Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

If she left her body when she danced, I left mine just watching her. She wasn’t like the many careworn Japanese dancers who attended the school, precise and anxious in their foot movements, as though dancing was something the body had to learn from scratch and happened only in an area between the ankle and the toes, at the behest entirely of the brain, but nor was she one of those Corybantes who thrash their hair about and wave their hands. Hers was a much more measured frenzy — concentrated, never not aware, as though the mind she was escaping from was always in the room waiting to escort her home again. So that in the end this state of possession was a sort of defiance — of herself not least. And, I liked to think, of me. She would close her eyes and let her head fall back — and I’d be gone from it.

On summer evenings I allowed her to seduce me into gentler exercise. We walked in Regent’s Park — a home from home for both of us — not hand in hand, not like lovers but like old friends with catching up to do. We sat on benches and watched the ducks, we identified flowers, we got to know the men who fed the birds, the Sikh with his black bin liner filled with crumbs, the squirrel man who held his hands out like a scarecrow, showing the squirrels the nuts he ’d brought for them and for which, with only the quickest nervy look around them, they ran up him as though he were a tree. We observed other couples with tenderness as though we were past all that and fondly recalled ourselves in them. Sometimes I contrived to walk behind her — pausing to tie up a shoelace or throw litter in a bin — so that I could admire the strength of her legs and have a moment to myself to swoon over her. But openly I made no show of what I felt and did not press myself upon her.

This role of friend to Marisa was one I found pleasurable — for Marisa was herself a vivacious talker once unloosed — long before we kissed, and regardless of what would come of it. Indeed, had Marisa offered the two men in her life the compromise of continuing to lie with the one so long as she was permitted to talk to the other, I for my part would have accepted it. Was I not, after all, destined to accept a much poorer bargain on the face of it when it came to Marius, a man with whom Marisa would both lie and talk?

But Freddy was not framed as I am framed. Though the mere thought of eating out alone with his wife, discussing the nothing very much of their domestic life (and no third party to appreciate the vivacity of his talk), made him apoplectic, the thought of another man discussing anything with her made him more apoplectic still. You can hurt some men, it seems, by stealing from them what they are not aware they want.

He visited me in the shop when he found out what had been going on, shouting, even before I’d come out of my office, ‘So these are the thanks I get.’ Most angry husbands would not have remembered their grammar. ‘This is the thanks’ is the usual locution. But Freddy was as punctilious in his usage as I am, and indeed as Marius would be, which must say something about Marisa’s preference for precise men.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said, ‘what it is I owe you thanks for.’ ‘For my wife for one thing.’

‘You haven’t given me your wife.’ ‘You’re damn right I haven’t.’

‘Then what are these thanks that you have come to collect?’

‘I haven’t come to collect anything. I’ve come to punch your nose.’

Hearing the commotion, my staff emerged in no great hurry from their cubicles. Had Freddy wanted to make a fight of it he ’d have had them to contend with as well. Not a terrifying sight, four antiquarian booksellers in worn bookworm suits (ponytailed Andrew the most macho of the lot), and an easily upset secretary in an ankle chain — I will come to the ankle chain — but then Freddy wasn’t a terrifying sight either. And I knew he would not make good on his threat to punch me on the nose. His hands were too important to him. Not because he feared particularly for his piano playing, which even he knew was execrable, but because he needed them in his profession as expressive television pundit.

‘It’s all right, go back to work,’ I told my staff. To Freddy I said, ‘We do no more than meet in restaurants some afternoons.’

Not quite true, but true enough.

He breathed through his nostrils at me, like a horse. I got the feeling that had I told him we no more than met at the Savoy and fornicated some evenings he ’d have been less disgusted.

‘I didn’t ask,’ he said, ‘for you to meet my wife in restaurants some afternoons.’

‘No, you didn’t,’ I conceded.

‘And no judge is going to believe that story anyway.’ ‘No judge?’

‘What — you think I’m not going to name you? You think I’m going to go for irreconcilable differences or whatever they call it now when I’ve got the evidence of her adultery staring me in the face?’

‘We just talk, Freddy.’

Not quite true, but true enough.

‘ Talk . I’ve seen your talk . I’ve got photographs of your talk .’

‘I doubt,’ I said, ‘that photographs of talk will cut much ice with a judge.’

A flippancy I regretted no sooner than I’d spoken it. But I’ve said that being the lover didn’t suit me. It turned me into a person I neither recognised nor liked. A jeerer. I even felt differently inside my own skin, as though I inhabited myself lightly, I a man who had always understood himself as heavy.

The husband burned his eyes into me. He too, perhaps, was playing an unaccustomed role. He lit a cigarette and threw the dead match on the carpet. I bent to pick it up.

‘We ’ll see then, shall we,’ he said. ‘We ’ll see what cuts ice , as you so elegantly put it. No doubt you are more familiar with the divorce courts than I am. But my feeling, for what it’s worth, is that what you mean by talk would get you a life sentence in some parts of the world.’

Which parts of the world was he referring to? Saudi Arabia? The Yemen?

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t think this would be a divorcing matter.’

‘That’s good of you. What would you have done had you thought it was a divorcing matter? Made shorter sentences?’

He was waving his arms about so violently I wondered if he might punch me, inadvertently, after all.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Nothing like as sorry as you will be. Rest assured, Quinn, I will take you for every penny you have.’

He made an operatic gesture with his hand, meaning, I supposed, say goodbye to all this: your shelves of modern first editions, your locked mahogany cupboards of illuminated bibles, your Berliozes, the pampered lifestyle which allows you to go out to restaurants some afternoons with other men’s wives. I even thought I knew the tune. Non più andrai, farfallone amoroso . .

I shrugged. What else could I do? I had no instinct for being the other man.

‘And I’ll be sending back every book I have ever bought from you, together with every book you seduced my wife into buying for me — buying for me , ha, there ’s a joke I’m glad I was not privy to — for which, for which I give you fair warning, Quinn, I expect to be reimbursed with interest.’

I inclined my head. Something told me that now was not the time to remind him that we operated, as Felix Quinn: Antiquarian Booksellers had always operated, a strict no sale or return policy.

He was done with me. Breathing hard, he ascended the stairs, but before he was at street level he turned to face me. I had seen him negotiate the identical pantomime swivel on television, before delivering one of his famously saltatory pieces to camera. He tossed down what was left of his cigarette. With one hand he made a gesture suggestive of the wildest largesse, casting his five fingers to the wind, with the other he made a sort of sucking sea creature with spidery tentacles, tugging obscenely at the viewer’s attention.