He parked his car behind the theater, depressed, elated, but relieved to have the pressure of the sex removed. The anger was reduced as well. He’d been a fool. He was resigned to what the future held if it held anything. He was content to be back in the ancient town, amongst the places that he loved. The buildings seemed to shimmer in the shifting lights, as offices winked off their lamps and bars and restaurants and clubs sprang to life.
Lix waited for a bus to pass, its windows full of backs and coats, before he crossed to the theater and made it to his dressing room without needing to exchange a word with anyone. He closed the door and he was Don Juan.
An hour later, costumed and made up, he stood at the window with his playscript looking out on the heads of the first arrivals at the theater, his captive audience. The building shook a little to the digestive rumbling once again of the nightmare streetcars that didn’t suspend their timetables for mere theater. Instead they did their best to remind his audience every night that they were watching an artifice and that only one street away the city’s aged transit system labored on, taking uninvented people to their uninvented homes.
There was a point in Don Juan’s last speech each night when Lix could almost guarantee a streetcar. Some of the audience would laugh. Such incongruity, a streetcar. Others, though, would look alarmed as the auditorium amplified the rattle of the carriages into something that might be the distant and approaching earthquake the city had been promised by geophysicists “within a hundred years.” Then the theater would shake with nervousness and they would ask themselves, Will we survive? What will survive? Uncannily, the answer came from the stage. “Of all the edifices in our town,” Don Juan explained as streetcars passed by, “no one can doubt, not anyone who’s lived at least, that love’s the frailest tower of them all, meant to tumble, built to fall.”
5
THEY’D NEVER TRULY KISSED before, Lix and An. It was undeniable, though — there were nine thousand witnesses so far — that their lips had touched, and had done so every night for fourteen weeks — in character, in costume, and onstage, abetted by their scripts. They were obedient professionals. The play demanded that they fall in love, so they obliged convincingly. They were old hands at that.
They’d been respectful colleagues, yes, cheerful and supportive. Yet nobody could claim that they were even friends offstage. If they ever coincided in the Players’ Lounge or in the bar behind the theater, they were polite with each other but uninvolved, the lively little actress, not so young and not so pretty anymore, and Mr. Taciturn, who’d led God knows what kind of life since his divorce and his success. The gossip columns couldn’t even guess, beyond the rumors circulating still that he was either egotistical in bed or impotent. The evidence was thin either way. Lix had no public life, no politics. Reclusive was the word the papers used these days to describe the actor. Or, better, secretive, because that suggested he was concealing something. You’d not expect a man like that to couple up with An, for whom concealment and reclusion were anathema. But this was the break of New Year’s Day, New Century’s Day, and both of them were lonely, and exhilarated by the date, 1/1/01. Conception Day for Rosa Dern.
THE THIRD MILLENNIUM for us started one year after everybody else’s, because some bored and playful speculators from the Tourist Bureau had decided and decreed that the City of Balconies and the City of Kisses could now be marketed for a lucrative month or so as the City of Mathematical Truth, the Capital of Calendar Authenticity, and would thereby reap and thresh the ripest crop of revelers from abroad who’d want a replay of the false new millennium they’d already celebrated so memorably, so profitably, one year before. We’d be the only place where you could observe the accurate millennium, they said. We’d be the only town where you could mark the Advent of the Future twice. Sudden fortunes would be made by hotels, restaurants, and breweries, normally closed down for the winter, and by the opportunists from the Tourist Bureau who’d put in place some subtle private deals.
So in expectation of fifteen thousand out-of-season visitors, all eager to procure a night of pleasure, the bunting and the streamers were prepared. The historic city center closed to traffic. The whole of Company Square was equipped with braziers and licensed for the sale of alcohol. The airport lobby was emblazoned with the banners THE TIME IS RIGHT (at last!) FOR HAVING FUN, and WELCOME TO THE CITY THAT TRULY COUNTS. Prostitutes took rooms downtown and women hoping to be wifed abroad bought new, provoking clothes and carried their final school grades in their evening bags as “proof.” And a midnight fireworks show which would be “visible from the moon” was readied on Navigation Island, in the mud.
The foreign revelers, regrettably, were sick of new millennia by then. The disappointment — and the hangovers — of the first would last them for a thousand years. One anticlimax was enough. Therefore they did not come to us in their expected droves. Instead, our hotels were half filled with math curmudgeons, mostly male, Dutchmen, Scandinavians, and Yanks, academics, intellectuals, and bachelors, who’d refused the year before to recognize the numerically premature end of the millennium but now had got an opportunity to demonstrate their bloody-mindedness and learning. Imagine it, on New Year’s Eve, our city full of nitpickers, hairsplitters, pedants, and rationalists, and local women dressed like queens scaring them to death, with their grade C’s in science, languages, and art. And what did these math curmudgeons want to do to celebrate the passing year? They wanted to avoid the crowds.
In fact, the streets were full enough that night. With citizens. We’ve always liked a fireworks show and alcohol and women in provoking clothes. “There is, indeed, good cause for all of us to celebrate,” Jupiter wrote in his Sunday column on New Year’s Eve. “Contrary to the evidence of our own eyes, we are making measurable progress in this city. Now we are only a year behind the rest of the world. Let’s see if we can close the gap by 3001.”
Lix had been onstage till ten in his revival of The Devotee, not the most testing of romantic comedies but an easy and welcome opportunity for him to sing and act and show his famous face before an uncritical audience that normally would not spend time or money in the theater. No need to exert himself. No need for nuances or subtlety. Just be certain, he reminded himself before each performance, that the laughter clears before the next amusing line, and that the next amusing line is timed to end before the laughter starts. “And don’t forget, of course,” his stage director said, “to beam and bounce.”
The audience did not want art at that time of the year or intellectual theater. They’d only come, that evening anyway, to pass the time before midnight by watching two luminaries make love onstage, and then to boast they’d seen the celebrated Lix in the flesh. They’d seen his birthmark and they’d seen his shaved and naked chest. What’s more, they’d watched their television star, the man who’d made a fortune from his songs about their city, kissing Anita Julius, the actress who was equally famous for her Channel Beta talent show, her range of tempers, and for her fleeting love affairs with older men, younger men, men with chauffeur-driven cars, and then the chauffeurs, too.
So when, finally, and as the curtains closed, An and Lix reached the moment of that much vaunted promised kiss — the one the theater posters reproduced, the one so many times reprinted in the magazines, the one that all the gossip columnists would use when the scandal broke on New Year’s Day — the otherwise inattentive audience grew tense and quiet. Opera glasses were lifted up. People shifted in their seats to gain the clearest view. Men licked their lips and cleared their throats, as if they believed their turn would come, that An would jump down off the stage to plant her lovely lips on theirs. Not one single person looked elsewhere. They watched through narrowed eyes. You’d think that Life magazine had got it wrong in 1979 when it recorded so much affection on the streets and that for us public kissing was still as exotic, rare, and disconcerting as a total eclipse. Miss it and it wouldn’t come again for years; stare too long and openly and you’d go blind.