Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

‘Like Marvin Kreitman?’

The sisters exchanged a long look. ‘Out of the frying pan into the fire,’ Dotty said.

‘Come on. You said I’d have been better off with a fucker. Have the courage of your convictions. Would I have been happier with Marvin Kreitman?’

‘I didn’t say you’d have been happier with a fucker, I said better off, less demeaned.’

‘So would I have been less demeaned with Kreitman?’

Dotty thought about it. ‘He’s a bit of a throwback.’

‘Meaning?’

‘He’s a sort we thought we were rid of. I feel a certain nostalgia for the type myself, but I can see that his was a virus we needed to knock out. Are you telling me there’s about to be another outbreak of him?’

‘Dotty, will you be straight! Would I have been less demeaned married to a man like Kreitman, whether or not he was fucking every woman in sight, than I was — than you say I was — married to a man who was visibly dying of not fucking anybody?’

Dotty thought about it some more. She held an olive out before her lips for so long that Chas thought she was going to scream. ‘Jesus, Dotty!’ she cried. ‘Is this another of your facial exercises?’

‘I will conscientiously answer your question,’ Dotty said.

‘When? Next week? Next year?’

‘Now.’

‘And …?’

Dotty swallowed her olive and looked long into her sister’s eyes. ‘God help any woman who has to make that choice,’ she said.

Waiting for her to call, Kreitman put on flamenco music — Lorca’s sore-throat cante jondo was what he loved, not the heel-clicking tourist rubbish — and lay on his bed listening to it all the day and half the night, drowning out the club opposite, the rasping melancholy of unrequitedness. How good sex was when you couldn’t get it! Why, on the night of their soul-searching, had he not frogmarched Charlie Merriweather out of the restaurant and over to Virgin Records on Oxford Street, bought him every piece of gypsy music in the store, and ordered him to go home and enjoy cultivating the exquisite art of doing without, instead of indulging his unseemly wondering and allowing it to bring them both to this pass?

When he wanted a break from flamenco he played shove-halfpenny with himself, hours at a time. Exhausted by that, he challenged his computer to chess. Pissed off with losing, he dusted down some of his old college books and grew maudlin. Beginning his early married life in the most straitened circumstances, Francis Place had cautioned against cramped living quarters. ‘Nothing conduces so much to the degradation of a man and a woman …’ Well, there was no woman living in these cramped quarters, and in Kreitman’s view nothing conduced so much to a man’s degradation as that.

Looking at himself in his bathroom mirror, he saw a lonely man. Was this the loneliest he’d ever been? Was he lonelier now than on that last lost night in Barcelona, heartbreak paella perfuming the cobbled streets and his hot fist stuffed with pesetas? Much lonelier. Then he could only guess what he was missing. Now he was in a position to count losses until his hair turned grey.

There is some mischief in numbers. Waiting for you in the midst of plenty, zilch. The more Kreitman counted the less he had. So was that all he’d been amassing over so many years — nothing?

Other than Charlie, who was not available to him at the moment, he had no male friends. It’s a choice you make: either you go chasing women or you have friends. There isn’t room for both. Kreitman’s women were his friends, which worked well, kept him in company, conversation and games of chess, so long as they remained his women. But he had no appetite for any of his women now, not since he’d watched Chas on her knees on the croquet lawn, in a black-mass mockery of prayer to a man for whom she had no regard. Some sights blind you to all others. Fix your gaze on Sodom and Gomorrah going up in sulphur on the Plain of Mamre and you turn to stone. Kreitman had disobeyed the injunctions of decency and wisdom and kept his curtains open. Only he hadn’t turned to stone; he’d turned to jelly.

If he were tucking his grown-up daughters into bed and telling them what life had thrown at Marvin Kreitman next, they wouldn’t have been much impressed with the adult content of his story. ‘Now, when it’s too late, you’re telling us fairy stories. In the catalogue of contemporary carnalities, Daddy, touching someone’s dick is not that mega.’

Where had he been, their old man? What would he say if they told him about a triple anal?

It was true. He knew it. He had stood at the window, aghast, watching not that much happening. But how much had to happen? For Marvin Kreitman, sitting in a cinema and waiting for the twelve-foot kiss — just that, just two lips brushing — was a shattering experience. No matter how trashy the plot, no matter how cheesy the actors, he hung on the coming kiss in palpitating suspense — was it soon … was it near … was it now ! And when at last it did come, it was as though he’d never seen one before: it dried up his mouth, soaked the collar of his shirt, bound steel hoops around his chest. Try breathing now, Kreitman!

No small thing, a kiss, whatever happened next. And as for reaching out for body parts …

In the end it’s all about susceptibility to shock. If it feels rude, it is rude. Call it wonderment. The wonderment of rude. Some of us never have it, some of us don’t know how to keep it. Chas had it and so far Chas had kept it. That was enough for Kreitman. He had looked out on to the moor, seen consciousness of rude and gone up in flames.

Who among those he’d been fucking for dear life only a month before — he’d show them triple anal! — could lodge anything in his head to rival Chas giving wonder? Ooshi in her rubber corset, playing the dominatrix with one eye on the clock? ‘Beg, Kreitman!’ Erica wetting his ear with what she’d done with other women? ‘Then I … then she … then I … after which we …’ Forget it. Yes, he’d begged abjectly enough in his time — ‘Please, Ooshi, oh God no, oh God yes, not that, yes that!’ Sure, he’d urged Erica on in her flagging fantasies — ‘You didn’t, you couldn’t, you never!’ But their day was over. They were bored with him and he was bored with them. Who started it didn’t matter. They’d lost the trick of rude. They were too overt, too seamlessly the thing they were. They weren’t respectable and lewd. They weren’t confident and gauche. They didn’t have fault lines running through them, on one side of which they kicked husbands off the premises, like queens of infinite space, and on the other pronounced prick as though it were the brand name of a tuck-shop lolly. No fault line, no desire; and if he no longer desired them (or, indeed, they him) there was no point seeing them. Here was the catch in his erotic reasoning. His social life waited on his dick. His dick waited on his imagination. So if his imagination was not stirred, he ate alone.

He rang his mother just once, then put the phone down. How was that for restraint! If ever there were a blame and kiss-it-better time, this was it, Kreitman up to his ears in his own bhuna chicken juices and reduced to playing chess with a computer. All your doing, Ma. Behold the glory and the ruination of your works! But Chas was the only person it excited him to blame for his decline and fall now. She was the woman in his life — let her fix it!

He had to force himself to leave the flat. One morning he found himself being tailed by a ruby-red Smart driven by an African chauffeur. It took him ten minutes of quickening then reducing his pace, and a further ten trying to work out who would be putting a detective on him — Hazel, obviously, but why? — before he remembered that the car and its chauffeur were his.