Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

So how did we ever get to where at last we got to? How did we negotiate our silences into an action as loud and incontrovertible as Marius?

Impossible to trace a progression — some, I acknowledge, would call it a descent, though they’d be wrong — as infinitesimally refined as ours. You might as soon attempt to paint the second by second changes in light that mark day’s disappearance into night.

But every day has its pivotal four o’clock and a marriage is no different. Imperceptibly but decisively we yielded to those equinoctial hours when relations between lovers quiver on their axes. And where we didn’t quiver as perilously as I wished, I applied my weight. An old acquaintance of mine would come to stay and I would feign indisposition in the middle of the evening, leaving Marisa to do the entertaining. I would make myself scarce at Marisa’s Oxfam and Samaritans parties, watching from the shadows while she talked and laughed with whom she chose, to all intents and purposes a woman who had only her own engagement book to consult. I danced with her less than in the days of our courtship, either missing out on the school’s social nights, so that she could mingle freely with those against whom she’d earlier pressed her body, or arriving opportunely late for one of our periodic classes, in the hope of finding her tangoing like a mare on heat with the newest teacher, an Argentinian with punched-out eyes and a ponytail.

Nothing was referred to during and after these events, if they could be called events, but a change was mutely noted — that change being my removal by another notch, like a fading ghost, from the adventurous scene of Marisa’s life.

Ghostly as this progression was and had to be, we could not avoid discussion of sexual turbulence altogether. We went to the theatre, the cinema, the opera, the ballet, we bought tickets to hear singers sing and writers read from their work. You cannot live a civilised life and not have your nose rubbed in art’s eternal telling of inconstancy and sorrow. But we did not crudely apply what we had seen to who we were. Only in the discursive and purely intellectual aftermath of some masterpiece of erotic despair such as Dido and Aeneas or Winterreise , only in language as impersonal as it was chaste, did we lay down what was necessary to our comprehension of each other.

One occasion in particular comes back to me. We had been out with Marisa’s youngest and least pleasant half-sister Flops and Flops’s husband Rowlie to see Othello at the National Theatre, a passionate and uncomfortable production because the actor playing Othello gave such energy to the jealousy that it was difficult to imagine how any man could think himself alive who did not suffer the torments he did. Very much my inter-pretation, I concede, but if I had to hold back at the theatre as well as in the bed, when was Marisa ever going to know me for who I was? But it was not only my interpretation, hence the heated discussion between the four of us in the Mezzanine restaurant afterwards — ‘Anyone would think from the performance we’ve just seen,’ Marisa’s half-sister’s husband protesting, ‘that Othello wanted Desdemona to be unfaithful to him, which I have to say isn’t the play as I understand it.’

I liked Rowlie, partly because his wife didn’t, and I didn’t like her, partly because there was nothing about him to dislike. I wasn’t sure what he did.

Real estate, I think. But what he did was of less importance than where he’d been. Rowlie was one of those Englishmen about whom the only thing to be said was the school he’d gone to. There was a touch of that about me too, only I was several thousand pounds a term less interesting. And I no longer carried around with me what Rowlie carried around with him, in his clothes and in his hair — not just the good manners and the assurance of being somebody in particular, but the odour of housemaster and prep and school song and chapel and playing fields and fagging and flogging.

Flops raised a ginger eyebrow to him — that was part of what I disliked, her peppery aggression — as though to say ‘And since when have you, my dear, had an understanding of any play?’ From which I deduced that jealousy in some form was an issue between them, hers of him, I thought, but you can never be sure.

‘Isn’t it in the nature of the marks jealousy leaves upon your soul,’ I ventured, ‘that you are unable at last to remember what it was like to be without them?’

‘That doesn’t mean,’ Flops said, blinking — she was a blinker, too — ‘that you don’t long for the time before jealousy began. Othello’s tragedy, as I understand it, is that he knows he will never again enjoy the peace of mind he used to.’

‘Not poppy nor mandragora,’ Marisa said dreamily, ‘shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep which thou owedest yesterday.’

A tremble of apprehension, as though of a joy or pain to come, ran through my blood and pricked my heart.

‘Yes, but that’s Iago,’ Rowlie objected. ‘The Othello we’ve just seen didn’t want sweet sleep.’

‘Who does?’ I managed with great difficulty not to ask.

‘Funny, though, don’t you think,’ Marisa said, ‘that Iago should be both the architect and the poet of Othello’s fall. I’m always struck by how poignantly he speaks of his victim and how much sorrow for him he feels.’ ‘But isn’t he talking about himself?’ Flops replied. ‘Isn’t it his own sweet

sleep he’s missing?’

‘Because he too is jealous?’

‘Yes, of what Othello has been up to with his wife.’

‘I never believe that,’ Rowlie said. ‘It sounds like rationalisation to me.’ ‘It would,’ his wife said.

‘No, I agree,’ I said. ‘It is almost as though Iago has to try out the causes of what makes him who he is. His jealousy, if that’s the name for it, is half-hearted. Confronted by Othello he realises he falls far short of the real thing. He knows envy and resentment and spite, but his mind is nothing like dirty or capacious enough to do jealousy on the grand scale.’

‘What’s so grand about jealousy?’ Rowlie wanted to know.

But Marisa was wondering about something else I’d said. ‘Does Othello have a dirty mind?’ she enquired, as though from another room.

‘He did tonight,’ Rowlie said. He seemed put out, as though it was something he would need to speak to Othello about if he persisted in it.

‘He should do every night,’ I said. ‘All Shakespeare ’s best heroes have dirty minds.’

Flops looked up at the ceiling of the restaurant, where she seemed to see something invisible to the rest of us. ‘I think our husbands, Marisa, are telling us something about what it is to be a man.’

Her husband snorted. ‘Othello’s heart is broken. That’s why the play’s called a fucking tragedy, isn’t it? What we’ve just seen was more like black comedy, excuse the pun. An Othello almost frantic to be proved a cuckold.’

‘I don’t see why you object to that,’ I answered him evenly. ‘Unless you object to it in the play. “I had been happy if the general camp had tasted her sweet body,” Othello says. “Her sweet body”, for God’s sake. I grant you he puts that in the conditional tense, but there ’s still no getting past how vividly he conjures up the scene, as good as undressing Desdemona not just for the general camp but for Iago too.’

‘Why would he want Iago to taste her sweet body?’

Unwise of me, but I laughed. ‘Iago, Cassio, Roderigo — it doesn’t matter. Paradise for Othello is for Desdemona to be enjoyed by as many people as are able to enjoy her, and for him to be hidden where he can see it. I’m not saying it wouldn’t also be a hell. There ’s no sweet sleep for the man whose wife has a sweet body. But it’s a hell he invites.’