Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

He was handsome, if you find high and hawkish men handsome. As a non-predatory man myself, I felt intimidated by him. But that’s part of what being handsome means, isn’t it: instilling fear.

He was standing by a table of sausages and pork pies, making access to it difficult for other people, flirting icily with two poochy-looking girls who, for no other reason than that he appeared to wish to divide them, I took to be sisters. He gave the impression, fairly or not, of a man who would cross any boundary if there was gloomy mischief in it. It was this same impression that made me wonder whether the girls were quite of an age to be spoken to with such freedom, all things considered. Exactly how old they were I couldn’t tell — when you don’t have children of your own (and I am not a breeding man) you lose the power to distinguish twelve from twenty-seven — but they wore the nakedly raffish expressions of girls who know they can get you a prison sentence.

For his part, though Marius allowed them to feel they had exclusive use of his attention and were exclusively the beneficiaries of his brilliance, he succeeded at the same time in holding them up as a sort of reproach to the gathering, as though it was their dullness that reduced him to whiling away his time with chits in black lipstick and nose rings. But I might have misread him. Perhaps he was deeply affected by the funeral, consumed by a grief which only indiscreet intercourse with the young and the provocative could assuage.

What did they see in him, I wondered, that dissolved the usual indifference young girls feel towards lugubriously clever men nearly twice their age. They laughed with a responsiveness that would have been flagrant at a coming-out ball let alone a funeral breakfast. They raised their bare, flushed, perilous pixie faces to him, ablaze with the consciousness that there was an audacity in his starry attention that demanded a reciprocal boldness from them.

Quite suddenly, as though he feared a scene, he called it to an end, recalling himself to what he owed the dear departed and his widow, however dull their conversation. But in the moment before he left the girls I caught him mouthing a phrase at them — half secretly, half not. I, for one, had no difficulty interpreting the communication, but then I miss very little that has a promise of impropriety in it. And yes, I admit it, will find impropriety where impropriety isn’t. Not this time though.

‘Four. . o’. . clock,’ he said without making a sound.

So what was he doing? Arranging to meet them after school?

Four o’clock.

The tremble hour.

If it was an assignation, he didn’t keep it — that was my guess. The jailbait, yes; one, or more likely both of them, each egging the other on as they stood at whatever corner Marius had instructed them to meet him, pulling back their frilly sleeves to consult their Mickey Mouse watches every other minute, laughing into their handkerchiefs, while their pulpy hearts pounded inside their blazers. But not Marius. What he wanted from the girls he had already taken.

How you can tell on so brief an appraisal (and most of it from behind) that a man is an absentee libertine, that he lights fires and doesn’t stop to see them blaze, that at the last he’d sooner withhold a sexual favour than confer one, I can’t explain. Perhaps that sort of sadism shows in the curvature of the spine. Perhaps I’m just good at seeing what I want to see. However you account for it, I felt, in advance, the ‘sting of his disregard’ — I steal the phrase from Leopold Bloom, Bloomuponwhom, the patron saint of the subjugated and deceived — as acutely as those girls would have felt it at four o’clock on whatever day in whatever place Marius did not turn up to meet them.

My territory — sexual insult. I’m a connoisseur of it. I could write you a treatise, a thousand pages long, and in a dozen languages, some of them dead, on the difference between a sting and a smart. It comes, partly, from an extensive and perhaps over-collaborative reading of that category of classic novel (English, French, Russian, whatever) whose subject is humiliation. I’m tempted to ask what other category of classic novel is there. But I accept — if with bewilderment — that there are some readers who open books in order to be mystified by extravagant event, or stirred by acts of prosaic heroism. I must have been born without a taste for mystery or heroics.

Love, that is all I’ve ever cared to read about. Love and love’s agonies.

Love afflicted me.

I draw no distinction between literature and life. In the stories I precociously devoured I gravitated naturally to the pain — to the sorrows alike of Young Werther and the older Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, to the easily bruised boyish prickliness of Julien Sorel and the deep womanly contemplative sadness of Anne Elliot. But it had never been any different for me in life. I was born lovesick — unrequited, highly strung, quiveringly jealous, with a morbid yearning to give my heart long before there was anyone to give my heart to.

That I too would be spurned, left to pine away like the heroes and heroines of my reading, I never doubted.

The first girl I could ever truly call a girlfriend — the first girl whose fingers I was allowed to interlace with mine — betrayed me the second time I took her out. We went into the cinema together and she left two and a half hours later with someone else. How and where she found him when there appeared to be only she and I sitting alone in the darkness and I had never once let go of her hand, what she saw in him with the lights down wherever she found him, why she preferred him to me, what I lacked or had done wrong that could explain that preference or her cruelty in making it so plain — none of this I understood. I was fifteen, she the same. She had a cascade of black hair, eyes like a fortune-teller’s and long, slender brown arms which I imagined wrapped around me twice. She had kissed previously, I had not. But she came from a family of teachers — her father taught cello at the Royal Academy of Music — and she said she would enjoy teaching me to kiss. Now, inexplicably, she was enjoying teaching another pupil more.

I stood outside her house after school for weeks, imagining that she would relent, that what had happened had been a mistake, a confusion that conversation or just the sight of me would clear up, but she never showed her face, not even at a window. I hoped her father might come out. As a cello teacher he would surely have understood my desolation. But he too never appeared. Eventually a girl emerged from the house, I assumed Faith’s sister, to inform me of the situation. ‘Faith says she’s going out with Martin now. She says would you please go home and leave her alone.’

I put my satchel down as though I meant to stay rooted to that spot forever. What did I want? The earth to open up and take me? A retraction from Faith of her sister’s words? A glimpse of Martin that would at least show me what I didn’t have?

The sister must have been moved by the spectacle of thwarted love I presented because she found a kinder tone in which to say, ‘These things happen. You’ll get over it.’

I never did get over it. What I suffered in the loss of Faith, reason told me, was quite disproportionate to what I’d felt for her on the mere two occasions we’d gone out and the time I’d thought about her in between. But reason was no help. Nothing helps against jealousy. I began to idealise her beauty. Her arms grew longer and more slender. Her kisses, which had been no more than tentative and toothy, were now deep probings, as fathomless as the sea and as desperate as drowning, only someone else was swimming in them and I was drowning in their absence. I was unable to eat. My schoolwork suffered. My head ached. I felt murderous, not to Faith or Martin but to myself. Had I possessed more of whatever it was that girls wanted this could not have happened. And it was too late to acquire that mysterious whatever it was now, because there was no future in which to put it into practice.