Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

So what did I see that others didn’t?

A new compassion for me was the start of it. A sorrowing look, almost as if she feared what the future held for me — an apprehension of my loneliness — would cross her face, not when we were alone, but in any sort of gathering, wherever our eyes met from opposite ends of the room, across a dinner-party table, or when waving a second goodbye in a crowded street. One sunny afternoon in her half-sister Flops’s garden in Richmond, with Flops’s unpleasant ginger children playing all around us — no hint of Rowlie in their offspring, all Rowlie ’s genes obliterated by the bitter pungency of Flops’s — Marisa held me through the smoke of the barbecue in a glance of such lingeringly melancholy regret that it was all I could do not to burst out crying. Day by day her tone of voice to me altered also. No one else would have noticed, but I lived in Marisa’s voice, as a child lives in its mother’s. And that was precisely the alteration I detected: a sorrowing tone to match her sorrowing looks in which I read the diminution of my status — as a loved person — from all husband to all child. Given everything, she owed me no apology as a wife: as a husband I was the author of my doom. It was in her duty of care — parentally, so to speak — that she was prepared to acknowledge dereliction. An acknowledgement that implied a countercharge, the merest whispering of a reproach: for who, if she was failing to care for me, was caring for her?

That was what I heard in the new music of her tenderness to me — the sad and unexpected reasoning of our arrangement, that when the husband abdicates his responsibility to protect, another must take his place.

And someone had.

Eventually, of course, for all Marisa’s exquisite precautions, he became present to me: an invisible but tangible replacement, on the other end of Marisa’s now too busy phone, at the arrival point of Marisa’s now too many taxis. Late for the theatre one evening and fretting because she ’d mislaid the tickets, she used a pet name for me I’d never heard before. She assured me, on the way out of the house, that it was a name she’d given Freddy. Short of ringing him, which was out of the question, I had no way of confirming the truth of this. But she did not appear concerned whether I believed her or not. Once upon a time, had anything been amiss between us before we took our seats, Marisa would have squeezed my knee during the performance. But on this night she kept her hands folded firmly in her lap.

Had anyone asked me, even in the interval, what the play was about I would not have been able to answer. Perfidy, I’d have guessed. What else is any play about?

Two or three weeks after this freeze-out at the theatre I found an expensive fountain pen I didn’t recognise on a side table in our living room. ‘Had visitors?’ I asked. ‘No, why?’ she replied, not looking up from her book. And that evening she turned her mouth away from me when I tried to kiss her.

There’d been no room for doubt before, but now certainty was screaming in my ear. A lover. Marisa had taken a lover.

The precise locution was important to me. She didn’t have a lover, she had taken a lover.

Had I imagined I would riot orgiastically in the moment when it came? No. I had anticipated it, correctly, as the eventualisation of terror, as when, hearing noises in the dead of night, you descend the stairs and discover that there is indeed a stranger ransacking your home. But I had not anticipated just how devastating this eventualisation would be. In the moments after Marisa refused me her mouth I shook with fear. A bar seemed to lodge itself inside my chest. My rejected mouth dried up. Had someone cut my throat, or had I — as would have been more appropriate to the occasion — taken a knife to my wrists, I’d have bled iced water.

A lover .

A lover such as I had once been to her — and he who was first the lover of his wife knows better than anyone the treacherous transference of affections of which that wife, without betraying it in the movement of a single muscle or the disarrangement of a single hair, is capable.

It was here, what I had asked for: the wounding doubt that was doubt no longer, the wound itself, the gouge in the heart, and I was distraught.

Yet at the centre of my distraction, coiled like a baby’s fist, was a promise of the immense and terrible bliss to come, not when I was calm, because I never would be calm, but when I at last learned to take possession of all my fears and accept them as my fate.

Very well then, I would learn and I would accept. A lover. A lover. Like a celebrant of some terrible religion of self-cruelty, I breathed the incense of deception and chanted the unholy words. She has taken a lover. She has taken a lover. My wife Marisa has taken a lover .

A lover — say it, Felix — for whom she was keeping her mouth pure.

And when, many months after this, emboldened by what seemed to me a change in our marital temperature — and remember, I measured on a scale of exactitude unknown to other men — I put out my lips to kiss her and was not rebuffed, I made the only rational deduction: lovers . Lovers in the plural. Too many now to remember which one of them she was keeping her mouth pure for. Like Zelda Fitzgerald who maddened her husband with the boast that she had kissed thousands of men and intended to kiss thousands more. Only with Zelda it was all pampered, Southern States, jazz-age bravado, whereas Marisa. . Marisa was a reflective being, a woman who didn’t naturally jig about in body or in mind, a woman who weighed the significance of her deeds, who did nothing lightly, and the consequences of whose kisses, therefore, could only be terrible.

And here’s an interesting and I don’t doubt utterly reprehensible question. Was I stimulated in my hurt more by Marisa’s taking many lovers than by her taking one?

Yes and no. That is not prevarication. I answered the question differently every day I woke with it on my mind, and as Marisa’s unfaithfulness became the settled pattern of our life, I never did wake without it on my mind. Each provoked me in his own way, the lover and whatever the collective noun is for lovers. If we are talking simple jealousy, then of course the lover, singular, had me by the throat as the gaggle of them never did. He alone had Marisa’s sole attention, therefore he alone had what belonged to me. And on top of that he was the first. With him I had to learn from the beginning — the Cuban doctor could no more be called a beginning than Quirin could — how to bear what I had no choice but to bear. He took from me — whoever he was — my virginity.

But simple jealousy was only a small part, as I learned — and I was learning as I went along — of what this was all about. Yes, I was the mental voyeur of my wife, lying alone in our vacated bed, picturing in relentless and unforgiving detail the progress of my rival’s every finger as it adventurously traced its stolen ownership of Marisa’s flesh. Pore by pore, I touched what he touched, lived inside his hands, took up residence in his mouth and followed his tongue wherever Marisa permitted him to thrust it. Where he went, I went. Must I go on? I was more him than he was himself. And perhaps more me than I had ever been. Had I ever entered Marisa as rapturously solus as we entered her together? And yet at no point in this intense familiarity I enjoyed with him was I curious to know who he was. I didn’t want to see him, learn his name, discover what he looked like, or find out what he did for a living. I assumed we were not acquainted; Marisa would not have been so vulgar as to take her first lover (her first lover since we had become lovers) from among our friends. But even if we were acquainted I didn’t wish to know about it and would not have reproached Marisa for her choice. This was about her not him. The story that engrossed me was the story of Marisa’s reaching out and taking herself one, and then several, regardless of who any of them happened to be. A story which, in all its essentials, I would rather Jane Austen than de Sade or Sacher-Masoch to have written. How did Marisa feel it at her heart, with what quickening of emotion and perturbation of spirit did she depart from the straight path of our marriage and plunge into that initial infidelity? And with what tumult of feelings, what expectation of felicity or dismay, what augmentation or diminution of self-regard, did she do to Lover Number One — who must surely have been particular to her — exactly as she had done to me and betray him in the careless distribution of her favours now to Lover Number Two, now to Lover Number Three, now to however many more of them there were? Which was the greater indecorum? Which, if any, shamed her more, assuming that shame was what at any time she felt? And if not shame — for she was, as I have said, a serious and reflective being — then what? Love? May the thought perish in the utterance, but could she have lost her heart a little to Lover Number One? Could she even have lost her heart to him a lot? And did the dissipation of her feelings for him, as she spread her net wider, cause her regret? Did she lament her infidelity to Him ? Or was lubricity now the element she swam in?