Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

She subjected me to one of her most precarious, eye-dropping scrutinies. ‘You know that for sure, do you, Mr Quinn?’

‘I deduce it. And I have seen the odd example of it for myself.’

‘And do you think a woman wants that?’

‘A faithful husband? Why ever not?’

‘Not a faithful husband, a Labrador.’

‘You don’t like Labradors?’

‘They dribble.’

I sighed. The old who wants a dribbling Labrador for a husband argument.

Dulcie sighed, too. She had, I noticed, been casting increasingly agitated looks in the direction of my wife ’s lover. ‘I’ve been staring at him all through lunch but it’s only just occurred to me who that gentleman is,’ she said at last, with a quick glance at me to be sure I wouldn’t mind her referring to him at all.

‘Who is he, Dulcie?’

‘My dentist. I’ve only ever seen him in a white coat.’

‘Your dentist? You sure?’

‘Sure.’

‘Then I wonder if he’s Marisa’s dentist too,’ I said, as much for my own benefit as Dulcie ’s.

Her green-grey eyes rested on me sadly. They were so wide apart it was almost like being looked at by two people, both of whom felt the same about me. At last, with a sweeping glance that took in the whole restaurant with all its garrulousness and glitter, all its gluttonous fantasies, spoken and unspoken, she asked, ‘Where will it all end, Mr Quinn?’

‘Where it always ends, Dulcie,’ was the best I could say.

My lunch with Dulcie should have been, like Quirin’s drunken imbecilic tumble down our staircase, a decisive event. To be sane as the world judges sanity is to know when there’s a lesson staring you in the face. But then had I been a lesson learner I would long ago have looked at my father and given up being a man altogether.

I have not sought to hide my snobbishness, so it will surprise no one that I started from the association of my marriage with Lionel’s as from a leprosy. Were we bonded in erotic necessity, that loose-toothed, illfavoured, list-making, effeminately vulpine, vulgar viola player and me?

There is a contradiction here, I know. On the one hand I insist that what I feel all men feel, the only difference between us being that they will not admit it. On the other I no sooner see evidence of a commonality of sexual impulse than I turn against myself. If such wretches as one sees crawling between heaven and earth want what I want then would I not be better among the wantless dead? In the end you have to admit, to quote a foolish poet, that you ‘share your knee bone with the gnat’ or some such fatuity, and get on with scrabbling in the same slop bowl as the lowly. One must eat as other men eat, therefore one must desire as other men desire, too. But I found the idea of libidinal democracy impossible to accept when it came to ankle chains and hot wives.

Was there truly kinship between Lionel’s cheap and cheerful fantasias for Dulcie and the austere religion of Marisa which I practised? I understood well enough Dulcie’s revulsion from her husband’s Americanised proposals. It wasn’t the sex she hated, it was the Disneyfication of sex. I knew about hot wives. I had been to Minneapolis myself on book-associated business, I had even made an after-dinner speech at an Antiquarian Booksellers Association conference in Milwaukee, and while I hadn’t met anyone I could identify as a hot wife on those trips, I had a sense that they were out there, in the malls and in the shopping aisles of Wal-Mart. There is a significant subculture of wife worship in America, sometimes opportunistic in the way Dulcie feared — a pretext merely for trading an old wife in for a new — but more usually of the classically submissive sort, the husband wanting the wife to emasculate him, ideally, it is embarrassing to report, through consorting with a well-hung black man who pimps her out to his friends and in extreme cases having the black man’s child. Perhaps because of the castrating times we live in, contemporary pornography has more of cuckolding in it than any other deviancy, and race-based emasculative cuckolding would seem, at least for Americans, to be the most popular fantasy of all. I was no stranger to the literature and winced from it: men who wished not to be men, husbands who called themselves wimps and sissies, husbands who could only be happy when their wives laughed at the ineffectiveness of their genitalia, husbands who dreamed of sucking black men’s sperm out of their wives’ vaginas. Was I on this continuum of castration? Was my dismembered trance just a dishonest man’s metaphor for this same longing not to be a man at all?

