Nor had he the heart to go back to the too-neat bachelor apartment on the embankment as he had originally intended. For true Millennium Eve, he’d planned to sit out on the enclosed balcony, with a glass of good red wine and something comforting on the stereo, and watch the fireworks. On his own. For Lix was not a man with many friends. He might not have a glamorous life offstage but at least he had the best view in town that money could rent, directly across the river to Navigation Island and then beyond into the proliferating towers of the campuses. He had to count himself as blessed, that whatever might be wrong with his first years of middle age, his isolation and his longing, he was living exactly where he wanted to, had always wanted to. Not Beyond, where everything was new and compromised, but in the city’s ancient heart of squares and stone, and narrow streets and balconies.
On sunny days, with his binoculars, he could watch the couples walking on the island amongst the tarbonies and candy trees, the tantalizing world of hand-in-hand; the cyclists, the picnickers, the teenagers in noisy groups around the lido. Scenes out of Seurat and Renoir. Even on busy days the only traffic he could see was on the bridges heading to or fleeing from the eastern side. At night, when all the bars were closed and all the lights were off, he could lie in bed and listen to the scheming of the wind and the sleepless shifting of the river, a lonely sound that sometimes made him glad to be alone.
His encounter in the theater lobby had shocked and shaken him. Of course it had. Shame and embarrassment had been delivered publicly and unexpectedly. It didn’t help to tell himself that he had merely been a victim of one of Freda’s vengeful schemes. As he’d expect from her, the whole ambush had been meanly staged, he thought, and damaging for everyone involved, except, of course, for the Lovely Neck herself.
Lix had played this scene one time before, for film, in a policier, The Reckoning. He’d been a politician, newly elected and, of course, corrupt. It’s still available on video. In the final scene, he comes out of his offices, surrounded by a clamor of supporters. He shakes a hundred hands. He issues platitudes and thanks, and smiles his practiced smile toward the ranks of cameramen, so many more than he had ever dreamed of. Out of the corner of his eye, while he is being loud and false with everyone, he spots his peasant father, and the police inspector. Behind them, waiting on the far side of his limousine, is the widow of the brother he has cheated. The cameramen move in. The screen goes white with flash. Then the sound track becomes silent. Regrets are deafening. All you can see, as the credits start to roll, are his admirers, clamoring.
It appeared to him, this night of the millennium, that he had strayed into a mocking version of that bad film — except this time the formula was not the Unmasking of the False Prophet but the cliché of the Lost Child. Once he’d shed his costume and removed his paint, Lix had, as usual and despite the lure of An, come down into the lobby of the theater to meet his more clinging admirers. It’s duty, he always told himself, not vanity.
So it was duty that made him pause on the bottom stair and patronize the gathered crowd of twenty or so with his best beam so that anyone with cameras could get a decent shot and anybody wanting autographs could form a line. Quite soon, out of the corner of his actor’s eye, he would spot the tall young man, blond-haired but unmistakably a Dern, a perfect specimen that any mother, any father, should be proud to have, a young man not quite knowing how to shake his fear off with a smile.
However, it wasn’t George whom Lix noticed first, or even Freda, though heaven knows Freda was immensely noticeable that night. She’d pulled out all the stops for this encounter. She’d piled her hair with careful randomness, as unignorable as a wedding cake. God help the man who’d sat behind her in the theater, though he might be glad to miss the play but have the opportunity, instead, to study Freda’s nape and neck, her swinging silver earrings, the tender intersection of her hair and skin, the golden zipper slide peeking from the collar of her fine black dress.
No, it was Mouetta whom Lix first noticed, an unembarrassed woman, not too young, her raincoat collar up, simply standing by the farthest exit door and staring at him blatantly as one might stare at the photo on a playbill or a film poster. She was clearly not the usual shy but awestruck fan. He’d always say he fell in love with her at once. But he felt next to nothing at the time, except uneasiness. He took the woman’s stare as evidence of something that he’d learned to run away from: the colonizing attentions of a stranger who — wrongly — thought that actors were as interesting in themselves as they seemed onstage, the sort who would never settle for a signature and a handshake or a photograph but wanted to be taken home and wanted to be listened to and loved, the sort who never joined the noisy line but waited at the exit door to join him as he fled the theater. He’d steer well clear of her, he thought, until she smiled at him, returned his stagy beam with something much more genuine. And he was lost. And so were any plans he might have had for meeting up with An.
He’d understand later that the smile was only meant to offer a little sympathy. Mouetta knew her lovely cousin’s ways. She knew that Freda had been selfish with the boy, and secretive. She knew that Lix would be appalled, discomfited, by what was planned for him. Most of all she smiled because she loved her second cousin George as if he were a younger brother and she wanted this first encounter with his father to be memorable. A pleasant memory. Her smile for Lix could only help to pave the way.
Lix stayed on the bottom step and stopped to do his duty. He thanked his fans, signed the last few programs and a couple of CDs, made his final practiced quips, turned up his collar too, like her, the woman at the door, and glanced again across the room to take a second look at that nice smile. He wouldn’t mind it, actually, if the woman fell in beside him in the street, if she came back to share his good red wine, his balcony, his fireworks view, his life. He’d be better off with her, surely, than with the waiting tongue upstairs. So many opportunities.
Finally he spotted Freda standing at the woman’s side, clearly not a fan of his, not wanting autographs or photographs, but smiling too in his direction and nodding her hellos. And then the young man he knew at once to be his son. Real life, at last: the curtain down; the clamor and the silence and the flash. “You’ve dined, old man — and now it’s time to face the waiter and the bill.”
THAT FRIENDLESS DRINK he’d planned on his veranda, with his privileged outlook over the island and his prime view of the fireworks, was not now, Lix realized at once, the wisest way to pass the first few moments of the new, true, mathematical millennium. He was too excited, overwhelmed, and horrified to be alone. He had intended to be calm and almost sober, and waiting by the phone at midnight, ready for the dutiful calls from Alicja and the boys.
There was no afternoon performance of The Devotee on New Year’s Day and he’d arranged for the children to make their weekly visit. He had the perfect set of treats for them. At ten and eight, Lech and Karol were the age when days out with their father at the zoo with its newly opened river aquarium and its camel rides were still appealing, despite the cold, especially if they were accompanied, as he had promised on this occasion, by a vedette ride upstream to the Mechanical Fair and permission, if they passed the height test, to ride the watercoaster, the Yankee Tidal Wave.
He wondered now if it had been a rash mistake to ask this stranger, George, to join them on the trip. “Meet your brothers,” he had said, a foolish suggestion, and many years too late. By now he should be taking George to brothels, not to zoos and amusement parks. The moment had been panicky. Freda could not have staged the meeting to be more disconcerting: the fans, the lobby, the postperformance frenzy, the bustle of the exit doors, the terror that she knew the very sight of her would visit on her ancient lover.