by Jim Crace
THE THIRD MILLENNIUM for us started one year after everybody else’s, because some bored and playful speculators from the Tourist Bureau had decided and decreed that the City of Balconies and the City of Kisses could now be marketed for a lucrative month or so as the City of Mathematical Truth, the Capital of Calendar Authenticity, and would thereby reap and thresh the ripest crop of revelers from abroad who’d want a replay of the false new millennium they’d already celebrated so memorably, so profitably, one year before. We’d be the only place where you could observe the accurate millennium, they said. We’d be the only town where you could mark the Advent of the Future twice. Sudden fortunes would be made by hotels, restaurants, and breweries, normally closed down for the winter, and by the opportunists from the Tourist Bureau who’d put in place some subtle private deals.
So in expectation of fifteen thousand out-of-season visitors, all eager to procure a night of pleasure, the bunting and the streamers were prepared. The historic city center closed to traffic. The whole of Company Square was equipped with braziers and licensed for the sale of alcohol. The airport lobby was emblazoned with the banners THE TIME IS RIGHT (at last!) FOR HAVING FUN, and WELCOME TO THE CITY THAT TRULY COUNTS. Prostitutes took rooms downtown and women hoping to be wifed abroad bought new, provoking clothes and carried their final school grades in their evening bags as “proof.” And a midnight fireworks show which would be “visible from the moon” was readied on Navigation Island, in the mud.
The foreign revelers, regrettably, were sick of new millennia by then. The disappointment—and the hangovers—of the first would last them for a thousand years. One anticlimax was enough. Therefore they did not come to us in their expected droves. Instead, our hotels were half filled with math curmudgeons, mostly male, Dutchmen, Scandinavians, and Yanks, academics, intellectuals, and bachelors, who’d refused the year before to recognize the numerically premature end of the millennium but now had got an opportunity to demonstrate their bloody-mindedness and learning. Imagine it, on New Year’s Eve, our city full of nitpickers, hairsplitters, pedants, and rationalists, and local women dressed like queens scaring them to death, with their grade C’s in science, languages, and art. And what did these math curmudgeons want to do to celebrate the passing year? They wanted to avoid the crowds.
In fact, the streets were full enough that night. With citizens. We’ve always liked a fireworks show and alcohol and women in provoking clothes. “There is, indeed, good cause for all of us to celebrate,” Jupiter wrote in his Sunday column on New Year’s Eve. “Contrary to the evidence of our own eyes, we are making measurable progress in this city. Now we are only a year behind the rest of the world. Let’s see if we can close the gap by 3001.”
Lix had been onstage till ten in his revival of The Devotee, not the most testing of romantic comedies but an easy and welcome opportunity for him to sing and act and show his famous face before an uncritical audience that normally would not spend time or money in the theater. No need to exert himself. No need for nuances or subtlety. Just be certain, he reminded himself before each performance, that the laughter clears before the next amusing line, and that the next amusing line is timed to end before the laughter starts. “And don’t forget, of course,” his stage director said, “to beam and bounce.”
The audience did not want art at that time of the year or intellectual theater. They’d only come, that evening anyway, to pass the time before midnight by watching two luminaries make love onstage, and then to boast they’d seen the celebrated Lix in the flesh. They’d seen his birthmark and they’d seen his shaved and naked chest. What’s more, they’d watched their television star, the man who’d made a fortune from his songs about their city, kissing Anita Julius, the actress who was equally famous for her Channel Beta talent show, her range of tempers, and for her fleeting love affairs with older men, younger men, men with chauffeur-driven cars, and then the chauffeurs, too.
So when, finally, and as the curtains closed, An and Lix reached the moment of that much vaunted promised kiss—the one the theater posters reproduced, the one so many times reprinted in the magazines, the one that all the gossip columnists would use when the scandal broke on New Year’s Day—the otherwise inattentive audience grew tense and quiet. Opera glasses were lifted up. People shifted in their seats to gain the clearest view. Men licked their lips and cleared their throats, as if they believed their turn would come, that An would jump down off the stage to plant her lovely lips on theirs. Not one single person looked elsewhere. They watched through narrowed eyes. You’d think that Life magazine had got it wrong in 1979 when it recorded so much affection on the streets and that for us public kissing was still as exotic, rare, and disconcerting as a total eclipse. Miss it and it wouldn’t come again for years; stare too long and openly and you’d go blind.
It wasn’t only the actual kiss that mesmerized and silenced them. It was also the unexpected display of what they took—mistook—as privacy, the unembarrassed breaching of a hidden world which only chambermaids and paparazzi ever stumbled on. Four famous lips engaged in lovemaking while all the world, sunk and squirming in their seats, looked on and felt the pangs of exclusion. Here was a life denied to ticket holders in the audience, a life of cash and fame and sex and unself-consciousness. No wonder no one dared to breathe or be the first to clap.
The audience that night was witnessing something new and dangerous, however. In every performance until this one on New Year’s Eve, the lovers’ kissing had been a cleverly rehearsed sham. They were, to use the actors’ phrase, “kissing like puppets” or “dry-drinking,” their lips stitched shut, their mouths as passionate and hard as stones, their breaths held in until the kissing was completed.
It’s true, all the audiences so far had seen both Lix and An put out their tongues a little as their faces closed in, as their noses touched. A little strip of reflective mouth gel achieves that trick. The stage lights had caught the wet and fleshy tongue tips exactly as the stage director planned. It might have looked as if the actors’ mouths were busy with each other’s tongues; everyone would swear to that. But they’d been fooled. They wanted to believe, they wanted to be duped. What was rolling the actors’ cheeks, convincing the balcony and the orchestra seats that this was more than theater, was only the mockery of tongues. Lix and An were performing in the pockets of their own mouths with their own tongues—“playing solo trumpet” is the term—with no more sexual passion than they’d need to free a wedge of toffee from their teeth. That’s show business. It’s trickery and counterfeit. The actors have to seem to care when they do not.
