Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

‘Couldn’t you at least have kept it in your hasen until we drove away from their front door?’ I’d expostulate with him, afterwards.

‘Did they complain?’

‘That’s not the point, Sheeny.’

‘So what’s the point?’

‘This is my round. This is where I sell ice-creams. They know me here.’

‘So you should thank me.’

‘Why should I thank you?’

‘For giving them a thirst. Oink, oink!’

I wouldn’t reply.

‘Oink, oink?’

‘OK, Sheeny. Oink, oink. Now put it away.’

‘What for? Aren’t we going to Laps’ now?’

He was right. Not about my needing to thank him, but that they didn’t complain. I’ve always been surprised about that — just how compliant women are when it comes to the putz. No one tells you that when you’re cowering in your shell. You drag the ocean bottom of your imagination and come up with the insane idea that it might be something to slide your in-between between a lady’s painted lips and then suffer months of shame for sinking to such depths. And all along the ladies are thinking the same thought. Not every one of them gave Sheeny what he wanted straight away. Some of them felt as I did, that it was preferable to wait until we’d driven fifty yards down the street. But none ever said, ‘How dare you assume that I’ll suck on that thing just because you’ve got the chutzpah to have it hanging out?’

This is not sour-grapes misogyny. I got my share. But I was an incorrigible foreplay man. I liked to know their names. I liked to talk about the weather. I liked to know what they were reading. Then I liked to fish my putz out.

And it upset me that all women weren’t insistent on these necessary little social rituals themselves.

Partly I felt this out of respect for the women who had brought me up. I wouldn’t have wanted to think that any aunty of mine, or any sister come to that, would have woodpecked Sheeny the way those Middleton women did, without a by your leave. But my relative squeamishness proved something else, too. I wasn’t the real thing. I wasn’t Kardomah to my soul. As far as tsatskying went I was merely a tourist.

I tried the Waxman method just once. I interrupted my ice-cream round one wet bile-yellow but still somehow sticky April evening to pick up a bull-necked choc-ice fresser who’d been giving me the nod every night for a week. ‘Get in,’ I said. I didn’t even open the passenger door of my stop-me-and-buy-one for her. I let her walk around of her own volition and climb in. Then I parted my yellow nylon coat and pulled out my putz. Then I drove up into the fields behind the brickworks, turned the engine off, and sat back the way I’d seen Sheeny do. Sat back and looked down over the shot-towers and chimneys of Middleton. She couldn’t reach me. Her neck was not flexible enough. And the mini was not coach-built with Sheeny Waxman ask-no-questions fellatio in mind. ‘Out,’ I said. Then I lay down in the clammy field and waited for her to do me there. No, warm for the time of year, isn’t it. No, I’m going to Cambridge at the end of the year, and what do you do for a crust. No, read any good books lately. And it worked. Sheeny was right. She didn’t complain. It’s even possible she was grateful not to be harassed with small talk. The only one experiencing difficulties was me. I had been too well brought up. It had always seemed to me that politeness demanded a big come. Astounded expression, rolling eyes, spasming shoulders, quivering feet, ten-minute howl — the works. But half-way through Act IV Scene v I over-convulsed and spilled the change from the pockets of my nylon coat. The evening’s takings, all of it in threepenny bits and sixpenny pieces, flung far and wide across the meadow of old bricks and weeds. I finished coming then got her to help me gather in the dosh. Anyone watching would have thought we were lovers in the grass, looking for four-leaf clovers and daisies to chain around each other’s necks. We fell to talking as we searched, whatever we were, which I suppose you could say was a sort of foreplay after the event. Also not something Sheeny expended any energy on. So I still wasn’t able to feel I’d succeeded in being a callous carefree fellatee.

I didn’t find all the takings either. And that wasn’t the end of my problems. So little was I a callous carefree fellatee that I’d taken the keys out of the ignition when I lay me on the grass — don’t ask me why: just to be on the safe side, I suppose, just in case she decided to swallow those as well, just in case she had a mind to make off with the vehicle while I was coming — and these too had rolled out with the change. And were gone.

We searched for an hour. Then I walked back down with her in the warm rain and rang up the depot from her house. There were questions to be answered in the matter of what I was doing parked in the middle of a hill field when I was supposed to be out selling ice-cream. And what I was doing throwing away the keys. But the real trouble came when I was towed back into the depot with melted ice-cream pouring out from the back of the mini-van. For if you lost your keys you lost your freezer.

‘Every night,’ the manager said to me the next day, ‘I have to remember to plug in my briefcase. Do you know why?’

Of course I knew why. Because he was a loser, that’s why. But what I said was, ‘To keep it cold, sir.’

He showed me the palms of his hands. ‘Exactly. To keep it cold. And do you know what would happen if I forgot?’

Of course I knew what would happen. His life would improve. But what I said was, ‘You’d have a wet briefcase, sir.’

So far he seemed pleased with me. ‘Exactly. And if I have a wet briefcase … But you know the rest. You’re a smart lad.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Look, Walzer,’ he said, changing his position in his chair, and changing his tone, too. Confidentiality, that was what he was trying for. Smart lad to smart lad. ‘Look, Walzer, I can do one of two things. I can take the cost of the ruined pieces out of your next pay-packet.’ (Pieces, we called them. Christian for shticks.) ‘Or I can sack you.’

He was Oxford, as I’ve said. Balliol. Handsome, with shadow-grey jowls. And sad. It couldn’t have been what he had ever anticipated for himself, having to remember to plug a refrigerated briefcase in every night. But you start with reading economics — and the next thing … That’s the way with tsatskes — they imperceptibly creep up on a man.

Maybe I saw myself in him, my own future. Maybe I was just losing my bottle again, the way I had against that limber foul-mouth Royboy Roylance. Or maybe I was once more the gull of language, as I’d been when talking on the phone to Phil Radic, and couldn’t resist the answer hidden in the question. I wasn’t much good at protecting my own interests, whichever way you read it.

‘Why don’t you just do both, Mr Lightbowne,’ I said, removing my yellow nylon coat without even bothering to check for personals, and flouncing out like someone failing an audition for a chorus line.

So I got to put in a few months with my father after all. And was there, in the middle, when the gantse geshecht came falling down.

The times were partly to blame. Swag wasn’t what it had been. People were spending their money on different things. The technological revolution hadn’t yet happened — no one had a computer or a facsimile or even an answering machine in those days — but transistor radios were coming in, and tape recorders were turning into cassette players, and when they weren’t jigging to a monotonous beat the poor were going to the Costa Brava and returning with more sophisticated attitudes to domestic ornamentation. Why have a love-in-a-cottage chalk wall plaque over your fire when you could load the mantelpiece with dying bulls and flamenco dancers whose satin skirts twirled in the updraught? Swag itself was changing — that’s what I’m saying. Swag was becoming internationalized, fulfilling grander dreams.