No, it was the prospect of their perilous adventures that shook her usual confidence, that dried her throat, that raised her pulse into the nineties in ways that her love for Lix never could, that made her want to urinate as often as a dog. “We ought to celebrate,” she said. “We must. What can we do that’s big enough?”
Lix was by now familiar with this single vulnerability, the self-inflicted comfort of her prattling. After all, they had been passionate and inseparable comrades in almost a month of politics. He’d stood beside her on the picket lines supporting Sakharov and Bonner, two Russian intellectuals he’d only heard of when she mentioned them but who were on a hunger strike and were worthy of support for reasons he had not dared to ask. She and Lix (on their first date as Fredalix) had joined the unlicensed procession to the Soviet consulate. The closer the police lines had got with their reverberating shields and their billy clubs, clearly forgetting for the moment, despite their sideburns, that they were in the middle of the Big Melt, the less Freda had sloganized and the more she’d talked about a holiday she planned in Greece, if only she could bribe a visa for herself. She had not ceded a centimeter to the policemen’s clubs. Instead, she’d switched the danger off, relit her thoughts with Adriatic sun and chattering — and, surely, that was valiant. And worthy of support.
He’d wept with her in clouds of tear gas and mace when police had tried to break up the “Geneva Solidarity” disarmament march on the Combined Defense Consulates. This time she’d taken blubbering comfort from recalling, word for word, a conversation she’d had that afternoon with her Natural Sciences tutor. It seemed that they had parents from adjacent villages. Lix, the novice at so many things, had been one of the first to flee that demonstration. His eyes, stomach, and lungs had not been trained to cope with nausea, blistering, and pulmonary edema. So he’d abandoned his first love on a traffic island and had only rejoined her twenty minutes later when he rediscovered her in exactly the same spot, standing almost alone, enveloped in the fog. The gas had dispersed but she had not. She’d taken comfort from “adjacent villages.”
He’d held her shaking hand when they had paraded by the barracks jail with their lit candles in the midnight vigil for detainees — and conscripts coming off their shifts (for laxity can cut both ways) had dealt out kicks and punches to the men and shouted in the faces of the women: bitch and cow and whore and bitch again.
Freda was not used to being anything but loved by men. Nor was she used to tolerating raised voices other than her own. She’d treated the loudest and the crudest conscript to one of her dismissive routines. She’d invited him to go home to mommy and not come back to town until he’d learned to tie his own laces and to button up his own shirt and to zip up his own mouth. He’d responded with some shocking, vulgar menaces. She’d trembled then, a mixture of theatrical distaste for vile and vicious men and some honest, justified distress for herself. Soldiers raped in every corner of the world, and would ever do so, with impunity. Our city was no different. You only had to see the porn magazines that had so recently arrived along with the Laxity. You only had to watch the men in bars. You only had to hear the venom in the conscript’s voice. She felt that, finally, she’d become a citizen, she’d said — and let us not forget her age, her admirable naïveté—of the Commonwealth of Universal Womanhood, the Femetariat. She was truly horrified for all the sisters in the world, the bitches and the cows and whores, the wives, who soaked the bruises up.
That brutal night of menaces, only two days after their romance had begun, had been the first time Freda and Lix had shared a bed. A significant moment for any lovers: admission to a woman’s bed, in those uncomplicated times, was an admission that her privacies were ready to be breached. Sex in the car or on the settee was for irregulars and opportunists. But to share your pillow and your nightie with a man, the body-worn sheets ornamented with your own dead hairs, the linen batiked with your saliva, sweat, skin cream, and makeup, was to offer up a tender invitation to be loved again, again, again.
They had not shared many privacies that night. They’d simply hugged like camping pals, like cousins, in fact, with Freda wanting nothing more than the solaces of touch and only Lix expecting greater things. It was a pity to leave such an opportunity unused, he had thought. Well, unexploited was a truer word. To share a bed, to share a pillow even. To be so close to her and yet disarmed. Yet he was wise enough by then (despite so far having only that single — or was it double? — full experience of binocular sex two years previously) to know that a woman who’d been spooked by threats of rape and had only recently joined the ranks of Universal Womanhood would not be in the mood for happy-go-lucky sex. He’d had to bide his time, resist the impulses to push his hands beneath her clothes or tug her buttons and her zippers. He’d had to treat the cousinly hugging as an opportunity to show his finer love for her, to be diffuse and not display his physical desires too obviously.
So Lix had hugged his lover in her rented room as anodynely as he could, as indirectly as he could, his body arched to shield his treacherous tumescence. And he had listened to his Freda handling her fears by chattering about — bizarrely — the American actress Natalie Wood, who’d drowned a few weeks previously and who — together with the bare-chested Czech and Che Guevara — had been “a sort of icon” for teenage Freda, the biddable and dutiful family girl she’d once been.
Lix had held her in her wrap of shawls, curled up around her on her bed, until his lover’s body had dropped asleep and she’d been free to wake again as certain of herself as ever. And they had masturbated each other for the first time and then shared breakfast on her sunlit dormitory bed.
SO HERE THEY WERE in place, RoCoCo and the Street Beat Renegades, waiting with their Trade Winds and their flattery, their blindfold and their charm, their instruments and their circus skills, their well-intentioned thoughtlessness, for Marin Scholla to arrive and lay his foundation stone. Their day of heartfelt fun had come. The chairman’s limousine would any minute now come curling around the campus service road, past the Masters Lawn with its bad statues and its frosted beds toward the university president’s official residence. There’d be official handshakes and smiling faces from the reception party, naturally. A $7 million gift would brighten anybody’s face.
At most, it would take ten minutes for the chairman and his group to reach the elevator doors. A rich old man never wants to hang about, particularly on days like this when every breath he’d take would carry a chill. In fifteen minutes then, or less, the exit door beyond the service corridor would open on the wind-torn parking bay, where Fredalix, as tense as athletes in their blocks attending on the discharge of the pistol shot, were waiting, and planning their evening out — such innocence — their anniversary, where they might dance (for Lix was quite the hero of the discotheque. The darkness suited him), where they might eat, what play or film they could investigate to mark their love’s longevity. No talk of making love.