Genesis Read Online Free PDF Page A

Navigation Island, annoyed and arguing, before they decided what to do. Past one o’clock already. It was a little too late and far too early to wake friends and ask for refuge, too late to phone a lawyer for Freda, naive to think they’d find a hotel still with beds to spare. They had the keys to Freda’s flat as well as her office, but that was on the campus, too, and almost certainly unreachable. And possibly unsafe. And there were cats inside and awful litter smells which only Freda had grown used to. They could, of course, return to the theater and rouse the janitor. Lix had done exactly that one New Year’s Eve, at this same theater. They could, in a pinch, sleep in Lix’s dressing room or even onstage. The Molière demanded three chaise longues. But the chances of the janitor still being awake himself at that hour, let alone responding to someone hammering at the doors on this of all nights, were pretty thin. They did what many other people had been forced to do. They drove the car again onto the island and took the first gate into Deliverance Park, looking for a parking space or turnout. Or Lix looked at least; Mouetta, disappointed, tired, had fallen
asleep already, suddenly, her body falling, as he drove, against the webbing of the seat belt.
    There were no parking spaces in the park or room for their long Panache in the already overcrowded turnouts. The park had turned into a dormitory of cars. So Lix bumped up onto the grass, careful not to wake his wife. He could have parked right there, just on the corner of the lawns, next to the road, illuminated by the headlights and the streetlamps. Safe. But he had other plans for their anniversary. He headed for the clump of ornamental pines, the darkest planted corner of the park, a place he had spotted as a possibility many times before but never used.
    At first the grass, immersed by the rain, was soft and muddy. He had to drive slowly, in the lowest gear. He churned up ruts and wakes of earth and water. He damaged tended grass. Soon the formal grasses gave way to raised picnic squares and cindered ball fields which were hard and gravelly. He switched the headlights off and bumped forward toward the shielding canopy of trees with the help only of his side lamps. And then—heroically—he switched the side lamps off. The gray Panache had disappeared from view. He knew that he was breaking Rules. That he’d be fined if caught. Imagine what the gossip columnists would say. He also knew that he was taking greater risks. The river had been known to swell and break its banks. In 1989, as he could testify, Navigation Island had been entirely submerged. No resident mammal had survived. But he was determined not to waste the opportunity. The sudden looming darkness and the frieze of foliage and the possibility of floods were thrilling. He’d found a spot where, even if the storm abated and there was moonlight,
they’d be completely hidden from the road. Here was another chance to fix that oversight he had failed to fix just an hour earlier: they had not had sex in the car for months, not since their Sunday drive down to the lakes that spring when Mouetta—midcycle and ovulating, according to her charts and her thermometer—had tried to stop him from using any contraception and what had started out as love had ended up as argument. He would not take the risk of having one more mouth to feed (even on alternate weekends). He’d pulled the comic condom on and Mouetta had reluctantly allowed him to continue. To be so fertile was a curse.
    To be so timid was a curse as well.
    Here was a predicament, then, tricky and elaborate, but so familiar to men, especially that night with so many couples unexpectedly accommodated in their cars and keen to make the most of it. Lix’s wife, already irked by him, was sleeping, snoring slightly even. Making love to her right then would require a degree of subtlety and patience that, obviously,