Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

But that I was more substitutively sensitive, so to speak, to the slights and caresses implicit in Marius’s vocabulary than was good for me — yes. Ask me how I’d have felt about Marius trying ‘doll’ on with Marisa and I’ll confess it would have been like having someone with long fingernails feeling around in my stomach. Not something you ever think you want until it happens. And then you start thinking about wanting it again. But it was a hypothetical sensation. Marisa would never have allowed him to address her in that fashion.

More’s the pity.)

‘And which faraway place of the senses are you inhabiting today?’ was how I tried my luck this time.

If a look could kill, I would not be alive to tell this story now. ‘I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else,’ he said. ‘You appear to be continuing a conversation we ’ve never had.’

‘Well, it was a long time ago,’ I said. ‘You told me about Thanatos.’

He shook his head. ‘Thanatos? Nah. Never been there, guv’nor.’

I was tempted to tell him he didn’t talk in this goonish fashion to my wife. Though that would hardly have served my cause. Interesting, though, in the light of what has been said about homoeroticism, that he reserved his serious self for women. Unless it was only me he chose to fool about with, and was perfectly direct with other men. In which case was his manner with me something I invited? Did I want him not to take me seriously?

‘How about Eros, then?’ I persisted.

‘Wrong again, squire. ’Aven’t been up to the West End in years.’

‘Every man,’ I said, pietistically, because his needling skittishness left

me few conversational options, ‘knows something of love and death.’

‘Before you start — if you’re looking for someone to discuss your

marriage or your love affairs with, I’m not your man. I dwell alone.’

‘But I’ve seen you in the company of women, I think.’

He turned in his seat to look at me, his face tight. ‘Do you want me to knock your block off?’

I laughed one of those crazy laughs that hangers-on in Dostoevsky laugh. A beat me, hurt me, humiliate me, do whatever you want with me but you’ll never shake me off laugh. Pavel Pavlovitch is probably who I’m thinking of, the Eternal Husband in the short novel of that name.

‘I was merely making polite conversation,’ I said. ‘You look like a lover of beautiful women to me. I am a lover of beautiful women myself, in my own way. I felt like a talk.’

‘Have it with your friends. Though it will come as no surprise if you tell me you have no friends.’

‘I have no friends.’

‘Then count yourself a lucky man. Friends only ever let you down. Women too. . Will that do you for the talk you wanted?’

‘Your experience is different from mine. No woman has ever let me down.’

He sat back in his seat, stretching out his legs and chortling — that was the only word for it — into his moustaches. Disconcerting in its incongruity, Marius’s chortle, as though some crazy half-aquatic creature were suddenly to snort at you in a zoo, a sea lion turned mad by too long a confinement, a walrus with a bitter sense of the ridiculous.

‘I hope you aren’t expecting me to ask the secret of your felicity,’ he said.

‘Putting oneself at all times in the wrong. If you’re in the wrong you can’t be wronged.’

‘Giving up all expectation of a happy life must work just as well.’

‘They aren’t the same. I have a happy life.’

‘Then why are you stalking me?’

‘Who said I was stalking you? I mentioned I’d seen you with a beautiful woman, that’s all.’

‘And what’s that to you? Are you a private investigator?’

‘No. I’m more what you’d call a pervert if you really want to know what I do.’

‘And you think telling me this will make me feel better about talking to you? What would you do if I told you to get lost?’

‘If I thought you meant it, I’d get lost.’

‘ If you thought I meant it! Is this what a pervert does? Hangs around people who tell him to get lost while he decides whether or not they mean it? Why don’t you just call yourself a glutton for punishment and have done.’

‘A glutton, yes. But not so much for punishment, more for the suspense.’

‘Would that be suspense in the hanging from a rope around your throat sense, or suspense as in being kept wondering whether anyone is going to cut you down?’

‘Well in the literature the two are not always to be distinguished,’ I explained. ‘But as in all art, the wondering and daydreaming are of the essence.’

‘ Art? I must have misheard. I thought you told me you were a pervert not a painter.’

I shrugged. ‘So when did you hear of a perversion that didn’t tend to art? Only sadism is anti-aesthetic.’

He slapped the tin table in mirth, making his coffee spill on to my shoes. ‘Anti-aesthetic! Do you talk like this to every stranger you sit next to in the street? Hombre, you’re not only pompous you’re wrong. What do you think art is — pretty pictures? Let me tell you — every artist is a sadist. He creates life in order to annihilate it as the fancy takes him. As, in this instance, the fancy may take me to annihilate yours.’

‘Aha!’ I said, daring to point a finger at him. ‘The violence of your feelings towards me proves me right. You’re a man of artistic temperament yourself — I can see that — but in the brutal reiteration of your impatience I doubt you’re able to stay still enough to make art. Annihilation is not art, it is the opposite of art. What you call art I call spilling blood.’

‘And why does that frighten you? “Of all writings I love only that which is written in blood” — Nietzsche he say that.’

‘And does Nietzsche he say whose blood? The artist you describe writes in other people ‘s. The artist proper writes in his own. When did a beater ever have a good tale to tell? When did a beater ever hold his hand long enough to see the world around him? The stories we love are always written by, or from the point of view of, the beaten — we who wait and wonder, always in suspense, watching, wondering, with time forever on our hands, retelling and retelling the story of our ignominy—’

‘And where is your art, Mr Pervert Artist, to prove this?’

‘Here,’ I said, extending my arms to take in the day, the sky, the time, the street, the table, us. ‘Here, in the magnanimity of my feelings towards you, in the suspense of our narrative, in the not knowing where our story ends.’

‘ We don’t have a story.’

‘Oh, you can’t be sure of that.’

‘This isn’t art you’re describing, it’s fantasy.’

I shrugged. ‘And your art?’ I asked. ‘The art to which your temperament inclines you? Where is that?’

For the first time, our eyes met. So that was what women saw in him! An angry icy sadness, like a polar bear’s. An ailment which, if they were fearless, if they dared get close enough, they might just be able to do something for.

Clearly he didn’t like what he saw in my eyes either, though they felt to me, from the inside, as softly compliant as a Labrador’s.

‘My art,’ he said at last, ‘is in keeping you no further in suspense. Get lost! Just get up, leave the table and keep walking. I pay your bill, and you don’t bother me again. How’s that for an ending to our narrative?’

I rose from the table. Just go to the fucking gallery , I wanted to say. Just go up the little stairs and see what’s waiting for you. You won’t believe yourluck . But I couldn’t.

‘Get lost!’ he repeated.

And this time I did him the honour of believing that he meant it.