“Come on,” he said again, an impatient, disappointed edge to his voice. He panicked her. Otherwise she’d not have made her great mistake. The consequences of this moment were immense. She was suddenly the center of attention for the first time that day. She’d show them she could be as mischievous as anyone. She shelved her boast that she had never learned to swim. Too dull. The dancer, probably, had never learned to swim either. She pushed aside the claims that she had never once been drunk, had never worn high heels, had not so far attended the ballet or a soccer match, had never had a filling in her teeth, could not remember ever having had the hiccups, even as a child, had swallowed oysters but never semen so couldn’t be put off by the smell. Her shocking, teasing boast was shouting at her from a poster twenty meters high: “Take risks. Surprise them all. Be truly mischievous.” Bring back the roguish grin to Joop’s fine face. She only meant it as a private joke. It wasn’t absolutely true. She said, “I’ve never had an orgasm.”
THAT AFTERNOON when they got home, they saw at once that there’d been burglars. Their house looked out of sorts, as if it had been caught cheating on its owners. The outer gate was open, upstairs lights were on, someone had dropped a duster and rope on the drive, no one had bothered to wipe their dirty feet on the porch mat, and there was a dry rectangle of driveway by the front door where something large had parked but which the recent rain had not yet had a chance to wet.
Had Alicja and Lix arrived back in Beyond just a few minutes earlier they would have caught the three young men in overalls loading everything expensive, imported, and electric into their van: the two television sets, the VCR, the emptied refrigerator, the new computer system and printer, not yet even installed, the hi-fi tower, the three telephones, the answering machine, the radio alarm clock, the Italian stove, the PowerChef, the washing machine, even the vacuum cleaner and Lech’s game console. Trading debts and import taxes had turned anything foreign with plugs into liquid currency and anyone too impatient to endure low wages and late pay into an Appliance Bandit. Only last weekend there had been a cartoon in a newspaper showing someone in a mask paying for a tube of toothpaste with an electric toothbrush and getting a socket plug by way of exchange.
It was a near escape that stayed with Lix and haunted him for many months, how close they’d been that afternoon to driving through the garage gates, into the shadow of their private trees, before the men in overalls had driven off to deliver that day’s “imports” to their clientele. Then what? What kind of heroism would have been required of him, the man who’d never satisfied his wife, to rescue their appliances?
The Lix we know would not have challenged any burglars. He might have hovered at the shoulder of his braver wife, muttering his cautions, if she’d been mad enough to get out of the car and battle with the thieves. He might have locked the car doors and blared his horn at them, the car hovering in reverse gear. He might have driven off at once, fled the scene, to call the police from the nearest bar. On this day of anger and resentment, however, there was another possibility. A murderous one.
It was, then, just as well, perhaps, that Lix would never have the chance to find out if his anger was more brutal than his fear. The traffic had been stalled across the bridges to the city’s eastern banks since midafternoon and so their drive out to Beyond had taken more than an hour, an hour in which the weather changed to drizzle and the dusk set in. What began in sunlight ended in darkness and in rain.
FOR AN ACTOR, trained in faces, Lix was surprisingly readable when he was in a temper. His muscles tightened and his eyes went watery. Anger, was it? Embarrassment? Hurt? During their journey home he needed to identify the exact nature of his distress, then he’d know what his reaction ought to be to what Alicja had claimed. Never is the cruellest word, beyond negotiation. He understood that he was the resentful victim of a joke, the rough-and-tumble of the tablecloth, and that his rage would appear — had appeared — paranoid and feeble to outsiders. But there was also something dark behind his wife’s disclosure at the Feast that needled him and panicked him. It had left him cold and cruel.
The driving home was difficult. Lix squinted back the sunlight and the tears, and then he had to peer through heavy rain — two films of water then — which made the road seem remote and hazardous. Lix had imagined earlier that day that they’d be heading home for sex. Now he wanted to get home only to shout at his infuriating wife, if he could find the pluck to shout. Lix, to tell the truth, the shy and celebrated Lix who’d never done much harm to anyone despite his curse, despite his fame, was in the suburbs of a breakdown.
So, trapped in the traffic in the inner parts of the city, he set his jaw against the world. He would not speak to Alicja. He would not even look at her until his mind had cleared and he had formulated sentences that would repay her, punish her, match her indiscretion with some bruising indiscretion of his own. He would not grant her a single nod or shake of the head, not even when she tried to thaw him out with her calm voice and then her tough one. He silenced her with his own heavy breathing and exasperated sighs, and then with music. He put on a maddening jazz cassette, a tinkling trio of New Yorkers — string, skin, and ivory — chatting amongst themselves through their fingertips. He added the percussion of the windshield wipers. He banged his hand impatiently on the steering wheel, pretending to enjoy the jazz. He drove the car erratically, on purpose.
Even that could not shake off his irritation. The last ten minutes of their meal, before the sulky settling of the bill and the awkward farewells, played through his mind in an uninterruptible loop: the malice of everybody laughing, the grateful gape of pleasure on Joop the Scoop’s normally disdainful face as the scandalous material for his next Diary piece dropped into his lap, the clumsy comment from the owner of his record company that “Never Had an Orgasm” would be the perfect title for a song.
“What, never, Alicja? Not even almost? Not even on your own?” the actress-poet had asked. Then everybody else — his colleagues and his friends, so-called — had felt obliged to add their ridicule.
“Not even on an airplane?”
“Try riding a scooter or a motorcycle. That ought to do the trick.”
“Go home and hug the washing machine. Super spin cycle.”
“Poor Lix.”
“No, poor Alicja! We ought to order her a plate of oysters. Waiter! Bring on the aphrodisiacs.”
“One for me, one for you, and one for the chicken.”
Lix’s Obligation Feast had been humiliating.
Alicja had been humiliated, too, of course. But she was used to it. Her husband’s friends had never been the subtle sort, especially after so much wine. She shrugged their comments off. What she could not shrug off was Lix’s hurt. She had not meant to hurt him; she did not want him to be hurt. It was inconvenient. What she had planned — a tender, loving telling of the truth to a man for whom she still had feelings — was now impossible. He was bound to ask, Is the sex better with Joop? So the orgasm quip had been a big mistake, because it would appear that the affair was only about sex. Then Lix would think that better sex would rescue it. Sex with Joop was better, as a matter of fact. Your neighbor’s fruit is always sweeter than your own. But it wasn’t about sex entirely. It was about marriage and freedom. Making love to Lix, between the household chores and work and being a responsible senator and taking care of constituents and finding time for Lech, had come to feel like just more wifework.