Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

Marius was not there.

She was mildly disappointed. She looked good, she thought, in a not too short steel-grey tulip skirt and wide leather belt, high-heeled sandals that showed her painted toes, big metallic earrings and of course a white shirt in which when she moved she rippled. She coruscated, was her own view of herself. But he wasn’t there to be dazzled. She was more surprised than hurt. Her instinct for these things was normally uncanny. If she expected to see a man she saw him. ‘I conjure them,’ she joked in an entry in her diary that might or might not have been left around for me to read. ‘Some people bend spoons, I conjure men.’

This was no wanton boast. More a reflection on the cruelty of things. Conjuring men was her affliction.

But she did not, on this occasion, conjure Marius.

She tried to dismiss him from her mind. He was not important to her. For herself she could take him or leave him alone.

The next talk in the series she skipped. Two could play at touch me not.

But the final one she attended. As, by the marvellous synchronicity of warped desire, did Marius.

I missed them meeting. (I was loitering with intent — Marisa’s intent — in Manchester Square. ‘Leave the shop early,’ she ’d told me. ‘Wait for me. Don’t know how long I’ll be.’) But it must have gone off well, because afterwards they sauntered round the gallery together, Marius deferring to her expertise, Marisa thinking he might like to see how Fragonard’s The Swing looked in its new position in the reinstalled Oval Room. My understanding is that they spent more time looking at this painting than a man and woman who are not officially betrothed should ever be allowed to spend. In my perhaps overexcited interpretation of events, what had of necessity transpired between them — given the painting, given the overheatedness of their discourse — was this: in full public view, and on the basis of an acquaintance of no more than fifteen minutes’ duration, including the look they had exchanged at the cheese counter, they had made Marisa’s vagina the subject of their conversation. Indeed, had Marius kneeled before her, unzipped the pinstripe trousers she was wearing, pulled aside her underclothes and exposed her genitals to his curiosity, he could not have offended against decorum more. I make no judgements. I merely describe events as they occurred.

A shame I missed it.

That they were able to do this without causing a scandal I ascribe to education. Educated people, particularly those educated in literature or the visual arts, have more ways of talking about a woman’s vagina than those who leave school when they’re fifteen. The latter will claim they call a vagina a vagina — except, of course, they mainly call it something else — and that talking about it anyway is not what they prefer to do. Thus they miss out twice: first on knowledge, then on sex at its most refined — talking about it being an indispensable prologue to doing it with any grace. But then the uneducated are not taught to value grace.

I’m not sure how much Marius knew already about the happenstance of Fragonard’s The Swing , originally titled Les Hazards Heureux de l’Escarpolette , but whatever gaps in his knowledge my Marisa found, my Marisa filled.

In fact you don’t have to be educated beyond the common tittle-tattle of art history to know how Fragonard came to accept the commission for this most prurient example of rococo trifling, so innocently admired of the art-loving public that they have it reproduced on tea towels and table mats though it is about the pudenda and nothing else. I don’t intend to repeat that tittle-tattle here. Suffice it to remind those who have forgotten that a lesser painter than Fragonard had been invited to execute the composition first, but declined the commission on the grounds that it was indecent. The commissioner of the painting — a French gentleman of the court — wished to have his mistress painted swinging in a bower, as high and as uninhibitedly as a bird. Pushing the swing was to be a bishop, and gazing up her skirts was to be the gentleman of the court. Why the bishop no one knows. As Marisa would have said to Marius, ‘There is no plumbing the religious filthy-mindedness of the French.’

It’s possible that for the painter — at the time enjoying some éclat in Paris as a religious allegorist — the bishop was the last straw. But it’s also possible, as Marius might have surmised in return to Marisa, as they stared up at the painting together, ‘That the invitation to throw the lady’s legs as wide as the composition or his imagination would allow was not one he felt he could accept, bishop or no bishop.’

Fragonard, being less queasy, and no doubt with a quicker intuitive understanding of why a man might choose to submit the private parts of the woman he loves to the eyes of as many onlookers as possible, took over without demur, introduced a young voyeur — perhaps to double the nobleman’s excitement — and painted what Marisa described as ‘The most profusely arboreal excuse for a vagina ever seen.’

Thus was coition managed between them, as an act of purely intellectual indecency, in a room full of art lovers not a one of whom would have noticed that anything untoward had happened.

Except me, and I wasn’t even there.

They took tea — as I was able to learn, deduce, or otherwise piece together later — in the courtyard where Marisa had expected him, but then again not, a fortnight before. Marius wondered, since their afternoon had been so educative, whether she would accompany him to dinner on an evening of her choosing in order that he might be educated some more. She told him she was a married woman. He asked her to name her favourite cuisine. She told him Italian. He said his was French. She asked him if he spent time in France. He said only in his head. She wondered what he had against going there in body. He told her he was more head than body, just as he was more past than present. Je suis un vieux boudoir plein de roses fanées , he said. Baudelaire, he told her. I thought as much, she said. Which was why, he continued, it was such a pleasure, this — stretching out his fingertips to her, which she didn’t touch with hers, she being a married woman — to talk to someone in the living present. There were too many withered roses, and insufficient live ones. She laughed at him. He coloured. She apologised.

‘I’ve never been able to take flower imagery seriously,’ she said. ‘The nuns used to beat me for laughing at Wordsworth. Three years she grew in sun and shower — and I had my head in the desk, imagining this little girl standing in the rain for three years.’

‘The nuns! You were a novitiate?’

‘Hardly. But I boarded at a convent for a year. My mother thought I needed a religious education. In fact it was she who needed a religious education. She released me into the hands of nuns to expiate her sins.’

‘And did you?’

‘No. Which must be why I am expiating them still.’

‘Is that what you’re doing? I thought you were agreeing to meet me for dinner.’

She made a pyramid of her fingers. ‘You are a presumptuous man,’ she said.

‘You know a lot about me,’ he said, echoing her earlier words to him, ‘for someone you’ve barely spoken to before.’

She smiled, and no doubt flushed a little, to be reminded of his fullfrontal attack on her the afternoon of her talk on Lady Blessington.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ she said. ‘Since you offered then to know so much about me, and offer now to be so certain I’ll enjoy your company, I’ll accept your invitation on one condition.’