Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

Thus it was as it always must be in a life dedicated to the twisted pleasures: with every gain I made there was a falling back.

Until at last I forced the issue. Not a word I associate with myself, force. But force was what I used.

‘Samaritans, can I help you?’

The voice was gentle but not unctuous. And not Marisa’s.

I had hoped for her but not expected her. You can’t just dial up a Samaritan of your choice. You can’t say, ‘Put me through to Marisa, please.’ You take your chance even if you’re a regular. Who you get is who you get.

I’d discussed this with Marisa long ago, not knowing I’d have use for the information.

‘So what happens,’ I’d asked, ‘if someone wants to talk to you and you alone?’

‘They can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because relationships are frowned on. Not always, but usually if they want a particular person it’s because they want the wrong sort of intimacy.’

‘What’s the right sort of intimacy?’

‘When you don’t hear heavy breathing at the other end.’

‘But if they’re not nutters or heavy-breathers, they can’t ever get the same Samaritan twice?’

‘I wouldn’t say “not ever”. It varies. But if you ring often enough you’ll strike lucky eventually.’

‘A bit of a lottery if you’ve got a gun in your mouth.’

‘Mainly they don’t have guns in their mouths, Felix.’

As did not I the day I rang. Though that all depends on what you mean by a gun in your mouth.

‘I hope you can help me,’ I said in answer to the impersonal greeting. ‘I think my wife ’s having an affair.’

‘What makes you think that?’ the voice enquired, a trifle bored.

I could have put the phone down when it wasn’t Marisa who answered, but I’d have felt pusillanimous. On the other hand I didn’t want to pass for a heavy-breather either. I fear my wife’s having an affair, what colour brassiere are you wearing? So I tried to sound like a perfectly normal man worrying about his wife ’s suspected infidelity, though it wasn’t easy, for me, imagining what a perfectly normal man worrying about his wife ’s suspected infidelity sounded like.

‘The usual signs,’ I said, deciding I could do worse than try to sound like Marisa’s first victim, Freddy — Radio Three, hurt, cultured, marginalised. ‘She comes home at odd hours. The person I suspect, who is my best friend, has suddenly stopped joking with me. It’s always the best friend, isn’t it? Those are the thanks you get.’

‘Have you spoken to your wife about this?’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘Don’t you think you should? People are often wrong in their suspicions.’

‘I never thought of that,’ I said, seeing a quick way out. ‘I’ll talk to her when she comes home this evening. Thank you for your advice. You’ve been very helpful.’ And I rang off.

This happened four or five times, with me thanking them sooner and sooner on each occasion. Once, when I thought I was back talking to the person I’d talked to first, I said, ‘I just rang to let you know she hasn’t been home yet,’ and rang off again.

But then, as Marisa said would happen if I persisted, I struck lucky.

‘Samaritans, can I help you?’ The deep, when I am laid in earth contralto in which, only five years before, she had consented to be my wife. Yes, she said, yes she will Yes , only not like Molly Bloom. Not then like Molly Bloom.

Curiously, it wasn’t the fact of my ringing her that seemed most duplicitous, but the fact of my ringing her from our house. I should be speaking from a phone box, I thought. I should be in the street. She would not be able to identify the street, but the silence of our house, what if it was obvious to her immediately? And wasn’t it a sort of betrayal?

I pushed a paper handkerchief into each cheek as we ’d done at school to change our voices. ‘I’m having trouble with my marriage,’ I said, sounding like Brando in The Godfather .

I could hear her listening hard. Much of your time, she ’d said when talking to me about her work, is spent deciding whether anything the caller is telling you is true.

‘What sort of trouble are you having with your marriage?’ she asked after a decent period.

‘I don’t appear to have one.’

Again she waited. Then she said, ‘In what sense don’t you feel you have a marriage?’

I sounded so old she must have expected me to say, ‘In the sense that my wife died sixty years ago.’

I moved the wads of paper with my tongue, trying to shed a few years. ‘In the sense,’ was what I finally did say, ‘that people tell me by their looks I don’t. Strangers regard me with compassion. The crueller of them laugh at me. And friends have started to enquire how the divorce is going, though I didn’t know we were separating, let alone divorcing.’

Paranoid, I heard her thinking.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ I went on. ‘You’re thinking I’m paranoid. But I have the evidence of my own eyes. Yesterday I found an envelope containing two theatre tickets on the hall table.’

Three weeks before, I had found two ticket stubs for Don Giovanni on our hall table. Along with a credit card voucher in Marisa’s name. It was not a performance to which she had invited me to accompany her.

‘Theatre tickets don’t necessarily prove anything.’

Now I was the one listening hard.

‘They do to me,’ I said. ‘They prove fornication, adultery, betrayal — those sorts of things.’

I waited for her to slam the phone down. But there was only a long, deep silence. ‘Felix,’ she said to me at last, ‘why are you doing this? You know you can’t ring me here.’

‘Can’t I? Then where can I ring you?’

‘Felix. .’

‘I’m ringing the Samaritans, not you. I have to talk to someone. I have a wife who is too sophisticated to communicate with me in the normal way of words. So I’ll talk to whoever picks up the phone. You just happen to be the unlucky one.’

‘Felix, we can’t go on with this conversation here.’

‘Then just tell me one thing —’ I was astonished by how upset I’d suddenly become. My hands were shaking like an old man’s. My eyes were wet. And I didn’t recognise the place my tears or my words were coming from.

‘No, Felix, not like this.’

‘— have you fucked him yet?’

And this time, with the faintest of clicks, the phone did go down.

That night we talked.

I will not reproduce the conversation because I cannot. Though I’d begged her for words it’s not the words that I remember. Even in extremis we were too good at talk, too slick, too oiled, for talk to have got us anywhere. Perhaps people who do not as a rule speak much to each other can use language to break through into candour. Not us. For all that I’d complained of the web of reticence she ’d spun around me sexually, we were worded out. Silent or not, we suffered from a surfeit of articulation and literature. What we needed to help us break through into candour, Marisa and I, was not more Medea or Menelaus but raw emotion. We needed to weep awhile together. Throw things. Maybe do violence to each other.

It goes without saying that neither of us raised a hand or threw a plate. Though I — for reasons that were then and still partially remain inexplicable — shed tears.

Marisa cradled me like a mother. ‘Hush, Felix,’ that I do remember her saying. ‘Hush, Felix.’

Where did it come from, all that emotion? What was I crying for?

Marisa was too good and intelligent a woman to point out to me that there was illogic in these tears, if true tears of regret they were. But it was palpable between us that I had rubbed the lamp in full knowledge of what would emerge from it, and been granted the first and maybe even the second of my three wishes.