Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

The one thing Marisa, as a woman, couldn’t be expected to understand was the erotic appeal of gaucherie in a woman with a title. A society woman making such a bad job of being a bacchante finds its way into the excruciation system of a man, where getting it sexually wrong is transformed into getting it sexually right. Which is not to say one would want to frolic with Lady Hamilton looking like that for long. In the end — and I didn’t doubt Marius was of my party in this — the intelligence in a woman’s eyes is more provocative than any other part of her no matter what her state of undress. No woman could be seductive who wasn’t clever — that, I was sure, was where we both stood.

So the sooner Marius got to hear Marisa in full aesthetic flow the better.

I had a word with Andrew, Marius’s old college acquaintance, about persuading Marius to come along to Marisa’s talk. They had the occasional drink together, I gathered, though Marius rarely stayed out longer than half an hour, leaving without a word the minute Andrew went to the bathroom or otherwise gave him an opportunity to escape. I made up some cock and bull story about my worrying whether Marisa would get a fair crowd for her talk. It was Andrew who’d told me about Marius’s passion for Baudelaire, and since Baudelaire had written about the artificial in art, and woman’s airs, and dandies, it was possible he ’d be interested in what Marisa had to say on those subjects as they bore on the life of Lady Blessington. Could he suggest it to him? Not to say who Marisa was or anything. I didn’t want to be seen begging my wife an audience. Just a discreet nudge. Not important. But I’d be grateful. And never of course to mention a word of this to Marisa whenever he next met her.

I gave him the flyer which had Marisa’s photograph on it. If Marius bothered to look he would surely recognise her face and that would be that.

Perhaps Andrew did as I asked, perhaps he didn’t. I think my interest in Marius piqued him a little. You never know where jealousy will surface. Perhaps Marius saw the flyer, perhaps he didn’t. What I suspect got him to the lecture was more providential than planned: a tableau, as I saw it, of inevitable connection — Marius cooling his heels in Manchester Square, deciding whether or not he was yet ready, after Elspeth, to look at paintings again, and seeing Marisa going in and out of the gallery, sharper put together than your usual gallery-goer, everything about her equivocal, severe and yet seductive all at once, her leather music case gripped under her arm because she disliked the femininity of a handbag, but her earrings saying something else, her heels picking at the paving as though it were ice beneath her feet, or as though she owed the stones some injury, angry — he must have thought — much as he was angry around art, a woman who looked at a painting more in the way he looked at a painting, grudgingly, not gushingly, whatever the pleasure, like someone startled out of a pleasant reverie, resenting the painter or the paint for pulling so importunately at that something in the heart that wishes to be left alone. . and in that instant seeing (just as I had seen) his fate. Remembering her from the fromagerie — you don’t forget a woman you’ve looked over as comprehensively as Marius had looked over Marisa — he must have wondered what frequent business took her to the Wallace Collection, and found in that wondering his opportunity to enter a gallery again, to look at paintings again, and in the process discover who she was and what she did. The consequence of which was his appearing at the back of Marisa’s audience, drinking in her words.

I too was standing at the rear but changed my position when I saw him enter. It felt like a changing of the watch. He stepped forward, I stepped back. A woman in front of me turned round to see what the commotion was, so loudly was my heart beating.

Marisa’s talk was a success. That air she had of being somewhere else worked well when she spoke in public. She didn’t try to please. She gave the impression of a person looking deep into a subject which both was and wasn’t in the room with her. The right way, I have always thought, to address art. As something that is and isn’t of one’s time.

People went up to her afterwards to talk about this and that. I hung back, as I always did. Not a husband’s business to be nosing into his wife ’s public triumphs. But I had more reason to stay out of the way this time because Marius, too, was waiting to say something to her. He let others go before him. I recognised the tactic. He wanted to be last. When he did have her to himself he ventured an observation he hoped she wouldn’t find too personal.

‘A very impressive act of concealment,’ he said, touching his moustaches nervously.

She wondered what he meant.

‘I feel I have been listening to someone speaking fondly of an enemy rather than a friend,’ he went on.

‘I don’t think of Lady Blessington as my enemy. Why should I? She is past doing me any harm.’

He smiled a slow sad knowing smile. ‘A person can harm you from the grave,’ he said.

She looked up at him. She wasn’t used to looking up at men. ‘And what harm, even from the grave, is it that you think I fear? Not the harm of a comparison, I hope. I’m not competing with her for fortune, or for looks.’

His eyes went from her to the painting and back again. His expression suggested she had nothing to fear from any such comparison. ‘On the contrary,’ he said, ‘I think you bear a striking resemblance to her, or she to you if you prefer it that way.’

‘Well I wouldn’t say no to her figure,’ she laughed. Marisa had never needed me to teach her how to her flirt.

She coloured a little. So did he.

‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘if the similarity isn’t precisely the reason for your hostility towards her, if that isn’t to put it too extremely. There ’s something in her eyes that might remind you of yourself. Something that would be direct and yet isn’t. Not a pleading, exactly, but a half-sadness, and with it a sort of expectation of sympathy she isn’t certain she deserves or even wants.’

Rather than look at Marius, who was becoming guilty of something very close to impertinence, Marisa looked at the portrait. He was right. Lady Blessington leans a little forward in her scarlet chair, lightly clasping her hands — a gesture of nervous ownership, of composure not quite attained. And yes, she didn’t like the look. Though it had not occurred to her that she didn’t like it because it reminded her of herself.

She turned to face Marius again. ‘You know a lot about me,’ she said, ‘for someone I’ve never spoken a word to before.’

He mumbled what might have been an apology into his moustache. ‘I was struck by your talk, for which I thank you,’ he said. ‘I listened hard. That was all. I just thought you weren’t saying all you thought.’

‘So you are privy to my intellectual life as well? I am an open book to you, evidently. You miss neither the words I don’t say nor the sadness I don’t feel.’

He stared hard into her face, noting the tea-bag stain pouches under her eyes, the site where the skin would turn from ochre to yellow and at last to brown, though as yet the pouches suited her, suggesting the play of seriousness, a capacity for philosophic amusement unspoiled by levity. He was like me in this regard: he loathed inconsequence. Or at least he did in the company of Marisa. No silly voices or foolish accents with her. A man who could be himself only with women, I noted. Or with women with whom he thought he could fall in love. ‘I would much rather,’ he said, lowering his gaze at last, ‘that you gave me the chance to know exactly what it is you do feel.’