NOT-SO-LITTLE GEORGE had witnessed all of this. He was sitting in an aisle seat on row H on New Year’s Eve, next to his mother, Freda, and her cousin Mouetta, when he encountered Lix for the second time. Was this the weirdest evening of his life? His mother had promised him four months before, on his eighteenth birthday — but only after years of secrecy and cussedness and argument — that she would “set up” a meeting with his father, “if you really have to persevere with this.” He was prepared. He’d always thought and hoped his father was the bare-chested man whose picture his mother kept in her wallet. The Czech. They would go to Prague and meet the hero in a gaslit restaurant. Freda had only laughed at the idea. “Your father’s not a hero, that’s for sure.”
“Just give me his name and his address and leave it to me,” George had said. “It’s time! You don’t even have to be involved.”
But she had always insisted, “If we have to do it at all, we’ll do it my way. You owe me that. He hasn’t shown a hint of interest in you, by the way, in eighteen years. He hasn’t contributed one single bean. So don’t expect some paragon. But still I want to make it memorable.”
“Memorable for whom?”
“For him and for you.”
She’d kept her word.
George had waited for the “setup” that she planned with (his genetic inheritance from Lix) timidity and fear. His mother’s setups always took an age to organize and, usually, another age to disentangle. Perhaps his father would prove to be less militant and complicating, and there’d be explanations, too, for why he’d never tried to get in touch himself.
Then, finally, a week before the end of the millennium, she’d said, “We’ll take a look at him on New Year’s Eve,” and handed over tickets to The Devotee, a play that normally she’d mock as bourgeois and offensive.
George knew better than to spoil her plans by asking for some details in advance. Had she arranged for him to sit next to the man, perhaps? That seemed like the likeliest. Was there some lobby rendezvous designed? Was he an actor, maybe, or one of the musicians? The possibilities at least had narrowed from the thousands he’d considered all his life: his missing father was a foreigner, a gigolo, a member of the government, an anarchist, a colleague at the university, a criminal, a beggar on the streets, a lunatic, a priest, a man too dull to care about, a man she’d hired to fill a tube with sperm. There’d always been a silence and a mystery. The only clue was that once or twice she’d described the man, dismissively, as Smudge. Then, on New Year’s Eve itself, when George, Freda, and Mouetta had been sitting in their seats, before the curtain rose, his mother had taken out a marker and ringed a name on the cast list. A famous name he recognized but could not yet quite put a face to. “That’s him,” she said. “Starring Felix Dern.”
The play itself, he thought, was a bag of feathers. What interest could it hold for anybody there who’d not come to be united with a parent? The music was ill balanced and predictable. The script was far too nudging. The female lead, an actress almost as old as his own mother, appeared a little drunk. But everybody in the audience, including Freda — and especially Freda — seemed amused, vindicated even. His mother’s was the loudest laugh, and not a mocking one.
When, halfway through the opening act, his father first appeared onstage and the spontaneous applause of recognition had abated, George himself burst into tears, which, luckily, he could disguise as laughter. That face was so familiar, of course. The celebrated Felix Dern. The photo in the magazines. The birthmark on the cheek. Now that he saw the actor in the flesh, animated, George was not only sure he’d already met the man some years before — he racked his brains but couldn’t say exactly when — but also he was certain that he’d seen him, a younger version, a thousand times, in mirrors every day. George had his hair. George had his walk. George had his father’s mouth.
If George had hoped The Devotee would offer hidden messages to Lost Boys in the audience, then he was disappointed. The drama was not relevant. Or only relevant to simple and romantic souls. George was mesmerized nevertheless, but as the evening progressed and as he weathered the two intermissions, preferring not to join his mother and her cousin in the bar, but rather to remain exactly where he was, in row H, studying that one name on the cast list, his exhilaration at being George Dern turned into embarrassment. Watching a father you have never known playing the part of someone who’s never existed, and speaking his invented lines, was bound to be a disconcerting experience for an awkward eighteen-year-old. In the last few moments of the final act, the boy’s embarrassment was total. Even Freda had been silenced by the kiss.
“Now do you remember where you saw him once before?” his mother asked after the final curtain call, when everybody else was hurrying off to start their celebrations for Millennium Eve.
George did not want to say, “The mirror.” He said, “His face rings bells. But no …” His shook his head.
“The Palm and Orchid,” his mother said. “When you were a kid. You saw him there. Do you remember it? I wouldn’t let you finish your cake.”
He shook his head again.
“Well, then, so now you know,” she said. “Your father is revealed. Exposed! You even look like him a bit. I’d never thought of it before. Don’t be like him, that’s all I ask.”
Mouetta raised her eyebrows, shook her head. She seemed, as usual, slightly shocked, and disapproving of Freda’s modern motherhood. Jealousy, Freda always thought. Her cousin hadn’t got a lover or a son. “Well, we have an hour or so before the fireworks,” she continued. “What shall we do? You want to eat? Go to a bar?” More shaking heads. “Or do you want to wait and say hello to the star?” No nods. Not quite. Freda was only teasing, anyway. She knew that meeting his father, offstage, was inescapably what George would want to do.
We must consider Freda’s smile, and judge if it was cruel or only happy for her son. To tell the truth, she didn’t know the answer herself. She only knew that she could not contain the smile. It took possession of her face and would not shift, although she tried to shift it. She was less handsome when she smiled. Partly she was glad to have Lix off her conscience, finally. Partly she was excited by the date and by the promise of a long, amusing night. Also she could not dismiss the compelling prospect of Lix’s face when they ensnared him in the theater lobby and finally he understood that this young man who’d seen his bloodless play was blood itself. She wasn’t truly cruel or vengeful, just certain of herself and unafraid. Whatever her more tender cousin Mouetta may believe, Freda always wanted what was best for George, despite herself. She loved dramatic times. She thought they made the world a grander place. That’s why she smiled and smiled. “I’ve come to introduce you to your son,” she’d say. He’d never dare reply, “The child is yours, not mine. Your pregnancy. Your body. Your responsibility. Your private life. Your kid!”
So this was how Lix met his second wife.
AFTER WARD, Lix did not have the nerve or even the desire to go to Anita Julius’s dressing room, where, surely, she’d be waiting for him, if what she’d done onstage meant anything, if that warm tongue had been an honest messenger. He was shaking badly, for a start, and feeling old. He was the father of a fully grown man. How could he concentrate on casual sex when every chamber of his head was crowded with sons?