Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

Vulvas come and go in ping-pong as in everything else. See one, some would say, and you’ve seen them all. But no vulva moved — actually moved and spoke to you — as Lorna Peachley’s did.

Who can disentangle what from what in such a matrix of consequences? Which of Lorna Peachley’s moving body parts, if any, was decisive in fixing me for ever in servitude to her? I can still see how her pony-tail pranced too, and how the light caught the lovesick purple of the ribbons she wore. Heart-breaking for me, ribbons in a lovely girl’s hair. Was I touched, rather than stirred, into submission? And what if I’d won that point, what if you’d netted that half-volley and punched the air in frustration not triumph, sending a vibration of defeat not V for victory through your breasts, your belly, your pudendum (though where was your shame, Lorna Peachley)? Would everything have turned out differently in that case? Would I have loved you conventionally? Married you instead of Sabine Weinberger? Outraged my father who wanted me to practise on shikselehs, not marry them, however beautiful and touching and all-moving? Sired a couple of sweet half-Peachley gentile children, Sally and Nigel, instead of the rabid Channa and Baruch? And maybe stayed in touch with where I hailed from, at the intersection of the Irwell and the Bug, joined the Whitefield golf club with you, played bridge with you in Bury, instead of getting out, going as far away as possible, running running running from the tsatskes and the losing?

Doubt it. Seriously doubt it. A gorgeous prospect, but not for me. I had to lose to someone softer than myself. Lorna Peachley was ideal. Made for it. And there would always have been another winning point to set me off, had she not found just the shot to do it that afternoon in Macclesfield. She had more than half-volleys in her armoury.

Unhappy in Timperley, her family moved to Whitefield Heights. That was decisive. Now she could play for Lancashire. Now we could train together. Now I could be invited over to her house, where she had her own table, partly to practise, partly to give her parents, the doctors Peachley, a closer squizz at a Jewish person. They hadn’t realized, when they’d shifted to Whitefield, that they were going to be the sole sandy Anglos in a concentration of ex-beetroot farmers from the banks of the River Dniester, recently made good. What they’d constructed their all-moving blue-black olives-in-garlic daughter out of, these lizard-still, cream-coloured Home Counties homoeopaths, I have no idea. It must have been a mystery to them too. And I guess that was another reason they had me round so often: they wanted to understand the manner of beast that had somehow snuck in between great-granny’s sheets calling cuckoo! however many full moons ago.

Brian and Mary. Sweet people. I’d catch them staring at me intently when they thought I wasn’t looking, trying to fathom my workings. How could an organism so hot still function? How did I see where I was going with all that hair hanging over my eyes? How come I didn’t fall over, with such top-heavy brick shithouse shoulders? I should have introduced them to my father. He’d have tested their understanding of the human sciences.

Of course the other thing they were looking to see was what I might be doing to their daughter. The years were advancing, but we still hadn’t reached that nadir of moral decline when parents invited you in to cohabit freely with their children. We were of the age of consent, but only just. Wisdom dictated that we shouldn’t be given too much free scope. But they would never have had an inkling of what we were really up to. What I was really up to. Not Brian and Mary. Morbidities of the sort I favoured were not dreamt of in their philosophy. Else they’d have insisted we get on with regulation shtupping between games, like ordinary well-adjusted kids our age.

I was making their lovely daughter ill.

She wrote to me, asking me not to call on her for a while. She was confused. Upset. Suffering headaches. Feeling — she didn’t know what — peculiar.

Welcome to the club. I’d upped the ante recently, having lost to her in a charity cup match, in full public view. A humiliation. A male player of my standing was not expected to go out to a woman, however good. And not so comprehensively. I felt the loss in what the Bible calls the bowels. It went straight there, like a low blow. A sort of nausea, but also a lightness, as if I hadn’t eaten for a month. Dizzy, too. I could barely stay upright. Or together. I felt I was coming apart in strips. Disintegration of the moral fibre. You could have blown me over and shredded me. Or she could. But then she had. Losing to her on her home table in Whitefield with only Brian and Mary peeping was one thing, but out in the world, with all the world watching — oh, the horrid sickly beauty of it, like the sweet disgusting death smell of a bat cave. Too high. Too warm. Too naked. Too many. No god.

Think jealousy, if you’re not familiar with the vertiginous sensation I’m describing. Think watching the woman you love submitting to another man’s embraces where everyone can see. Go on, get into it! Think two fingers up the cunt. Think three if it’ll help. Think everything Othello thought when he saw Sheeny Waxman wiping his dick on Desdemona’s handkerchief. And now remove the third party. Keep it just between you and her. Except that there is no you. You’re shredded. Blown apart. Not just disregarded but dismembered. Skinned until your bones squeak. And now sit back and enjoy.

It’s only love you’re experiencing, when all is said and done. Love with all the schmaltz removed. The house, the kids, the pension fund. It’s only eroticism without the domestic aftermath.

We’d horseplayed, afterwards, back at her place, fallen into a bean-bag, rolled on to the floor. ‘Beat you, beat you!’ she’d laughed, and I’d manoeuvred myself so that she had her arm round my throat and I could barely breathe. ‘Now finish the job,’ I’d pleaded. The urgency in my voice surprised even me. ‘One little squeeze. That’s all it would take. I won’t stop you. I couldn’t stop you. You’re too strong. I yield to you utterly. Make me nothing.’

And she’d laughed and squeezed and laughed some more until she realized that I meant it.

Hence the headaches.

She pointed her bat at my temples, like a pistol, some days later. After beating me again. Bang bang, you’re dead. ‘Not like that,’ I’d said. And I’d taken the bat out of her hand and put the handle down my throat. Like that.

Hence the letter.

Don’t take the bat metaphor too literally. I did for a while, in later years, when I was trying to make sense of it all. I frequented clubs where you could actually be beaten with an instrument resembling a ping-pong bat, that’s if you can imagine a ping-pong bat made of leather and studs and someone in spiked boots wielding it. A paddle, they call it in the business. Fancy a paddling, me duck?

Altogether too literal. They’re right to call themselves fetishists. They’ve lost the meaning in the means. They worship the mere instrumentation. You know the moment you bend over that that’s not it, not it at all.

But you go ahead anyway. You slip your wrists into metal rings, consent to a leather strap closing around your throat, shut your eyes and put up with the grinding unimaginativeness of the ritual, so as not to cause offence or distress. For sadists, too, have feelings.

The last thing I wanted Lorna Peachley to do was hang me from the rafters and paddle me with her bat. Not the very last thing, but one of the last things. The point of the bat was that she should use me as she used it. I didn’t want to suffer the bat, I wanted to be the bat. Let’s be clear — not the ball, the bat. The bat. A bat has a handle, so does a man. Maybe it’s all very simple really and goes back to the days when all those women took turns to hold me out. By the handle.