Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

‘I’ll buy you another mattress.’

‘Marvin — just once in your life, shut up! Believe me, there were bloodstains on the ceiling. If that’s what your friend does to someone he loves, Charlie said, I wouldn’t want to be in the next room when he’s with someone he hates. I know, I see it on your face — what right did we have to sit in judgement on sex Marvin Kreitman-style? But we weren’t sitting in judgement. We were just frightened for you.’

‘Oh, come on, Chaiiie, frightened? ’

‘You didn’t hear yourself. Anyway, whatever the rights of it, whatever you meant by half-throttling Hazel or letting her half-throttle you, and whatever we were doing having any sort of attitude to it, that wasn’t nice sex. I trust you will at least agree to that. Nice sex, Marvin, isn’t about finding another form for murder. I couldn’t have raised a hand to Charlie even in play, nor she to me. What is it Hamlet says about his father’s lovingness to his mother — ‘he might not beteem the winds of heaven visit her face too roughly’? That was me. That was us. Even a vulgar slap and tickle would have been impossible between us. Is impossible between us. It’s not for me to enquire about the hows and whys of it now, but you and Hazel used to make no bones about it — you fought like tigers, and then you fucked like tigers. Your own phrase, Marvin — the clash of mighty opposites. Well, Charlie and I didn’t feel opposite, we felt the same. We weren’t reconciling differences in sex, we were confirming congruences. In bed together, sometimes, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you where I ended and she began. My cock, her … What’s wrong, Marvin. Why are you gagging?’

‘You know darn well why I’m gagging.’

‘Of course I do. I’ve drunk too much and you hate sex talk that isn’t adversarial.’

‘You’re wrong. What I hate is the word cock. Watcha, cock! Use dick, it’s more respectful.’

‘Yes, yes, the famous Kreitman niceness around the organs. Nice around the nomenclature, less nice around the usage.’

‘You’re the nice one, Charlie.’

‘Well, you’re certainly not. Listen, you asked, so I’m telling you. Nice sex — it means what it sounds as though it means. Sex that is all consideration. Smug too, if you like. An expression of how much you like each other and everyone else can go to hell. And that’s why I’ve always found it impossible to do anything if I’m away from home, in a foreign country or wherever — I know I wouldn’t be able to think of anyone but Charlie. So what would be the point? Then when I got back I would be guilty, and when we made love I would be unable to think about anything but my guilt, lying there lewdly between us like a third party each of us thought the other had invited. Three in a bed. Something you’re not averse to, I know. But not me. I don’t judge it, I’m not against it, I just can’t do it. So that’s something else about nice sex — it’s sex strictly for the two of you. Sex you don’t go round experimenting with …’

‘Sex that’s not sex, you mean?’ Unbidden, Erica, his wife’s interior decorator, sitting on his chest in nothing but black hold-ups, her hands crossed on his throat, saying ‘Make me!’ Unbidden, but he bade the apparition go. ‘Sex that’s no fun, you mean?’

‘Wrong. That wasn’t fun you were having with Hazel all those years ago. That wasn’t even play, Marvin. That was hang, draw and quarter. And you both looked like you’d narrowly escaped the mob when you came down to breakfast. You’ve always looked like that after sex. Another close shave. Got away with my life again — just. Don’t forget how many times I’ve seen you after you’ve been fucking. And you never once looked as though you’d been having fun. People smile when they’re having fun. When did you last smile at Hazel, Marvin?’

‘This morning.’

‘After sex?’

Marvin Kreitman put his elbows on the table and supported his chin on his fists. ‘Charlie,’ he said wearily, ‘Hazel isn’t the person I do the deed with these days. Decent men don’t badger their wives of twenty years for sexual satisfaction.’

Charlie waved away any imaginary imputation that he might be curious who, in that case, Kreitman did badger for sexual satisfaction these days. ‘The last time you smiled at anybody post-coitally, Marvin? Or even pre-coitally, come to that?’

Kreitman thought about it. ‘Do you want the year or the day?’

‘The year will do.’

‘Nineteen seventy-three.’

‘Then that was the last time you had nice sex.’

And in such a manner, had the discussion been about Kreitman’s misery and not Charlie’s, would the evening have ended. Go home and sleep on that one, Marvin. He was quite prepared to. Nice sex, eh? Well, why not. Two in a bed, no thought of a third, and a smile before and after? Thinking of the smile worried him by virtue of its unlooked-for allure. Forget the rest, but a smile wouldn’t have gone amiss. Nineteen seventy-three was a lie. Kreitman had never smiled before or after sex. Or, if he had, he had forgotten, and where was the point of a smile you couldn’t remember?

He sat with his chin still on his fists, staring into the blood-red lake of his wine glass, listening to the long silence of Charlie’s triumphant refutation. He was head over heels in love with five women — discounting the other four he loved in a calmer fashion — and he couldn’t drag from the bottom of the wine-dark Brunello sea a single recollection of a sex-related, sense-drenched smile. Not on his part anyway. What he could see, if he concentrated, were sometime smiles directed to him. A fatalistic but comradely creasing of the eyes only the day before yesterday from Bernadette, mother of his wife’s interior designer’s former husband, registering the black folly of life. A playful grin after the theatre, because she scarcely knew him yet, from Shelley, nursing Kreitman all of a sudden when a violent cramp threw him howling off her. Did they count? If you inspired a smile did that mean you were the reason for nice sex in others, even though you were not a participant in it yourself? Could just one of you have nice sex?

What do you think, Charlie?

No, was what Charlie thought. No way, no how. Just as nice sex couldn’t be for more than two, so it couldn’t be for less.

‘You’re a stickler for numbers,’ Kreitman said.

‘Rich, coming from you,’ Charlie said.

‘You know what this is all about?’ Kreitman said, as though struck by it for the first time. ‘Sentimentality. Masculine sentimentality. We both love ourselves in the love women bear us.’

‘Wom en don’t bear me anything,’ Charlie said.

‘It comes to the same thing,’ Kreitman said. ‘You love the image of yourself as a nice man which Charlie reflects back to you. I love the image of myself as a bastard which Hazel and the rest reflect back to me. That’s why you can’t betray Charlie — she has a sentimental hold over you. She is the monster guarding the labyrinth where your other selves are hidden.’

‘So I have to behead her to find out who else I could be?’

‘That’s only if you want a fuck, Charlie.’

‘I want a fuck, Marvin.’

‘Then behead her.’

‘And you?’

‘I’m happy as I am.’

‘You aren’t. You’ve let me see you aren’t. You’d like to smile before you die.’

Would he? ‘Then who do I behead?’

‘That you must tell me. I don’t know who’s guarding your labyrinth.’

‘I have told you. They all are.’

‘Then behead them all.’

‘Ah,’ Kreitman said, ‘I can’t do that.’

‘Then choose one,’ Charlie said, ‘and give her to me.’