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“WHAT'S SO AMUSING?” Mouetta tapped him sharply on the hand with her coffee spoon. “I said I'm going to the restroom, Lix. You're grinning like a little boy. Were you dreaming or dozing?”
“Pretty much both. I didn't get enough sleep last night.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“I only need a nap, that's all.”
“Well, that makes two of us.”
She left the table and made her way across the room toward the toilets, even smiling at the woman in blue as she passed. His wife looked disheveled from behind, as well she might. She'd slept in what she wore, her once smart skirt and favorite blouse. Made love in them. Inside a car, deep in the park. She hadn't had a chance to wash or even brush her teeth that morning. So far she'd only used a comb, a touch of cologne, and a couple of tissues. No wonder she was the least crisp woman in the room.
Mouetta's absence was an opportunity, but not to contemplate his undermining shame at trading in the firebrand student for six minutes' pleasure in the car. He had to bury that at once. Rather it allowed him to concentrate unambiguously on all the women in the room. Lix could not help himself. Besides, Mouetta wanted his reply on her return. Again he studied the three attractive possibilities over the rim of his lifted cup. He tried them out. He was auditioning. He placed them in Mouetta's seat across the table in the Palm & Orchid, imagined how they'd look and what he'd say to them if they'd been married for two years, what might occur when they drove home, how they'd react to his determined ambush on the stairs. Again the oldest woman won the day.
He had his answer then. The Prickly Pear. She was the one he chose, out of all the women in the room. She was the likeliest. She was the one that he'd prefer if he could take just one to bed. He wondered what his wife would make of that when she came
back from freshening herself. Would she believe him when he pointed to the older woman, oddly dressed, boy-haired, and overdrawn as a cartoon, and said,
She is the one that I desire the most?
Lix felt his cock fattening at the very prospect of it, the conversation he and Mouetta would enjoy about the woman's face and body and clothes, how that might lead, must certainly lead, to more lovemaking when they got back home.
For surely this was Mouetta's project, to find some sexual stimulation in the answer Lix would give, whatever it might be, while still fully retaining Lix. His passions might well drift beyond recall. His body never would. Mouetta was the only one allowed. Her question, “If you could go to bed with anybody here, which one?,” was her foreplay, a scheme to get her husband talking about having sex with someone else, encouraging his imaginary couplings, his unreal consummations, so that she herself could play the role of that new woman, give herself to Lix as someone new, an actress in a fresher part. That's why she'd set him loose and left him to indulge these unrequitable but animating fantasies amongst the female colleagues at the table in the city's chicest coffee shop. She wanted him to test his dreams with her.
Isn't that what men and women did? Men and women who had shared a marriage berth for two years and a day? They'd want some shore leave, wouldn't they, to visitâin their hearts, at leastâthe beds of other lovers, other spouses? We need to flirt and covet strangers for the health and spirit of our marriages. They would be wearying otherwise. There'd be no love. Oh, to begin the day, each day, with fresh desires and still stay true.
Lix could quite easily, with Mouetta safely out of sight for a
few minutes, catch any of the women's eyes, make profiles of his famous face for them, engage one in a conversation, flirt, arrange to meet her in a bar one evening, seduce her with some tickets to his show. That's exactly what his colleagues would do, given half a chance. An actor's touring life is cut out for adultery, affairs, the weekend fling. What harm in that? And whatâif he were truly someone who would cheat on his wife, other than inside his never faithful, ever scheming headâif he were to go up to the likeliest? If he were to step across and what? Invite her to abandon her workmates and come with him onto the long-imagined beach? What harm in that?
The harm in that for him was the misfortuneâwas it truly a misfortune?âthat every kiss produced a child. Remember? Fertile Lix had never slept with anyone withoutâeventuallyâa pregnancy. There always was an aftermath for him.
So then: How dare he take Madame Picasso from the hotel restaurant into the kissing elevator and up into his room, the bed, the mirrors and the steam? There'd be a child, impatient at the door. A boy, he thought. A mother's boy. Well dressed for one so smallâand too obedient. The little violin case in his hand told all of it, as he stood in the corridor amid the uncollected trays, patiently waiting for his parents as they created him inside the hired room. He'd do his practice every time, be quite the little fiddler though not quite good enough to win the prizes that his mother wanted so muchâand which his celebrated father would be jealous of.
How dare he be the passing stranger for the plumper woman in the forest with her dogs. How dare he fondle them and her.
There'd be a child. A pretty, well-built girl, her face distinguished awfully by the cherry mark inherited from Lix, but plucky and adventurous.
How dare the overfertile Lix take his
jolie laide
down to the beach ⦠? Well, to all intents and purposes, that was not so problematic, he realized at once. Her age. Of course! He studied her again. Yes, in her fifties, certainly. Her fertile years long gone. Here was a woman he could safely cheat with, if he were the cheating kind. Perhaps that's why he'd felt so free in his imagination in her company. Whatever they might do, there'd be no child. It could be his first and only nonproductive affair. Inconsequential sex!
