“CHOOSE ONE,” Mouetta said. “Choose one. If you could go to bed with anybody here, which one?”
This was a question she’d posed to Lix a dozen times before, in public places, very often as a postscript — and not, despite her husband’s best endeavors, as a prologue — to their lovemaking.
It was hardly 8:30 in the morning, Friday, not seven hours since their close encounter in the car. The early hours of her undiscovered pregnancy.
That coming night, revitalized by the drier weather, there’d be new disturbances, better organized and more venomous than Thursday’s. Nine dead, this time, including three cadets trapped in a burning transporter. And, dramatically, the firebombing of the Bursary Chambers Club where — wrongly — it was thought some bankers and some military were dining. The wounded victims were, in fact, two waitresses, a cloakroom clerk, a fireman, and fourteen members of an investment club who hadn’t had the lungs or legs to get away from their third-story dining suite.
For the moment everything was quiet. Apart from the parked police vans and the helicopters, the city, still in debt and shock, still riotous at heart, had — physically, at least — returned to normal. Sunshine, traffic jams, shopping and commuter crowds, and floods. Floods are normal here: the usual flooded passages and streets along the riverbanks, the flooded underpasses and the flooded gutters where, as usual, the drains had let us down. The city had been overwhelmed by rain.
Mouetta and Lix had stopped for breakfast at the Palm & Orchid Coffee House on their way back home. She held his arm across the tabletop. She pinched his hand. She wanted to inflict some gentle pain. “Come on,” she said. “The truth.” The coffeehouse — a converted botanic conservatory — was chockablock with unsuspecting women for her husband to choose from.
Lix, as usual, misread her mood. He took her question as a kind of erotic afterplay, a sign that she was still stimulated by their recent lovemaking and wanted to continue it, not physically perhaps, but somewhere else inside her head, some secret fold. A female thing. Men recovered after sex more speedily. For women — he had said as much onstage (a play by Palladino) — intercourse was just the overture. But for a man an orgasm was — the playwright’s metaphor again—“the final, rushing note.” The music stopped — and now he could embrace the wider world again. For men (another common metaphor) lovemaking pops the champagne cork. The captive gases dissipate. The pressure is released. The pressure he was feeling now was of a different kind.
Here, for breakfast, Lix was happy to indulge his wife. He liked her question. It also made him wonder if, on their return back home, the as yet untested stairs might earn themselves a second chance. “You really want the honest truth?” Again she dug her nails into his palm.
Lix thought he understood the boundaries and rituals of her now familiar game. He’d made mistakes before — thinking, possibly, that her invitation to search the restaurant, the bar, the hotel lobby, the departure lounge, the cast of a film, and, on a couple of occasions, the pages of magazines, for someone he would like to make love to was her way of testing his fidelity. In which case, the only answer was the reassuring, diplomatic one, that out of all the women he could see Mouetta was the only one for him. That was clearly not the answer she was seeking, though. He’d tried it out before — and it had irritated her. She truly wanted him to look around. And choose. And tell the truth.
“Come on! Which one, if you were free?”
“But I’m not free.”
“You’re free to choose. You’re just not free to act.”
“I see. I am your prisoner, then. At liberty to think and look but not to move.”
“Exactly so. Like through binoculars.”
“And no parole.”
“Not till I’m dead. And, anyway, wives nearly always outlive the men. So I’ll be free before you are.”
There was another lesson Lix had learned, through his mistakes. Mouetta would not welcome it if he showed too much ardor in his choice. He should not seem aroused. He should not lick his mouth or breathe too heavily. He should not need to touch himself or rearrange his trousers. She would not welcome any vulgarity either, though he was always tempted by vulgarity. He had to be dispassionate and analytical, but not too coldly scientific. “It’s just my private chemistry,” he’d said on one occasion previously, when he’d been free to choose amongst the women at a reception they’d attended and had selected someone Mouetta had dismissed as “short and plain.” By chemistry, he’d meant a little more than just the dopamine and oxytocin, or any other agents of libido. He’d meant the chance and random fusions that could occur in the test tubes of two strangers. She’d been disappointed and upset — and evidently baffled — for reasons that he never really understood. From then, he’d always found it wisest to start off with a wary, playful joke. A decoy, as it were. Then he could judge how serious she was, how easy to offend.
Lix looked around the crowded coffeehouse, packed with breakfasting commuters. Here were the city’s office staff, mostly women dressed for desk work and warm weather — although the Palm & Orchid boasted that its “atmosphere” was always semi-temperate — their makeup as yet unsmudged, their skirts and tops fresh from hangers and drawers. Still crisp and fragrant. He’d sleep with fifty women there, if life were simpler.
“The little waitress, obviously,” he said at last.
Mouetta pinched his hand again. “Be serious.”
“I’m being serious. I like my women old and gray. And wearing sandals. I like a lived-in face with lots of chins. And I’m especially fond of bunions. You should be pleased.”
“Oh, yes? My pleasure knows no boundaries. I can get some gray highlights put in today, if that’s your preference.”
“I’m joking but I’m serious. Old’s fine by me. Up to a point. It means I’m not the sort to dump you for some frisky pony as soon as you begin to …” He hesitated, searching for a further equine metaphor. “ … refuse the jumps.” He had to laugh, despite the warning tilt of Mouetta’s face. “The truth is, I can’t wait till you’re sixty — and serving me with your tray and apron. Naked otherwise, of course. Bare bunions.” Lix made his lecher’s face. “I’ll have a double latte please. And honey cake. Give me the little waitress anytime.”
“Why am I less than thrilled with that good news?” she said.
Mouetta could not find it in herself to be pleased with anything that morning. She wasn’t still mentally stimulated by their lovemaking in the car, as he’d imagined. Far from it. She felt, illogically, as if he’d poisoned her. She was in toxic shock. Her temperature was wrong. Her stomach ached. The seat belt strap, her pillow for the night, had left a ridge across her cheek that had not yet repaired itself. Her head and heart were dulled by something out of her control. She could not, dare not, put a name to it. A woman of her age and hopes who has no children yet is always nervous of an early menopause. She’d not slept well, of course. Who does, in cars? But there was something else that bothered her, something undermining and elusive that she’d squeeze out of her husband’s palms with her fingernails, an answer she could only draw with blood.
It was, of course, mostly the onset of her pregnancy that had disrupted her, the gelling of the early cells, the hormone parties striking out to colonize new settlements, the stiffening of glands. How could she know at this precocious stage? How could she yet understand her sudden listlessness, the unusual and overwhelming irritation that she felt for Lix, the nagging private voice that seemed to say her world had changed? Mouetta was a morning person, normally. Only moody after dark, when she was tired. So this was worrying.