It wasn’t only the actual kiss that mesmerized and silenced them. It was also the unexpected display of what they took — mistook — as privacy, the unembarrassed breaching of a hidden world which only chambermaids and paparazzi ever stumbled on. Four famous lips engaged in lovemaking while all the world, sunk and squirming in their seats, looked on and felt the pangs of exclusion. Here was a life denied to ticket holders in the audience, a life of cash and fame and sex and unself-consciousness. No wonder no one dared to breathe or be the first to clap.
The audience that night was witnessing something new and dangerous, however. In every performance until this one on New Year’s Eve, the lovers’ kissing had been a cleverly rehearsed sham. They were, to use the actors’ phrase, “kissing like puppets” or “dry-drinking,” their lips stitched shut, their mouths as passionate and hard as stones, their breaths held in until the kissing was completed.
It’s true, all the audiences so far had seen both Lix and An put out their tongues a little as their faces closed in, as their noses touched. A little strip of reflective mouth gel achieves that trick. The stage lights had caught the wet and fleshy tongue tips exactly as the stage director planned. It might have looked as if the actors’ mouths were busy with each other’s tongues; everyone would swear to that. But they’d been fooled. They wanted to believe, they wanted to be duped. What was rolling the actors’ cheeks, convincing the balcony and the orchestra seats that this was more than theater, was only the mockery of tongues. Lix and An were performing in the pockets of their own mouths with their own tongues—“playing solo trumpet” is the term — with no more sexual passion than they’d need to free a wedge of toffee from their teeth. That’s show business. It’s trickery and counterfeit. The actors have to seem to care when they do not.
The fact was this, however it appeared onstage: until the final act on New Year’s Eve, their tongues had never touched. An did not truly fancy Lix, no matter what the gossips and the posters might imply, no matter what they did onstage. He did not truly fancy her. Yet if theater was powerful and could transform an audience, then how could it not affect the principals themselves, eventually? How could their nightly kissing on the stage not spill over into life — particularly on New Year’s Eve when all the cast and all the staff, including Lix and An (especially), had oiled the way by drinking to one another’s health before the show? It isn’t love that’s blind, it’s alcohol.
The twenty minutes he’d spent sharing wine with his costar in the Players’ Lounge that evening had left Lix — who never had a head for drink — a little off balance and even more bewildered than usual by his offstage feelings for his irritating little colleague, so lively and so noisy, so “unstitched.” On the one hand, anyone could see — to use the idiotic jargon of our city’s most expensive psychoanalyst, a man whom An had “couched” herself on more than one occasion—“their compasses were pointing at a different north.” She might be only a couple of years younger than Lix, but she was the product of a different age. You’d think her only gods were clothiers and coiffeurs. She liked a man in uniform, she claimed. She liked him even better out of uniform. She’d never voted, never would. She dined and dieted instead. She held strong views but only about the sounds and fashions of the day, whose singing voice was sexiest, what went with mauve, how best to get away with hats. She’d told a journalist that if the Mother Nature Beauty Clinic had intended her to stay at home with a good book on a Saturday night, it wouldn’t have equipped her with such high heels, such long fingernails, and “plastic breasts that didn’t jiggle when she danced.” Lix had read the press releases before The Devotee had opened, and they had made him blush. Bring back the Street Beat Renegades.
On the other hand, it had to be admitted that the little featherhead could act. It had to be admitted, too, that as each day and each performance had passed, his dismissal of and disdain for An had ebbed. Now when he was reminded what she’d said about her bulky plastic chest, he was more curious and amused than irritated. She certainly had pluck. She certainly was fun. She certainly was beddable. Whereas during rehearsals and the first few days of performance their stage kissing, dry though it was, had been an embarrassment and an ordeal for him — fencing and wearing weight bags were the only things he hated more — he had since become resigned to it, and then addicted. Some things are inevitable. Once again, the old refrain, “Such is the nature of the beast.”
Lix had discovered as each night passed in this long season of The Devotee that truly not wanting a woman, not in his head, not in his heart of hearts, not in his Perfect Future, was not a logic that the lower body valued much. Anita Julius might not be the kind of partner he dreamed of waking up with in his own bed or — horror at the thought of it — engaging in a conversation over breakfast cups on his expensive balcony, but lately, as the final curtain cut the audience away on their supposedly unfeeling kiss, he had felt increasingly perturbed. His face was numb, perhaps. His lips were little more than bruised by her hard mouth. The insides of his cheeks were tender from too much “trumpeting.” But elsewhere Lix was suffering what actors call “an impromptu,” that is to say an unexpected intervention by an unpredictable performer. His cock was enlarged. His “rubbery zucchini” was ripe.
It stirred a little more each evening, a little earlier in the plot, a little more insistently. It could not help itself (the truest and the weakest excuse you’ll ever hear in life). It responded to his costar as unjudgmentally, it seemed, as mushrooms react to light.
By late December, Lix had become wearied by his performance, its drudgery and duplication, and only became truly involved in the closing moments of the play, when finally An’s body crossed the boards to hold her Devotee. He was not nervous around his costar anymore. He trusted her. Her skin and hair now smelled familiar, like family. They were becoming intimates. He enjoyed the laundered and rustling contact of their costumes, the comic stiffness of her breasts, the gelid perspiration on his fingertips from her back and neck, like offstage lovers do. He prized and cursed the audience. Without the audience, he thought, his cock would not stir for her. They were a love triangle, the star, the costar, and the crowd.
It would be ingenuously optimistic — the stuff of theater — to hope that An herself had not become aware of Lix’s extra contribution to the play. There could be no disguising what was going on from her. Their costumes were too thin and flexible. The stage directions said, “They hold each other tightly and they kiss. The curtain slowly falls.” She would have felt the difference up against her abdomen. That’s not to say that his erection was abnormally large and resolute. It was a meekly modest one, like most men’s are, most of the time.