Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

Though I did not question her in this way to her face, I questioned her, in her absence, to her soul. And I do not scruple to call this line and intensity of questioning love. Not a mere crush or act of passing fancy, not the faint love-twinge Marisa might have felt for the man with whom she first unhusbanded me, but proper, indurated love — my sort of love, uncondi-tional, time-tried, morbidly steadfast and submissive, all absorbing and absorbed.

Until we are in love — my sort of love — we pass one another by. We take glancing notice when our interest is aroused, we half perceive or carelessly wonder, but we do not truly observe or interrogate until we love. This is how we know love from its poor relations: by the greed with which we devour its object, not resting until we have ingested the loved one in his or her entirety. Only artists are as voracious in their gaze and curiosity. And of course the religious, who will eat their god to know him.

Art, religion, love — how closely allied in their baffled sensuality all three have always been. I was lover, artist, fanatic devotee of Marisa. And never more so than when, like those vanishing damozels in whose pursuit poets and painters wear out their lives, like the cruel, invisible deity whom the prayerful again and again entreat in vain, she eluded every attempt I made to enter her imagination as others were now permitted to enter her body.

I borrow that somewhat archaic way of putting it from Marisa herself. In my company, at least, that was how she described and (forgive me) performed the act of love — as a surprising and maybe even inappropriate intrusion. I am not saying she opposed it on those grounds. On the contrary, I think the more unintelligible she found the experience of being penetrated the more it aroused her. At that moment when other women closed their eyes and tried to vanish from distracting consciousness altogether, Marisa would grow more alert and curious, raising herself up on to her elbows to look down, needing to see the mechanics of it — the actual penetrative moment — as if only then, when beholding it in all its un-accountable obscenity, could she admit that although she never understood why people, including her, enjoyed it, she did.

And if this was a spur to my understanding her when I was with her, how much the more so was it when I thought of her with someone else.

On the nights Marisa left me to myself, not saying whether she would return before morning or not (I always knew when she would not) I turned our bedroom into a cathedral. When I played music, it was always Schubert, the great agoniser –

Ich frage keine Blume,

Ich frage keinen Stern,

Sie können mir alle nicht sagen ,

Was ich erführ so gern

— not asking flowers or stars to tell him what he burned to know because the thing he burned to know he burned not to know as well. But mostly my excruciations needed no accompaniment.

At about nine o’clock I locked the house up, not to keep Marisa out but to keep me in. For my cathedral was a prison too. Thereafter I didn’t leave the room, or do anything except by the light of two church candles which burned on either side of the bed. Incense, too, I burned. Opium was the aroma that suited me best. By ten I liked to have changed out of my business suit or whatever I was wearing that attached me to any purpose other than Marisa. In the days before she ’d taken ill in Florida, Marisa had bought me white pyjamas in a shop in Key West that sold only garments Hemingway might have worn. Hemingway’s connection to white pyjamas was a mystery to us, but they were certainly more suited to the damp and heat than those I’d brought with me. Marisa had laughed, I remember, on discovering I had brought any pyjamas to Florida. Why pack such things to go on honeymoon? ‘So that you can laugh at me,’ I told her. There was no laughter associated with my white pyjamas now. These were sacrificial garments, the vestiture which signified the abnegation of my virility and independence. I was Marisa’s to do with as she willed, and let my icy blood stain the garments I wore in her service until every corner of them was incarnadined. Thus robed and eviscerated, I lay myself down to keep vigil through the night.

There is a word used by those who practise suspensefulness as a calling: subspace — the ritual abandonment of your will to another’s sexual caprices, the nirvana stillness of complete submission. In subspace you receive with joy and gratitude whatever punishment is meted out to you — a private insult, a public humiliation, a flogging, a blade, a flame, the torture of your choice or your torturer’s.

The subspace I entered was ruled over by Marisa’s absence. With joy and gratitude I suffered her being somewhere, and that cut deeper than any blade.

Sometimes I got some sleep — short, fitful lapses of moral duty — most nights I did not. When I did sleep I woke in guilt, believing that not to have stayed awake was disrespectful and ungrateful to Marisa who was out there labouring, in a sense, for me. But I forbade myself sleep on other grounds, too, for you do not squander subspace on unconsciousness. You are alert or you are nothing when you choose submission to your wife ’s caprice as your vocation. You are Henry James’s novelist on whom nothing dare be lost. And every second I slept was a second lost of the torture of being awake. Sleep through the nights of your wife’s unfaithful absence and you might as well embrace the consolations of common men — drink, gambling, sport, suicide.

Besides, I could never be sure which night of wounded wakefulness would be my last. Not in the suicide sense, but allowing, as I had to, for the volatility of human passion. Marisa might do anything. Might take it into her head to return to our life as it had been, in which case no more sickly vigils kept by me. Or might do the very opposite and leave me al-together, in which case again my devotions would be over. For make no mistake: this ritual was a celebration of our singular togetherness, a marriage sacrament that would lose all point and savour were we to part. The exquisite peace of subspace — the peace that passeth all understanding — was predicated on a happy union.

As for the other privation which I owed Marisa in the course of these cathedral nights, I will not speak of it here. Whatever else it may be, this is not a fluidal narrative. But no is the answer, I did not. To have done so would have been to take from Marisa what was, by the terms of our marriage contract, hers whether she had use for it or not — more hers, paradoxically, the less use she did have for it: hers to declare void.

In the blackest corner of my soul I would have wished her to secure me against treasonable temptation before she left the house, perhaps by binding my hands behind me. Or even — for there was nothing in my fever I dared not contemplate — by hacking them off at the wrists. And that wasn’t the end of it either. Once you allow amputation into your erotic imagination there is only one conceivable conclusion. The man must be constrained, the man must be unmanned, the man must die without a trace of manhood left. But if Marisa knew of these longings, she never satisfied them. Perhaps on the grounds that she was doing enough for me already.

And so I lay there, in the stretched silence, as on a slab of stone, imagining how it would be when one day, as a gift, she consented to dismember me, though she had to all intents and purposes gifted me dismemberment already, by virtue of her absence. I held myself very still, impatient of any noise or movement that wasn’t Marisa’s. As if attached to her by tenuous threads of love, like a fly caught in the web of his desiring, I vibrated to every sound she made and every thought she had. Marisa whispering, laughing, confiding, gasping. Marisa opening her body — it didn’t matter to whom, it mattered only that she felt the shock, the shame, the rapture or whatever of it, and sent the silken message back to me, from however far away she was.