Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

Fortune favours the brave. The following day, Marius was to be seen crossing Manchester Square, I assumed (for I was in a taxi myself and couldn’t stop to make certain) on his way to the fucking gallery.

I can’t prove it was our conversation that changed his mood. Logically, he might as soon have packed his bags and left the area forever. Who wanted to run into me on the High Street? And even if it hadn’t affected him that way, there was nothing to say it had affected him the other. He might simply have woken up on a different side of the bed. Or looked out of his little window above the button shop and seen Marisa shopping at one of the boutiques opposite, or on her way to read to the blind man, wearing nothing under her coat. Just to have seen her at all would surely have reminded him, as his father’s ghost reminded Hamlet, of his almost blunted purpose.

But what I like to think had happened was that I’d goaded him back to his desk. And your art, Marius? Where is that?

And of course reminded him of the existence of a beautiful woman.

Where was his art? Well, no doubt he thought he ’d answer that — if

only to himself — in the one way an artist could. He’d make some. Except he hadn’t. That was my guess, anyway. It’s art or women for some men, and Marius was definitely a man of that sort. Death, women, art. Art, women, death. Art, death, women. It didn’t matter how he juggled them. One was always compensating for the other. He’d done death. Which left only the other two. And who would want to be making sentences when sentences didn’t come easily and there was a luxuriant woman out there, his for the taking — quick, provocative, spiky, unsentimental, and married to another man.

The day Marius began belatedly to take up Marisa’s challenge was the start of a new adventure for me too. I sat in the back of the taxi barely able to hear myself think, so loud was the lecherous chattering in my brain. ‘Goats and monkeys!’ I must have said aloud.

‘I thought you wanted Paddington,’ the driver said.

I told him I’d changed my mind. I was meant to visit a retired headmaster in Gloucester to give a valuation. But how could I concentrate on old books? ‘Back to Marylebone,’ I said. For I wanted to be close.

He was reading her note, or he soon would be. I read it again with him. It was some invitation. More than he had hoped for, all right. More than I had hoped for too. Marisa curled into the chest of the poet. Naked to her toes. And the water boy smirking.

God almighty!

He was as good as inside her.

He took her to her favourite restaurant (hitherto our favourite restaurant) where they sat as two cemented into one. They didn’t notice what they ate. Afterwards they strolled out into the evening air, heavy that night with thunder, first arm in arm, then hand in hand, and then, a mere block from where we lived — Marisa and I — mouth to mouth, pausing to savour each other more — Marisa and he — under a street lamp that illuminated them as though from the glow of their hearts.

He looked more than usually handsome and very nearly in good temper in a tweedy suit that gave him the air of a country solicitor. He was the sort of man who excited romance in the hearts of farmers’ wives and daughters, and of course the wives of red-brick university professors. But it goes down well with city women too, that suggestion of wind-blown provincial pitilessness. As though there are cruel country assurances of which soft men who work in international banks or inner city antiquarian bookshops are incapable.

Marisa, too, appeared animated. Conversation suited her. For conversation she wore her highest heels.

They ate out again, at the same restaurant, indeed at the same table — our table, naturally — until it became as much a tradition for them to eat there as it had been for us. Eventually — though this is to hurry anticipation forward — she invited him to the house we shared, and subsequently into her bed. Not our bed — she wouldn’t permit confusions of that sort though she must have known I’d put up no objection. It was in the daytime and I was out at work. I’d been neglecting the business for Marius and was glad of the chance to get back to it. Sometimes I walked the streets, liking to walk where I knew they had walked.

It is highly romantic, haunting the place from which you’ve been removed. It is like living your life between mists and mirrors. I breathed with difficulty some days, but I put that down to elation. I didn’t quite have what I wanted yet, but I was on the way. The ball was in their court. I’d done my bit for them, now they had to do the same for me.

I wasn’t asking much. Only that they love each other.

FOUR O CLOCK SUITED US ALL. L’APRèSMIDI D’UN FAUNE. SUITED THE FAUN,

suited the nymph, suited the cuckold.

I liked him being in my house. There are men who would kill for less reason. They are in denial. Their funeral. They don’t know what they’re missing.

Marius was not of course aware whose house he was fauning it in, other than that it was half Marisa’s. So I cannot accuse him of triumphing over me personally. That he enjoyed being in some man’s house, though, I was certain. It sauced the afternoon up for him. He could throb to a woman for her looks and qualities alone, but he could throb to her to even greater effect if he was taking her from someone else. I’m not sure if that someone else had also to be someone older. But it wouldn’t have surprised me. His track record suggested no less. And who’s to say that we are not all cut from the same cloth? We cower before our virile fathers, like the boy in Turgenev’s story, or — and it is only the same impulse reversed — we behead them. Marius was a beheader.

He hadn’t wept at the funeral of the man whose wife he stole. He had picked up two underage girls instead.

Whatever their age, and whatever their bruising, girls had been his undoing. I have not been able to uncover categorical proof of why he left the university that employed him in a junior capacity not long after he ’d eloped with Elspeth. Some whiff of scandal was in the air, but it was unlikely that Elspeth’s husband had anything to do with it. He was too honourable and too doddery to bear a grudge. If anything it was probably him that got Marius the job in the first place. Professors like placing their students, whether or not they’ve run off with their wives. It satisfies a dynastic longing. Marius was gone, anyway, for whatever reason, before he’d made any lasting mark at least on the countenance of the university. The marks he ’d made on the girls he taught was another matter. They idolised him, some of them. He was, as a teacher, as he ’d been as a student — inspirational, brilliant, over-confidential, disposed to idealise and then despise. Where he thought he saw real aptitude, he brought it on. He liked winning unlikely converts to culture. When the grandiose mood was on him he thought, Pygmalionly, that he could animate what was lifeless and bring half humanity — the female half, that is — around to Baudelaire and Céline if he could only be granted sole access to it. No doubt he gave reading lists to the underage schoolgirls he had his way with in the cemetery before he found the loose change for their bus fares and packed them off home to their parents.

The shame — an especial shame for Elspeth — was that he couldn’t leave it at converting his women students to culture. He had to convert them to him as well. There is reason to believe that he was whispered out of his job by campus feminists. I unearthed a couple of articles about him in the student newspaper, dated about the time of his resignation, which implied (careful of lawsuits) not only that he was the most lecherous member of a lecherous department (literature: it goes with the territory), but that women had been circulating letters among themselves and to freshers warning that he was the worst kind of teacher: not only a breaker of hearts but a rewarder of favourites, a teacher who starred your essays not for what you wrote for him on the page but for what you did for him in the bed. I doubt that. He had far too strict a sense of himself to go messing up the categories. If anything, he would have marked down any student he slept with to demonstrate his intellectual probity. And of course to show how little passion had moved him. So I take this to be a hysterical calumny of a sort that was rife on university campuses in those days. But a bounder is a bounder whatever the details and I presume him, on this account, to have been blackmailed out of his tenure.