Genesis by Jim Crace Page A

choice. To walk on past, without a ready lie, would be unnecessarily rude. So he sat. He was blushing uncontrollably. The spy exposed.
    The blushing, though, was irresistible. Not only was it evidence of innocence, embarrassment, and shame, but also of desire, arousal, fear. She’d never seen such fear on anyone’s face. It made her feel unusually powerful, to be able to bring on such involuntary discomfort in a man. The shoe should be on the other foot. Had always been before. So this was what it felt like to be male, a hunter, predatory, to have a blushing quarry within reach, the color in his face the flag of his arousal.
    She made Lix look her in the eye by simply chatting at him like a cousin. It helped that he was so much younger than she was. Perhaps ten years, she judged. It helped, as well, that she had already drunk two shots of alcohol. It let her talk. Why not? It’s not unnatural—especially in the ABC—to talk when you are sharing a table with a stranger. She bullied him till he submitted to her questions. And as he spoke—about his theater studies and his agitprop, his many opinions on almost everything, including—on that day—the good news, bad news from Iran, the coming plebiscite, the confrontation planned for Nation Day, the famine in Cambodia for which he’d organized a street performance called, he said, PolPottery—she
started once again to feel contented with herself, to feel attractive, passionate, even to like the woman sharing a tablecloth with him, the unmasked Peeping Tom. She wasn’t listening, of course. The theater and PolPottery? Iran?
    She liked it best when he was being playful, playing someone else, that is, and not himself. His speaking voice was beautiful. And he could sing. He could do accents well. Though his repertoire of American actors was amusing, his imitation of their waiter with his odd head and his strange, strangulated voice was clever enough to make her laugh out loud.
    To tell the truth, though, this snooper, for all his cleverness and youth, for all his physical difference from her older, paunchy lover, wasn’t her type of man. Not broad enough. Too loud and sensitive and too much of the student in his dress, his voice, his hair, too keen to change the world with his slogan T-shirt and his campaign buttons. And far too inexperienced with women. She could tell at once. He couldn’t flirt if he were paid for it with gems. He didn’t have the nature or the skill—unlike her own pitiless and impatient lover, who used the world—and her—so roughly and so carelessly.
    This inexperience was tantalizing in a way. It put her in command. She needed more than anything, on this of all nights, to imagine she was at the steering wheel. His inexperience also made her strong enough, once they had finished eating and there was nothing on the table but their coffee cups, the bills, and their two pairs of hands, to touch his fingertips, the fingertips that had held the spyglasses in which she was desired, and then to grip his wrists, and then to say—quite shockingly—“Where do you live?”
And then, before he had the chance to reply, “I know exactly where you live. The fourth floor above the cafe along the street.” How wonderful to see him blush again and squirm.
    She could not stop herself. The night was beckoning and she was dressed for it. But if there was any hero in her sights, the young man (now hurrying with her out of the ABC and into Cargo Street, four flights of stairs ahead of them) was not the one. She herself was the only person she observed in her mind’s eye. The clock reversed. Again she was the woman, half a couple, waiting at the street cafe. But magnified. Enlarged. Desired. The blur of men passed by and liked her hair, her dress, her face, her legs. How better she must be than any wife, they thought. Half of the city wanted to sleep with her. She was the woman on the poster