Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

‘Not.’

‘Then she isn’t smiling at you. Turn away.’

Try telling that to Lot’s wife. Still convinced her radiance was for him, and dangerously woozy now, Charlie Merriweather shone his countenance across the distance of three tables and gave Nicolette Halliwell the benefit of that trample-me expression which had served him so well with Charlie several decades earlier, and no doubt continued to prove useful, Kreitman thought, in keeping him in her favours.

In their day a mistake was a mistake and everyone was careful to help one another out of an embarrassment. Things were different now that there was no such thing as society. Public personalities come and go quicker than a burning match, but ideas take longer to blow out and reignite. Thatcherism had fallen off its patent heels, an absurd memory today, like trying to recall Mr Pastry; yet society hadn’t, as a consequence, been fanfaronaded back inside. It suited everyone, even the new socialists, especially the new socialists, to pretend it had gone away of its own accord and wasn’t coming back. Without it, we could be as charitable or as hurtful as we felt like being, for we weren’t on any journey together. Hence Nicolette Halliwell’s too loud snort, her dismissive wave of her bejewelled fingers — funeral rings, she collected, trash from the past, one on each finger — and her zonked ejaculation: ‘Not you, saddo!’ And then, to her company, but for everyone in the restaurant to hear — ‘The leery old prick thinks I’m smiling at him.’

Sozzled? Freaked out? Who could say. Kreitman couldn’t tell who was on what any more. His daughters came home not themselves for different chemical reasons every night of the week. One of his lovers had taken to laughing during orgasm. Another to weeping on the lavatory. Only their mothers seemed to be together. For two pins he’d have marched over to the artist’s table and beaten an apology out of her (his second imaginary assault that night), however forcefully the stubbly beards that grinned approval round her might have tried to stop him. But why draw even more attention to Charlie’s mortification? He was drained of blood, the colour of mozzarella, and didn’t seem to know what to do with his face.

‘Let’s go,’ Kreitman said. ‘We’ll pay at the desk.’

But Charlie couldn’t, or didn’t want to move. ‘Coffee,’ he said. ‘I think coffee. And I think another bottle of wine. Oh, God!’

And over coffee and wine and more coffee and more wine he asked Kreitman what he thought the matter with him was, why he was so unhappy, why he was so prone to make a fool of himself these days, why he was forever catching his children giving him long anxious sideways looks, as if they feared he was going to run away or fall over or fall away or be run over the moment they took their eyes off him, why he was sleeping badly, why he seemed to be getting on Charlie’s nerves, why he was ratded by what was going on in his sister-in-law’s love life, why he wished sometimes that it was he who was knocking her off, except of course that he didn’t, and why, in short, his life was fucking falling apart.

Kreitman put his fingers together. ‘Well now …’ he said.

‘Don’t take the piss out of me, Marvin. We’ve been talking about nothing for ten hours. Let’s be honest, we’ve been talking about nothing for twenty years. Just this once, eh? Eh?’

‘All right, Charlie, then it isn’t your life that’s falling apart, it’s your marriage that’s fucking killing you.’

‘Well, you would say that.’

‘In that case don’t ask me.’

‘You’ve been wanting to tell me that my marriage is fucking killing me since you first met me.’

‘You weren’t married when I first met you.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Charlie, I don’t know what you mean. I promoted your marriage. I would even say, were I given to like marriages, that I particularly liked yours. But this conversation has got nothing to do with what I want to say, or even with what I happen to think. I’m just watching you. You’re behaving like a man whose marriage is fucking killing him. You’ve not stopped looking at women all day. Not even women, Charlie — girls! When a man of your years can’t take his eyes off every under-age bit of skirt that flounces by, that hasn’t even grown tits yet, it’s fair to deduce his marriage is in trouble.’

‘That’s different. Marriage in trouble is not the same as marriage killing me.’

‘Then go fuck one of these titless girls and get your marriage out of trouble. Give yourself a little leeway. I’ll get up and have a word with the trash queen for you. I doubt she holds to any position for very long …’

‘If I were to “fuck one of those girls” Chas would never forgive me. It would break her heart.’

‘Don’t tell her.’

‘She’ll find out.’

‘How will she find out, Charlie?’

‘She finds out everything. She knows me backwards. I can’t dream about a fuck without Chas knowing.’

‘There you are — your marriage is fucking killing you. And I’ll tell you which part of it is killing you — the nice-sex part. Fantasy, Charlie. Sex isn’t nice.’

‘Maybe not for you, Marvin.’

‘Leave me out of it. It isn’t nice for you , otherwise …’ Kreitman made a weary, exasperated gesture with his hands, taking in the waitresses, the sculptor and every other damn distraction that had made a monkey out of Charlie Merriweather this night. Made a monkey out of him as well, because even late and in the company of men he hated marriage talk, wife talk, love talk, fuck talk. For he too was a good husband in his way, and believed he owed it to Hazel not to discuss her. Or her interior decorator. Or his daughter’s curator. Or his one-time lover and her mother. ‘Look, Charlie,’ he went on — in now, in for a penny, in for a pound — ‘why don’t we have this nice-sex thing out once and for all? You think I don’t get it. OK — I certainly don’t get it. And if I don’t get it we can’t talk about it. You started this. You said your life’s falling apart. I’m saying you can chalk that down to nice sex. So you go ahead and prove to me why I’m wrong. You explain to me what I’ve been missing all these years.’

‘Deprivation.’

‘Paradoxes now. I could surprise you, Charlie. I’ve done plenty of doing without.’

‘Yes, but not systematically. Nice sex is about agreeing to do without. It’s a trade-off. In return for relinquishing everyone else — and that doesn’t mean not having an eye for everyone else, Marvin — you enjoy a closeness you wouldn’t otherwise have. I’m not talking about trust only. Partly the closeness is contingent on the sacrifice …’

‘You get hot thinking about everything you both haven’t done? It’s like talking dirty, is it? Only it’s talking clean? Tell me about it, darling, whisper it in my ear — Who didn’t you fuck today?’

‘Is that what you think?’

‘I don’t think. About nice sex I have no thoughts. You’re the expert.’

‘You might not remember this, Marvin, but when we were first married and living in Market Harborough you and Hazel used to stay with us for weekends. You two weren’t married yet. It’s possible you weren’t even thinking of getting married at that stage. One night we gave you our bedroom. I can’t remember why, maybe you’d just got engaged or something, maybe it was Hazel’s birthday. Maybe it was mine. Anyway, you slept in our bed. We were both astonished by the noises you made. Like creatures in pain, Charlie said.’

‘You were listening to us?’

‘No, we weren’t listening, we heard. We couldn’t not hear. The dead would have heard. And when we got our bed back in the morning we couldn’t believe what you’d done to it. You’d ripped the sheets. You’d mangled two pillowcases and somehow shrunk a third. You’d torn the headboard off the bed. You’d bitten chunks out of the mattress …’