So she’d dressed up in her ComPoneau suit, determined to enjoy herself despite the immodest and undiplomatic company of Lix’s “limpets.” Luckily, there was one of his newly minted friends she was keen to share a table with — and the Debit food was always interesting, even in the Hesitation Room, where the lighting was so blunt.
Alicja had seemed, Lix thought, almost enthusiastic at the prospect of spending lunchtime with her husband for a change. She’d had her hair styled early in the morning and had then spent an hour at home on clothes and makeup. Lix had been a spectator, more disarmed by watching her than usual. He’d always liked to watch his wife prepare herself, a homely version of the many times he’d spent in theater dressing rooms talking to half-dressed actresses in mirrors, addressing their bare backs, their pins and zippers and straps.
Yet in the past few months his and his wife’s physical intimacies, the social glue of lovemaking, had become so infrequent and fraught, and so inconclusive, that even watching her dress had become a bitter pleasure, especially as recently — and this was pitiless — Alicja seemed to have discovered a new interest in her appearance to match her status in the senate and on the street. She’d never dressed so sexily before. She’d always thought his occasional gifts of clothes hilarious and “fussy.” Now she’d taken to wearing skirts and well-cut suits and shoes with just a tiny heel and did not seem impatient as she once had at the mindless waste of time of putting on makeup and coordinating her colors and fabrics and jewelry. Clothes, at last, were fun for her, it seemed. Her mother’s influence, possibly. Mrs. Lesniak had always thought her daughter dressed “like an English dumpling,” just to prove herself a rebel. This was one rebellion that even Lix — ashamed of all the other compromises they had made — was glad to see the end of. What happened to the plump, quiescent girl, he asked himself, the woman eager to appease and please? He blamed the Lesniaks. He blamed the stultifying culture of Beyond. He blamed Democracy for voting his Alicja away from home. He faulted himself as well — and he was justified — for letting his ambitions on the stage become more vital and consuming than his marriage. His wife could not be blamed for seeking spotlights of her own. He’d mend his ways.
Alicja’s more yielding attitude to clothes, Lix understood, was just a happy product of her age, but he also hoped that she was doing what she could to rescue their relationship as well from its ever present anxiety and its heartless determination to be civilized. She wanted to display a livelier, more seductive version of herself because — the Poles, as ever, had a mordant phrase for it—“a dab of rouge resuscitates the dead.”
Relations between Alicja and Lix—dealings might be a better word, these days — had become, if not quite corpselike, then stiffly formal. Not just in bed, where, truth be told, stiffness was not always guaranteed. No, out of bed as well. They had turned into little more than domestic colleagues, starched and polite but unengaged. A child and sitter in the house did not encourage intimacy. Neither did the late nights they both kept nowadays. Nor the increasing number of occasions when they slept apart, whether divided by an angry hollow in the bed or marooned in separate rooms, in different parts of town, the Anchorage apartment or the family house Beyond. She told her mother that Lix snored. That’s why she ended up so often in a different bed. He never snored. Nor was he a restless night companion. Much worse. Her husband sighed while he was sleeping, as if even his dreams were flat and saddening. To share a bed with Lix was to wrap yourself in sheets of woe. How had the man become so wounded by success? Alicja’s dreams were livelier and full of hope and opportunity. She’d dreamed, just the night before his Obligation Feast, that he was in the flood-tossed houseboat, and lost downstream amongst the missing crocodiles and koi. She understood her dream to mean their marriage was, well, waterlogged, too swept away to save, and that this was an opportunity for her to be an adult finally, liberated from the Lesniaks and Derns.
Lix himself knew no such thing. He thought the new blouse she was putting on for him that day suggested a rapprochement of a sort, a signifier that there could be (before he fled to Hollywood) a renewed alliance between old friends. When she’d returned from the hairdresser looking like a mature bride, Lix had sat in the wicker rocking chair on the bedroom balcony with his coffee and a playscript he had to consider and witnessed her undress, throw her clothes over the back of a chair — so many layers, so many unexpected and alerting loops — and then bedeck herself before the mirror in recent purchases. A woman is renewed by clothes. Perhaps a marriage could be, too.
The blouse was beryl green, short-sleeved and halter-cut. It seemed to make her nakeder. Alicja’s spine, so girlish and inexpressive when innocently unclothed, was not removed from sight when thinly covered by the blouse and underclothes, but, rather, emphasized and sexualized by new and displaced vertebrae, where the clasps and buckles of her brassiere showed up as petite bony studs against the cloth. Her back became a pattern of raised signs.
Lix considered getting up at once to read the message of her braille. Yet again — the story of his life — he lacked the courage and he lacked the confidence. He knew that if he stood and moved toward his wife, then she would close herself to him. A woman dressing does not welcome damp fingers or damp lips. Lix would be left — as ever when he took chances, in love, in business, on the stage — standing, swaying in a fug of vertigo, that familiar nausea and loss of balance that had always made him take descending steps away from risk.
So he stayed where he was, behind his playscript, making marks on the page and imprinting marks into his own back, from the pressure of the wicker chair. He’d wait for a better opportunity. Patience is a dignified form of cowardice, that’s all.
If he waited till the evening, Lix thought, there would be other marks for him to ponder and enjoy. Throughout the day, her underclothes, mediating between the naked and the dressed, the hidden and the visible, would press their tender traceries not only on her outer garments but on her naked body too. When she undressed again, then he would find — if she allowed it, if she came home with him and did not spend the night on Anchorage Street — indentations and elastic imprints across her back and shoulders, around her waist, around her upper thighs.
The very thought of these brief nevuses which could not last beyond the hour, which were so innocent and yet so rousing, made his throat go dry. A hint of vertigo. It was not only fear of contact with Alicja but also the opposite, the shocking prospect of his fingers never touching her again. For a man who no longer had the habit or the self-belief to cross the room and hold his wife, there was something heart-wrenchingly tender, too, about the vestigial rectangles of ridge and furrow from her pressing and her folding of the blouse. Those creases and impressions were eloquent and sad, and so domestically nostalgic. They were the marks of married life — a shelf of clothes, a cupboard and a room, an ironing board, the smell of bodies and cologne and steam.
Alicja, unexpectedly, was not in the least discomforted that her husband was watching her and that — she knew the man of old; men were so visual—he was sexually aroused. She was aroused herself, but not aroused by him. Not making love to him empowered her. It was satisfying. She watched herself pull on her tights. She did not think that she was showing off, although she knew she would have dressed herself more hurriedly if Lix had not been watching from the balcony, behind his cursed script. The man was always buried in a script. It seemed that everything she’d ever said to him had been filtered through a script or blocked by one. The pages of dialogue were the shield with which her husband rebuffed conversation, consigned her to the wings. He’d lost the knack of being normal and offstage. Alicja was coming around to her father’s view of theater.