Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

Soon, Marisa was saying such things to me, I couldn’t be sure she remembered Marius had gone, or noticed that it was I who was lying beside her and not him. Such things I almost pitied Marius for missing out on.

This was a story, though, that couldn’t end. One Thousand and One times One Thousand and One Nights, and always more to anticipate and dread. How long before Marisa would plunge her nails into my neck and whisper in my ear, like a lick of flame, ‘Love me, Marius’? And then ‘Fuck me, Marius’? And then, and then, ‘Marius, I love you’?

How long before my bodice-ripper’s reader’s heart would crack asunder with the madcap all-consuming joy of it?

Go on — ask. How long how long how long. .

And Marius?

If he was the loser by these violations, he was only the loser in someone else’s eyes. Unaware, he grew more airily handsome the more four o’clocks he notched up.

It would have been cruel of me to have begrudged him this new lightsomeness. These are hard enough times for men already. Outside thenever-neverwhere of celebrity, men are no longer permitted to fuck for the fun of it, though it is obvious that the activity brings out the best in many of them, as least as far as physical health and appearance go. And fucking my wife three times a week — allow me to say that again for the sheer unholy sweetness of it — and fucking my wife three times a week certainly brought out the best in Marius. Whenever I caught sight of him his hair was wet, either from showering before Marisa, or from showering afterwards. The look suited him. Men like me emerge from water blind and dripping like a rat that has gnawed itself out of a sack; Marius belonged to that class of amphibian mammal that rises glistening from the sea, shaking silver droplets from its torso, like Neptune. Or the Forsaken Merman, except that his forsaken appearance had left him entirely. His moustaches were clipped. His eyes had lost their ache. He was speaking audibly. And if I was not mistaken he had bought himself new clothes — a black corduroy jacket I had not seen before, a striped suit that played bohemianly, in much the same spirit as Marisa’s suits, with the concept of the City, and a number of soft Italian shirts that buttoned high and added further arrogance to his already haughty head.

As I have explained, I wasn’t watching him as much as I had before he became my house guest. This wasn’t all precautionary. It was logistical too. If he was lying with my wife at four o’clock in the afternoon, he was not out on the High Street or pacing the floor above the button shop in frustrated creativity. He interested me no less now that I had him, so to speak. Nor did Marisa’s late-night confidences diminish my curiosity. I by no means believed I knew all there was to know of him in report. But I had to be more vigilant than in the carefree past. We all had too much to lose if he discovered me now.

Nevertheless, he was never entirely out of my sight. Above the fray at the best of times, he barely saw where he was going now he had Marisa on his mind. So I could get a long view of him at the Sunday market, buying bread, or from the other side of the road collecting his Financial Times . Once I passed him coming out of the chiropractor’s, and thoughI gasped, fearing the encounter, he strode on oblivious of me.

‘Love her,’ I said under my breath when I saw him. ‘Love her, love her, love her.’

Did that show that my feelings toward him had softened? ‘Fuck her,’ was what I had always imagined saying to him in the course of our early meetings. ‘Fuck her, fuck her, fuck her.’

Was ‘Love her, love her, love her’ the proof of my contention that you can love the man who fucks your wife, if only you are able to sort your mind out?

It might have been this new softening of husbandly feeling that made me start up a conversation with him, many months into the new arrangement, when we ‘happened’ — Fortune is a pimp and all that — to find ourselves in the travellers’ bookshop on the High Street at four o’clock on a non-Marisa afternoon. But mischief can never be entirely ruled out of the motivation of a cuckold. It satisfied me to beard him in this way, he who knew nothing of me, I who knew everything of him. And then there was the frisson of seeing, close up, the aftermath of Marisa on his skin. What was it like to smell the breath of the man who was burgling your wife?

(‘What’s this quasi-biblical talk of his “entering” me?’ Marisa had enquired in the course of one of my earlier encouragements to her to describe her afternoon.

‘I learned it from you. “The moment of entry is visually transfixing” — your words.’

‘Oh, Felix.’

‘What are you telling me, that entry isn’t what he does?’

‘Literally, I suppose he does.’

‘You suppose so? Entry was good enough for me. Why is it too literal for him?’

‘Because you make it sound like a burglary and that’s not how it feels.’

‘So how does it feel?’

‘No, Felix. No you don’t.’

I bit my lip. It isn’t pleasant to be reprimanded at my age. And my question was reasonable enough. If it wasn’t with him as it had been withme, how was it with him? But since she wasn’t saying, I stuck at burglary. She might not have liked the word, but I — for reasons that were part onomatopoeic, part self-lacerating — did. Hence ‘burgling my wife’.)

He was idling, the burglar of Marisa’s body and affections, before the Africa section, not looking for anything in particular, I decided, but that didn’t stop me wondering: was he thinking of fleeing, and if so was he thinking of fleeing alone or with my wife? He’d eloped before. Maybe it got easier each time.

‘Off somewhere?’ I asked.

He didn’t know who I was at first. He never did. I didn’t think it was personal. He just didn’t know who anyone was at first, unless it was a woman or a girl in whom he had an interest. Part of me would have liked to reciprocate the insult — but it was a bit late for that.

‘Oh Christ, you,’ he said, when at last my face did swim back into his recollection. ‘My Nemesis.’

I threw him a self-deprecating smile. I wasn’t going to tell him he was mine.

‘French Guinea,’ I said.

‘What about it?’

‘I see you’re planning a trip. French Guinea is said to be nice.’

‘And what the hell has it got to do with you?’

‘As your Nemesis, a great deal. It’s important I know where you are every moment of the day. I can’t have anyone else determining your fate.’

‘I think you’re taking me a trifle literally. Nemesis as in fucking nuisance was what I had in mind.’

‘Not a usage I’m familiar with,’ I said. ‘But when we first talked and you described to me your four o’clock heartlands you never mentioned French Guinea.’

‘I’m not mentioning it now. I don’t owe you an atlas of my movements.’

‘Of course you don’t. But I wouldn’t have picked you for an Africanophile.’

‘I wouldn’t have picked you for someone who had a right to an opinion.’

‘I don’t have an opinion. All I was going to do was recommend youfurther reading. Robbe-Grillet — you read him? I’d have thought he was up your street.’

He looked at me at last, or at least he looked at Robbe-Grillet. He was like me in this — he couldn’t say no to an author or a title. It wouldn’t have surprised me if in his mind’s eye he could see the jacket of the first edition. Poor bookish bastards we both were.

‘Robbe-Grillet? I don’t know about up my street, but certainly of my persuasion in that he made objects more important than men. Which you’ll forgive me saying — since you seem to want a man-to-man conversation — is precisely the ordering I favour at this very moment. I count on you to understand me when I say I would rather be talking to this bookcase than to you.’