He met Mouetta in the back room of the Habit Bar, the city’s best-kept secret — or so the newspapers and radio had been saying for a year or more. He was obliged to stop and be polite at one or two tables before he’d crossed the excited, overcrowded room to hers. The Habit Bar could always boast a celebrity or two, other than himself, particularly journalists and heroes of the left and particularly when there were protests and comrades to support across town by eating out in reckless solidarity. You’d never catch a politician there or someone ministerial or military, except in disguise, wired for gossip. Even the waiters and the chefs, it was claimed, were impeccably progressive. The meals were progressive, too. No boycott goods, no shed meat, no reactionary wines, no condescending sauces. The Habit was the place to come if you were on the left and indiscreet — and, incidentally, not hard up. Its motto should have been, according to the shanty boys who touted for scraps and coins on the terrace outside, “One meal for the price of six.” Its nickname was the Debit Bar. And so its clientele were Debitors and not Habituals.
Mouetta was not alone. Her cousin Freda was sitting opposite in Lix’s chair, her back against the room, but unmistakable — and dangerous. She shared an ancient, awkward history with Lix. Awkward for Mouetta, too. Her hair was up, of course, coiled and clipped in place by an ocher lavawood barrette. She had the longest neck — and the heaviest earrings — in the Debit, and that, for such a restaurant where short-necked diners were a rarity and jewelry was always immodest, was quite a boast.
Lix had been wondering all evening, even as he labored through the Molière, his thirty-eighth performance of the play, what Mouetta might be wearing for their anniversary. For him. A skirt or dress, not trousers, if there was a God. And buttons down the front. And musky, ancient perfume as a sign that she had not forgotten what the night might signify. But now, as he excused himself a passage past the backs of diners’ chairs, through smoke, through kitchen smells, through wine-induced curses against the army, banks, and church, he could not take his eyes off that long, cousin’s neck and when he did — he shamed himself with his disloyalty, with his nostalgia, perhaps — it was only to look down beyond her chest, her modest chest, into her lap where her fine hands were crossed and resting on, of course, what else? her uniform — a loose black skirt.
IT WAS a photojournalist with Life magazine who, in 1979, when Lix was in his first term at the theater academy, came up with the phrase the City of Kisses to replace the more alluring, truer title given us by Rousseau, the City of Balconies. That was the year of khaki skirts and tunic tops, when all the brighter girls were feminist, and rudely militant in bed. The photographer was one of fifty sent to Fifty Cities of the World to record the flavor of the place on one particular Sunday. His picture essay concentrated on our city’s better-looking girls — and all of them were kissing. A boyfriend kissed, full on the mouth. A girlfriend chastely kissed in greeting from behind on the high loop of her ponytail. A grandma blessed by her granddaughter’s lips. A teenage mother with a child. A puppy kissed. A couple kissing at the swimming pool, their hair like weeds. It was a city doing little else but kissing, you’d think. In a way, that is exactly how it was that year. But famously, the photograph that truly caught the spirit of the place, so Life would claim, the photograph that sold countless posters and, for several years, was responsible for packed hotels and the resurrection of our red-light district, was taken at the Debit Bar. A woman in a Cuban beret applying lipstick to a glass of wine with her red mouth. Reflected in the glass, two men, their own mouths gaping and both encircled by the kiss.
Life could, of course, have photographed this essay anywhere. They kiss in Rome and Paris, too. They kiss in Tokyo. The whole world osculates. Yet this was public kissing, and unusual for us. That was the year the postwar ban on all public demonstrations of affection, even in the theater, was lifted. Using your lips became the simple evidence of progress. We all made up for those lost opportunities. We had the kisses that our parents missed. That was the year, indeed, when Lix first kissed in earnest — and inadvertently provided us with his first child.
There was still a framed copy of the original Lipstick poster in the lobby of the Debit on the night of Lix and Mouetta’s anniversary, the first evening of the riots when interest rates seemed so much more relevant than kissing. Lix did not perform his usual playful pout for it when, a minute after midnight, he left the bar. He was exasperated. His wife and her cousin had sabotaged their anniversary. He’d planned a little hand-holding, some eye contact, some drinks, a light exciting meal, no garlic certainly (actors and lovers should not be “cloven-mouthed”). He’d hoped that he and Mouetta would go home to bed quite soon. Well, not “to bed,” perhaps, but somewhere on the way to bed. The car. The hall. The study couch. The stairs? The stairs had always seemed a tantalizing possibility.
HIS EVENING on the stage had been, as usual, both stressful and arousing: the uncritically approving dimwit audience in their subsidized seats, the dressing up, the liberties that actors take, the swish and odor of the actresses had been a stimulant. The fear of “drying and dying” mid-speech provided the anxiety. As did (more recently) a shaking hand which, his doctor had assured him with the backing of some tests, was not early-onset Parkinson’s as he had feared (or “toper’s wobble” as one gossip columnist had suggested) but simply nerves. Late-onset stage fright.
That evening Lix’s tremor had been especially undermining. Tartuffe had held a very shaky book, and then had spilled a glass of wine. Lix was infuriated with himself. He needed to unwind. He was, of course, still partly in character even though the shaking had disappeared the moment the curtains closed. An immersion actor such as Lix cannot shuck off the emotional raiments of a play as easily as he can shed the costume. Performance always leaves its mark, for an hour or two at least. Indeed, the remains of Tartuffe’s florid Pan Stik pink makeup could be seen, if you were close enough, in his eyebrows and his sideburns.
As usual, he’d had to kiss his leading lady twice onstage that night: Tartuffe seducing sweet Elmire within the text but also Lix playacting with a colleague unjustly famous for her love affairs. Stage-kissing, obviously. Dry lips. He always relished it, however, the smell and taste of her (makeup, brandy, perspiration, cigarettes, cologne), the enticing possibility that one night their kisses might turn wet. Lix had seduction in mind. So already he had fixed his hopes on Mouetta and on stairs, the view they offered as his wife preceded him, the urgent discomfort they promised any couple mad enough, inflamed enough, to pause and kiss. He’d spent the evening scheming their impromptu, corrugated sex.
Freda, though, had other plans for him, for them. One of her students at the Human Science Academy (“an activist and very, very dear to me”) had been “listed” in the morning papers, alongside a photograph and phone numbers to contact with “rewardable” information on his whereabouts. He was, they claimed, “a firebrand leader of the SNRM, already known to the civil authorities.”