His heart was racing suddenly. Here was his certain risk-free, vindicated choice, ready for when Mouetta returned. He favored someone who could never bear his child.
Yet when she came back to the table, washed, refreshed, and recologned, her hair brushed back and neatened, her skirt and blouse hand-smoothed, entirely more desirable than she had been five minutes earlier, she did not sit down to pursue the answer to her question.
“Let's go,” she said.
He recognized that tone of voice. Something troubled her. She wanted to get on. There'd be an argument. He feared that somehow she had heard that her student had been arrestedâand that she'd guess the reason why. She'd hate him for such wickedness. She'd be right to do so.
It was only once they'd crossed the busy Circular that his wife
even spoke. She had another unexpected question for her husband: “Which of my cousins would you like to sleep with most?”
Lix laughed. Uneasily. He was naturally relieved that nothing worse was upsetting his wife. “Ah, cousin Gracia,” he said. He'd named the oldest one, a woman already in her sixties with thick gray hair and as tall and bony as an ostrich.
“Be serious.”
“Your cousins? There's not a serious answer. I wouldn't sleep with any one of them. Particularly the women.”
“And Freda, then? I'm sure you'd like to sleep with her again. She's lovely, isn't she. More lovely than before. She dresses so beautifully. Imagine if you'd never even met me that dreadful New Year's Eve, but Freda ⦠well, you'd make love to her again, wouldn't you? I'm sure of it.”
“Ha ha.”
“You can tell the truth. I promise I won't mind.”
“Of course you'll mind. You've minded all along about Freda and George.” He wouldn't add his own name to the list. “The mystery is, why do you still arrange to see the woman? Why do we still put up with her?”
“Because we must. She's George's mother, anyway. She's family.”
“She's not my family.”
They drove in silence to the house, the house where they would spend the third year of their marriage, where their childânow smaller than a fingertipâwould take its first uncertain steps, the house where they would love and live and row, the house
where nearly all his children came to stay on weekends, for the holidays, their empty house with no firebrands asleep in their spare room.
Mouetta followed Lix through the shrubs and pots of their front yard. “You still fancy Freda, don't you, honestly? After all these years. You fancy cousin Freda.”
More than me
. She said it to his back.
“Not in the least,” Lix said, though there'd been moments in the car the night before and in the Debit Bar when he'd hardly been thinking of his wife. And there were bound to be some moments in the coming days, the coming months and years, indeed, as there'd been many moments in the past, when he would dwell on Freda for a while and what they'd almost, should have, shared, their George, their lost son in America, now twenty-four years old. He'd always think of her as someone he desired. Mouetta was the woman he required. This is the nature of the beast.
LIX LEFT IT late. Till November 1979. He was almost twenty-one and it was nearly midnight when he first had sex with anyone. Full docking sex, that is. Full snug-ân'-comfy. Like almost everybody else his age, of course, he'd had hand jobs, not only with himself since he was twelve but twice with helpful boys at school and once (a birthday treat when he was seventeen) with an unsuspicious girl, one of nature's volunteers. Her first time with a boy. She'd seemed surprised at what she'd done, at what she'd made him do, and with such little exertion. She jumped back just in time, so that only her sandal and her wrist were soiled by Lix's sudden gratitude.
On that night of his inductionâif it were not for the birthmark on his cheekâyou would not recognize the celebrated Lix. Less heavy for a start, less grand. And much more volatile, as
you'd expect of someone in his first semester free of parents and the family home. He was training for the stage at the academy. This was a time when Theater, newly unleashed from the censors, was argumentative and powerful. Lix truly wanted to improve the world, believed that Art was Revolution's smarter twin, that Acting and Action were equal partners. Collaborators, in fact. He'd signed up with the Mime/Scream Community Drama Collective in his first month as a student and was active, too, in Street Beat Renegades, Provocations & Co., and the Next Stage (as in Paul Roesenthaler's “The next stage is the elimination of captains, chaplains, and kings”). He didn't have a repertoire, Lix said (adapting Roesenthaler yet again, our city's feted radical), he had “an onstage manifesto.” Actors seemed to be the partisans of change back in those simpler times when appointees and the army controlled our lives even more completely than they do now, now thatâto chant the cynics' chorusâtheater is unfettered and trifling, all our leaders have been democratically imposed, and Freedom has destroyed our impulse to be free.
Lix had a democratically modest fourth-floor room amongst the tenements down on the wharf, with not only skylight views across the newly named City of Kisses toward the river but also a narrow glimpsing view from his box kitchen into Cargo Street, where now there are boutiques and restaurants instead of groceries and bars and “working folk.”
