Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

This action, I must stress, was not that of a man who meant to replace me. The part he played was more that of my assistant, in the sense that a magician has an assistant. But doesn’t every magician’s assistant want to be the magician in the end?

As I hadn’t raised the Cuban doctor with Marisa, I saw no reason to raise his ghost. Though I had virtually talked her out of her previous marriage, though conversation was our medium and words were our caresses, some things we were too discreet ever to speak about. Direct verbal engagement with our feelings for each other was not our way. I’m not saying that our relations were cold — far from it. There ’s a heat in inexplicitness which couples who live in a state of mutual erotic candour know nothing of. Our eyes met furtively across signals barely made and scarcely halfperceived and in the exchange of guesswork and intuition we found our space.

Had I spoken of the Cuban doctor’s presence in our bed, had I proposed finding another man to do what he’d done when he’d examined her, or suggested to Marisa that she find one for herself, I might well have lost her. There was a streak of severity in Marisa that I feared. Make no mistake: I loved her for it. It excited me to be married to a beauty who was also a moral philosopher. Not every man gets to lie simultaneously with Salome and Socrates. But the disadvantage, if it can be a called a disadvantage, was that I thought twice before opening to her the sewer that was my mind.

And to myself, too, I knew to be careful about bringing up the Cuban doctor. I didn’t want to murder in me a sickly hankering which had a way to go yet before it flowered into a monstrous appetite.

There are some desires which are too elusive and undefined ever to be put satisfactorily into words: utter them and they lose their trepidation, call them by their name (supposing that you know their name) and you forgo that oscillation between the possible and the unthinkable, between what you rub at in your imagination and what you fear ever coming to pass (or worse, not coming to pass) in reality. If that oscillation made us giddy it also made us the more in love. Perhaps I shouldn’t speak for Marisa. It was part of our unspokenness never to be certain how in love the other person was. For me, though, the not knowing what was permissible, what Marisa made of my odd nature, how many of my dreads and fancies she had become aware of and would ever allow to come to pass,threw me into a frenzy of waiting and wondering that conventional people would regard more as servitude than love, but which for me was love ’s very image, love without surety or promise, love in an eternity of suspense.

There are men in whom the masochistic impulse takes the crudest forms. They want a woman to strike and abuse them, to spit in their faces, to thrash them like children. It was otherwise with me. Marisa’s knee would surely have been a fine place on which to take one’s punishment, but it was her mind I wanted to lie across. And there, in the wordless quiet, to wait for her to think her worst.

I glowed with the suspense of it. People I ran into in the impersonal way of work commented on my appearance. My staff suddenly enjoyed my company and seemed to want to talk to me in the morning rather than scuttle off into their cubicles. Defencelessness, I suppose, was what they saw. That aura of being unprotected and unguarded we love in infants or young lovers, as though they are in their milk skin still, waiting for the second layer to grow. Isn’t that, half the time, all we mean by beauty? A translucence of the flesh through which the quaking nakedness of our souls is visible.

I rarely visited my father. We didn’t like each other. I had deposited him in an old persons’ home in Hertfordshire where, as I have said and will say again because it gives me pleasure to hear the words, he played canasta with elderly women with sick minds, making them promises he couldn’t keep. He had done the same with my mother. Me too, in a way. He had promised I would never get the business but here I was in charge of it. For which he promised he would never forgive me. But even he, the one time I did go to see him, was struck by how well I looked.

‘Anyone would think,’ he said, spitting into a bowl, ‘that you’d found someone to get your leg over at last. It’s not a man, is it? I recall your mother had a brother who went in for that. It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s in the genes.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It isn’t a man.’

Though of course strictly speaking. .

My doctor went so far as to offer it as his opinion that marriage so agreed with me it had extended my life by at least ten years. My bad cholesterol had gone down, my good cholesterol had gone up, my blood pressure was lower than at any time since I’d been his patient, I had lost weight and if I allowed him to measure me I would probably discover I had grown taller by a couple of inches.

‘Whatever it is she’s giving you, Mr Quinn, it would save the National Health Service millions if we could bottle it.’

‘I visit you as a private patient,’ I reminded him. ‘Think altruistically,’ he said.

I fear I must have blushed, so altruistically was I thinking.

I have said Marisa was severe but I must not give the impression that she was prim. Of the two of us, though I was the more criminally insane, I was also the more censorious. It is not uncommon to be simultaneously perverted and puritanical. For only the pervert knows how rank it gets inside his head. Had I been the judge charged with trying me for crimes against the hearth, I’d have sentenced me to hang at first light and let the birds peck my bones clean.

Marisa, on the other hand, was unshockable in matters of sex, passing judgement on nobody, least of all herself. Prior to me, whether married or single, she had taken lovers freely. Not always when she wanted them, for there were other people ’s feelings to be considered, which made her hang back or go ahead not quite in accordance with her desires. But as a woman who admired the freedoms open to a man, and who was herself, psychologically speaking, the triumphant product of those freedoms, she had no choice but to reach out and take a lover so long as there was no compelling reason not to. Men helped themselves to what came along; she did the same. The experience neither inflamed nor depressed her. It was possible she was not in it for the sex. Yes, the act first of making, then of keeping an assignation energised her: being taken to a restaurant she did not know, deciding what to wear, choosing what to eat, wondering what might happen next, where and in how much secrecy and danger. Hotels she liked, provided they were comfortable, the beds warm and large, the hot water plentiful and the room service efficient. Four star was about as low as she could tolerate. Anything less and she would rather forgo sex altogether. Was she in it for the linen? She sometimes wondered. Things went best when she saw to the arrangements, who would sign in first, how one would know the other was in the room, in what fashion (meaning in what manner and in what garment) she would either open the door or knock on it. The social-organisation side of adultery — its Women’s Institute, bring-and-buy-sale aspect (helping out rather than helping herself) — she found engrossing; thereafter — the kissing, the unbuttoning, the penetration, the apologies, the thanks, the excuses and the fabrications — she could take or leave alone.

Once, someone she worked with in the Oxfam shop suggested she accompany him to a wife-swapping club he had himself, in other circumstances, frequented.

‘But I’m not your wife,’ she ’d objected, mildly. She was not being prudish about it; merely precise.