Lix had developed the habit while still a young boy of holding a hesitant hand up to his eye when he spoke to strangers as if shielding it from sunlight. It drew attention to the birthmark, of course, rather than hiding it, and gave the boys something more to tease him about at school. He had tried to keep that hesitant hand in his trouser pockets, to be — or seem — relaxed about himself. Too frequently he also felt obliged when making new acquaintances to introduce himself as Smudge and then point out the cherry-colored birthmark as if it had not already been noted and ignored. He made jokes about it at his own expense. He was overinsistent, in fact, and made some old acquaintances so uncomfortable that they started calling him Felix and looking fixedly at their feet when they conversed rather than give offense by flickering a glance at his face.
What Lix could not accept, would never realize, but which the woman from the sidewalk cafe had recognized at once, was that the nevus was attractive rather than ugly. How tender it had been to kiss him there. It was like kissing someone better on a bruise, or kissing someone’s eyes to stop the tears. Here was an invitation to be tender. The birthmark was the sweetest part of him. It lent to an otherwise inexpressive face a sardonic and whimsical note, a touch of innocence and beauty. What small romantic successes Lix had enjoyed in his teens had been encouraged rather than hindered by what the mark did for his face. Lix did not understand. All his personal and public failures he blamed upon the stain.
Perhaps that’s why Lix grew to love the cinema so much. It was a refuge where his birthmark was not seen, where everybody faced the front and no one stared at him. It does not explain, however, the oddly self-exposing decision he had made that he would be an actor, someone stared at for a living. Or, possibly, as his best friend cleverly observed when Lix announced that he had won a place at theater school, “He’s looking for a job where he can cake himself in makeup.”
If only his best friends could see him now, a woman on her tiptoes kissing him, again, again, on his birthmark as if the cherry stain were fruit. Here was proof for them at last that love — or passion, anyway — was blind, that it could overcome, ignore, forgive the blotches and the blemishes.
She kissed him there again, prevented him from pulling back. He was a timid soul, birthmark or not. Another man, most other men, would not conceal themselves behind the curtains of an upper room. They’d be out on the streets themselves, consummating their desires. Another man would not require cajoling and encouragement. But here, still at the kitchen door, still with her lips pressed to his cheek, she realized quite soon, was someone who, if he (just like the city) had hardly kissed before — and that seemed possible, to judge by his hesitation — almost certainly had not made love before either. He was more than inexperienced. A virgin, then? She felt more purposeful.
Thank goodness someone there was purposeful. Lix was all at sea. His only physical contact with women — other than that one startled volunteer — was onstage or in his acting classes when there was a drama coach or stage directions to guide him: Take her arm or Seize her roughly or Embrace. And he obeyed the script. And she — whichever student actress it might be that day, instructed to be his Blanche, his Juliet, his Beatrice, his Salome — responded by the book.
These were the licensed touches of the theater, unconsummated congresses, studied passion, love technique that’s only there to dupe the audience.
Of course, the flesh he handled was not fake. Those onstage partners in his embrace were genuine women, ready with the action and the words. These were real lips. Those hands he took to kiss or shake, those costumed shoulders he enveloped in his arms, were not from props. The peasant’s dress that dashed against his ankles when they danced was fraudulent, just dressing up, a play. Yet when his hand supported her — the girl in his stage group, whoever she might be that week, his partner — for her cartwheel, then those glimpsed legs were alarmingly real, as was the heady smell of bottled perfume from Chanel, as was the bra strap, textured and insinuating against his palm.
None of them were quite as real as she’d become, the little shoeless woman from the sidewalk cafe who now was backing him out of the kitchen, across the wooden boards of his small room, until his legs were pressed against the endboard of his bed and he was toppling.
She knew enough about young men to please if not utterly satisfy herself before she let him ejaculate, although their lovemaking had been so urgent and frantic that neither of them had removed a single item of clothing. Not one, except her pair of shoes, abandoned in the kitchen. His underpants and trousers were around his thighs. Her underclothes had just been pulled aside. Her brassiere, still fastened at the back, was riding underneath her chin. Thank goodness for the Sandinista rough-look skirt. She could go home by streetcar and look respectable, and not appear unbecomingly disheveled. Despite her tears. For there’d be tears as soon as she descended from his room.
THE WOMAN HADN’T yet revealed her name to Lix. She was feeling guilty actually and would have lied if he’d inquired what she was called or solicited her phone number or suggested that they make the ABC their occasional rendezvous. But he had not inquired, solicited, or requested. Having sex had doubled his embarrassment, not eradicated it. His tongue, so active just a few minutes before, was now entirely tied. No matter. She didn’t think they’d meet again anyway. She didn’t even think she’d go back to the sidewalk cafe anymore. Her future, dearly, was elsewhere. Her catch would have to find another friend for his binoculars.
They lay in bed, his narrow bed, for far too long, looking at the posters on the ceiling — rock groups she’d never heard of, demonstrations and campaigns she’d never join, experimental plays she’d hate, and on the facing wall an illustrated slogan by Roesenthaler which declared that “the Artist is the Armourer.”
“What must you think of me?” she said.
“I don’t think anything. Well, nothing bad.”
“Am I your first?”
“First what?”
“First one in bed.”
“First what in bed?”
She shrugged. Men always disappointed her. “Where can I wash?”
“They’ve got a shower down the corridor. I use the kitchen usually …”
Lix followed her into the unlit kitchen and waited at the door (a host at last) while, finally, she began to take off her clothes, a silhouette against the darkened window, and drape them over his radiator. She tied the towel he gave her around her waist.
“I’ve got some coffee if you want.”
“I do need coffee, yes.”
Lix leaned across her at the sink to fill the saucepan with water. Her breasts were hard and cold against his arm. “I’ll have to boil some water for you too, if you need to wash,” he said. “There isn’t any hot. Not from the tap.” The gas flame dramatized the room. “I have a question.”
“Go on.”
He wanted to ask, “Am I okay in bed? Can I be confident with girls? What should I know that I don’t know?” She was an older woman after all. It was her job to put his mind at rest. Instead, he said only, “What’s up?”
“‘What’s up?’” Already she could see how irritating he could be.