Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

‘And what condition is that?’

She rose from the table, not coquettishly, but abstracted. Marius paid for their tea, put money into the collecting box at the door of the gallery, then led her out into the thundery dampness of the afternoon where I was waiting for them, as invisible and inconsequential as an ornamental bush. Above them a watercolourist’s sky, great smudges of grey cloud breaking up no sooner than they’d formed, a wet brush inscribing the impermanence of things in charcoal marks which they would have been within their rights to suppose they could read, so like calligraphy was it. A more fanciful man than Marius would have made Marisa look up to see their names coupled in bleeding black ink — Marius and Marisa or maybe Marius Loves Marisa — but then Marisa was not, in turn, fanciful enough to have cooperated with him in this. ‘I see no such thing,’ she would have said, unless the marks had been incontrovertible, and I am not prepared to go so far as to assert they were.

‘And what condition is that?’ Marius asked again.

I pricked my ears, aroused by the word ‘condition’. If there was already a condition between them, they were making progress.

‘That you book the table at the restaurant of my choice any night but Friday, and then ring me to say you’ve booked it.’

‘That’s not a very stringent condition. Consider it done. Just tell me the name of the restaurant and give me your number.’

‘Ah, but that’s the condition. You have to find those out.’

‘And how do I do that?’

‘I will hide them.’

Ah, Marisa — hiding now for someone else! ‘Hide them where?’

‘In the gallery.’

‘In the gallery as in at the enquiry desk or on a noticeboard?’

‘No. In the gallery as in the art.’

‘Art as in paintings?’

‘Not necessarily, but not necessarily not. The Wallace Collection has a fine collection of European furniture and sculpture.’

‘And will the information I seek come in a code I must crack, or in an expression I must interpret, or will I be looking for an actual object in a drawer?’

She thought about it. ‘I’m still deciding,’ she said. ‘I’d say a combination of all those. But yes, there will be a thing. Though I’m hardly going to tell you where to look for it, am I?’

‘A thing?’

‘You ask far too many questions for a man with such a quick intelligence. Use your eyes and you will find it.’

‘Do I get any other clues?’

‘None.’

‘And when can I start looking?’

‘One week today.’

‘It will take you that long to hide it?’

‘Keeping you amused is not all I have to do.’

‘Amused is not exactly the word I’d use to describe my condition.’

Nor mine, I have to say. Not on this afternoon of words and hidings.Doubly false, I found it, the idea that Marisa would hide a thing from Marius, a man with whom she hid herself from me.

A Big Issue seller accosted them before they could shake hands.

‘I don’t see your badge,’ Marius challenged him.

‘It was nicked from me,’ the seller told him. ‘They nick things from you on the street.’

Marius put his hand into his hip pocket and pulled out a wad of notes — a costermonger flourish which I recognised from the fromagerie. ‘Don’t believe a word of it, old cock,’ he said, refusing the Big Issue but handing the man a five-pound note all the same.

‘You’re having an expensive day,’ Marisa laughed.

‘As the poet says, “There is no pleasure sweeter than surprising a man by giving him more than he had hoped for.”’

‘Baudelaire, presumably.’

‘Ah! I’m sorry. I have become predictable already.’

I thought so, but Marisa, I observed, did not.

From where I was positioned, it wasn’t possible for me to hear every word they exchanged, but what I didn’t hear for sure I lip-read or intuited or made up for them out of the intensity of my curiosity. I took it to be a good omen that Marisa had asked me to wait for her on the off-chance of her encountering Marius. It was a sign of how differently she felt about him that she could flirt outrageously with him in my presence — if you could quite call what I was a ‘presence ’ (certainly I wasn’t present to Marius) — without acknowledging me as she had somehow at all times acknowledged me the afternoon I saw her out with Dulcie ’s dentist.

Did it excite her to do this? Did it excite her for herself as well as for me? Was she, in Marius’s company, able to remove me as effectively from her consciousness as she appeared able to remove me from her proximity?

I never asked. I knew my place. And Marius was not a name we dared so much as breathe to each other. We carried him as though he were a precariously loaded tray which a single badly chosen word would cause either one of us to jolt and spill. He was our precious secret, hers from me, mine from her, inadmissible and unpronounceable, even as I lurked in the shadows of my own making, a self-ghosted man, and watched him fall in love with my wife. And she — if my luck held — with him.

He apologised again for the Baudelaire which she told him she did not recognise. I did. It was from one of the Frenchman’s prose poems. La Fausse Monnaie . But I was not able to demonstrate my cleverness. Ghosted men have no faces and no tongues.

‘The person who does the giving in the story,’ Marius explained, ‘is actually passing on counterfeit — performing a pretend-charitable act and making a good deal at the same time, gaining forty sous and the heart of God. A piece of calculation Baudelaire finds contemptible.’

‘You are not passing on counterfeit yourself, I presume?’ Marisa wondered.

‘Not knowingly.’

They looked each other directly in the eyes.

‘Not knowingly,’ Marisa repeated.

‘Not knowingly,’ Marius said, repeating her repetition.

Have I said I was as invisible as a bush? Think the burning bush.

SO WAS I SATISFIED YET?

No. Hungrier than the sea on which he ’s buffeted, a cuckold sighting land. They had gone further in one afternoon than I could contemplate with calm — enough had been said and done and promised to burn a thousand ordinary stay-at-home cuckolds alive in their beds — but I could look only forward, not back, and every act of lewdness vanished in its accomplishment and made me impatient for the next.

It also worried me that Marisa had told Marius there was no point in his starting looking for at least a week. A long time in politics, a week in love is an eternity, the more especially when one of the lovers was a man as easily stirred up and then as easily turned off as Marius.

One thing Marius didn’t mention to Elspeth after her husband died was that he ’d met another woman at the funeral and subsequently spent time in her company. In fact two women, and spent time with them both. Not women, strictly speaking, either. More girls. Sisters, as I’d thought. One fifteen, or so she said; one sixteen, or so she said. One with black lipstick, one with a ring through her nose. Marius wouldn’t have taken the trouble to remember which was which.

It would appear that I was mistaken, then, the morning I observed him in the village hall in Shropshire and picked him for a man who arranged more debaucheries than he attended. He did, after all, keep his four o’clock appointment. And that is not the only surprise. The appointment was for that same day. And not more than a few steps away from where he ’d made it. Meet me among the headstones, girls , he must have said, at four. .o’. . clock .

I don’t know why I should have been surprised. Why not get on with it? What’s owing to the recently dead aside, I suppose because it’s beyond me to understand immediate gratification. Why come so quickly to the end of a pleasure you can spin out?