Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

‘Is this what’s always in it for you?’ she asked.

He didn’t stir. ‘I don’t get any part of that question,’ he said. They had left the bathroom door ajar and by the faint yellow light coming in from the street he could just make out their distorted reflections in the chromeware, some of him in the taps, some of her in the towel rail, come together more astonishingly, if that could be, than even in their actual conjoined flesh.

She took her time. Infinity was all around them. ‘Is this the reason you go from woman to woman?’

This? Well, he couldn’t pretend he didn’t know what this meant. ‘ This , Chas, is the reason I’m going nowhere.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It isn’t necessary to palm me off. I’d actually prefer to hear it from you that you go from woman to woman in order to keep on feeling this. I can see how it could become compulsive. Looking to be reinvented, again and again, remade in another person’s appreciation of you. I can forgive that sooner than some heartless, accumulative thing.’

‘I’m not heartless, I’m humourless. I can’t do casualness.’

‘I thought casualness was exactly what you did do.’

‘I know that’s what you thought. You were wrong. I do solemnity. I make a wake out of everything. That’s to say I did .’

‘But I’m not talking about the spirit in which you do numbers, I’m just asking why you do numbers at all.’

‘I don’t. Just because they accumulate doesn’t mean I’m an accumulator. They accumulate in the course of my trying to pin them down.’

‘But why do you want to pin women down, Marvin? Listen to your own language. Why must they be down , and why must you bring them down?’

She was disappointed in herself. She had meant to be subtler. He had not acted — so far, so far — as she had expected him to act, yet here was she asking precisely the questions which he must have known she’d ask.

Listening to her, Kreitman felt a fraud, and not a little sorry for them both. If he’d ever had a day as a doer-down of women, a libertine or whatever the word used to be, that day was over. There were no more libertines. The very idea was an anachronism. Only in the heart of Charlie — herself an anachronism — did the fear of libertinage still exist. Only in this bed, next to this woman, was he still a dangerous man. He thought it behoved him to tell her that.

‘Listen, Charlie,’ he said, ‘you’re fighting an enemy that’s packed up and gone home. The great seducers of the past were first and foremost blasphemers and revolutionaries. They got at God and the established order through women. There’s no mileage in that any more. Now the worst crime we can charge them with is misogyny. Which is not just feeble psychology — the idea that you would go through women because you hate them — it’s also milk-and-water theology. What a downgrading of sin! To reduce evil to such a piddling ambition — the sexual downfall of a gullible woman.’

‘It’s not so piddling if you’re the woman.’

‘Of course it’s not … assuming she exists any more, the poor but honest wictim.’

‘It’s still a question why you seek it, Marvin, even if you would rather be fighting God.’

‘I don’t seek the downfall of women. I just need them to stay still while I work out what I do seek. Which is more likely to be my own downfall.’

She could hardly stay still herself after that. ‘No fear,’ she laughed. She tried to break from his arms, but he kept them close around her, his hands locked in the fuzzy hollow of her back, a smaller space than he’d imagined, a velvety declivity like something unexpected in nature, a mouse hole on a golf course, or a tiny crater from a meteorite. In clothes she seemed all bones, a woman made of calcium and chalk, out of them she was an undulation of smooth surfaces. How this could be, Kreitman had no idea. But then she was all surprises to him.

He could have said that that was one reason why he went, in her quaint phrase, from woman to woman — why he had once gone from woman to woman — because you never knew what you were going to find. The ever unfolding amazement. But he was no longer in the grip of unlocated curiosity; what moved him now was the miracle of Chas: why her skin refuted chaos theory; why his own skin seemed to come off under her fingers, so unexpectedly possessive was her touch; why his body received hers as though her imprint had been on him since birth.

He kissed all around her eyes. Two perfect circles. ‘I can’t make it sound any good,’ he told her, ‘and I ask you not to ask me to name it — but here, now, with you, I have found what I want.’

She blinked something salty into his mouth. ‘Will it do me any good to believe that?’ she asked.

‘Not for me to say. I can only tell you what I tell you.’

‘Will it do you any good for me to believe that?’

He thought about it. Make a woman believe you and you’re in trouble if you’re lying. Trouble with yourself. He knew that. Every man knows that. The hard bit is to know whether you’re lying or not. All he could think was that he’d come through a sort of purgatory getting to this point with her. She had been touchy at dinner with his business friends, noisy men who sold sunglasses and weren’t at all, to her sense, those easygoing profiteers he’d promised her. ‘I don’t know where you’re going, Kreitman,’ one of them had challenged him, over the third or fourth bottle of champagne, ‘but I’m going this way’ — pointing upwards and meaning, if Chas understood him correctly, to the topmost rung of the ladder of success. Before Kreitman had found something witty to say in reply, a second sunglasses man had roared with laughter, offering it as his opinion that ‘that way’ — meaning up the stairs of the hotel — was exactly where Kreitman was going too. Just the coarse surmisings Chas had been dreading. God knows, in Kreitman’s reading of the situation, she had fought hard to dispel any doubts that she was his tart for the night, by coming down to dinner in an appallingly ill-fitting trouser suit made of green sacking, the jacket loose on her chest, revealing altogether too much of a white armoured brassiere, and too scant behind, showing the label of her trousers, or something even worse; the trousers themselves too floppy and too long, a clown’s trousers, through which, whether or not that was the label he could see when she rose to leave the room, was too visible the outline of her underwear. For desire to have got past such an outfit, what was over and what was under, some other element must have come into play. That other element could only have been love.

He buried his face in her neck and breathed in her odours. Hay and plum wine. Upsetting. God knows why. Something autumnal. She was passing and it was his job to hold her back.

‘If you want to know what will do me good,’ he said sadly, as though speaking of impossibilities, ‘it’s you learning to believe what I say to you.’

This time she did break from him, and sat up, pulling the sheets to her neck. She didn’t like her white freckled chest, with its striations of middle age, nor did Kreitman; she didn’t like her undermined breasts with their flat nipples, unpalatable even to her babies, as indeed they were to Kreitman — didn’t that prove it was love?

‘What would you think of me if I took at face value everything you’re telling me,’ she almost pleaded, ‘and pretended to ignore that you’ve said it to a hundred other women?’

He sat up himself and reached for the unfinished wine by his bedside, by her bedside rather, for he had come to her room, not taken her to his, knocking gently, softly softly, no brusque alarms, even while she was still trying to decide whether she was a blackguard or not. The wine had been waiting, a queer-shaped bottle on a stainless-steel tray, with a card telling you the price around its neck. All part of the twenty-first-century makeover of grand hotels from chintz to stainless steel, the beds twice the size that had sufficed last century’s travellers, and no more pretence that fucking wasn’t the reason you were here. Gone, the old awkwardness around the signing-in — Mr … and Miss … oops!; gone the shifty expression on the porter’s face and the coughing in the lift; gone the morning flurry to remake the bed so the chambermaid should never guess your secret — all gone, anachronisms, just like Kreitman, the last soldier of illicit sex. Now you fouled the sheets before you left the room, so no one should think you’d had a quiet night.