Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

‘Absolutely follow you. .’

‘Yes, you do absolutely follow me, don’t you. Is it just me, or are you following around other readers of Robbe-Grillet as well?’

‘Ah, there are very few of us. As you don’t need me to tell you, he’s not in fashion. But honestly I’m not following anybody. I’m out and about a lot, that’s all. I find it hard to stay inside. There is so much to see on the streets. Wasn’t it Barthes who said that with Robbe-Grillet the novel becomes man’s experience of what’s around him without the protection of a metaphysic? Well that’s me. I am that novel.’

‘Oh, Christ yes, The Voyeur . You’ve tried to tell me this about yourself before, if I’m not mistaken, though why you think your voyeurism might interest me a second time when it didn’t the first—’

‘You remembered! I’m flattered. But I never told you I was a voyeur exactly. A general pervert was about as far as I was prepared to go with it to you, on the strength of a brief acquaintance and all that. Though now we know each other better. .’

‘No, please don’t. General pervert is fine.’

‘Haven’t read The Voyeur , anyway,’ I said. ‘Though I will now you’ve recommended it. Is that set in French Guinea? I’ve always reckoned, you see, though I don’t think we’re ever really told, that French Guinea is where Jealousy is set. You know Jealousy , I don’t doubt. It’s the one where the main character — if you can call him a character — sits and counts the rows of banana trees between his house and the house he suspects his wife of carrying on in. The best novel about the banality of suspicion ever written. It’s so authentically tedious in its minuteness of observation it’s unreadable.’

‘That saves me, then, the chore of having to read it.’

‘But then again,’ I said, as though he hadn’t spoken, ‘that’s what it’s like. You count the trees, you note the different heights of the trunks, you distinguish between the tangle of the fronds, you measure the unevenness of the rows, and then you start to count again, over and over because jealousy is the harshest taskmaster, demanding from its victims a punctiliousness that your average obsessional tap-twiddler would find deranging.’

‘I think,’ he said, ‘that you’ve just put me off French Guinea.’

‘But not, I hope, Robbe-Grillet.’

‘Him too. You have a way about you of putting me off just about everything.’

‘Jealousy as well?’

‘I have never been on jealousy.’

‘Never experienced it, or never approved of it?’

‘Both. It’s invariably an indulgence. We have the strength to walk away.’

‘But one might not want to walk away.’

‘Exactly, one might not. That, I think, is what indulgence means. You can but you won’t.’

‘You’re a lucky man,’ I said, ‘to be able to exert so much self-control.’

‘If this is a prelude to more pervert talk,’ he said, ‘I’ll leave you to it.’

‘I’m off perversion now. That was yesterday’s interest. Today all I want to speak about is love.’

‘Then I will definitely leave you to it.’

‘Just one word before you do.’ I was almost pulling at his jacket, so eager was I to continue the conversation. ‘It is not of course my business but could the reason you do not feel jealousy be that you have never been in love? If there’s no one you care about losing, then it stands to reason you won’t care about losing her. Or him. Whereas when you are smittento your soul. . but you’re a reader, you must know all this from books. Don’t you ever want it, though? Don’t you ever envy those whom jealousy makes so alive that they register — well, like Robbe-Grillet himself — the minutest resonance of every object that is witness or confirmation of that which they suspect, every hair on the loved one’s head, every button on the lover’s jacket, every banana on every banana tree if we happened to be in French Guinea—’

‘No,’ he said, and without a further word of goodbye he strode out of the shop.

I offered an apology to Stefan, who managed the shop. We keep a friendly eye on each other across the book trade. ‘Sorry, Stefan,’ I said, ‘I seem to have talked you out of a sale.’

‘Well you’d have talked me into buying Robbe-Grillet. Which one should I start with? Jealousy or The Voyeur ?’

‘You were listening.’

‘Felix, the whole shop was listening. You wouldn’t pop in and do this on a regular basis?’

‘What, and lose you a customer every time I do?’

But I decided, in the circumstances, that the least I could do was buy The Rough Guide to West Africa .

‘Do you want it gift-wrapped?’ Stefan asked.

‘Of course,’ I said. But didn’t dare ask him to address it, much as I’d have loved to — for the pleasure of seeing the look on his face as much as anything, in order to suck on his pity for me — To my wife’s lover. In appreciation.

‘I’ll pop round and buy a book from you one of these fine days,’ Stefan said. Comical in his bookshop check suit and round David Hockney glasses.

‘Not without an appointment, you won’t,’ I reminded him.

But the merriment of booksellers aside, what the hell did I think I’d been doing talking jealousy and banana trees to Marius?

Could it have been that I wanted him to know I knew?

And why had I bought him The Rough Guide to West Africa ?

Did I just want to give him things?

Or did I want him to start making those associations I’d been so careful to blur? Discover me? Lose that fuzzy halo of happiness he carried above his head like a medieval saint? Feel used and cheated? Get the fuck out of my marriage?

I WASN’T ALWAYS OUT OF THE HOUSE WHEN THEY THOUGHT I WAS. THE FIRST time I stayed in when they were there was accidental. I’d been working in my office at home as I occasionally did even on workdays. I forgot it was a Marius afternoon. I realised when he rang the doorbell — a commanding, emasculating ring — that I couldn’t escape without being noticed. So I quietly locked myself in. That was all. It wasn’t as though I could hear anything, so I couldn’t be accused of eavesdropping.

Though that’s how I remember it, there is one thing wrong with this account. I would not have forgotten it was a Marius afternoon. I wore the almanac of his comings and goings in my flesh. So I must assume I lied to myself in order to be closer to them.

Thereafter I made a practice of it, by which I mean I did it about one visit out of six. Say once a fortnight. There was a queer comfort in it. Call that sinister if you will, but I meant them no harm. I simply wanted to occupy the same physical space they did. I would have preferred being alongside them in their bed, the same silent and ignored figure I’d have cut at their table had they let me, but as that was out of the question my study was the next best thing. I would lock my door, pull down the blinds, lie on the carpet at the time I calculated Marius would be lying himself beside Marisa, and remain there for the duration of his visit.

Subspace, but without the High Church ceremonials. Subspace pure and simple, subspace Calvinistical even, just me stretched out on my floor,gone from the world of the living, breathing only by courtesy of Marius and Marisa, so that had they stopped, I’d have stopped with them.

But once you’ve gone this far, only practicalities prevent your going further. It wasn’t long before I made the decision to move up a floor. To one side of their adulterous bower was our bedroom, but it would have been impossible to conceal myself there in advance of their appointment without Marisa discovering me. To the other side, though, was a lumber room, full of computers I couldn’t throw away, old photographs of the family, suitcases and ski clothes and ships’ lamps from the thirties which I felt I ought to keep. Hidden in here, a room Marisa never penetrated, I believed I would be able to enjoy a greater proximity to the lovers, and on occasion maybe even hear them. I had thought about getting someone from the spy and surveillance shop on Baker Street to come along on a day Marisa was out and bug the house. Hidden cameras, too, seemed worth exploring, until I faced the fact that my needing to know contained an essential element of needing not to know. I wanted to think and feel myself between them, an altogether more active exercise for jealousy than merely looking on and listening in. Would that the general camp had tasted her sweet body, but not on closed-circuit television.