Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

I looked up at the window but there was no sign of them. The lights still burned, but nothing, no one, not a shadow, moved. Did that mean they had left the room? If so, to which room had they repaired?

Not a murmur from the house. I turned the key in the door and went inside. It was not my intention to spy or listen in; all I wanted was to be under the same roof as them. The house was as quiet within as it had seemed without. I trod quietly, but not so quietly that they shouldn’t know I was back. You will not be disturbed by me, I hoped my tread would say. You are not to hold back on my behalf.

I sat in the leather chair in my office — a chair which had exuded authority for generations — uncertain what to do next. You can never know how you are going to feel in a situation such as this. I was elated as I expected to be, but I had no employment to which to put my elation. You cannot stay elated, waiting in a silence which might be a silence of something or nothing. Exclusion had all along been my object, but now exclusion was achieved I felt excluded from the exclusion I had sought.

The wife-besotted artist Pierre Klossowski — a photograph of whom, acting out his besottedness, I had on my desk — wrote a novel on this very subject. Roberte Ce Soir . Not much read on account of the erogenic subtlety of its subject matter. How, Klossowski wondered, do you take a woman in your arms when you want it to be someone else who takes her in his arms, and you aspire to see him at the very moment he sees you? The conundrum that had troubled Candaules and Anselmo both: how to be simultaneously voyeur and actor, exhibitionist and stage manager, husband and lover. ‘One cannot at the same time,’ Klossowski wrote, ‘take and not take, be there and not be there, enter a room when one is already in it.’

Or, conversely, leave a room that one has already left.

Once or twice I crept out into the hall, but heard nothing. All the lights were on as they would have been when the evening began, otherwise it was as a house shut up for the night, not a sound anywhere. I am not sure how long I kept up this vigil of pacing, listening and not listening, but I must at last have fallen asleep in my chair because the sound of a cry and then a thumping sound, as though something had fallen off a wall, and then a second cry reached me as from some other dimension. By the time I was out of the chair there was more commotion. I ran into the hall and there was Quirin unconscious, if not dead, at the bottom of the stairs, and there was Marisa, frantic, in her nightgown, at the top.

Quirin was not dead. He was not even all that unconscious if you discount the wine. Blood was trickling from a small cut above his nose. He moaned when I kneeled by him and felt his shoulder. ‘Christ,’ he said, looking around, ‘what’s this?’

‘A bloody miracle,’ I said.

He stared around him as though he’d never seen the place before. So that was two of us.

Above him, switched on by Marisa, a thousand starry shipboard lights began to twinkle. Quirin looked up with an imbecile grin on his face, as though he expected to see the dazzling countenance of God grinning back at him. ‘Great chandelier, Uncle Felix,’ he said.

‘I’m not your uncle,’ I told him.

Marisa was ringing for an ambulance. ‘Tell him to lie still and not talk,’ she called from the phone.

What was it she didn’t want him to talk about? It couldn’t have been the chandelier, so what then? The kiss at the top of the stairs that had been so dizzying he couldn’t keep his feet? The erotic horseplay that made them careless of all danger? Had she pushed him to repel him? Had he fallen to escape her?

My questions were not of the Maigret sort. I wanted to know what had happened, but not to solve a crime.

How far had things gone?

I phrase the question with the bluntness it phrased itself to me at the time, despite there being more pressing matters to deal with. But there you have it: for me there was no matter more pressing than this. Yes or no? Suppose Quirin to have been in mortal agony, which, thanks to young bones, soft carpets, and all-round insensibility, he was not, I would have ordered my thoughts no differently. Had the thing happened, and if it had not, what chances were there of its happening still?

You are meant to be returned to your senses when an accident occurs. That is what accidents are for. The madness goes and sanity reasserts itself. But my elation had not been dampened by events. Baulked, yes, but not extinguished. The night was not over yet.

The doorbell rang. I could see a blue light flashing outside. ‘I think,’ I said, taking Marisa to one side, ‘that you should go with him in the ambulance.’

She stared at me. ‘Felix, this is not a joyride. The boy’s fallen down the stairs. He might have broken every bone in his body for all we know.’

‘That’s why I think you should go with him.’

‘He’s your relation.’

‘Yes, but distant. You’re much closer to him.’

‘I?’

‘You.’

She backed away from me. Something she had never done before. ‘You’re insane,’ she said. ‘Are you sure it isn’t you that’s fallen down the stairs?’

I didn’t say I had no reason to fall down any stairs because it wasn’t I who’d been locked in a wild embrace at the top of them. ‘I can’t see what’s insane about my suggestion,’ I said instead, which better proved my mental stability. ‘If you won’t go with him I will, but I don’t know what I’ve said that’s insane.’

She shook her head. ‘Does it never stop for you?’ she asked.

Shocking in itself, for what it posed, the question shocked me still more for being put at all. This was the most direct Marisa had ever been with me on a subject that burned between us, but which we had tacitly agreed never to address in words.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, not looking at her. Had I met her eyes they would have roasted me alive.

‘Yes, you do, Felix. Does it never stop? Does nothing more important ever intervene?’

It was a great temptation to seize the moment and admit it — no, Marisa, nothing more important ever intervenes because nothing more important exists. But that would have been the end of everything. She already thought I was crazy and she didn’t know the half of it. When the moment presents itself to a masochist he dare not seize it unless he wants to pull his world down around his ears, which he thinks he does and boasts he does, but which of course he doesn’t. More even than the sadist, the masochist craves infinite repetition.

I took a step back from the precipice so that I might stand over it again.

THINGS WERE BOUND TO BE DIFFERENT BETWEEN US AFTER THAT.

But not on the surface. And not all at once.

I’d gone with Quirin in the ambulance and could see there was not much wrong with him. Not in body, anyway. He was released from hospital after a couple of days of observation, and was thereafter, so I heard, to be seen limping around town with a silver-topped cane. He didn’t show up for further work experience. He dropped us a card to thank us for our hospitality and conversation — the word conversation underlined for some reason which I thought only Marisa would understand — and sent round a friend with an even more untrustworthy air than his own to collect whatever he ’d left lying about our house (toys, as far as I could tell) and return the key. The end. Marisa did not mention him and nor did I. Our conversation sealed over him, as it sealed over the dangerous eruption of frankness he had precipitated. He hadn’t taken a suspicious tumble down our grand triumphal staircase. I hadn’t asked Marisa to travel in the ambulance and hold his hand. Marisa hadn’t said to me what she ’d said.