The explanation is mundane. The contraceptive Lix had readied and slipped beneath the bed had let the lovers down and either Lix had spilled his semen or Lix had pulled on the sheath too late. Or their lovemaking might have dragged the contraceptive loose, shortened it and buckled it, like ankle socks, cold and corrugated on his shrinking penis end. Or they had stayed with it just half in place for far too long after he’d ejaculated, allowing his emissions to leak and seep and fertilize.
So Lix and Freda might imagine that their day of lunacy and passion had let them off scot-free, no police, no blame, no aftermath. Except? Except that Freda had become some moments earlier the unexpecting mother of his child. It was a pregnant woman now who slumped down on Lix’s chest and concentrated only on the pumping of the once loved lover’s lungs. It was a pregnant woman, too, who hugged the actor to her chest and whispered that she had to wash and dress, who peeled herself away from him, separating their adhering clothes, despite the vents and furrows of their skin clinging on with semen glue and sweat. It was a woman quick with child who was already imagining the pulling over of the sheets, her journey home, the getting on with life and no regrets. It was a mother who pulled aside the window blind in Lix’s room and looked down on the office workers, overworked, as they made muffled progress to their streetcars and took on the trembling rearrangements of the weather-laden wind, the scrim of falling snow which seemed to make our city both lighter and darker at once.
Cargo Street was full as ever at that time of the evening on a weekday, but more tentative than usual. The fallen and impacted snow had made the sidewalks treacherous. So everyone was concentrating on their balance, their collars up, and either heading home where it was safe or making for a bar or restaurant where it was dry and welcoming and full of other weather refugees. Nobody was aware of Freda watching them, four stories up above their heads and hats.
This was a night of pregnancies, and not just Freda’s pregnancy The snow is sexier than sun. The cold encourages us to get to bed and hug the person we love. Our folklore says it’s so. As does demography. The snow is consummate. Fine weather brings the birth rate down. So this was only one of many rooms that benefited from fertility that night, and Fredalix was only one of many pairs. None of them as yet was counting on the cost, the cost of lovemaking, the cost that lasts for threescore years and ten. Nobody thought, when all the hugs and kisses had been finished with, to tell themselves, Things never end. They only stretch ahead from here. We have to thank our lucky stars for that.
3
A HIGH APARTMENT with a river view would be ideal, they’d thought. Three or four rooms facing east, with a small balcony in the City of Balconies where they could taste the air. The water and the sunset seemed important then. So did remaining close to the city’s ancient, motivating heart, near neighbors to the bustle and the stir, of course, but also close to graduated couples like themselves who’d once been untroubled students and were now more compromised. Couples, that is to say, who wanted permanence but were not prepared quite yet to celebrate that fact. They were still young, but not so immature as to imagine as they’d once done that marriages could prosper in cramped, cheap rooms. They required somewhere they could stay until they were ready not for children but for a single child. Five more years, perhaps. Somewhere big enough and bright enough for privacy and rows and lovemaking.
Alicja and Lix had not been made of money when they’d moved in together. His meager, irregular fees from the stage and, more frequently, from busing in the local restaurants, and her low wages as a consultant-volunteer on the night shift at the Citizen’s Commission were not enough to rent a river view.
Their income wasn’t quite enough, even, to pay the rent on the more modest, unbalconied apartment they’d finally settled for, their two ill-kept low-ceilinged attic rooms on Anchorage Street, a busy neighborhood — too much bustle, too much stir — nine blocks from the grander embankment residences they’d aspired to. It was hardly larger, though more expensive, than Lix’s old fourth-floor student room-‘n’-kitchen near the wharf. They fell in love with it as soon as they pushed back the sloping door in the bedroom alcove and found that they could step out on the roof. Still no river view. But somewhere to smoke and drink a beer, their urban version of the rural stoop. Somewhere to grow their herbs and vegetables in pots. Somewhere to be expansive and look out across the city, through the pylons and the tower blocks, the aerials and radio masts, beyond the leaf-fresh suburbs and the new commercial parks, across the plains toward the faint, uncivil hills.
This “private roof patio” was the landlord’s justification for the scarcely manageable rent. They’d had to borrow from the bank and made do at first with thinly furnished rooms. They had a bed, an electric stove, two bamboo chairs, a pair of bicycles, a fly larder, and little else to make the first months of their marriage comfortable, except their books, their gramophone, and what Paul Knessen has called “the conciliating rigors of the flesh.” Well, they had love, of course, the most essential furnishing of all, especially when poverty and hardship share the home. It was a calmer and less threatening love than Lix had had for Freda, but a thorough love, nevertheless, and one that would not soon be ripped apart by passion.
They could have had a river view quite easily and a fully furnished apartment on the embankment. The Lesniaks were made of money Alicja’s parents, despite their mistrust of Lix (‘Actors never pay — and actors never stay!”), would have cleared the rent and swallowed all the decorating bills rather than have their daughter share a staircase with waiters and shop assistants on a street unfashionably “mixed.” They had a friend who ran an import/export enterprise and who, if leaned on not too gently, could sort out some stylish furniture. (“And no bamboo!”) A new business colleague, eager to impress, might well be happy to provide a television and a fridge. “You want a telephone and no delays with the connection?” her father asked. “For me a working telephone is just a call away. I only have to whisper in a friendly ear. I only have to say our name.”
The Lesniaks would pay to have Lix’s cheek “spruced up” as well. A fashionable surgeon was in their debt. How could their son-in-law expect to succeed on the stage when he was branded like that? Besides, a birthmark such as Lix’s spelled trouble and adversity for anyone who came too close. A Polish prejudice, perhaps, but never wrong. It seemed a pity that their pretty daughter had ended up with such a curiosity. Every problem could be fixed, however. Mrs. Lesniak would make the phone calls; Mr. Lesniak would write the checks. Alicja only had to nod and she could have an apartment and a husband, neither of which would offer much offense to the eye. Polish parents are the best.
Alicja, despite her husband’s counsel of caution, turned every coin down. “I like things as they are,” she said. She meant she loved the man she’d married, would not want to change a cell of him. More than that, she wanted freedom from the Lesniaks, a chance to flourish as herself and be resolute on her own account. Finding a husband such as Lix would set her on her way. Her married name, Alicja Dern, provided instant anonymity Anonymity was exactly the base upon which she was determined to construct her successes and achievements — for this was something hidden from the world: buried underneath her sweetness, her patience, and her eagerness to please, Alicja was driven by a need to climb and conquer a different, higher summit than her father had.
Lix’s ambitions, however, were not concealed. How could they be concealed? To be an actor, even one who’s not in work, is to declare a public dream and purpose. But he had not yet got his call from Hollywood. He’d not recorded his first album. He’d not been cast as Don Juan or hosted any television shows. In his late twenties now, he’d ended up a table singer, as dependent on tips as any waiter, and — no more the Renegade — a minor, disappointed stalwart of touring theaters and the city’s lesser ones, famous only in his dressing room. So Mrs. Dern could still be judged mostly by her own achievements and campaigns and by the impact she’d make on platforms of her own. She took up causes in the neighborhood, chased complaints, investigated failures of the city government, but never made a nuisance of herself. His sweet, plump, tireless wife, Lix said unkindly to her face when they’d been stopped once too often in the street by troubled locals, was “a problem magnet.” She’d be upset to know his nickname for her was the Quandry Queen. Yet she was more respected and well liked than any Lesniak had ever been. That was more important than a sunset and a river view — and harder to acquire than foreign furniture.