No, is my considered answer. There is no continuum of aberration, except in the sense that every act of sex sits at a crossroads which leads to every other. We would all perish ecstatically in sex at last if we had the courage to go on travelling. ‘In the end,’ Bataille said, ‘we resolutely desire that which imperils our life.’ Otherwise, no, I was not companioned in the kitsch of being cuckolded with Lionel. I was a Frenchman, not an American, in my erotic life, seeking carnality’s greatest prize — extinction. No one could have been further removed than I was from the breezy Disneyland of wifeswapping, cocktail nuts and ankle chains. No one.

But I kept an aloof eye, as it were, on these distant cousins in perversion, as an aristocrat enjoying perfect health might note with concern the incidence of rickets among the poorer branches of his family. Though Lionel and Dulcie were not family, I feared they had brought the affliction closer to me than I could tolerate. The thought even occurred to me as we were talking that Marisa and her lover were having the identical conversation about me. ‘He’s sick, Miles. He needs help.’ And Miles, I was pretty sure, would not be championing me, as I’d vainly championed Lionel, as one of masculinity’s pioneers, scouting for what was out there beyond the phallic pale. Dentists don’t think like that.

Enough. To the degree that it was within my power to rescue Marisa from the category of hot wife, and me from the category of spermsnuffling sissy, then I should do it. Enough. We had gone far enough. But no sooner did I make the decision to parley with Marisa and put it to her that we were in mortal danger of looking like the thing we both despised, that while morally we were sainted and heroic, aesthetically we had sinned, and so, my dear, enough — at that precise moment of resolution I heard the vitality leave my body in a rush. The psychoanalyst Theodor Reik describes what comes over a masochist ‘patient’ as he closes in on what might be termed ‘recovery’. ‘He notices that life loses some of its rich-ness, its interest and colour. Life is felt as dreary, the day is trivial; life seems to have lost its substance. It becomes numb and meaningless.’

Which was exactly how ‘recovery’ felt to me as I envisaged it. Enough ?

I couldn’t say the word.

Enough trivialised the day.

Enough made life numb, dreary and meaningless.

Enough promised nothing that had any richness, interest or colour in it.

There was no Enough .

Something else occurred that lunchtime which should have sent me in one direction, had I been a sane man, but which sent me once and for all, since I was not a sane man, in the other.

The something else was a look Marisa threw me across the restaurant, a look that bypassed her one-time Irish millionaire lover, now a dentist, bypassed Dulcie, and simply rested on me like a torch-beam in an empty room. Only two people who knew the complexions of each other’s souls and knew what compassion the one could call on in the other, would have been able to exchange what we exchanged in a single glance. I read Marisa’s meaning in her eyes, but it was the expression of her whole face that spoke to me. She opened her eyes wide, emphasising those serious teabag stains which I had always regarded as the site of all that was philosophic in her nature. Such a serious and reflective face, and yet kind and mirthful too in the wide, pearl-shadowed spaces above her eyelids. How are you getting on with Dulcie? her expression asked. She looks as though she is having a hard time of it for whatever reason. I hope you are being gentle with her. You can be ironic and impatient, Felix, so please don ’t be. I don’t think she is strong enough for that. Few people are. You underestimate the strength of your personality and will. I intend no reproach by saying that. What you will you will and what I do I do. You exercise no tyranny over me. Perhaps you try to, but in so far as I submit to it I do so for my own reasons which are not necessarily my own desires. You sometimes, I think, confuse the two but they are not the same. You can have a reason for doing something that doesn’t answer to a desire to do it. I will say no more. I am a fictionaliser like you, and I know what truth can spoil. You look, by the by, very nice sitting there. It gives me immense pleasure to see you across a room, I don’t always get the opportunity to see you in this way. And seeing you looking so nice I wish we were at the same table, you and I, talking. We have always talked so well together. Sad, isn’t it, that we can’t be doing it. Or at least that we can’t be doing it at this instant. .