Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

Five days into our humid honeymoon Marisa fell ill. We had established a routine: every afternoon we returned to our hotel, I peeled her dress off her sticky body, then we showered the bad-egg odour of mangrove off each other, then we went to bed and stayed there until it was time for her to shake herself into something even more diaphanous for dinner. No woman I had ever known inhabited tropical fabrics better than Marisa; some women bulk them out, some disappear inside the folds, Marisa wore them as a second skin. Which made peeling her out of them a slow and laborious business, in the course of which I sometimes had to sit on the edge of the bed to get a second wind and look at her, the dress over her head, still caught on her arms, her glistening thighs and belly unprotected from my stare. But on the fifth afternoon she was too feverishly weary for any of this conjugal horseplay. At first I took it to be merely one of those butterfly malaises to which she was subject. Lassitude. Loss of temporal bearing. Not unhappiness exactly, more a mislaying of happiness, as though she was happy in some other place but couldn’t remember where. The fever, however, was real enough. And she wasn’t sweating for my pleasure. The hotel called a doctor who examined her in our suite. He was a Cuban with an avaricious mouth, brown teeth the length of a horse ‘s, and exaggerated good manners. I wondered if he wanted me to leave the room. He put an arm around my shoulders, noticing my concern. ‘Stay,’ he said. ‘Pour yourself a drink. And pour me one while I see to Mrs.’

He had, I observed, the most beautiful long hands, with inordinate fringes of silky fur on every knuckle, and a wedding ring on both his little fingers. I poured us a drink then sat myself down in an armchair and watched as he took Marisa’s temperature, shone a light into her ears, looked deep into her open mouth, felt under her armpits and examined her chest. The moment was decisive. Not the beginning of a new sensation but a revelation of it in its entirety, like coming out of a dark room and being met by the brilliant orb of the sun. Whoever I had been before — whatever luxuriating oddities had marked me out from other men in the matter of love and loss (and I had only ever felt marginally odd, just a trifle too given to losing my heart and ending up at the suffering end of passion) — all equivocations were finally at an end: I was now someone who was aroused by the sight of another man’s hands on the breasts of the woman he loved. Henceforth, given the choice, I would rather Marisa gave her breasts to a man who wasn’t me. That was to be the condition, the measure, of my love for her. At a stroke I was freed from the fascination of Freddy’s jealousy. I was now liberated into my own.

You know it when you walk into the torture garden of your own disordered nature. You recognise the gorgeous foliage, overgrown and fantastical. You know the smell. The smell of home.

‘Overexposure to the sun,’ the doctor told me, looking round but keeping longer than was necessary I thought, his hand on my bride ’s breast, allowing the nipple to swell unseen inside his palm.

Did he exchange a glance with me, in which the proprietorship of those breasts passed briefly from me to him, or did I imagine it? I am not blind to the politics of a woman’s breasts; I knew then, as I know now, that Marisa’s breasts were the property of Marisa and no one else. But familiarity confers the illusion of possession, however impertinent, and it might have been the rights to that familiarity that we exchanged. The sight of those silken-furred fingers on Marisa’s breasts precipitated in me, anyway, the desire to see them elsewhere on and, yes, in her body. A generalised desire which, over time, took on a less opportunistic, more sophisticated colouration. Marisa did not have to be feverish or otherwise at the mercy of a man. We did not have to be in Florida smelling the Everglades. And at last I did not have to see with my own eyes. Hearing about it, learning about it, and ultimately simply knowing about it, would be enough.

ON TOP OF THE TWO AFTERNOONS A WEEK SHE GAVE TO PRICING ART BOOKS at the Oxfam bookshop, the four Friday nights out of five on which she manned a hectic phone line for the Samaritans, the occasional day she put in at the Wallace Collection, not quite telling visiting ladies from the provinces what she thought Fragonard was really painting, Marisa read to a blind man once a fortnight and four times a year bundled up the clothes she no longer wanted to wear and gave them to a local hospice. Though she believed she was good at what she did — twice, for example, she had found books which had gone on to fetch in excess of £1,000 at auction at Christie ’s; the blind man, she felt sure, was enraptured by her reading; art lovers thanked her for showing them what they could never have seen without her; and God only knew how many deep depressions she lightened at the slit-wrist end of a Friday night — she was unable to recognise herself in these activities. She didn’t begrudge the time (how could she, given the amount of time at her disposal), nor did she resent the neediness of those she helped (in their need, she believed, she found her purpose). But she wasn’t personally engaged in what she did. The only time Marisa felt she was anyone she knew was when she danced. ‘You say you find yourself dancing,’ I told her once, ‘but to me it looks more as though you lose yourself.’ She smiled in recognition of the paradox. Outside herself was where she lived. Other than when she danced she was in some foreign place, speaking in a voice that wasn’t hers, though where that foreign place was, and whose voice she borrowed, she couldn’t have said.

‘Where are you, Marisa?’ — her mother calling.

‘Hiding.’

‘Marisa, you are always hiding.’

To which Marisa knew better than to say, even at that early age, ‘That’s because I’m trying not to be found by you, Mummy.’

Apart from the charity work she did — that’s if it really was her who did it — and all the dancing she could crowd in, she was not what could be called a busy woman. Though well educated — well finished, might be a better way of putting it, but then I’m a snob when it comes to education — she had not, in her words, ‘achieved anything’. No need. She had always been well provided for. Her father, who had owned most of the bed shops on Tottenham Court Road, walked out on her mother when Marisa was five years old. The child could perfectly well see why. Her mother lacked judgement. True, it was her father’s fault for leaving her mother alone as much as he did, but that didn’t excuse her mother for falling for every man she met and introducing all of them to Marisa as her new daddy.

‘Why does Mummy love everybody?’ she asked her father. ‘She doesn’t love me.’

‘But she used to, didn’t she?’

‘Yes, and I used to love her for loving me. Then I realised she would have loved me no less had I been a cloth bag stuffed with marbles. Or with beans, like your frog Frenchie.’

So would her mummy have liked her just as much had she been stuffed with beans like her frog Frenchie, Marisa wondered, hiding in her wardrobe.

Hiding became at last their only medium of communication. To lure Marisa out of the wardrobe, her mother had to hide presents for her, hide her clothes, hide her supper. ‘See if you can find what I’ve made you, Marisa.’

‘What have you made me?’ ‘You’ll have to find it to find out.’

‘See if you can find me, Mummy,’ Marisa said. The difference being that while she wanted to find supper, she didn’t want her mummy to find her.

‘I wish she ’d hide my new daddies,’ she told her old daddy, ‘where they can’t be found.’