The woman who had set her heart that night on Lix stood with his binoculars (where he had stood and spied on her so many times), her back against the little stove, her face veiled by the curtains, the rubber eyecups pressed against her lids and focused
on the late night customers, the waitress, and the owner in the sidewalk cafe below, across the street. His stolen daily view of her. She was surprised how large the people seemedâthey filled the lensâand how unsuspecting, uninhibited, they were, free to mutter to themselves, or stare, or rearrange their belts and straps, or swing their legs, with no idea that they were being scrutinized. “So!” she said. So this was where the owl had his nest. “I've often wondered what the view would be like if I were looking down on me!”
Lix was embarrassed, obviously. Caught out. He was also frightened and aroused. For all his noisy confidence, he'd never had an unrelated woman in his room before. What might it mean? He watched her from the kitchen door, his arms stretched up to grip the lintel, his printed T-shirt riding high above his belt to inadvertently display an adolescent abdomen and the apex of his pubic hair.
She, too, seemed large and detailed, in a way she'd never been through his binoculars. Her outfit was familiar, of course, her general shape. He recognized the fashionable “Sandinista” tunic suit with its half sleeves and “rough-look” calf-length skirt. He recognized the matching spangled rebel scarf. But mostly she was unfamiliar. The angle, for a start, was different. He'd mostly seen her from above, the shoulders and the head. Binoculars had shortened her. Binoculars diminish the world, reduce the senses to one. Precision optical instruments, no matter how finely ground, fogproof, waterproof, and vision-adjusted, could not hope to convey true proximity, the candid softness of the flesh, the spiciness of scent, the rustling, independent simpering of
clothes, the clink of her bracelets, the perfect imperfections and the blemishes of someone close to thirty years of age. Until that night, he'd only seen this woman from afar.
Lix, actually, like many young men, was practiced in the art of watching women from afar, not always through binoculars, of course, but women he could only dream of touching, women he could only scheme about: his voice tutor at the Arts Academy, the swan-necked student called Freda from one of the science faculties, the daughter of the concierge at his apartment house, the overscented cashier in the campus cafeteria, the tiny half-Greek actress in his course, the bursar's haughty wife in her white suits, the many tough and visionary women in his “groups,” andâlet's admit the universal truthâany female under fifty simply chancing into view. All worshipped from afar. They'd all be judged and sifted, feeding his mind's eye, as casually and unself-consciously as a sea anemone might sift the random flotsam in its reach.
When you're that young and inexperienced you take in fantasies with every breath. You mean no harm. But then you don't expect a distant fantasy to walk up to your room. You don't imagine that the woman waiting for her boyfriend every evening after work in the sidewalk cafe below your kitchen window will ever be so close and intimate except through your binoculars. You cannot know, might never know, that she will be the mother of your eldest child.
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SHE'D NOTICED HIM standing there with his binoculars many times in the preceding weeks, behind the twitching curtains
in the rented rooms. The shifting lenses caught the light and signaled to the street. As did the pale and transfixed face beyond, with its dark birthmark on the upper cheek. She hadn't minded that he was spying on her. Being watched and waiting for your lover was much less tedious than simply waiting unobserved. She did not display herself, exactly. She stayed demure; crossed legs, with a newspaper or magazine to read, perhaps, or a letter to write to her sister in Canada. Sometimes a book. Occasionally a cigarette. She always seemed so self-contained and concentrated, this little information clerk in her expressive outfits. Always looking down. She had learned to watch the upper window in the building opposite without lifting her head. Men weren't as undetectable as they imagined. And she did seek out the best-lit tables in the sidewalk cafe, the ones most favored by the evening sun, the ones directly opposite the snooper's room. She liked this silent and seductive rendezvous.
It had occurred to her, of course, that any man so patient and persistent with binoculars, and fixated enough to waste his time staring through his lenses at her, might not be honorable or sane or attractive even. She'd seen the remake of the classic Peeping
Tom.
She'd read the trial reports of dangerous voyeurs. There was something animal about his spying, too: faces at windows, figures in caves. She should have been more fearful and more wary. Yet she felt safe. She had spotted her admirer once, out on the street. There'd been no mistaking that birthmark, or how unmenacing he seemed. The young man was striking. The blemish on the face was beautiful, an unexpected touch of innocence for one so secretive and scheming. She was surprised, as well, how adolescent
he was. That made his voyeurism charming almost, more forgivable, appropriate. How satisfying to have magnetized a fellow scarcely out of his teens when sheâa mere month off her thirtieth birthday, not married yet herself but desperately dependent on a married manâhad almost dismissed herself as being attractive to no one single.
