Genesis by Jim Crace Read Free Book Online Page B

problem she had woken to. Not the night locked up, or the student trapped beneath the desk. It was more personal—and not a problem to be fixed by lawyers. It was the certainty that she, Mouetta, was second best to her tall cousin yet again. Second best even with her husband still, even on
their wedding anniversary. The small rejections of the evening before, in the Debit Bar, which normally she’d shrug away as meaningless, now seemed insufferably huge, inflated by the disappointments of the night. She could not readily forget how Lix had stared into Freda’s lap—goddammit, yes, her cousin’s magnetizing lap—when he’d approached their dining table after his performance. And, yes, of course, how jealous and how sulky he had been when it was clear the student firebrand in Freda’s office was her cousin’s lover. She’d noticed how he’d blushed and could not look either of them in the eye while they were eating, and how oddly exasperated he had seemed when they left the bar.
    Mouetta felt defeated suddenly, defeated by the body and the face of someone else, defeated by her not so groundless jealousy and by the past, defeated by her childlessness (while her cousin had already proved herself with Lix in that regard, of course, so many years before. Freda could boast The Lovely George, their lovely George, whom she had raised and trained all on her own, without—she always liked to claim—“a sniff or glance” from Lix).
    Mouetta could not bring herself, despite the damp, despite the early morning cold, her lack of underwear, to get back in the car, to join her sleeping, disappointing husband. The moment she’d married him, she’d married jealousy. She drummed her fists against the windows and the roof of the Panache. His morning call. What must she do, who should she be, to be more certain of her husband’s love? The whole thing was a mystery. What urged and motivated men? Who would he truly go to bed with if he had the choice? Was it the undefeated cousin or the wife? In those first
sunlit minutes of the day, she’d kicked up loops of water high across the grass with her bare feet.
    So now, in shoes but still no underwear, Mouetta waited for her answer amongst the foliage and the breakfasters, her husband easily within her reach, across the teas and pastries in the Palm & Orchid Coffee House. Coffee fixes everything. She did not feel defeated anymore, just baffled and impatient for his choice. She looked around the room herself. It seemed that there were beauties everywhere. “What about the one in blue?” She tilted her head toward a group of office colleagues two noisy tables to her right. “She’s pretty, isn’t she?”
    â€œWhich one?”
    â€œYou know which one. I saw you staring at her earlier. Stop playing games.” She sighed at him, her lower lip stuck out. A famous warning sign. Mouetta sighs with that shaped mouth, and there’ll be arguments.
    â€œI mean, which one in blue? I’d sleep with anyone in blue. You’re dressed in sort of blue yourself. I’d go to bed with you. When we get home.”
    â€œYou’d not choose me before all these others.” She was ashamed to set so transparent a trap.
    â€œOf course I would.”
    â€œOf course you would.”
    They let their conversation simmer for a while and pretended to concentrate, in practiced and contented silence, on their breakfasts, the Aztec coffee in the paysanne cups, the glace fruits, the local—and expensive—savories, the honey slice. The Palm & Orchid was a place where it was easy not to talk. The talkers missed
the beauty of the place, the filtered shafts of colored light, refracted and intensified by the patchwork of stained Portino glass in the conservatory roof, the somber rhomboids of shade from the woven kites of green rattan suspended from the rafters, the massive earthenware pots of fessandra bushes,