Now, only three months later, finally, they had a river view without the help of Lesniaks.
On the same day they gained their river view, they conceived their son as well. Five years ahead of time. Much sooner than they’d planned or wanted. We can be sure it was Alicja’s first child. She was a virgin when she first met Lix, a lapsed but well-trained Polish Catholic, fearful of the wrath not so much of God as of her all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful mother. It was true that Alicja had “sacrificed herself” to Lix, “surrendered herself immodestly” while the family was “dining” (her mother’s later version of events), before they’d married. But only a month before. She was hardly dissolute or precocious. Despite her hidden appetite for change, she would not consider sleeping with anyone apart from the man she married, for three more years at least.
Lix was not a virgin, as we know. Already he’d had sex, penetrative sex, with Freda (even if the penetration had only been a short P.S. on all but one occasion). Nineteen times, in their not-quite-a-month of passion, on and off the picket line. And twice with the nameless little clerk, who back then would have been about the age Lix was now, approaching thirty
This would not be his first child, or even his first son. It would be the timid actor’s third mistake. His first — his birthmarked daughter, Bel, the product of binoculars — was undiscovered still, undiscovered by Lix anyway, though very nearly nine years old already and full of life while Lix’s life, to tell the truth, was emptying. The vessel full of dreams and plans had sprung a leak — no wad of fame to plug it.
Several times the girl had been within a hundred meters of her father. This city isn’t all that large. You meet and pass and meet again. They’d shared a crowd, a streetcar, a shopping street, a flu virus, they’d strolled the same catalpa avenue in Navigation Park one Sunday afternoon, bought nutcake from the same vendor. And recently, when she’d been in the Play Zone by the zoo, her mother had seen Lix walking past, beyond the roses. Unmistakable. Not a face she could forget. If it hadn’t been for the roundfaced woman on his arm, she would have found the courage to go up — for Bel, for her daughter’s sake. A blemished child has a right to meet the author of her blemishes — and introduce the pair of them, acquaint their family nevuses.
His second grand mistake — Freda’s six-year-old son, George — was still an awkward and rancid secret that Lix had kept from Alicja. What was the point in telling her? He never saw the child himself, had not even been identified as its father by anyone other than its mother. Alicja had hated Freda, anyway, and Freda despised her, “Lix’s dreary compromise.” A little clear-skinned boy, especially if he had his mother’s neck and hair, would not appeal to his wife, nor would it delight any of the Lesniaks. So Lix was happy to keep his past secret and resigned to being not so much an absentee parent as an evicted one. It had been Freda actually, when she was six months pregnant and her relationship with Lix was long dead, who’d commanded him to stay away: “The child is mine, not yours. My pregnancy My body. My responsibility My private life. My kid!” she’d said, rapping out her arguments on the palm of her hand with knuckles that had once shown love for him. “You understand?”
“Five very eloquent mys,” he’d said as mordantly as he dared. Her throat and earrings tortured him. This had been the dream once — to be with Freda and his son, a sort of neofamily. “Consider me as good as dead.”
And that had been it — at least for the time being, anyway. Fredalix split in two. Then three. They went their separate ways. She had — and raised — his unacknowledged son.
COULD LIX HAVE any idea yet that there was a curse on him, a more insistent version of the happy curse that falls on almost everyone, that if they persevere with sex, then chances are — not quite as sure as eggs is eggs, but close — a pregnancy will follow? Certainly that one mistake he knew about had freighted all his fantasies and practices of sex with Cargo Consequence. Had he become afraid of making love because of Freda and her son? Before Alicja, he’d not had intercourse with anyone since he and Freda split up in 1981. That was seven years. Key years for young men in their twenties. His month with her had been a costly farce and a disaster from which he’d not recovered yet. How pleased Freda would be if she discovered how she’d blighted him and all the women in her wake, even — especially — Alicja.
Certainly, Lix had been slow on the night a month before they’d married to respond to Alicja’s un-Lesniak initiatives. She’d never been that intimate before or so daring. She’d seemed excited that her parents were downstairs with dinner guests and hired staff, immediately below, separated only by a rug, the ceiling joists, and plaster. The wine they’d smuggled into her room had helped. As had the cannabis. She locked her bedroom door and put on music as a sound track and to disguise the noise they might make. The actors always made a lot of noise in films.
He’d not encouraged her. Because he understood the dangers better than she did? Because he feared the consequences? Because she was not Freda? Because there wasn’t a single condom in the house? No, actually, because he had not yet succeeded with an erection. Nervousness was playing havoc with his potency Fear dispatches its adrenaline to the lungs, the muscles, and the heart, and undermines the blood flow to the genitals.
Alicja, however, had thought his reluctance considerate and endearing but had surprised herself by pressing forward with inflamed resolve and — always the ones you remember — inexperienced but persuasive hands. Finally, Alicja was “graduated,” as they say. She and Lix had made the light shade swing above her parents’ table. She liked to think she’d peppered everybody’s soup with ceiling plaster. But Lix’s imagination had almost let him down that night, and let her down as well. His fear of those five mys was not an aphrodisiac.
THIS WAS the season of his third mistake.
Although their marriage was already three months old, he and Alicja still had no table, or any reason to join the city’s morning rush hour. Lix had no rehearsals at that time, and it would be another year before his fortunes changed so magically, and so disruptively. So neither of them needed to leave the apartment until the afternoon.
In those days, their marriage was an embarrassment of time and poverty and self. In other words, if it was free or very cheap, then they could do it all day long. So they would take their breakfasts and their books out onto the roof during that late spring and sunbathe with their backs against the slates in their nightclothes, the matching pair of long fake-granddad shirts she’d bought from Parafanalia and which he hated. These were beloved times, in fact, despite the shirts. They had the whole apartment building to themselves. By the time they’d settled on the roof, all their neighbors were already sitting at their desks or standing at their tills or setting tables for lunch, “earning corns.”