It can be no surprise, then (given how her sense of worth had been diminishing), that the daily half an hour between her ending work and her part-time lover getting to the cafe became for a month or so the best part of her day. She sat with a perc of coffee, out on the street, her body trim, and was desired. Desired sexually. Desired simply for the way she looked by the young man now swinging from the door frame only a meter behind her, with his sweet, appealing midriff and the kiss-me birthmark on his face. She did not want him for a lover. She didn't even want him for a friend. She wanted him just once, just for the hour, and just to reassure herself. A “little interlude” to salve her wounds.
Her “little interlude” had not been planned. She'd never cheated on a man before. Never needed to. But when the call had come through to the cafe that evening to tell her that her lover had been delayed and that he'd phone the next day at her office “when he got the chance,” then she'd been troubled and offended beyond words. The small offenses irritated mostâthe effort she had expended after work, before arriving at the cafe, touching up her makeup, fixing her hair, changing into clothes he liked, the time she'd squandered during the day imagining their meeting, rehearsing their embraceâalthough the larger implications were unignorable and frightening. The pattern was familiar. This was
the third time in ten days that he had let her down in one way or another. This was the third cheating husband in the last two years who had disillusioned her. She took the hint. She felt the chill. Another cooling, flagging man was scuttling from her life.
She'd started out the day as a woman with some status, not bloated with self-regard like some people she could name but confident enough to know that she was valued somewhere. Whenever she was waiting in the cafeâan almost daily routine for the past three monthsâshe had a purpose and a role. She was the early half of a couple, waiting to be validated by her manâand that was satisfying. The owner and the little waitress understood that she would arrive before the boyfriend, that she would order a coffee andâoccasionallyâa glass of mineral water. They were used to her eager nervousnessâthe frequent checking in the little vanity mirror she carried in her purse, her habit of shaking her watch as if to hasten time, the way she stared into her book, her writing pad, her newspaper, but never seemed to turn a page. And then, when he arrived, the lover always just a little bit too late but standing over her at last to stoop a kiss onto her cheek, they'd be familiar with his embrace, her hand bunched up across his back.
Some days they'd only stay at the table for a few moments and then depart separately. The briefest meeting, just to hug. Once in a while, they'd share a beer, though clearly the man was not comfortable in such a public place. On other days, they'd go off hand in hand to possibly a restaurant or the hotels on the wharf. Then their passion would be almost palpable. It made her beautiful, the waitress thought.
Where was the beauty, though, in being so publicly stood up? Her borrowed husband could at least have called her to the cafe owner's telephone, to whisper in her ear from his safe distance with his excuses and apologies. Why would he be so cowardly as to trust his betrayals to a messenger if he were not ashamed? Or lying? She'd had to smile and nod and seem wholly unperturbed when the cafe ownerâthe co-conspirator, it seemed to herâhad come to pass on the shaming news: “Your friend said to tell you that he'll phone tomorrow, when he gets the chance.” She felt exposed. Demeaned. A woman with no purpose in that cafe. She could drink a thousand coffees there and still not count as half a couple waiting for completion. She was a laughingstockâa woman revealed as exactly what she wasâunmarried, only half successful in her work, the tenant of a less than homely apartment shared with two women just as unfulfilled as she was, reliant on the rationed attentions of a married lying man with children and a home he'd never abandon. She could hardly hold her coffee cup without shaking, she was so angry and upset. The evening had been so promising. They had planned to spend some time together in a restaurant, the famousâand expensiveâHabit Bar where all the singers and the actors went. There'd be no grubby hour in a hotel room before he hurried home on this occasion. There'd just be food and wine and romance. She'd always liked that better than the sex. Love must be fed or it grows thin.
What occurred, then, to turn this calamity on its head and rescue the evening? What took her up the stairs to Lix's unappealing room? An almost-stranger's room? It must have been the romance that she had already planned for that evening which made
the difference. The bottle was uncorked. Sitting on her own (before her lover's phone call came) in her familiar place in the sidewalk cafe hadâas nowadays it often didâmade her not sexually but emotionally aroused. Romantic expectation was her moodâthe expectation of the stooping kiss, her lover's guaranteed tumescence, the watchful, surely jealous eyes of the cafe owner, the passing glances of the many husbands going home to their dull families, the certainty that she was being spied on through far binoculars, that kissing one in this bright street was making love to two or more. Was this a mad indulgence for a woman of her age, that she was being wanted from many angles by several men at once? Perhaps this was the worst of vanities. But surely anyone could see how poised and heaven-sent she was for men.
Now what? No boyfriend suddenly. No prospect of a kiss. Not even any twitching curtains on that night. She'd checked. Just the complicit sympathy of the cafe owner and his waitress and the added insult of the stiffening liqueur they had offered her “on the house.” To go home was impossible. How could she bear the chatter of her roommates, the television programs, the surrender of her hopes to all the domestic chores that needed attending to? A woman who had expected to be dining out with celebrities in the Habit Bar would be at home instead, ironing blouses, defeated by the telephone.