Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

It’s wrong of me to speak as though such women had trooped through my life. They had not. If I generalise from Marisa it’s because I learned from her, in the very first moment I saw her, what I had all along been looking for in woman, or, to put it another way, I no sooner saw her than I saw my fate.

What was it that I saw? A grey light in her eyes. Not ruthlessness exactly, but a sort of surety born of seriousness. She smiled, she laughed, she looked elsewhere and wasn’t with us, but no one could have given less the impression of frivolity. Was she a puritan? I believed she was, and only puritans are worth bothering with sexually, for there is no eroticism where there is not a grave weighing of consequences.

I had been aware, also, when I gave her my hand, that she had taken it as though it were hers by right to possess. There was nothing remotely forward or flirtatious about this, nothing of what my father used to call the ‘old whore’s claw’. It simply appeared natural to her to accept what was on offer and hold on to it for as long and with as much sense of proprietorship as she chose. Whatever of mine she touched hereafter, would be hers. I sat there, watching her, enumerating my losses.

‘The way a man takes off his jacket tells you all you need to know about him,’ my grandmother used to say. ‘If you can’t do it with confidence, keep it on.’ When Marisa took off her jacket — beautifully tailored it was, single-buttoned with wide revers and a peplum that graced her hips — she told me all I needed to know about myself . I was gone. In fact a waiter helped her out of it, a test of confidence in itself, but she responded to his movements — leaning into him and then shaking herself free — as though men had helped her out of jackets all her life. Under the jacket she wore a filmy, lovesick satin shirt that seemed more to haunt her body than to clothe it. No cleavage. She was not, as I was to discover, a cleavage type. She owned nothing low-cut. There is always something desperate about women who want you to look down into their breasts. Marisa carried hers with a full-on assurance, knowing that the beauty of her chest was frontal not abysmal, a matter of the harmonious interrelation of thorax and abdomen, of arms and back and shoulders, not the mere shape and protuberance of her mammaries. I stress this because I have never been particularly moved by breasts as discrete objects, to be enjoyed independ-ently of the woman to whom they belong. It was the way Marisa carried her chest as a sort of introduction or frontispiece to herself — at once soft and sculpted, the breasts themselves not large, though the general effect luxurious — that moved me. At the moment of her sitting down, anyway, I had to look away. It was that or go blind. Whether that was why she laughed I couldn’t tell, but she was one of those women who know they must laugh at the disturbance of which their voluptuousness is the cause. And hers was a rich contralto laugh, full of depths, like everything else about her somehow material and evanescent all at once, evoking the laughter of summers long gone or summers yet to be.

Of her husband Freddy — a successful media musicologist who advised radio listeners on their record collections and popped up on television as well on account of the lightness with which he wore his learning and the frenetic way he moved his hands, a man who made too much conversation and tore his food before he ate it — she was absently tolerant, sometimes remembering to brush crumbs off his lap, or to wipe cream from his face, but always with the back of her hand, and without looking at him, in the manner of a mother busy with too many children. Of me, her husband’s bookseller, she took no apparent notice, whatever her treatment of my offered hand (as though it were hers to shake or sever) portended. . Saving me for another day.

Whether the clandestine appointment she made boldly with me some months later really was about buying her husband a birthday gift of Berlioz’s Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration in as beautiful an edition as I could find, or whether it was me she wanted to see, I never asked, even after we married. We were to exchange many confidences that were obscene by the usual marital standards, and it’s true that I subjected her to interrogations for which many a person would have said I deserved to burn in hell, but we were never gross in the intrusive sense. That’s to say she always led me away from intrusion when intrusion threatened the secrecy necessary to a successful union.

I begrudged Freddy his Berlioz, whatever Marisa’s motives in buying it for him. Not the book itself but the circumstances of her giving it — the fact of her putting her mind to what would best please him, her conscientiousness in seeking my advice on the matter, her not caring how much it would cost, and her meaning to present it, as she told me, at a dinner in Freddy’s favourite Roman restaurant to which she was secretly flying out their closest friends. This was a wife with a grand sense of marital ceremony, who meant well by her husband, who followed his passions and cared about his happiness, even if she did have half an eye on another man. Principled, I called that, and only women of principle have ever aroused me.

Man for man — setting aside his modest media fame — there was not a great deal to choose between us, Marisa’s then husband and me. I had more money, he had a more demonstrative presence; I was better-looking, he had a more powerful build, but neither of us was what you’d call a Byron. What I believe swung it my way was talk. I’ve said that Freddy was a conversationalist, but a conversationalist will often leave a woman lonely. Marisa wanted to converse, not be conversation’s recipient. And I was all talk of the sort she needed. Talk that was dramatic, observational and of the moment, talk that was amusing but more importantly amusable, talk that was fed by talk, talk that was listening to talk. I am said to be womanly in this regard, though I confess to not quite knowing what that means.

Oceanic, perhaps. Not rigidly structured. Amniotic. I liked starting without knowing where I was going to finish or be led, I liked letting the current of talk carry me along, wishing neither to deliver a lecture to any woman fortunate enough to find herself ensconced with me (as Freddy always did), nor to curtail her in a flight of her own because I had more pressing matters to attend to (as Freddy always had). I made myself an agreeable but above all an available companion. On days when we’d made no arrangement to meet, Marisa always knew she could ring me up and ask me to accompany her to a gallery opening, to the theatre, to a concert, or to dinner. It helped that we were near neighbours, both residents of Marylebone. Everything we needed for a life of civilised, incipient adultery was there for us to extend a dainty pair of fingers and pluck without appearing obvious or greedy. We looked at art a lot, but we ate out even more. Food was our milieu, restaurants more the medium of our courtship than hotel bedrooms. Marisa’s favourite restaurant — the one to which Marius would one day win the right to take her, the scene of their first kiss (hear the deranging sibilants in it: first kiss ) — was my favourite restaurant first. It was part of my appeal — how many more restaurants I knew than she and Freddy did, and how many more restaurants knew me. I must have appeared sybaritic to her: a man wholly given over to the three great sedentary pleasures — reading, eating, talking. And women like men who sit still for them.

But Marisa also liked men who would, at other hours, dance with her. I was reluctant at first. Not because I couldn’t dance but because dancing was an activity I associated with my mother and my aunts and never remembered I enjoyed until I did it. It was her telling me that Freddy had never danced with her that changed my mind. Whatever Freddy wasn’t, I was. Whatever Freddy didn’t, I did. And the dancing school, incongruously housed in the vaults of a grey steepled Victorian church, was virtually on my doorstep. When Marisa rang me out of the blue and asked me, even in the middle of a working day, whether I was free to dance, I could be quickstepping with her in under twenty minutes. Sometimes she would already be there when I arrived, in the arms of one of those apache dancers she could conjure up out of a room of cleanly shaven bank clerks. Then I would sit — a more than willing wallflower — on one of the plastic chairs arrayed on one side of the room, among the discarded anoraks and day shoes, and let the man and the movement claim her.