Alicja had planted up some heavy gray pots — to match the roof tiles — with mints, marjorams, and balms and four or five fessandra shrubs. They flourished there, with the help of coffee dregs, abandoned cereal, and bowls of used soapy water, and — once in a while, when Lix was on his own and too idle to go indoors — urine. Otherwise they had the sweetest-smelling roof in town. The foliage provided a civilizing fringe of green along the roof parapet, muffling much of the traffic thrum from the Circular but still allowing Lix with his binoculars — the householder at last, the lord of everything in sight — to study the hats and shoulders of passersby, the roofs of streetcars and automobiles, the shadows and the silhouettes in adjacent attic rooms, the ornamented summit of Marin’s finger, and anything that moved between the city and the hills.
Except he could not see the hills in early May.
Rain had fallen on the prosperous and slanting plains that embraced the city in a semicircle of shale-on-clay-on-sand and the grand estates of manacs, vines, and tournesols which kept the owners rich and their tenants busy. Rain had fallen in the far-flung hills and stripped the valleys of their oaten topsoil and their undergrowth. The fields were silver and the rivers bronze. Nine days of it. Rain had fallen everywhere, it seemed, except on us. We had blue skies. The whole of May was mocking blue for us, disdainful of the countryside. The city’s blessed, we told ourselves, in shirtsleeves, eating out in sidewalk cafes, getting tanned, getting overconfident. We have the nation’s summer to ourselves.
So the hills were virtually invisible to Lix and to Alicja from their high and costly patio. A heavy mass of slaty clouds had gathered discreetly in the first few days of the month like a sieging army, patient and bullying, softening the countryside with rain, but still just far enough away from the outer suburbs not to appear too menacing. No wind. The clouds just seemed to darken, breed amongst themselves, and fatten on the washed-loose produce of the plains, reluctant to depart, unwilling to invade the determined patch of urban blue that kept our weather fine and caused the Dern rooftop to snap and crack unseasonably with heat. Their true horizon had been smudged away by clouds, and so even in the rain-free city, untouched it seemed at first, the days were shorter than they should have been. The dawns were late and dusk was early. A sweating wintertime in May. The rising and the setting sun, to use the finest phrase of a newspaper columnist, was “smothered by a black-brown shawl and swathed in widow’s cloth.” Wet wool!
These were dramatic days for Lix and for Alicja. The weather made them feel grandiloquently loving. The fitful romance and the ecstasy of early married life can only benefit from breakfasting amongst the rooftop pots under such sensual, operatic skies. By chance, they’d rented happiness. Their midmorning light was startling that May, low and sharp enough to give the clouds — especially in the photographs they took — their own ravines and cols and peaks and scarps that seemed as permanent and sculpted as the granite ones which they’d obscured. These were clouds you could trek in, ski down, climb. You’d think that you could mine in them for tin and silver, sink great shafts through fissures, plates, and strata to haul up spoils of solid oxygen and fossil rain.
The clouds were full of riches and rewards.
Lix and Alicja watched an aircraft fly too close to that great granite cliff of wet suspended atmosphere. They watched it disappear, illogically intact. They watched through his binoculars the flocks of geese and plovers, displaced by rain, the jazz quintets of buzzards extemporizing on the thermals against the backdrop, blackdrop of the clouds, the laboring of herons, and, closer, with the naked eye, they watched the resigned and stoic flight of crows, forced into town for once. They were puffed up themselves like clouds, puffed up with massive confidence, with everything-is-possible, with an affection that Lix at least had never felt before. The weather was a prelude, so they thought with all the arrogance of newlyweds, to something grand and memorable for them.
Lix was mightily relieved to find that three months after their hasty and impulsive marriage — no church, no Lesniaks, no honeymoon, just three good friends as witnesses, a short civil ceremony, two shaky signatures, and a bottle of spacchi — he was growing more attracted to his wife. More sexually attracted, that is, less fearful of the lovemaking. He’d always liked, then loved, her gentleness, of course, her quiet efficiency, her many skills, her pluckiness, her company. His fixed vision of happiness had encompassed her. Her mood was not tempestuous. She was not cruel. But he had doubted in those early days whether he was truly passionate about her. He’d found with Freda, all those years before — and barely for a month, it’s true! — that they’d possessed a kind of private ideology, beyond the politics, a set of common condescending principles and prejudices, a shared vocabulary of phrases and signs that they regarded as superior to anybody else’s. Oh, pity everybody else; those diminished, longing looks when he and she walked past, those dull and compromising lives. Not so with Alicja. She did not make Lix feel superior. She might love him more than Freda ever had, if such a thing were measurable, but somehow, so far, all her love seemed lesser than the passion he had felt in 1981.
It worried him at first, of course. Love minus true sexual desire is little more than friendship, he had thought. It’s a lager without gas. Preferable in a marriage to true desire without the friendship, of course — a marriage such as that could not survive the honeymoon. But it was still not total love, still not quite the brimming liter. He understood only too well whose fault it was. He dared not say this even to himself — but his new wife was not his type. Not the type he’d dreamed of sleeping with, still dreamed of sleeping with. In those days he liked a woman who was tall, bony, small-breasted, unconventional, and slightly and capriciously cruel. A woman just like Freda actually. Alicja was none of these things. That made her good and chastely lovable, of course. But not desirable. Not arousing. He did not feel like a hero in her company. Her qualities, he sometimes felt, especially her homeliness, her coziness, her patience, were sexual liabilities. They blunted his desire. She was not the actress he would cast to play his wife in his stage fantasies. That part belonged elsewhere.
She’d surprised him, though. She might not turn as many heads as Freda on the street. She dressed too casually and too timidly, neither elegant nor bohemian, neither striking nor mysterious, and wary of adornments such as jewelry or hats. Her underclothes were functional. She wore amusing T-shirts — perhaps the only way in summer that she could draw attention to her breasts. Lix was not amused. An entertaining T-shirt was not a flattering accessory, in his precise opinion. Also, she was too plump and healthy to be anything other than agreeable to the eye.
But naked she was beautiful. Plump’s only plump in clothes. Released from her unexceptional garments, her serviceable shoes, her sensible pants, Alicja was curved and silky and irresistible. Solid, comely, yes — but not unpleasingly overweight at all. If only everybody knew how beautiful she was with nothing on, and how substantial.
Naked she was unpredictable. What greater stimulation can there be than that?
THE ONLY PROBLEM with the weather and the outlying storms was a pretty one, at first. Within a day or two, the city’s river was engorged. It heaved itself out of its bed. It didn’t break its banks exactly. It merely ventured here and there into a waterside parking lot, cleaning tires, activating litter, or nosed across the running track to show its idle interest in the bird pavilion and the children’s jungle gym.