched a hand across and rested it, palm up, in her lap. Still damp.
“You're trembling,” she said.
They'd not get home that night. There'd be no copulating on the stairs. The Circular was still cordoned off and already flooding, anyway, on the uptown highway, and all the other routes out to the hilltop suburbs where Lix and Mouetta and many of the
rich and famous had their houses were blocked. There'd been a rumor that these houses where the guilty bankers and civic bosses lived would be targeted if things got out of hand down in the city. There were incendiarists about and anarchists, expert in breaching cordons. So the police protection of their home would stop Lix and Mouetta from getting home. Safety at the price of freedom? Another awkward, ancient choice. Besides, here was an unexpected bonus for the uniformed defenders of the city. They could turn the rich and famous into the homeless for the night.
Lix and Mouetta had traveled twice across the two bridges of Navigation Island, annoyed and arguing, before they decided what to do. Past one o'clock already. It was a little too late and far too early to wake friends and ask for refuge, too late to phone a lawyer for Freda, naive to think they'd find a hotel still with beds to spare. They had the keys to Freda's flat as well as her office, but that was on the campus, too, and almost certainly unreachable. And possibly unsafe. And there were cats inside and awful litter smells which only Freda had grown used to. They could, of course, return to the theater and rouse the janitor. Lix had done exactly that one New Year's Eve, at this same theater. They could, in a pinch, sleep in Lix's dressing room or even onstage. The Molière demanded three chaise longues. But the chances of the janitor still being awake himself at that hour, let alone responding to someone hammering at the doors on this of all nights, were pretty thin. They did what many other people had been forced to do. They drove the car again onto the island and took the first gate into Deliverance Park, looking for a parking space or turnout. Or Lix looked at least; Mouetta, disappointed, tired, had fallen
asleep already, suddenly, her body falling, as he drove, against the webbing of the seat belt.
There were no parking spaces in the park or room for their long Panache in the already overcrowded turnouts. The park had turned into a dormitory of cars. So Lix bumped up onto the grass, careful not to wake his wife. He could have parked right there, just on the corner of the lawns, next to the road, illuminated by the headlights and the streetlamps. Safe. But he had other plans for their anniversary. He headed for the clump of ornamental pines, the darkest planted corner of the park, a place he had spotted as a possibility many times before but never used.
At first the grass, immersed by the rain, was soft and muddy. He had to drive slowly, in the lowest gear. He churned up ruts and wakes of earth and water. He damaged tended grass. Soon the formal grasses gave way to raised picnic squares and cindered ball fields which were hard and gravelly. He switched the headlights off and bumped forward toward the shielding canopy of trees with the help only of his side lamps. And thenâheroicallyâhe switched the side lamps off. The gray Panache had disappeared from view. He knew that he was breaking Rules. That he'd be fined if caught. Imagine what the gossip columnists would say. He also knew that he was taking greater risks. The river had been known to swell and break its banks. In 1989, as he could testify, Navigation Island had been entirely submerged. No resident mammal had survived. But he was determined not to waste the opportunity. The sudden looming darkness and the frieze of foliage and the possibility of floods were thrilling. He'd found a spot where, even if the storm abated and there was moonlight,
they'd be completely hidden from the road. Here was another chance to fix that oversight he had failed to fix just an hour earlier: they had not had sex in the car for months, not since their Sunday drive down to the lakes that spring when Mouettaâmidcycle and ovulating, according to her charts and her thermometerâhad tried to stop him from using any contraception and what had started out as love had ended up as argument. He would not take the risk of having one more mouth to feed (even on alternate weekends). He'd pulled the comic condom on and Mouetta had reluctantly allowed him to continue. To be so fertile was a curse.
To be so timid was a curse as well.
Here was a predicament, then, tricky and elaborate, but so familiar to men, especially that night with so many couples unexpectedly accommodated in their cars and keen to make the most of it. Lix's wife, already irked by him, was sleeping, snoring slightly even. Making love to her right then would require a degree of subtlety and patience that, obviously, at pressing times like these, he did not have. Sod's Law. Catch-22. The mocking Science of Perversity.
Like other men with complex and attractive wives, he'd fantasized, of course, so many times, so many tense and sleepless times, of waking in the middle of the night, Mouetta dead asleep, as innocent as a cat curled up on her side of the bed, and simply helping himself to her.
Helping himself
in both the sense of rescuing and the sense of stealing. Just reaching out and piling up his plate with her, as if she were as ready and quiescent as a slice of cake. Her body, almost naked underneath the rucked and pushed-up
nightclothes, would wake before she did, as he imagined it. Or perhaps she'd wake only after he'd pushed into her, alarmed and shuddering and animated by the wet and warm conjunction of their limbs. She'd wake aroused. This would be arousal in both senses of the word for her. She had to wake aroused. That was the whole point of his dream.