Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

The pity was that I couldn’t take the man from Atlanta home to show him that.

He came to my house three afternoons a week, my wife’s lover, and stayed from four until seven. These hours suited them both, emotionally no less than practically. Each liked to keep a lid on things. From four until seven, Marius believed, he was in no danger of losing his head. And the idea of daylight robbery appealed to him. His life would have been different had he done that with Elspeth all those years ago. Had he gone to get the professor’s assessment of his essay, and stayed to borrow the professor’swife. ‘My turn, Professor,’ it would have pleased him to say. ‘You can have her back when I have finished with her.’

Instead of being stuck with her while she turned into an old lady.

As for the handover conceit, I malign him. It was mine not his.

Much of what I attributed to Marius was mine not his. They take your wives, these marauding melancholics, but they seldom give you the scurrilous vocabulary you long for in return. Which justified, I thought, the occasional ventriloquism. ‘Watch it,’ Marisa warned me when I let ‘handover’ slip one afternoon as I was putting on my coat. ‘If you think you’re playing pass the parcel, I ain’t no parcel.’ She was genuinely angry. I tried to explain that it was I who was being handed over, tossed out of my own house while my wife was wifed by another man, and then permitted to return when there was nothing she could want from me. But she was not so easily mollified. Any suggestion that I was playing push-me pullme with Marius enraged her. What she now did, she did for herself. ‘Pleasing you, Felix,’ she shouted as I opened the front door, ‘is a thing of the past.’ Which terrifying thought warmed my insatiably topsy-turvy cuckold’s heart as I walked the streets.

Otherwise the four o’clock slot fitted in well with Marisa’s other arrangements. She didn’t want to change her hours at Oxfam, and she would not have gone without getting her nails done or her feet massaged at the usual time. By four o’clock she was able clear her day for Marius, and by seven, when he left, she was ready to think about something else — dinner with one or other of her half-sisters, the theatre, the Samaritans, the Wallace, dancing. Or, if I was lucky, if I hadn’t called her wrath down on me, she might re-enact her afternoon’s abandonment for my unholy delectation, in language as graphic as she could bear to make it. My ear in such proximity to her mouth they might have been a single organ.

I won’t pretend, as Marisa herself did not pretend, that this came easy to her. ‘I find it embarrassing,’ she told me, ‘I find it ludicrous, I find it disloyal, and I find it upsetting.’

‘Tell me, tell me slowly about disloyal,’ I said.

‘Good joke, Felix.’

I thought so, too. But I really did want her to tell me about disloyal. ‘If it were you,’ she said, ‘you would not want to be talked about afterwards.’

‘If it were me,’ I said, ‘I would not be going to another man’s house three afternoons a week.’

‘Does that absolve me of all obligation to respect his privacy?’

‘Privacy! I am not asking you to describe his dick, Marisa.’

We were in bed — our bed. We had the lights off. And — my idea — we were burning incense. My back was turned to her, to minimise the embarrassment she’d spoken of. But I could sense her looking at me quizzically. They always wonder, women, whether it’s the dick you’re really interested in. Because they don’t do jealousy as men do jealousy, because they take the Othello murder route themselves, and cannot imagine where the pleasure part comes in, they conclude it must be the deviancy they understand that explains it, rather than the deviancy they don’t.

Leaving that, she said, ‘Whatever I tell you is a violation of confidentiality.’

I agreed with her. ‘It is,’ I said. ‘But sometimes a person loses the right to confidentiality. You climb over another man’s wall, you take your chance what happens next.’

‘I’m not your wall, Felix.’

‘Wall, wife. . He likes the transgressive element.’

‘And you don’t?’

‘We’re not talking about me.’

‘We are, actually. What you ask of me violates you too, doesn’t it.’

It was my turn now to say, ‘Good joke.’

‘A violation of your ear, was what I meant,’ she said.

I told her she needn’t worry about my ear. That it was a robust, inviolable organ.

‘Don’t dare me, Felix,’ she said. And we lay there a long time, listening to her weighing up what she might do to me if I dared her.

But little by little, after a number of false starts, and bouts of nervous laughter — that salve to our conscience which we call a sense of theridiculous, that spoiler of sin and sex and sensuality, that strategy for keeping our feet on the ground — we got around to it. But always — which was never the way when we danced, though this too was dancing of a sort — always with me leading. And then and then and then. .?

The questions, as in all ages and in all places, time-worn, tattered, tragicomic. And then and then and then. .? No matter whether the man is a metaphysician or an illiterate fool, the questions will be the same. And then and then and then. .? Thus does jealousy, like fear of death,iron out our differences. Some men are more exacting in their curiosity, that is all. They want the knife to cut a little deeper. And then and then and then and did you look at him did you look into his eyes and did he look into your eyes and what did your eyes say and what did his eyes say and did you kiss him where did you kiss him how did you kiss him or did he kiss you who initiated it who kissed the first kiss and were your lips parted did you part them or did he part them with his tongue did you let him part them did you invite the parting or did he part them forcefully and then what were you thinking did you feel at that time did you feel what did you feel were you happy were you eager how eager were you how eager was he what did he say then and what did you say then or were you past words was there nothing more you wanted to say to him or he to you nothing you wanted to hear were you past hearing and then what did his hand caress your breast did it explore the roundness of you and did your nipple harden and did you say harder and did your hand what was your heart going like mad and yes did you say yes you would Yes?

And did Marisa, in reply, orchestrate her re-enactments? Did she do to me what she had done to Marius?

I take that line of questioning, since we are being candid, to be no better than mine. Wherein lies the difference between the cuckold’s transports of uncertain wondering — tell me tell me tell me tell me — and the reader’s?

The wanting to know what happened next — and then and then and then : what is that but the spur to curiosity that drives us back, again and again, to our oldest and greatest stories?

Listen, Menelaus — what is Helen whispering to Paris? What Trojanpromises lull her to her sleep, what Trojan laughter stirs her from her bed of shame?

What are her suitors, Odysseus — more suitors than she has ears to hear them with — saying to your wife Penelope while you dawdle on the high seas?

Thus literature, pandering to our unclean desires. And thus the reader, in his eternal wanting to be told — what next what next — as unclean as any cuckold.

As for what Marisa re-enacted, that is between her and me. Suffice it to say that I never loved her artistry more than when she swooned in Marius’s arms while she swooned in mine. And never did I — a man who had read too much — approach any text with more attentiveness.