Once they had toured the trestle bars in Company Square and lowered inhibitions around the scorching braziers with shots of aquavit, they went back to the theater. Where else? They hammered on the Actors’ Gate, relieved to be a little drunk, until the night man came and tucked their proffered banknote in the pocket of his linen coat as routinely as somebody who must have done this very thing before, and, possibly, for An.
“I’m in my room if you want letting out,” he said. “You know your way about.”
Indeed, they knew their way about. They ran up to the Players’ Lounge, where there were chairs and couches, and some unfinished bottles of wine and piles of unlaundered costumes from that evening’s show. They pulled the curtains open so that the only light was coming from outside, from moon and stars and motorcars, and from the empty-office lights across the street.
“We have to do it in our clothes,” An said. She meant the costumes they wore each night, the clothes they acted in when they pretended love. “Let’s do it like we’d like to do it, in the play.”
“Onstage?”
She hadn’t thought of that herself. But, “Yes, onstage. In costume.”
They’d never truly kissed before, but now they truly kissed, onstage and in and out of character in their stage uniforms, with nothing but the borrowed light of corridors to break the darkness of the auditorium. Their tongues engaged. Alone at last — and ready to yield. An actor and an actress are most confident when they are not themselves and can inhabit places where the sound and light are trimmed and flattering, where there might always be applause, and where no matter what they do, no matter what their curses are, there’d be no price to pay, no consequences when the curtain falls, no child to bear and rear and feed forevermore, amen.
THERE WAS a message on his answering machine when Lix got home a little after one o’clock, already fearful of the big mistake he’d made that night, the big mistakes he’d made for forty years. The message was from Freda, not from An, as he had feared at first. She was being pleasant for a change, he thought. Her voice was light and genuine. He could hear her bangles shake. She wished him all the best for the millennium. She said how much she had responded to the play. And, by the way, oh yes, George was “prepared” to see his father on New Year’s Day, but he was shy and just a little angry and more than normally stressed by the prospect of making contact after all this time, as surely Lix could understand. So George would not go to the zoo with his two half brothers unaccompanied. He’d need a friendly face. So Freda’s cousin Mouetta had volunteered to “chaperone.”
“Good night, then, Comrade Felix Dern,” Freda said on the answering machine.
“It was a good night,” Lix replied out loud, standing at the window high above the loyal river while the tape played on through undeleted messages until it hit the high-pitched discord of a broken line.
6
SO NOW it is Mouetta’s turn. She’s had one hundred minutes in the city’s dampest cinema, hardly bothering to focus on the film, certainly not paying attention to the subtitles, to think about her pregnancy. She doesn’t much enjoy the cinema, to tell the truth. She’s only there for Lix. She’s been grateful for the darkness and the opportunity to rest. She’s waited for The End quite happily, but concentrated only on herself, her unexpected joy, her hands clasped in her lap where soon there’ll be no lap, she hopes. Her growing child will spill across her knees, expanding like warm dough. Her hands have formed and cupped the shape a hundred times. She’s let herself imagine it: she’ll never be alone, she’ll never be unloved.
It’s only in the last ten minutes of the film, and after the brief appearance of an actor colleague her husband says he met and shared a cognac with in Cannes twelve years ago, that finally he is relaxed enough to take her hand in his and rub her thumb with his. Her pregnant thumb, her hand that’s quick with child, does not respond to him. She’ll make him wait, like he has made her wait. Mouetta feels as if she has become untouchable, beyond her husband’s reach, but also untouchable in a grander sense, beyond mortality. A baby’s due in May.
It no longer bothers her that Lix has yet to speak. She understands his caginess. She’s used to it. She married it. Her husband’s feelings do not really matter anymore. His purpose has been served, she thinks. Biology has overtaken him. Now he can either be a swan and stay, or be a dog and run from this, his sixth and final child.
They are the last to leave the matinee. As usual, they’ve been the only ones to stay and watch the credits until the logo of the studio and the final bars of the sound track have given their permission to depart. Then Mouetta tucks her fingers under Lix’s arm — the married grip that’s far more comfortable than holding hands — and steers him into the street, past the box office manager who always loves to talk with him, past the taxi stand and the taxi touts. It has rained and stopped raining while they were in the cinema. The streets are glossy and greasy. The early evening air is washed and fresh. She wants to walk and build an appetite, Mouetta says.
You do not notice them, in this half-light, a couple almost middle-aged, not smart, not purposeful, but simply grazing on the streets with time to spare. The city’s full of couples like them at this time of the evening, too late to work or shop, too soon to eat or drink, too restless to go home. They follow the streetcar route which leads up from Deliverance Bridge into the ancient city, crossing Anchorage Street and Cargo Street, old haunts of his, two high and fertile rooms with no views of the river, until they reach the last remaining stretch of the city wall and the medieval gate. They could go straight to the cafe district. Instead they negotiate the puddles and turn into the narrow Hives to window-shop for Turkish carpets, hand-built furniture, unlikely children’s clothes. Just like the cinema, the dream is lit and organized, a row of plate-glass screens. They pass a shop that only deals in cutlery, a framing store, a potter’s workshop, an antiques studio, until they reach the cobblestones of the great, cold square where commerce becomes history and where the odor of the rain is overlaid by kitchen smells and the early, flaring coals of braziers as the beet and kebab vendors set up their stalls.
Mouetta wants to try a new bistro she’s read about, the Commerce Supper House, on the east side of the square behind the Debit Bar. It’s quiet enough for them to talk, for Lix to eat unrecognized. He usually leaves the choice of restaurant to her. He chooses films; she chooses what to eat. But they have reached the terrace of the Debit Bar and the maître d’ is standing underneath the canopy, smoking his cigar and curling smiles at everyone who passes. Mouetta grips her husband’s arm more tightly, but as soon as Lix has stooped to say hello she knows her choice of restaurant is lost.
It isn’t comfortable to admit it to herself, but Mouetta is resigned to sacrificing the Commerce Supper House with its advantages because she’s almost certain that her cousin will not be inside the Debit, waiting to deride her pregnancy and Lix’s gift of parenthood. There’d be no risk of Freda, for a while at least.
Mouetta is ashamed to feel such comfort at her cousin’s continuing misfortune: she’s been in jail since that wet and riotous night in August, charged that she’d abused her public duties as an employee of the university, that contrary to Conduct Codes she’d had intercourse with a student in her charge, that she possessed a canister of mace and documents belonging to the state, that she’d received dollars from her son in America without declaring them, that she had out-of-date IDs, and two passports, and cannabis. These are only trifling charges, peccadilloes hardly worth a fine, although already she’s been fired from her faculty and lost her campus rooms. The charge that threatens her with more imprisonment is that she’d assaulted a militiaman outside the Debit Bar, exactly where the maître d’ was at that moment shaking Lix’s hand.