Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

I would not be true to the condition — neither to myself nor to the love I bore Marisa — if I did not admit that even so complete a trance as this was subject to whimsicalities. Strange fits of passion did I know. .

What if something bad should happen to Marisa when she was out on the wing? What kind of husband allowed his wife to wander unprotected through a feral city? Erotic transport even when it is as extruded as mine enjoys close relations with superstition in its moral guise. Centuries of puritanism cannot be thrown off in a single night. How could I not ask myself, under pressure of that puritanism, whether Marisa wasn’t courting danger? Didn’t she deserve to come to harm? And didn’t I deserve to lose her, whether to mishap or another man? You cannot play fast and loose with the conventions of a disapproving, vengeful world and not expect it to exact its payment in dire consequences. The wages of dull sublunary sin is death. What then the price of wickedness as weird as ours?

My compunctions, as you see, were of a moralising, omen-mongering nature, never sexually visceral. I did tremor cordis but I did not once do nausée . Of course I rose some mornings from my sleepless victim’s bedwith a keen, English sense of the preposterous. I would throw off my white vestments and look with irritation at my reflection in the mirror — a man closer to his middle than his early years, with tired eyes and yet an expression of almost beatific innocence on his face, a washed boyish gratitude which made me angry with myself. But I took this to be a necessary revulsion if I were to get on with the other, lesser business of my life. And it never lasted more than a day or two, or spilled over into a revulsion from Marisa and the dog’s life she was leading me.

The famous words from Dostoevsky’s great novel of moral inversion The Brothers Karamazov — ‘What the intellect regards as shameful often appears splendidly beautiful to the heart’ — are profoundly true. But one can rearrange their thrust. ‘What to the heart appears splendidly beautiful the intellect must not regard with shame.’ I have always made it a matter of principle to encourage the intellect to go wherever the heart dares. If it is beautiful enough to feel it, it is beautiful enough to think it. And let reason — which is so often no more than awkwardness before the heart’s excesses — go hang. So, though I turned briefly from the spectacle I was making of myself, I was not for long disgusted by what my life with Marisa had become.

As for the love I bore her, it increased the more reason she gave me to admire her boldness. With every infidelity — actual or imaginary (for the imagination does not suddenly stop working just because reality becomes a match for it) — my devotion to her deepened. No man truly loves a woman, I have said, who does not know her to be lying in the arms of someone else. I do not retract a word of this. When she was away from me, I pictured Marisa in the greatest, and that is not necessarily to say the grossest, detail. I counted the hairs on her head. I measured the skin between her fingers. I heard the sound her eyes made when she closed them and then again when she opened them. She was so vivid to me I could have put her together, vein by vein, had imagination been gifted with the where-withal to re-create a human life.

Love, of course, does not reside only in the veins. And it wasn’t only the look and feel and touch — the presence — of Marisa that made my heart grow fonder in her absence. I thought longer, too, about the style and courage of her — for hers were no ordinary acts of marital deception. It took strength of mind and intuition and kindness — kindness to me, at least — to balance her affections and loyalties as she did. It required exquisite tact and knowledge of herself, acuity, breadth of understanding, judgement — the quickest discernment of character if she was not to play fast and loose with people ’s feelings, not excluding her own.

So add admiration to my devotion. An esteem for her that grew with every infidelity which in her became infidelity’s very opposite: the proof of how much, how well — how intelligently — she loved me.

Practically, of course, these loving infidelities did not consume all our time. Whether she was rationing herself or rationing me I did not know or care to know; but I must not give the impression that Marisa’s life was nothing but one amorous adventure after another. To the eye of an outsider the life we lived must have looked pretty much like the life we ‘d always lived. We still ate out most nights, still went to the theatre and the cinema, still kept up our dancing lessons (for which I continued to be obdurately late), still saw our friends. I worked every day as usual, Marisa read to her blind man, priced art books at the Oxfam shop, made jam to sell at fund-raisers, guided art lovers into the light of comprehension, and on Fridays sweet-talked the desperate out of the deep dark of their despair. Months could go by without a third party intervening in our marriage. But the fact of her unchasteness, however well spaced the incidences of it, did not leave me. I was never for a single moment not conscious of it. And therefore never for a single moment not in thrall to her.

I would stand at our bedroom window on those evenings which were consecrated to someone else and watch her climb into a taxi or go striding down the pavement with that lovely loose-limbed action, her skirt tight about her flanks, her heels making their characteristically precise attack upon the paving stones, her music case with her credit cards and make-up in it hot under her arm, and I could scarcely breathe for longing for her. Everything about her moved and stirred me in equal measure — the shine of her hair, the strength in her legs and back, the vibration which those clicking heels sent through her frame, and something lonely about her mission. This last always threatened to undo me. Oughtn’t I to run out and bring her back? Oughtn’t I to stop all this? Some nights I waved to her retreating form, wondering whether this would be my last goodbye to her. An apprehension of disaster that should have made me rap on the windowpane and plead with her not to go. But the thought of where she would soon be kept me motionless at the window. The general camp was tasting her sweet body, I knew it, everyone who saw her busy in the world without me knew it, and I was happy.

Whereas. . Well, whereas if I had broken the silent spell that held us and said, ‘Marisa, my beloved wife, my darling, enough now, I have supped full, I am satisfied and can take no more, come home,’ who was to say that she would not have replied, ‘My dear Felix, my dearest dearest husband, but what does any of this have to do with you? It never was and never will be about you and your wants. It is about me and mine. Now go back to your bed.’

And then where would I have been?

I SAW HER ONCE OUT AND ABOUT WITH A LOVER.

I hadn’t followed her. There was no need to follow her. One way or another, by fair means or foul, sightings of Marisa at her impure devotions reached me. People dropped me hints. I read her diary. It is possible I was meant to read her diary. Letters which she left lying about I opened, as presumably I was invited to open, for Marisa was not a careless woman. Letters which were not left lying about I opened too, for Marisa did not hide things carelessly either. And I saw no reason not to listen to messages for her on the house phone. That I found no tangible proof of any love affair was itself no proof of anything. She would have wanted me to find no proof that she was having an affair as proof incontestable that she must have been. Spying on her in this way — entering her haunts on paper — had become our lovemaking. But I would never have dreamed of dogging her footsteps. It was a matter of honour to me that Marisa should be given the widest topographical latitude for her intrigues, and if that meant the whole of London then I would never leave the house.