Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

‘Wife-swapping is a manner of speaking,’ he explained. ‘It’s more fetish.’ ‘Fetish as in voodoo?’ She couldn’t help herself: she could only imagine

he was proposing taking her to West Africa or Haiti. ‘More as in chains and leather.’

She explained she owned no leather clothing, other than shoes and belts and a jacket that was too good to wear for clubbing in Haiti. And her only chains — the only chains she kept — were eighteen-carat white gold necklaces bought by lovers from Asprey’s or Garrard’s.

He offered to find her something on the rails at Oxfam. She told him she had never worn second-hand clothing. ‘In that case just select a skirt and jacket from your own wardrobe,’ he suggested, ‘then lose the skirt.’

‘I look my best in skirts,’ she told him. But met him halfway, losing the jacket.

He hadn’t told her stilettos but she assumed them. She could do stilettos. And liked wearing them. They made her taller than most men.

The club was in fact the living room and kitchen of a semi-detached Victorian house in Walthamstow. Some of the men wore shorts with crossed leather braces, a bit like lederhosen; others hero shirts and riding breeches. A few had dog collars round their necks. One had come as a Druid. The women, by and large, wore what she imagined prostitutes must wear under their coats. A tall blonde girl in a diamanté eyepatch and choker danced by herself in a pink and purple rubber cocktail dress which Marisa thought she ’d like to own were she to do this more often, which she didn’t suppose she would. The atmosphere made her think of a taxi drivers’ Christmas party, though she ’d never been to one.

She danced with an unattached young black man in PVC trousers who put her hand on him and proposed intercourse either where they were or in the bathroom. She didn’t mind what he did with her hand. She was dancing and what happened when you were dancing was not governed by any of the usual laws of good behaviour. He wasn’t a bad dancer either. But intercourse, in either place he’d suggested, she was not up to. She had seen the bathroom and would not have wiped her nose in it. As for where they danced, she was reminded of a boarding house in Bournemouth to which her mother and one of her faux-daddies had taken her not long after her real daddy walked out. The carpets were green and there had been bowls of crisps and peanuts on the mantelpiece. ‘Don’t ever,’ her mother had admonished her, grasping her wrists, ‘take crisps and peanuts from a bowl where God knows who have had their fingers.’ Marisa, wishing her mother were only half as particular about herself, cried the whole time they were there. The carpets in Walthamstow were green and there were bowls of crisps and peanuts on the mantelpiece. Marisa left her hand where the young black man had put it but shook her head. ‘Let’s just dance,’ she said.

He shook his head. If he’d wanted to just dance he ’d have gone to the Hammersmith Palais.

‘Then I can’t help you,’ she apologised. ‘It’s not personal. I can do debauch, I just can’t do crisps and peanuts.’

She went looking for the Oxfam colleague who’d brought her. A very fat woman in a riding coat was sitting astride his face, reading the racing pages of a newspaper.

‘Home time,’ Marisa called down. He wasn’t able to answer.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I’m perfectly happy to leave on my own if that’s what you’d prefer. Just bang once on the floor if you’re staying, twice if you want me to wait for you.’

The man banged once. ‘Then I’ll see you in the shop next week,’ Marisa said.

She wasn’t in the slightest bit scandalised. No vagary of the sexual life was ever scorned or rejected by Marisa. What people did they did. But for herself, as she wrote in her diary, where she was unable to feel free with the savoury snacks, she was unable to feel free with her body.

She wasn’t at all frigid, withholding or non-orgasmic. She didn’t wonder whether there was any experience of the senses she was going without or needed to experiment with further. What women were supposed to feel she felt. What she was supposed to feel — which might have been a different matter — she felt. But none of it occupied her beyond the moment in which she felt herself feeling it. As a discrete event, she looked neither forward to congress, nor back on it.

In so far as she anticipated with eagerness any aspect of this netherworld of her existence, it was the conversation. She liked verbal fluency in men and would not have sought physical intimacy with anyone, no matter what his rival attractions — unless he was the best dancer in the world, of course — whose mind was not a source of interest and amusement to her. She had to like a man to exchange bodily fluids with him, but she had to have exchanged intellectual fluids with him before she could like him.

Some nights she found herself thinking about someone she had stretched out alongside in the day, some nights she did not. The ‘thinking about’ bore no correlation to any sexual excitement she’d happened on. Something they’d said about their lives might have intrigued her, an idea they’d had, a sentence they’d formed. She quite enjoyed hearing about their work. Or where they’d been. She didn’t at all mind hearing about their wives so long as they were not demonised or airbrushed to spare her feelings. She could sleep with a man who loved his wife. If pressed, she would probably have accepted that a man who loved his wife was the better option. Less chance of his turning up on her doorstep with his eyes moist and his cases packed.

In this way, you could think of her as conservative, not to say reactionary, where the institution of the family was concerned. She wanted everybody to stay together. It was not unknown to her to think about her lovers’ children if she ’d been shown photographs of them or they had in others ways been made vivid to her. So much so that on more than one occasion she considered ‘doing something’ for them — contributing to their schooling, say, or opening a small trust fund for their later years. This, as a means, perhaps, of compensating for the absence in her of anything like a maternal instinct, which absence she of course attributed to the poor example of parenting to which she herself had been exposed.

Thus, the men she had the leisure to devote the secret hours of her life to were secret only in the literal sense, and didn’t answer to any unconscious needs or unacknowledged longings in her. Other than the pleasure she took in being secretive. They were consistent with the rest of her life; they could have been invited to her dinner table but for the conventions that said they couldn’t. When they were out of her sight, they were out of her mind. She might have reflected on their marriages, their children, and even their job prospects, but the one thing she did not find herself going over when she was unable to sleep was them : how much she did or didn’t love them, how much they did or didn’t love her. She loved her husband. Then she met me. Another husband. And loved him. End of story.

Or should have been end of story.

In so far as I didn’t know whether it was or it wasn’t, I was happy. As I have said, the uncertainty suited me.

And yet it didn’t.

My skin shone all right, but within the tense cocoon of silent expectancy which passed as contentment, I yearned for some repetition or equivalent of the scene I’d beheld all trembling at Marisa’s bedside. If she was not to be touched by other hands just yet, could she not at least be seen by other eyes? Though I was not yet Victor Gowan’s age, I understood his desperation. Marisa was not running out of time, nor was I come to that — indeed I’d been told I’d gained time — but you never know what’s going to happen. I feared that the comfortable unblemished conventionality of our life together, with much promised but nothing ventured, would swallow us if we weren’t careful. A wife can grow accustomed to her husband not undressing her for another man.