The fact was this, however it appeared onstage: until the final act on New Year’s Eve, their tongues had never touched. An did not truly fancy Lix, no matter what the gossips and the posters might imply, no matter what they did onstage. He did not truly fancy her. Yet if theater was powerful and could transform an audience, then how could it not affect the principals themselves, eventually? How could their nightly kissing on the stage not spill over into life—particularly on New Year’s Eve when all the cast and all the staff, including Lix and An (especially), had oiled the way by drinking to one another’s health before the show? It isn’t love that’s blind, it’s alcohol.
The twenty minutes he’d spent sharing wine with his costar in the Players’ Lounge that evening had left Lix—who never had a head for drink—a little off balance and even more bewildered than usual by his offstage feelings for his irritating little colleague, so lively and so noisy, so “unstitched.” On the one hand, anyone could see—to use the idiotic jargon of our city’s most expensive psychoanalyst, a man whom An had “couched” herself on more than one occasion—“their compasses were pointing at a different north.” She might be only a couple of years younger than Lix, but she was the product of a different age. You’d think her only gods were clothiers and coiffeurs. She liked a man in uniform, she claimed. She liked him even better out of uniform. She’d never voted, never would. She dined and dieted instead. She held st
rong views but only about the sounds and fashions of the day, whose singing voice was sexiest, what went with mauve, how best to get away with hats. She’d told a journalist that if the Mother Nature Beauty Clinic had intended her to stay at home with a good book on a Saturday night, it wouldn’t have equipped her with such high heels, such long fingernails, and “plastic breasts that didn’t jiggle when she danced.” Lix had read the press releases before The Devotee had opened, and they had made him blush. Bring back the Street Beat Renegades.
On the other hand, it had to be admitted that the little featherhead could act. It had to be admitted, too, that as each day and each performance had passed, his dismissal of and disdain for An had ebbed. Now when he was reminded what she’d said about her bulky plastic chest, he was more curious and amused than irritated. She certainly had pluck. She certainly was fun. She certainly was beddable. Whereas during rehearsals and the first few days of performance their stage kissing, dry though it was, had been an embarrassment and an ordeal for him—fencing and wearing weight bags were the only things he hated more—he had since become resigned to it, and then addicted. Some things are inevitable. Once again, the old refrain, “Such is the nature of the beast.”
Lix had discovered as each night passed in this long season of The Devotee that truly not wanting a woman, not in his head, not in his heart of hearts, not in his Perfect Future, was not a logic that the lower body valued much. Anita Julius might not be the kind of partner he dreamed of waking up with in his own bed or—horror at the thought of it—engaging in a conversation over breakfast cups on his expensive balcony, but lately, as the final curtain cut the audience away on their supposedly unfeeling kiss, he had felt increasingly perturbed. His face was numb, perhaps. His lips were little more than bruised by her hard mouth. The insides of his cheeks were tender from too much “trumpeting.” But elsewhere Lix was suffering what actors call “an impromptu,” that is to say an unexpected intervention by an unpredictable performer. His cock was enlarged. His “rubbery zucchini” was ripe.
It stirred a little more each evening, a little earlier in the plot, a little more insistently. It could not help itself (the truest and the weakest excuse you’ll ever hear in life). It responded to his costar as unjudgmentally, it seemed, as mushrooms react to light.
By late December, Lix had become wearied by his performance, its drudgery and duplication, and only became truly involved in the closing moments of the play, when finally An’s body crossed the boards to hold her Devotee. He was not nervous around his costar anymore. He trusted her. Her skin and hair now smelled familiar, like family. They were becoming intimates. He enjoyed the laundered and rustling contact of their costumes, the comic stiffness of her breasts, the gelid perspiration on his fingertips from her back and neck, like offstage lovers do. He prized and cursed the audience. Without the audience, he thought, his cock would not stir for her. They were a love triangle, the star, the costar, and the crowd.
It would be ingenuously optimistic—the stuff of theater—to hope that An herself had not become aware of Lix’s extra contribution to the play. There could be no disguising what was going on from her. Their costumes were too thin and flexible. The stage directions said, “They hold each other tightly and they kiss. The curtain slowly falls.” She would have felt the difference up against her abdomen. That’s not to say that his erection was abnormally large and resolute. It was a meekly modest one, like most men’s are, most of the time.
Nevertheless, An would have known exactly what it was and who was causing it. After all, it couldn’t be edema or a hernia. It came and went too readily. For her, a woman used to provoking men, the explanation would have been a simple one. Her charms were irresistible. After all, she could deliver erections to half a theater. She’d made a living out of it. Usherettes at other shows had told her several times about the witless stiffening of men standing at the back of the gallery, thirty meters from the stage—and out of range, you would have thought. And during her brief appearance in Regina Vagina before it was raided and banned, she had heard reports of husbands who had to squirm and rearrange their trousers while their wives preferred to concentrate elsewhere. The “members of the audience,” some wit had said at the time, “stood up for Anita Julius.”
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 entirely—free is not the word—at 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 him—oh, there’d been offers many times for Lix from waitresses—because 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. Then—once they had realized that here was a man unable to yield himself—it angered them. They did not persevere with him.
But mostly Lix did not engage at all. He was fearful—and, 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 been—not even once, he judged—much 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 enou
gh, 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 becomes—it’s glib to say but nothing else is true—as 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 it—and so they might as well get on with it. Let’s eat the porridge while it’s hot.