“Your skull is sculptural,” she said, longing not so much to touch it as to smell it.
“I’ll have it cast in bronze, Senator, and give it to the city. I’m sure that you can find a plinth for it. The empty plinth in Company Square, perhaps.”
“Amongst the cobblestones, yes.”
They had embarked on an affair. Alicja and Jupiter.
So now she listened to the dancer’s anecdote about Swan Lake, Nureyev, and the bearded French ambassador and watched her lover paying polite attention to his host. Any moment he would catch her eye, and she would smile for him, the risky smile that says, I’m Yours, the risky smile that can’t suppress the showing of the tongue.
What if Lix looked up and caught her eye? Well, let it be. That evening, when they were home, or preferably as they were driving home protected by the darkness in the car, while he was trapped behind the wheel, she’d find the courage to talk to him. She owed it to the man who’d been her husband for more than three years, the father of her child, the first who’d ever earned her love, to be direct with him, to send him off to Hollywood understanding that everything would be rearranged while he was gone. More than that, she owed it to herself. She’d got a career. She’d got constituents. She’d got the promise, if she watched her step for a year or two, of joining the Executive and making history. No other woman in the city had ever gone so far. She’d got a well-connected lover, too, whose appeal included a vasectomy. What she didn’t want was a husband or another child to hold her back. The time had come, the time was good, for the city senator and the celebrated Lix to separate.
So Alicja can surely be forgiven for her nervousness at lunch, the shrill and wine-fueled conversations that she held, her unexpected gaiety, her robust appetite, her pleasure in the word games that were passing around the table, and then the risque games of Truth or Dare and Ultimatum.
Perhaps it was because playing Never was her lover’s suggestion, his way of flirting with her across the table, she imagined, that Alicja joined in too readily and so incautiously. The game was this: each diner at the table had to admit to something they’d never done that everybody else there most certainly would have done. If it proved that you were not alone in your humiliation, then you were out of the game and could not join the second round, when further admissions of inexperience were required. “You have to use the word never in your confession. And lying’s absolutely not allowed,” said Joop. “This isn’t journalism.” It was an invitation to disclose failings, cowardice, defeat, and limited horizons. The prize? “The mocking disrespect of all your friends.”
“It’s your idea. You first,” Alicja said to Joop. Already she had persuaded herself — or else his roguish grin persuaded her — that his own contribution would convey a private message. Almost everything he said turned out to be a tease. He kept her on her toes. “I’ve only ever loved one person in my life,” he’d say. “I’ve never loved another.” Or (a confirmation of a trip they’d planned), “I’ve never shared a hotel room. Not yet.” Instead he disappointed her. He said, “I’ve never been on a motorcycle or scooter. The very idea terrifies me.” But he was out of the game at once, because it seemed that the dancer had never risked a motorcycle either.
So now the dancer’s go. She claimed for herself that she had never seen the sea. No one could rival that. How was it possible to reach your thirties and not have seen the sea, especially when travel was so easy during the Big Melt?
“Not even from an airplane?” Lix asked.
“I’ve never been on an airplane,” she replied. Three goes in one. No motorcycles, no airplanes, no sea.
The trumpeter went through to the second round with his “mortified” claim never to have swallowed an oyster, an embarrassing and squeamish admission, he said, because he’d spat one out one evening in New York when his bass player had drawn attention to an oyster’s semen smell.
“Tasted, yes, but never stomached one, never passed one through.”
The twenty-two-year-old had never had sex with a person younger than herself, she claimed. “And never will.”
“So I’m in with a chance,” the trumpeter said, parping out his cheeks.
“Hardly. I’ve never had sex with a hamster either. And absolutely never will.”
The actress-poet’s contribution was “I’ve never smoked a cigarette, not one. Only my cigars.”
“Not even after you’ve made love?”
“When I’ve made love I always take a shot of peppermint liqueur. To take away the taste.” Their laughter bounced around the room.
Now Lix’s turn. He lied. He lied because he wanted Alicja to challenge him and be reminded of their early married days. He claimed, “I’ve never had sex standing up.” No challenges from anyone. Surprisingly, he went through to the second round unopposed, even by his wife.
“Too drunk to stand up, Lix?”
“Or wasn’t the goat tall enough?”
Lix had chanced a glance in Alicja’s direction and he could not mistake the look of embarrassment on her face. He’d meant the claim as a joke, a challenge, a hasty response to the raised sexual playfulness of the twenty-two-year-old’s boast never to have had sex with a younger person and the actress-poet’s unexpected indiscretion. It was only an invitation for his wife to contribute some mordant reply of her own and to remind her of a happy afternoon with river views.
He’d also expected Alicja to say either, “Well, if he’s not had it standing up, then I’ve not either, of course. So he’s out of the game.” Or better, she might say the truth, “He’s lying actually. We had sex standing up during the floods. On the roof of our apartment. At least, I think it was Lix. I couldn’t see his face. I was looking in the wrong direction. Disqualified!” Then his trap, his joke, would be pleasingly rounded off by her.
She should, as well, have challenged and matched the earlier winning claim “never to have had sex with someone younger than myself,” he realized. Lix was eight months older than his wife. She’d been a virgin almost to their wedding day. She’d said nothing then, and she said nothing now. She only frowned and reddened and let her fingers gallop on the tabletop. She evidently didn’t want to enter into the spirit of the game. Because, he thought, matters sexual were not to be discussed at table with people she hardly knew. It wasn’t “politic.” It wouldn’t do for Madame Senator L.-D. to let her hair down for a change amongst his friends. Oh well, her loss. The Lesniaks were famous for their prudery and fear of fun. The Papal Stain. “Your turn,” he said to her.
Alicja was annoyed with her husband, but mostly not for the reasons he suspected. Social proprieties and reticence, especially with a newspaper columnist at the table, should be sensibly observed, she’d always thought. But she was more embarrassed than irritated. He should not have reminded her of their lovemaking on the roof in such a crude and clumsy way. She remembered most the massage of the herb leaves and the blessing of her pregnancy. He remembered best the unromantic standing up. Men were the enemies of romance. The sex gets in the way of loving.
Joop had said that “absolute truth” was essential to the playing of Never. Well, her husband had not been absolutely truthful. Then neither would she. She could not ratify or challenge Lix’s Neverness without betraying herself. For within the last three weeks, Alicja had also had perpendicular sex — quick sex — with Joop more than once while she was standing. In the vestibule of his apartment house; leaning on the sink with the water running in the Anchorage Street apartment; at his office desk one evening, her back to him, her nose pressed up against the window blinds. She’d smudged her lipstick on the blinds. Here was a lover who always took his time, who never let her off lightly. The absolute truth? Well, now was not the moment to tell her husband that she’d been sleeping — standing — with another man. The truth would have to wait.