Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

‘I’m interested to hear,’ were his actual words, ‘that when you go to bed what you dream about is going to bed.’

‘Only after seeing you.’

‘I wouldn’t think that one through, Charlie.’

Charlie Merriweather laid down his chopsticks and sighed one of his big sad cheery sighs. ‘Not the homo routine, Marvin.’

‘I can’t help it. I’m homophobic.’

‘You affect to be homophobic.’

‘Only because I’m a latent homosexual.’

‘You’re not a latent homosexual. And anyway, no homosexual would have you.’

‘That’s why I’m homophobic.’

‘All this,’ Charlie said, trying to change the mood, ‘to disguise the fact that you think I’m the bent one.’

Kreitman laughed. People liked getting Kreitman to laugh because his laughter always seemed to take him by surprise, as though it was a sound he didn’t know he had it in him to make.

‘Charlie, not for one moment have I ever thought of you as bent. To be candid with you, and I’d like this not to go any further than these four walls, I don’t believe anyone is bent. Not really. Not in their hearts. My theory is that they’re all pretending. But you … Why are you shaking your head?’

‘Because you aren’t being candid with me. Why won’t you admit you’re not able to come up with any other satisfactory explanation.’

‘For what? The mincing way you pick at your food? You don’t have to be gay to burn your fingers on pork-and-chive dumplings.’

Charlie Merriweather inspected his fingers, velvety and padded like a dog’s paws. He appeared to be thinking about licking them clean. ‘Now that’s homophobic,’ he said.

‘Tell me about it.’

‘You think I’m peculiar, Marvin, because I don’t have affairs.’

‘Charlie, it’s not my business whether you have affairs or not. Besides, for all I know you have hundreds. I’ve seen you at book signings.’

‘You’ve seen us both at book signings. And the people we sign for are all under twelve.’

‘Twelve going on seventy. They’re getting older, your readers, I’ve noticed that.’

‘Your usual point is that they’re getting younger.’

‘The old are getting younger — I think that’s my usual point.’

‘You’ll also have noticed, since you notice so much, that I haven’t had an affair since I met Charlie.’

‘When I first knew you you were complaining you hadn’t had an affair before you met Charlie.’

‘Oh, Lord, was I? Then that just proves it. I’m not an affair person. That’s why you’re starting to wonder about me.’

‘People who wonder whether people are wondering about them are usually wondering about themselves. But I’d leave being gay out of it. Doesn’t the received wisdom have it that gays tend more to promiscuity than the other thing?’

‘Not the happily married ones, Marvin.’

‘Ah!’

Kreitman finally let the hovering Chinese waitress take away his bowl. She’d been eyeing it from the minute Kreitman started eating. But that’s the way of it in Lisle Street, where the restaurants tend to be tiny and the clearing-away matters more than the cooking. What Kreitman and Merriweather both liked about this restaurant was having to step over the yellow plastic slop buckets at the entrance. It gave them the feeling of being in Shanghai.

‘ Ah what?’ Merriweather wanted to know.

‘Just Ah ,’ Kreitman said. He wiped his mouth with his napkin and closed his face down. Not another word until the quarters of orange arrived. And the hot barbers’ towels, exploding out of their hygienic wrappers. Bang! Bang! Untouched by human hand. (There was a joke, in the backstreets of Shanghai, WI — fastidiousness!) Only after he’d exploded his towel did Kreitman explain himself. ‘Are you on an errand from Hazel via Charlie? Is that what this is all about? Are we raising questions of sexual irregularity so that you can steer the conversation round to mine?’

‘Charlie and I don’t discuss your marriage, Marvin. Much, no doubt, as you would like us to. You’ve been trying to wring disapproval out of me for twenty years. Sorry — no can do. I have no attitude to the way you live.’

‘ The way I live? ’ Unbidden, the face of Shelley, his mother’s second husband’s nurse, invaded Kreitman’s thoughts. They had been to the theatre the night before where Kreitman had been struck by the prettiness of her concentration. He had told her so, whereupon, without changing her expression, she had called him a patronising bastard. He was remembering how prettily she said that.

‘I have no attitude to you and women other than maybe some sneaking envy. I think you’re a lucky devil …’

‘Luck doesn’t come in to it, Charlie.’ Unbidden, the long unshaven legs of Ooshi.

‘I don’t mean I think you’re lucky because of what you get. I mean you’re lucky to have the temperament you have. Lucky to be able to do it. I couldn’t. Can’t. Don’t want to, either, in the end. I think I’ve become used to nice sex …’

‘Run that by me again.’

‘Nice sex …’

‘You mean tired sex.’

‘I mean nice sex. Same person, same place, same time — I like that. But that doesn’t mean I disapprove of your way. It’s not for me. I just don’t have the balls.’

‘Fairy!’

Followed by the bill.

Two old friends, one steadfastly in love with the same woman all his married life, one not, meeting regularly to decide who is the unhappier. And then losing their nerve.

Some days, so engrossed were they in not getting round to having the conversation they would like to have had, they couldn’t part. They would idle about Soho, back through Chinatown, across Shaftesbury Avenue and into the wicked warren of Berwick and Brewer and Broadwick, where every window was suggestive of deviance, even those with only cream cakes or rolls of calico on display. Then they would cut back through the street market, past the fish and veggie men playing furtive stand-up poker with the barber outside the King of Corsica, past the fruiterers offering ‘A pound a scoo’ ‘ere!’ — three tomatoes, five lemons, seven onions, take your pick, pre-weighed in stainless-steel bowls, scoops, like winnings at a fairground — then out via suppurating Peter Street, where the pimps pick their teeth with match ends, into Wardour, dog-legging through Old Compton, getting gayer, into Dean and Frith, scenes of some jittery escapades in the skin trade when they were students, or at least when Kreitman was, but sorted out and hardened now, pedestrianised, masculinised, production company’d, cappuccino’d. What they were waiting for was a decent interval to elapse between lunch and afternoon tea. They needed to go on sitting opposite each other, eating and drinking, skirting the issues of their lives, almost saying what they wanted to say. Space allowing, they would crush into Patisserie Valerie where it was too public to break down and weep, failing that one of the new coffee houses, though preferably not one that was too exclusively or too hostilely butch.

Genuinely bothered by gays, were they? No. Yes. No. Yes. No, not bothered exactly. More destabilised. How could they be otherwise? The public hand-holding was so new and so challenging. And intended to be destabilising, was it not, in the way that a protest march is intended to shake the convictions of those happy with the status quo. Of the two, Kreitman was more agitated by gayness than Charlie, for whom the hetero life was baffling enough. The beauty of monogamy is that nothing outside its magic circle impinges on it; it has its own worries to attend to. Kreitman, though, was in a sort of competition with gayness. He felt seriously undermined by it. Challenged on the very ground where he had planted his colours. He meant it when he said he wasn’t sure he believed anyone really wanted to mess around in his own sex. Other, other — that had been his driving force since he could remember. As much other as you could muster. They had even called it other, he and his friends. ‘Cop any other, last night?’ Other when life was ribald, other when it grew more serious. The nobleness of life is to do thus … He being Antony, the other being Cleopatra (blazing black eyes, gold hooped earrings and dirty fingertips). But apparently not. Not necessarily so. What about the nobleness of life is to do thus — he being Antony, the other being … well, you tell me? Was that the great love story of our time — Antony and Antony? In which case where did that leave him, toiling at an activity no longer prized? Carrying home the cups and pennants no one else wanted or could be bothered to compete for?