Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

Among the changes I instituted, for the benefit of every employee, was the installation of what I thought of as a comfort room or snug, not somewhere to drink coffee and catch up on one another’s gossip — there were sufficient pubs and cafés above ground where staff could do that — but a place of meditation and quiet, almost like a hermit’s cell only not quite so isolated. It was lit by a single pink lampshade and had a silvery pink Chinese rug on the floor. Originally there ’d been a door so that my father and my grandfather (separately, of course) could lock themselves away in it and press their suits on willing or unwilling subordinates — a distinction, I regret to say, that was largely lost on both of them. I had the door taken off. Thus, if you’d repaired here in low spirits, you could count on a passing sympathetic glance, or even a concerned enquiry, if you simply raised your eyes to signal that you needed it.

It was here, not long after the first appearance of her ankle chain, that I found Dulcie doubled up like someone who had been shot in the stomach, sobbing like a child. Her right foot was stuck out in front of her. I saw that it was denuded of all ornament.

I popped my head in, gingerly.

‘Everything all right, Dulcie?’ I enquired.

It needed no greater prompting than that for the poor woman to unpack her heart to me.

I must have noticed, she began through her tears, that she had, these past three or four weeks, been wearing jewellery on her feet.

I lowered my head. ‘No, Dulcie,’ I lied, ‘I had not.’

‘Thank God at least for that,’ she said.

For a fraction of a moment I wondered whether she might have taken my unnoticing to be an insult. A woman wears jewellery, when all is said and done, in order that its effect upon her be remarked.

She must have read my mind. ‘It was not,’ she said, ‘my idea to wear the dreadful thing.’

Whose then? was the natural question, but I didn’t feel I had the right to ask it.

She told me anyway. The whole sad saga of it.

Her husband Lionel, the viola player, had, while on a concert tour of the Midwest of America, encountered at a party he was loth to discuss in any detail an example, indeed several examples, of what Americans call a hot wife. Hot wives, Lionel had explained to Dulcie, were married women who, usually with the connivance of their husbands, announced their availability to men who were not their husbands by wearing gold chains around their right ankles. In the subculture where a semiology as subtle as this was recognised and acted on, a gold chain worn around the right ankle was as a promissory note of fornication with no strings attached, unless having the hot wife ’s husband looking on — as frequently occurred — could be called a string.

‘It all sounds,’ were Dulcie ’s first words to her husband on hearing about hot wives, ‘appallingly blue collar. Did these people actually come to hear you play Janáček?’

‘What you have to understand,’ Lionel told her, ‘is that they are in all other respects identical to you and me.’

Dulcie shuddered and feared the worst. Lionel had been seduced by one of these appalling women and had either fallen in love with her or brought home a social disease or both. Even if neither she was not sure she could forgive him. A woman with an ankle chain, from Detroit! Oh Lionel, Lionel, how could you?

But in fact — and Dulcie knew when he was telling the truth — Lionel had not fallen in love with anybody. He was as much in love with her, Dulcie, as he had ever been. In token whereof he had brought back from America an ankle chain for her to wear for him.

‘To signal I am a hot wife?’

‘Yes but only to me.’

‘From what you’ve told me, Lionel,’ she said, ‘a hot wife is for other men to enjoy. Where would be the point of my showing you that I am available for other men’s enjoyment when I’m not?’

He found that question, apparently, hard to answer. ‘It’s just the idea of it,’ was the best, finally, he could manage.

‘The idea that I am available to other men?’

‘Yes.’

‘Even though I’m not?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think you should see a psychiatrist?’

I had felt, even as she was talking to me, great sympathy for Lionel. I had met him a few times, either on the Antiquarian Booksellers Association’s equivalent of a works outing, or at occasional recitals his quartet gave at the Wigmore Hall or other local venues which I felt we owed it to Dulcie to attend. I can’t say I cared for him. He was at once a little too manly in the basso profundo, real-ale sense, and a little too womanly in the organisational way of things, ringing up unnecessarily to confirm dates and making lists of people ’s orders at restaurants — particularly Chinese restaurants where he liked to order by number — so as not to confuse the waiters, though his officiousness invariably confused them more. He had a long, Founding Father’s face, marked by a sort of wolfish puritanism which he exaggerated by wearing what couldn’t quite be called a beard, more a permanent five o’clock shadow which was sculpted into points on his cheeks and below his ears. There was something about the way he moved his mouth I didn’t like either, as though it pained his teeth to talk to you. And he couldn’t stop touching his hair. Even on stage, when he wasn’t playing, his hair appeared to plague him. I’d have said it was a wig, except that no one would have paid good money for such a mildewed patch. But you don’t have to like a man to feel for his predicament as a husband. He had been happily and conventionally married for too long. Nothing wrong with Dulcie. If you had to be happily and conventionally married for an eternity, Dulcie was probably the ideal person to be happily and conventionally married to. But the strain of keeping to the straight and narrow had begun to tell on him as it tells at last on everybody. It is too cruel, the way our society packages and sells the ideal of blissful conjugal normality. There is not enough room left for people to be peculiar. And by and large it is only by being peculiar that we achieve a measure of happiness. The majority of people who rang Marisa at their wits’ end were not at their wits’ end being peculiar. The peculiar are too busy being peculiar to have time to ring the Samaritans. It is not odd sex that drives people to the window ledge, it’s no sex. We die of loneliness at the margins, not perversion. Perversion is exhilarating. The pervert might have second thoughts about himself sometimes but he knows he’s alive.

Marisa told me this. Or at least I deduced it from the little Marisa did tell me. And I plied Dulcie with the essence of Marisa’s wisdom. ‘What do you think a psychiatrist might do for Lionel,’ I asked her, ‘that you, just by humouring him with an ankle chain, cannot?’

‘Make his mind right.’

‘Dulcie,’ I said, ‘there is no right.’

‘You don’t think it’s wrong then that I should encourage his fantasy that I’m a hot wife?’

‘I think it would be more wrong of you not to. . so long as it doesn’t otherwise entail your doing something you would rather not.’

‘Wearing it is something I would rather not!’

‘Well then,’ I said, throwing open my hands, defeated by the perfect circularity of her logic.

‘Would you ask this of your wife?’ she suddenly asked.

I looked at the ground. ‘An ankle chain, no,’ I said. ‘But that’s just an aesthetic thing. And you have more slender ankles than Marisa.’

‘Then, tell me,’ she said, ‘why a man would want this. Lionel says it’s common. All over America, he says. And all over the Internet. If it’s common, explain to me why it’s common. What’s happening to our society? I was brought up to believe a wife’s job was to be faithful to her husband. Once upon a time Lionel went to bed and wouldn’t speak to me for a month if I looked at another man. Now I’m supposed to be a hot wife.’