George had not been pleased to be there in the first place, in such a disappointing restaurant. Now he is furious to be dragged away before he’s even dispatched his cake or had a chance to feed the finches with his mother’s crumbs. He drags behind his mother’s arm, afraid to make a fuss, and as he drags, he catches for an instant the eye of a man he cannot recognize but knows, a hypnotized and startled man who’s staring at him with an open mouth.
4
ALICJA MUST HAVE known as soon as she opened her mouth that risking such a joke in front of her husband’s most recent friends might be an error — and a costly one, because, as any Lesniak could tell you, “for every pair of ears, there is a set of teeth.” In other words, if anyone can hear what you say, then anyone can repeat it, and anyone can sharpen up the most blameless banter to give it a damaging bite, especially if the object of the joke was an as yet unrevealed public figure.
So despite the ingenuousness of Alicja’s blunder, the word went around that Lix, for all his money and success, was not much good in bed. That would always be the sweetest rumor of them all, to hear that even a celebrity could fail between the sheets. Not fail to procreate, of course, he’d not failed that, but fail to please. The word spread fast. By midnight all the dogs were barking it and all the owls were hooting it.
Alicja by now was not the woman of the roof, a little overweight, ill dressed, too eager to comply, dismissive of her parents’ wealth, in love with Lix. She had become the woman that she’d planned, free at last of her lesser, deferential self, impatient to move on. She was a working mother, hardly slimmer than she’d always been, but grand and smart enough these days to “carry it.” Mrs. Lesniak-Dern was the new director of the Citizens’ Commission and also a district senator, elected by the waitresses and office workers of the Anchorage quarter because three years before she’d done so much — without success — to fight for flood repairs and compensation for the neighborhood. Her little kindnesses had paid big dividends for her, exactly as she’d thought they might. The Quandary Queen had been the local heroine for several months, long enough to offer herself in the elections — and to win.
It didn’t seem to matter to the Anchorage voters that nowadays their senator mostly lived elsewhere. In Polish luxury, Beyond. What mattered was that she and Lix had kept the little apartment-without-a-river-view as their city center pied-a-terre, no longer their rented rooftop happiness, perhaps, but somewhere for Lix to sleep after a late curtain, somewhere for Alicja to meet with her constituents — and with her lover. So — democracy! — their homely representative could sometimes be caught walking in their streets with her little son in his stroller and could be greeted by her Christian name. Alicja could still be thought of as a neighbor and a fixer, the ear to whisper in. She was their woman to admire and claim to be their own. Though her husband, Lix, was not so patient when they greeted him, just the presence of his familiar face was further evidence that even people who had once inhabited cramped apartment rooms, even people who’d been marked at birth, could make successes of themselves. Though two successful people in one household, as everybody knew, was one too many. Successful people are too busy, as the saying goes, to take care of the chickens. So it was with Lix and Alicja. They hardly seemed to meet these days. Even their photographs appeared in separate sections of the newspaper. They lived in different and divergent worlds.
To celebrate his first contract with Paramount in Hollywood (he’d co-costar with Pacino in The Girder Man) and the outstanding reviews and ticket sales for his Don Juan Amongst the Feminists, Lix had decided to blow some of the profits from the album sales of Hand Baggage, the “travelogue of songs” he had tested out so many times in restaurants and bars when he was still unknown and hungry for loose change and cheap applause, by hosting an Obligation Feast to prove his gratitude to thirty or so good friends. These were the actor colleagues, musicians, journalists, and slighter celebrities with time to spare who clung to him now that he was recognized and famous in the city. He could not expect them to drive out to his and Alicja’s new village-style house in Beyond (as the New Extensions on the east side of the city were known dismissively by those who did not have young children or money and did not value privacy, security, and lawns). These men and women were either too busy or too grand to make the forty-minute trek. Anyway, he’d rather keep his private house — with its seven private trees — secure and secret even from them. He’d not been truly happy there. Beyond had ruined everything. Besides, he did not want his name to turn up in a tittletattle diary piece in the newspaper, ridiculed for having — what? — the wrong-shaped bath, a bourgeois sofa set, last year’s shrubs, or mocked for having in-laws like the Lesniaks who could both buy, then give away to their daughter, such a fine and current building.
Beyond was not only beyond the old suburbs but beyond the means and wildest dreams of anyone in Lix’s lunch party. “Grand and busy” is not the same as rich, not in the Arts. It was never wise to make your comrades jealous or resentful or scornful. Best that they were kept away and not invited to inspect what tainted Polish cash could buy. Childless people never understood how costly — to your purse and principles — parenthood could be. “Blood before Ink” was Roesenthaler’s mocking phrase for it. Nor do they understand — the never married ones, at least — how quickly love gets washed ashore and beached. They’d see the evidence themselves if they came out to Beyond: the shallowness, the elegance, and the formality.
So Lix had rented the Hesitation Room (as the windowless private cellar beneath the Debit’s public areas was known). Perhaps it was the lack of natural light on this aggressively bright spring day that caused the diners to behave more drunkenly and less cautiously than they should have done at lunchtime. Once that baize door — with the high flood mark of May 1989 recorded just a centimeter below the lintel — was closed and all the meals had been served, it must have seemed like night down there, late night, with hardly any traffic noise and just occasionally digestive rumbles from the nightmare streetcars reminding them of city life. Time, then, to pop a pile of corks and throw discretion to the many cellar rats, even though, out in the world, the sun had hardly passed its highest point.
More often than not Alicja would have used their son, Lech, as an excuse for not attending Lix’s “self-celebrating” meal. Lech had to be collected from his sitter. Lech had to be delivered to his grandparents. Lech had to be adored and fussed and indulged on any day that Lix would like Alicja to be his public wife. There were other useful excuses, of course. Her public duties were the perfect alibi. Sometimes she simply said that it would not be politic to be at his side at this event or that occasion. The company was not discreet, there were too many journalists, her presence might be misinterpreted politically, et cetera. It wasn’t hard to fake an alibi. She and her husband led their own lives, neither one of any interest to the other. The senate and the theater were ancient enemies.
There were no convincing reasons, though, not to join his private gathering in the Hesitation Room. It was taking place in daytime after all. Lech was at the Polish kindergarten until late afternoon and then he had a toddler party to attend. The district senate was not due to meet for two more days. The Citizens’ Commission provided an income but, since its appropriation, few responsibilities. And Lix would take offense — quite reasonably — and sulk like a carp if his wife was absent from the Feast. My God, the man could sulk the juice out of a lemon. In less than a week he would be leaving for L.A. and then the film set in Nevada and not returning home for two sweet months. Surely Alicja, he had said, could make the effort just this once and smile upon his friends.