Nevertheless, An would have known exactly what it was and who was causing it. After all, it couldn’t be edema or a hernia. It came and went too readily. For her, a woman used to provoking men, the explanation would have been a simple one. Her charms were irresistible. After all, she could deliver erections to half a theater. She’d made a living out of it. Usherettes at other shows had told her several times about the witless stiffening of men standing at the back of the gallery, thirty meters from the stage — and out of range, you would have thought. And during her brief appearance in Regina Vagina before it was raided and banned, she had heard reports of husbands who had to squirm and rearrange their trousers while their wives preferred to concentrate elsewhere. The “members of the audience,” some wit had said at the time, “stood up for Anita Julius.”
It would be unusual, then, and perhaps a little disappointing, if Lix, a youngish, active, divorced man and not a homosexual, so far as anybody knew, did not respond to her, especially when her body was so close, especially when her long nails were digging through his shirt.
Lix, really, was not as active as An imagined, not as busy with the women as anyone with his celebrity and power ought to be. Perhaps that’s why he’d lost control with her so easily and why his penis had informed on him as incautiously as an untrained boy’s. He was the celibate celebrity, unused to having women in his arms.
Lix had been divorced now since 1993. He’d been physically apart from Alicja since he’d taken flight to Hollywood and Nevada. His wife had gone. His anchor was pulled up. He was entirely—free is not the word — at liberty. Yet here’s a truth that’s hard to credit, given what we hear about the opportunities of fame, but more common than you’d think in men who are divorced and past their prime: he’d not had any full sex or any romance since then, not since that afternoon of burglary in fact when Karol was conceived. That’s more than seven years on his own. That’s more than seven years’ losing confidence. You’d never guess it from the way he spoke and walked, the city’s movie star, the celebrated Lix. You’d think a man like him, with distinguished looks, a mighty income, and acclaim, could have as many women in his bed as he wanted, and any way he wanted. You’d think, you’d hope, he had so much passion that he wearied of it.
Well, that’s the daydream. But even if the opportunities were manifold, Lix like many actors did not trust strangers even in the dressing room. He’d not invite the audience to watch the shedding of his costume and his makeup, the stowing of his wig and sword. He’d not disarm himself in public. That’s the point. That’s what he studied for, pretense and privacy. So certainly he could not have much appetite for being the naked animal in bed with someone he hardly knew, that chance encounter in a bar who recognized his face and didn’t want to waste the opportunity, that theater student intent on ways of furthering her own career, or that waitress who’s only there, in bed with him — oh, there’d been offers many times for Lix from waitresses — because she’d like, just once, to squeeze up close to fame’s gold ribs.
Lix had been tempted, naturally. The magnetic force of casual sex is almost irresistible, like gravity. In those seven years, he had almost succumbed half a dozen times at most, but he always managed to avoid true intimacy. He did it Freda’s way. No penetration, that is to say, and therefore hardly any chance of pregnancy. Heavy petting was the best he could offer. Initially his sexual reticence baffled his admirers. Then — once they had realized that here was a man unable to yield himself — it angered them. They did not persevere with him.
But mostly Lix did not engage at all. He was fearful — and, as ever, timid. Fearful of the body in the mirror. What would these conquests think when he took off his clothes to show the gray hairs on his arms, the raised veins on his legs, his paunch, his meagerness, his tremor, the telltale addition of purple tints to his skin’s pale palette? Fearful also of the future and the past. He dared not expose himself again to that cruel battleground. He was ashamed of his near celibacy as well, as if it were a character flaw and proof that he was insufficiently advanced for love. He’d never been — not even once, he judged — much good with love or sex, except onstage. (And in photographs, of course. Freda and Alicja were always smiling for him in the photos that he kept.) Certainly he’d not impressed the three women he’d slept with so far: one had only stayed the night, one had only stayed a month, and one had told the world she’d never had an orgasm, so packed her bags and left. His was a history of love rebutted and love devalued. Besides, the poor man felt the force of his unfortunate fertility. Three children was enough, he judged: two children whom he rarely saw, a son he’d never loved or met, and more calamities attending in the wings, no doubt. He was, he understood too well, best left alone: the unshared frying pan, the undivided loaf. He’d turned into a reluctant kind of man, disconcerted, hesitant, persuaded that he had little future as a lover, except the futures he dreamed up alone, and hardly any past.
Yet Lix had gained contentment of a sort. Desire was like a plant, he’d found. The more you watered it, the bigger and the thirstier it became, the more demanding and dissatisfied. When he’d had a woman in his life, then Lix’s sexual frustration had not diminished. Rather it had escalated. To have removed himself from the cycle of demand was for Lix a release into a long, flat period of calm.
Yet an understanding of oneself, a well-earned dread of strangers, children, love, is no defense against the concentrated moment in the arms of someone of the other sex; her textures and her odors and her voice are old and powerful. There comes a point where everything is lost, where self-control becomes abandonment, and man becomes — it’s glib to say but nothing else is true — as mindlessly and helplessly fixated as a beast.
Lix, then, can be excused by his biology? Well, yes. So can An. Biology’s the victor every time. It’s only natural that she would want to fool around with Lix, provoke him more and more. She could not help devising ways to fit her body just a shade more snugly into his when they embraced before the spellbound ticket holders any more than a bee could fly away from honey. My God, the play was tedious, she thought, but new distractions such as this at least added spice to their performances.
As the days passed and their stage kisses multiplied, she began to choose her underclothes and body scent more carefully, and even to make her bed before she left her studio for the theater each evening and to spray her mouth with TobaGo if she’d smoked in the interval before the final act. She understood ahead of Lix that it would only be a matter of time before the two of them were having sex, and so she might as well prepare for it — and so they might as well get on with it. Let’s eat the porridge while it’s hot.
On New Year’s Eve, the last performance of the year and stoked up by the wine she’d drunk a little earlier and by a lack of partners for the Night of the Mathematical Millennium and by the evidence that pressed against her abdomen, An ditched the usual protocol and when they kissed, the scripted Widow and her Devotee, she popped her tongue into his mouth, just for a second, a warm and playful sortie into perilous domains. She dipped it in and out so swiftly that his own tongue did not have the chance to mate with it, although it tried, instinctively. Both tongues briefly caught the lights and for half a second a string of glistening saliva unified their lips.
Now everybody in the theater could swear that absolutely they were making love. The only one in any doubt was Lix himself. All An had to do, she knew, was wait. Do nothing more, she told herself. Act normal during the curtain calls. Be cool. Enjoy the moment while it lasts. If he was as weak and predictable as all the other men she’d poked her tongue into, then he’d come running to her dressing room with some excuse or else he’d hang around outside the theater for her, and she could celebrate her New Year’s Eve in company.