Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

‘An eternity.’

She laughed, but didn’t hesitate. ‘I’ll be wearing a scarlet leotard.’

As I dreaded, Kreitman thought.

He slept badly. No man sleeps well before a prizegiving. Now that she was almost within his grasp — he didn’t mean that in any predatory sense, but her confusing her husband’s name with his did seem to signal some significant mental changing of the guard on her part — it was natural that he should consult with himself on the question of whether or not he really prized or wanted her. What if he didn’t? If he didn’t, there was no explaining why he’d been moping about without the consolation of company all these weeks — but what if he didn’t? She seemed a responsibility, suddenly. A burden. You don’t take on lightly a woman whose husband has left her, a woman whose husband has left her for your wife and whose voice has risen to perilous heights. Chas normally had a loamy, vegetable contralto — soothing rather than thrilling, like being tucked up in a warm bed. Now her voice was skidding about the upper register, as though it were on ice skates. She sounded like a woman in need of support. Remembering his cat Cobbett, Kreitman wondered whether support was something he had it in him to provide.

He was at the gym shortly before ten, his driver unable to resist a joke about the location. ‘You decided to take up bodybuilding, Mr Kreitman?’

‘Time to get a bit of fat off, Maurice,’ Kreitman said. He thought he caught Maurice grinning Africanly at his new overnighter.

Chas wasn’t waiting for him in reception. They told him at the desk that she was already upstairs in the gym, but it wasn’t going to be as easy as nipping up to find her and having a quick run-around. First he had to enrol as a temporary member, choosing a full-peak, off-peak or semi-off-peak tariff, then he had to fill out a questionnaire about his health, then he had to have his photograph taken, then he had to swap a credit card for a key to the locker room and a towel, and even then they wouldn’t let him up in case he intended getting on to one of the machines prior to medical assessment and without supervision. An insurance thing. ‘I’ve got plenty of insurance of my own,’ Kreitman said. ‘But anyway, I promise I won’t go on anything. I still have a note in my pocket from my mother, forbidding me to climb on to anything mechanical. It’s held good for over thirty years. Trust me, I just want to talk to Mrs Charlie Merriweather. So far you’ve relieved me of the best part of three hundred pounds — that must buy me ten minutes of conversation. Please let me go up.’

The unilluminated women at the desk — he would not have employed them, not even for West Norwood — took pity on themselves, rather than on him, for gyms are wordless places and Kreitman had already spoken more sentences in a minute than they heard here in a month. ‘That way’ — pointing him in the direction of the locker rooms. Not like school showers, no echoing tiles, no rotting timber draining boards for feet, none of that hot badger’s-lair smell of what, before the advent of trainers, they used to call pumps; but still the old discomfort around undressing in the company of people of the same sex. The woman didn’t exist before whom Kreitman wouldn’t, in the blinking of an eye, display his genitals. How many had seen them? How many hundreds? How many thousands, even? In Ispagna … mille e tre . But men, no. To men he remained a secret. Nor did he want to see theirs. Nor their buttocks, though that was the way men generally made it easy on one another, effecting a three-quarter turn so that any genitalia you got, you got in profile; otherwise innocuous rump. Except it never was. Very shocking to Kreitman, the plump wire-haired backside of a man. Naked with one another, men were too naked. Kreitman found them frightening. What they found him was another matter. A man who did not use his mouth like other men? Automatically, he undressed as he’d last undressed as a schoolboy, keeping his shirt on till last, then sliding his shorts on under that.

Chas laughed when she saw him. Pressed polo sweatshirt, socks with a horizontal blue stripe in them pulled halfway to his knees, clumping snow-white trainers the size of moon boots. And still carrying his leather overnighter.

‘You look ready for anything …’ she noted, ‘… except exercise.’

‘I haven’t come here for exercise,’ he reminded her, going over to where she was langlaufing like a mad woman, beating eggs with both hands.

She pushed buttons on her machine and slowed down. A bank of numbers appeared on the dial, followed by a heart, lit up and pounding. She had high colour in her cheeks, no doubt from the exertion. But also, Kreitman thought, from hypermania. He was surprised to recall that he hadn’t seen her since she’d driven him home from Dartmoor in a knitted hat ( her in a knitted hat), with so much left unsaid between them. So how was she looking after all this time, other than perfervid? Was he still in love with her, after weeks and weeks of imagining, now that she was flesh again?

The other and perhaps more important question to ask — was she at all (never mind still) in love with him?

One phrase will suffice for both: Who knows.

What counted was that from this moment they felt locked into it: they had talked of meeting, they had toyed with meeting and now they had actually met — to go backwards from that would have been more tiresome than to go on.

‘I’m sorry about the way I look,’ Kreitman said, offering to read her mind.

‘Is that another way of saying you’re sorry about the way I look?’ Chas said, reading his.

He took her in. Hair pulled up in a fairground-coloured alligator clip, cheeks on fire, chest flat under a taut white body garment whose manufacturer’s label was out and which must have stud-fastened under the crotch, given how lumpy the crotch appeared to be, legs spidery, with too much space between them, and that superabundance of gusset and seam that makes you avert your face when you see it on little girls kitted out for the ballet. How did she look? Shit was how she looked. But who was he to talk? They both looked shit, just like the last time they’d met. Was that their fate, always to look shit for each other?

But if he’d wanted smart he could have stuck with Erica, couldn’t he. Not a fold or seam awry anywhere on Erica. Not a label showing. Ditto Hazel, who went to the gym once in a blue moon, carrying a little too much weight certainly, grown top-heavy over the years (though definitely no tub of lard), but always nicely coordinated and zesty, still capable of turning heads. And Ooshi in running shorts — taking it as read that unshaven legs kindled wild desire in other men as well — was a sight to make an atheist believe in divine purpose. But Kreitman wanted none of those. Kreitman wanted Chas.

‘You look the way I hoped you’d look,’ he lied, and when she peered down her nose at him quizzically, as though over spectacles, though she wore no spectacles for the gym, then extended her long milkmaid’s arms (at the end of which her little afterthought hands, denuded, he noticed, of all rings) — a handshake was what she gave him, not a kiss, her pumping cheesemaker’s handshake — he realised he wasn’t lying at all. He did like the way she looked — she, Chas, as opposed to what she had capitulated to, her unspeakable end-of-civilisation aerobic-wear — liked her because she was contradictory, droll and solemn, stern and wicked, capable of everything that was opposite to her nature. The old fault line.

And she?

Terrified.

Terrified of what she was doing. Terrified of herself, of her own temerity. Terrified of him.

Hard to credit, watching him on the treadmill while she flailed for another fifteen minutes across Norway, a man so unrhythmic, so unaccustomed to any bodily exertion except the little of it imposed by lovemaking, that the slightest unevenness in the revolutions of the rubber tread he toiled along, like Mother Courage, made his head spin and his balance precarious — hard to credit that such a man could inspire terror in anyone. But yes, she was afraid of him. It was possible she had chosen to meet him in the gym precisely so she could put him at a disadvantage and see him at his least fearsome. If so, it didn’t help. His reputation came before him. He was unreliable. He was a man who let you down, whatever he looked like on a treadmill. He made promises he couldn’t keep. ‘It’s not as though I don’t know what I’ll be letting myself in for,’ she e-mailed Dotty, only the day before she asked Kreitman out, supposing you could call this ‘out’. ‘And I am not so naive as to suppose I can be the one to change him.’