The vehicle was shaking, not as it might seem to Lix from Freda’s shuddering, but partly from the wind which slapped and pressed their van’s high sides and partly from the fast and heavy traffic speeding past their parking spot on the highway ramp behind the campuses. It was a biting afternoon, with gelid blueness, spiteful gusts, and forecasts of snow Disruptive snow, intent on injury. The City of Balconies did its buttons up.
You might have thought if you had encountered Fredalix for the first time that afternoon that it was Freda who, for once, on this occasion, would prove to be the quitter and that Lix must be the braver of the two. Of course, that was not just. Nor likely. For all her trembling, for all her trivia, Freda was fully resolute. They’d go ahead with their madcap plan because she said they would.
No turning back. They’d take the risk. They’d face the consequences. Talk of their coming anniversary was only Freda’s way of saying, “We will be free next week. We’ll not get caught. We’ll not be robbed of our certificates. Our parents will not be informed. In just a couple of days, exactly as we’ve planned, we will have earned our little place in folklore, campus history. Our hidden faces will be on the front of newspapers.” Her constant naive mantra was (would always be) “I am in charge.”
Lix, deceiving Lix, deceiving both himself and anyone he met, the master of disguises and of masquerades, despite his outward calm, his steady hand and voice, his best attempts to remind himself that what they were attempting was not so revolutionary, was intensely apprehensive. Just twenty-two years old, and already he was in the tightening grip of his major flaw, his main regret, his saving grace — timidity.
He should — and could — have kept the company of gentler souls than Freda. Alicja for one. She’d also set her heart on him. Yes, Alicja Lesniak, the unsuspecting and innocent dedicatee of Marin Scholla’s Trade Winds, the girl who’d be (so Freda hoped) the prime and named suspect in his kidnapping. She was that year’s plump but clever president of the student caucus. Indeed,
Lix had a few months previously, against his better judgment, accepted an embarrassing approach from her, an innocent invitation to a film but made while she was touching the back of his hand with a single finger. Only their shoulders had touched in the cinema. On another occasion, she had held Lix by the elbow in the campus bar, on some pretext, and turned her unpretentious face too readily to his.
Alicja was Polish by descent. The Lesniaks were one of our city’s richer families, and she was keen to prove her political independence from her inheritance. She was, of course, active that year in Poles Abroad for Solidarity, and Lix had last met her when she had spoken three weeks earlier to RoCoCo, seeking its support of her daily vigil outside the Polish trade mission.
“The Lesniaks are ruling class,” was Freda’s view, recognizing Alicja as a rival in more ways than one. “Never trust the daughters of the ruling class! Besides, Walesa is a Catholic.” So Lix (because this blond and slender stem of womanhood was his ideal of womanhood and he only wanted to be well regarded by her) allowed Alicja — his wife-to-be, the mother of his boys — to turn her face away, to take her hand away for almost eight more years.
He’d missed his safest opportunity
He could have stood in line at Alicja’s side in her dull, responsible campaigns, her fleshy hand in his, sensibly dispersing when the police required them to, retreating from the tear gas and the batons, and not provoking rapist conscripts with her looks. She’d still provide the chattering, this plumper girl, but save him from the danger and the fear, preserve the little courage that remained in him — for Lix had realized when he was just a teenager this shaming fact, that courage was a finite commodity, as nonrenewable as fuel, and that he had almost exhausted his own supply. Since he’d been sixteen, seventeen, he’d sensed the timid years ahead. He’d hoped a woman like Alicja was waiting for him in the shadows, with promises of uneventful days.
Instead, Lix had stood in line with Freda and scared himself to death. However, he already had the knack — how else would she be fooled by him? — of dropping all his fear into his toes. An actor’s phrase. An actor’s knack. A breathing exercise. Control the lungs, control the dread, and then step out into the lights to seem unflappable before an audience. Technique and practice.
So you could — as Freda had — mistake this young man with the birthmarked face for the most resolute of activists. As calm and stubborn as a rock. You could expect great things of him. She felt it now, behind him in the rental van. He’d hardly moved when she had rapped him so firmly on the bone behind his ear. He was so still and unperturbed, his hands clasped neatly in his lap, his breathing soft and regular, his comments cool and rational, while she, she knew, was talking like a fool. She thought — and this was genuine — that she and he would be comrades for eternity if only she could stay as unwavering and dispassionate as he was. He’d be a useful foil for her loud ways.
She kissed her fingertips — that resurrected little girl again, that Natalie! — and touched the bone behind his ear. A damp caress and an apology.
“You okay?” she asked, feeling more physically excited as the minutes ticked away.
She felt him smile and nod his head.
“I’m fine,” he said, though had he the choice, he would gladly start the engine of the van and drive away from what they had arranged to do. Lix only had himself to blame. Again. After all, it was his plan, his entertainment, that would go so oddly wrong that afternoon. Three prospects frightened him: the kidnapping, the Street Beat premiere, the lovemaking. He’d need to navigate the city streets for her, then be an impresario, then steer their risky course to bed. He would have to be uncharacteristically calm and strong.
Marin Scholla’s limousine had surely reached the campus gates by now Lix concentrated on settling his nerves by breathing through his nose and focusing on the woman in his rearview mirror, the shrunk and silvered planes and facets of her shaded and reflected face. He was mesmerized by her but almost queasy with misgivings at the certain prospect of the ardor and the kissing that were promised him. He practiced breathing, his feet braced against the floor of the van. He bedded Weather Report into the radio-cassette. He checked the ignition on the van — this must not turn into a farce. The engine turned and purred at once. The gas tank was full.
“Not long now,” Freda said. Again she leaned forward, reached across his shoulder to stroke the side of his cheek. Not long for what? Not long before they’d trade the chairman for an orgasm?
THEY COULD HAVE WAITED there for three more months before the chairman showed his face. His foundation stone was finally laid in March 1982, when the Laxity had ended, the city streets were calmer and predictable, and once again we truly had good cause to demonstrate if only we could demonstrate. But Marin Scholla never crossed the river to the campuses that December afternoon. He did this duty at MeisterCorps’s new central offices and then flew out, in his own jet, ahead of any snow, to Rome.
Lix and Freda concentrated on the exit door for forty minutes. It owed its only movement to the wind. Of course, they feared the worst: kidnappers arrested and a bungled afternoon, their comrades spilling all the beans, their future ruined by their foolishness.