Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

The way back. There it was — the retreat into normalcy.

As always, at such a time, the hobgoblins of the ordered world gath-ered to congratulate me on my narrow escape. Thank your lucky stars you didn’t get what you were after , they gibbered. Now you can live as the sane live. And be careful in the future what you ask for . And just as reliably, the other voice — the voice of my addiction — shouted the impossibility, the undesirability (quite literally that which answered to none of my desires), of giving in to reason. I could even taste it on my tongue: the savourlessness of living as the sane live.

He didn’t matter to Marisa, her Irish lover. If that wasn’t what she was telling me, it was what I saw. Throughout my conversation with Dulcie I had kept track of Marisa and her lunch companion and no, they weren’t tearing at each other’s throats or grabbing handfuls of each other’s flesh beneath the table. I took note of who put whose hands where, and no, they didn’t. Call that crude, but there was necessity in it. I also took note of whether they whispered under cover of conversing about food, leaned cheek to cheek, met noses or kissed with their lips parted, and no, they didn’t do that either. In most regards they looked no different from me and Dulcie. What I thought I’d seen when they raised glasses I probably hadn’t. Maybe Miles was her lover, maybe he was just her dentist, taking her out to monitor her bite, maybe he was both — it didn’t signify, one way or the other. This much I knew for sure: she wasn’t hot for him. Very probably she liked him well enough — certainly she ’d have approved his tailoring and spotless scalded fingers — but she didn’t long to be with him, didn’t conjure up his body or his features when he wasn’t there or count the hours before she could be with him again or keep a curl of his hair in a locket worn around her neck. And certainly didn’t tango with him like a mare in heat.

Excuse the frilly language, but that’s jealousy for you. If you refuse to descend into the cesspit with Othello or roll around the comic brothel with Leo Bloom, snickering at the keyhole of your own cuckoldry — Show! Hide! Show! Plough her! More! Shoot! — then all you’re left with is the bodice-ripper or the girly mags. Nothing I could do about it: the minute I put my mind to Marisa on the loose, I either had her swooning in the arms of a highwayman in tight breeches, or stripped naked and fucked until her brains bled. I accept no personal responsibility for this. When it comes to finding words for sex, the narrowest no-man’s-land separates the most refined imagination from the coarsest. Literature and popular romance the same — the border between them is invisible and unpoliced. Is Jane Eyre a novel of serious intent or an exercise in sentimental pornography?At the moment Anna Karenina weeps over the loss of her honour to Vronsky, are we in a tragedy or a penny dreadful? We are in both, is the answer. Because desire itself inhabits that same narrow strip of unclaimed territory between sacrament and slush.

Consider this scene. A youth, sick with love for an unattainable woman, goes riding with his father. When they reach a ‘tall stack of old logs’ the father dismounts and tells the boy to wait where he is. Eventually, when the father does not return, the boy goes looking for him. At last he finds him, standing by the window of a small wooden house, talking to a beau-tiful woman. The woman, of course, is the object of the boy’s unrequited love. Something — ‘stronger than curiosity, stronger even than jealousy’ — stops him from running away. (We know what that ‘something’ is: the ecstatic anticipation of proof oracular.) Then an ‘unbelievable’ event takes place before his eyes. The father lifts his riding crop and strikes the young woman a sharp blow across her arm, which is bared to the elbow. She quivers, looks silently at her assailant, then raises her arm slowly to her lips, and kisses the scar which ‘glows crimson upon it’.

Phallic logs, sons sexually envious of their fathers, riding crops, crimson scars, women of spirit made to cower and quiver — of what work of monumentally melodramatic tosh is this the climax? Ivan Turgenev’s First Love . And it is a masterpiece.

Great Expectations , of which my father once, for a small fortune, sold a copy signed by Dickens to his mistress Ellen Ternan, binds us into the same near-Gothic tale. In both novels a boy etherialises a woman out of her corporeal existence. In both instances he must suffer the spectacle of another man or men violently returning her to it.

Grand guignol , I grant you. But that’s the temperature at which a man’s erotic imagination functions. Mal functions, you might say. I won’t argue the toss. But pity us anyway, clattering between the extremes of believing that a woman is beyond the gross contaminating touch of man, and fearing that the brute male assurance of which we are incapable is what she ’s really after.

But where was the brute male assurance in Marisa’s life? Not sitting at her table — anyone could see that. Whatever else Miles had going for him, he wasn’t mastering my wife the way mastering works in Turgenev and the bodice-ripper. Didn’t have the muscles. Didn’t have the dirty eyes. Didn’t have what Henry James, that sad voyeur of one primal betrayal after another, called the ‘sacred terror’. Good. For that relief, muchibus thankibus. Another hurdle in the steeplechase of dread negotiated.

But after the relief, the let-down. For if Miles was no threat to me, who was? What if all Marisa’s lovers were like him, doctors or dentists or accountants, no more capable of wielding the riding crop than I was? Worse — what if Miles was all Marisa’s lovers? My cathedral bed of jealous agony was a fraud in that case. I had no one to be agonisedly jealous of.

And perhaps that too was what I read in Marisa’s expression across the restaurant — that she felt she ’d let me down. That she’d done her best for both of us, but this was the limit of her iniquity. Reality had blown away illusion, and now the game was up.

I meant what I’d said to Dulcie about the faithfulness a wife can rely on from a husband who finds his fulfilment in her unfaithfulness to him. I didn’t stop looking at other women when I first met Marisa. She hadn’t, by simple virtue of her beauty and her presence, removed me from the field of promiscuous desire. But the moment I saw the Cuban doctor’s fingers on her and conceived her infidelity, I became hers only. No other woman was remotely interesting to me. I neither looked at them nor thought of them. Not once. What could any of them have given me that would be anything like as engrossing — engrossing of every aspect of my attention — as this ? False to me, Marisa occluded all her sex. I lived only to be faithful to her.

But fidelity of this sort — eroticised fidelity, by comparison with which the gadfly vacillation of the libertine is as gruel to wine — extorts its price. It aroused me to be faithful on the condition that she was not. I am not saying I would not have gone on being faithful to Marisa had she not gone on being faithless to me, but the arousal was in the inequity. For me to burn for her, Marisa had to burn for someone else. I could not lie transfixed in subspace, imagining her out in the abandoned night, if she were merely enjoying an orderly conversation with someone at the very sight of whom she did not go up in flames. If I were to continue extinguishing myself as a man, it had to be in a higher cause than this. Marisa had to frighten me with greater recklessness, of heart and body, and with a rival far more destructive of my peace of mind, and far more menacing to her erotic self-composure, than Miles.