She watched her father’s launch proceed along the street, sending wakes of water up against the windows of the second-floor rooms and rocking all the floating debris that had surfaced in the night, the plastic dustbins and the furniture, while Lix sat at her feet and persevered.
Finally, of course, she warmed to him. She put her hand back on his head and gripped his hair. “No need to stop,” she said, in case he thought she was rebuffing him again. Actually her first rebuff had quieted him, reminded him how single-minded she could be, and how resistant to his bullying. He tried to be more tender and more circumspect. He pulled a leaf off one of the fessandra bushes and ran it down the back of her right knee. He’d never really paid much attention to the smell of fessandras before, but the pressure of his forefinger and thumb had bruised the leaf and let the odor out. It was oddly pungent, like cough lozenges with lemon undertones, bittersweet and cloying like a teenager’s perfume. He smelled his fingertips and was aroused by what he smelled. Physically aroused, that is, and — unlike an animal — imaginatively aroused as well because it was not hard to imply and to anticipate what might ensue, this moment rushing forward to the next at his behest but out of his control. The busy fingertips, at first, but then the lips and tongue. The gentleness, at first, but then the gripping and the biting, the fingernails. The man, at first, and then the beast.
Let’s not forget that Lix, indeed, was just an animal, compelled by base impulses to spread his seed in his selected mate so that his species could, in principle anyway, negotiate from eighty thousand genes an offspring more efficient than themselves. He was content to be “just an animal” on these occasions in his married life, to be instinctive and unambiguous in ways he couldn’t be when not aroused, to be unembarrassed by his irrational self, to be unself-consciously brave, patient, and cunning.
So Lix, the mating mammal, folded the fessandra leaf and rolled it up and down her leg, perfuming her, a ruminating little courtship play that would not ill suit gorillas or baboons. His wife stayed at the balustrade and let her husband put his leaf to work. She knew the smell, of course. She often rubbed the shrubs and brushed up against them, and she’d always found the odor stimulating, half kitchen and half dressing table. Someone ought to bottle it, she thought. An aphrodisiac. An aphrodisiac that at this moment truly worked. She felt her flood of irritation seep away, and then the swooning shift of mood that tossed her inhibitions to the far side of the roof. She felt intensely physical, exactly as she should, for her body was in free fall, in a kind of benign but toxic shock.
Her skin was turning red. Blood was pumping to the surface of her face and chest. Blood congested in her lips and nose, her earlobes and nipples, her breasts and genitals. The arteries were working faster than her veins. Her pulse had passed the hundred mark. Her blood pressure was up. Her lungs seemed hardly capable of reaching for breath. She was sweating visibly. You’d think the woman was not well, and that she should be hooked to sugar drips and heart machines and monitors.
Alicja was concentrating now. She had to draw the moment in. She stood a little straighter to allow the released odor to reach her nose directly. Her legs were buckling. She had to rest her hands on Lix’s shoulders for support. “Fessandra,” she said, as if this were an identification test. Lix took her comment as a cue. He snapped off leaves from balm, much damper leaves, more succulent and ticklish, and rolled them once again on Alicja’s lower leg. This time the odor was much fruitier and clogged, the smell of bed and sweat and oranges, as pungent as a potpourri and heavier than the fessandra perfume. It didn’t float as readily, but gathered in the curtains of her shirt. “I can’t smell that.” Again an invitation to move up. Again he pushed her shirt aside and tested out the balm on the softer, plumper skin between her bottom and her waist. And then some marjoram. “It’s balm,” she said, a little late.
Lix still had one hand free to pluck some mint for her. But he’d stood at last and now was pressing against her back, a little buckle-kneed himself. If anyone naive, some passing boatman or a marooned neighbor on another roof, had seen them there, they might just pass for a couple looking virtuously at their flooded street, as innocent as pigeons, but only if you took their swaying and their twining, their sudden shakes, to be a childish, clinging dance and their contorted faces — their mouths agape, their nostrils flared — to be a game of Visages.
When they had finished and were able to stand tall again, Lix rubbed the mint into the nape of her neck, a freshener, a waking tonic for the nose. It was a smell she’d associate forever with the advent of their son. Mint would remind her, too, of proper love, because their midday breeding on the roof (that’s what it was), their mating in the time of floods, had also been an act of fondness and affection. Everything they’d done and seen in those nine days of rain had led as surely as water runs downhill to lovemaking. Everything had proved to be a prelude to the kisses and embraces, and the child. There’d be no grander day than this.
This couple, these rooftop newlyweds, shipwrecked above the flooded streets, had done two things at once, two things connected and discrete: Had sex. Made love. What better way to start a life? What better way to start an afternoon?
A CHILDISH QUESTION now. What happened to the clouds? What happened to the clouds once they’d peeled off to give us back our hills, their scalped-to-the-bone maturity? They’d spread out as evenly as oil. The blue skies lost their pure edge as well. The wind picked up. By June, it was another summer just like all the others we endure in this safe city on the water’s edge. Not fine, not wet, but hazy and exhausting and unkind. Our world regained its shape. If we were hawks, if only we were hawks once in a while, we’d recognize that city patterns had returned to normal, the river flowing in its place, observing man-made banks, the traffic moving freely in the dried-out streets and on the mended bridges, no sheeny parks or squares to paddle in, the bipeds as busy as they ever were, observing sidewalk rules.
And, as hawks, we’d spot an unexpected confluence one afternoon in July, beyond glass roofs. Not such a rare coincidence. For cities like ours where people move around on tracks, meetings such as this are inevitable:
Alicja and Lix have gone down to the Palm & Orchid for a late Saturday afternoon treat. They’ve something to celebrate and think about. Something both pleasing and unnerving for Lix: his children stretch behind him and they stretch ahead. Her pregnancy’s confirmed.
Unluckily, for this should be a blissful, undiluted time, Freda’s already in the Palm & Orchid Coffee House with her small boy. She’s sitting almost hidden by a plant, facing out across the room disdainfully and being watched by half the men. When she sees her ex-lover, her very best RoCoCo Renegade and the father of her son, with his fat Polish wife at the entrance desk pleading with the maître d’ for an unshared table, she’s tempted first to stay where she is and ignore them, loftily. He’d not dare bother her.
They are being led to a table far too close to hers. So she gets up from her seat, brushes all the crumbs off her black skirt, and hurries out without a glance, but only once she’s sure that Lix has noticed her, seen not only how grand and beautiful she is but also how she’s still concerned, involved, engaged (and if she still is beautiful, then that’s a beauty that stems not from her genes but from her seriousness). She wants the man whom she possessed for more than thirty days to take the blame for everything, the child, the kidnapping, the ever growing problems of the city and the world.