Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

I was not, you see, your ordinary twopenny-halfpenny voyeur.

Anything I heard while concealed in the lumber room would by this reasoning have belonged to active not to passive jealousy, but I heard very little. Marisa had never been a noisy lover, and Marius at best mumbled his pleasures into his moustaches. Of the three of us I was the only one who bellowed, and I wasn’t here to listen to myself. But I wasn’t interested in hearing them moan anyway. I am not that kind of pervert. It’s talk that does it for me — a single ‘Fuck me, Marius’ knocking the stereophony of fucking itself into a cocked hat. And if I couldn’t hear the words I always had Marisa’s narrative of the night before to remember and peruse. Humiliating though this is to report, I would flatten myself against the wall, not to hear the lovers but to be close to them, to feel, if nothing else, the vibration of their breathing, and then I would mentally run through all that Marisa had told me of their lovemaking the last time they were in the house. Thus, though I’d contrived to be at their elbow, I was always trailing in their wake — having to make do with the reported kisses of yesterday when I was only a few inches and a wall from the real kisses of today. Yet again, never quite laying hold on the thing I sought.

‘There was always something wanting,’ David Copperfield complained. There always is when you’re slave to the adamantine in women. Though David Copperfield did not know that about himself until he matured into Philip Pirrip.

About four months into the new arrangement — I hiding in my own house while Marius helped himself to what he wanted from it — Marisa found me out. It was always a complex business, getting in before or after her, remembering whether to put the burglar alarm on or off, removing all incriminating trace of myself from the house, staying as silent as the grave, and eventually I made a dog’s dinner of it, leaving a coat I should have been wearing to work on the bannister, and falling over a box of papers as I changed my position in the lumber room. Marius heard nothing. Marisa pretended to hear nothing but must have been a lot less fun to be with for what remained of the afternoon. After she’d let Marius out, she came looking for me. She was wearing a silk negligée I’d never seen before, black with the finest straps, and high-heeled, pubic, boudoir mules. I was surprised to see her looking so conventionally — she who chose her clothes with such meticulousness — the part of another man’s mistress. Pleased, too. Words might have been my medium but the odd visual clue still helped. If I was not mistaken there was a bite mark, or at least a patch of broken skin, just inside the bodice of her negligée, above her right breast.

‘Explain this,’ she said.

‘Explain that ,’ I felt like saying. But I feared the candour of real life. What if she’d stepped into the negligeé and painted on the bite mark the minute Marius left, in order to tighten the screws of jealousy? And what if, the moment I questioned her, she owned up to the deception — punitively — in order to loosen them again?

Besides, I was in no position to ask her to explain anything. I put my hands in the air. ‘I surrender,’ I said.

‘I can’t believe you’d stoop to this, Felix.’

I went to embrace her but she held me off. A great pity. I’d have loved to hold her still soft and nuzzled from Marius.

‘I thought by now you knew I’d stoop to anything.’

‘Are you recording us?’

‘Of course not.’

‘How do I know?’

‘You can search me, or search the room for wires. I haven’t been videoing you either. I just like being close to where you are. I love you.’

‘You have a strange way of showing it.’

‘The strangest. But you knew that.’

‘I won’t allow this, Felix. If you can’t keep your side of the bargain I won’t keep mine.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I won’t meet him here any longer. You said you were OK about him coming. You said it would make you feel safer. But you also said you’d be out. I can’t have you both in the same house at the same time.’

There were a thousand retorts to that, and I rejected them all. ‘I’ve said I surrender. I won’t do it again. It was wrong of me. But it’s hard, all this. So near to me, Marisa, and so far.’

‘Is that a joke?’

‘I don’t do jokes within an hour either end of your lover.’

‘Isn’t it enough that I tell you all you want to know? That’s hard, too. But I do it. Now it would appear that I don’t do it well enough.’

‘You couldn’t do it better,’ I said. ‘I live to have you whisper your infidelities in my ear. It’s what my ear is for. I ask for nothing else. Just every now and then, I wish I could be with you, that’s all.’

‘With me?’

‘With you both.’

‘You’re mad.’

‘Of course I’m mad.’

‘With us? Here? ’

‘Here, in the restaurant, in the park. Anywhere. I’ll take you both away for the weekend if you like. The seaside would be nice.’

‘It’s not appropriate, Felix.’

‘Oh, appropriate ! Do you call ours an appropriate household? What I propose — no, what I beg, Marisa — is as appropriate as you want it to be.’

‘And I don’t want it to be.’

‘Then there ’s an end of it. But he doesn’t have to know I’m your husband, if that’s what’s worrying you. I could just run into you. You could introduce me as your friend. I’d join you for a drink and then piss off.’

I watched the scene unfold before her eyes. She shuddered. I don’t mean shook her head, or rolled her eyes, I mean shuddered.

‘Why do you want this, Felix?’

‘I’m lonely. I feel excluded.’

‘I thought exclusion was what you sought.’

‘I seek palpable exclusion.’

‘Felix, there is no such thing.’

‘There is. There is the exclusion of being there and not being there. The exclusion of your being oblivious to me. Allowing his hand access to your breasts, kissing without inhibition in my presence, as though I am beneath your notice.’

‘Has it occurred to you that kissing without inhibition in your absence might be more fun?’

‘For you.’

‘Can’t you consider yourself excluded by virtue of your exclusion — or is that too straightforward?’

‘I want to be a witness to my ignominy. I want to suffer the sting of disregard.’

(I could have added, but decided it was unwise, that I wanted to be the water boy to their Horace and Lydia, a witness to their naked Roman revels, Marisa coiled into Marius’s chest, naked to her toes.)

‘Want, want, want.’

‘Yes, want, want, want.’

She looked at me without pleasure. ‘Then if the sting of disregard is what you want, you’ve got it. I disregard you. And if that’s not enough, I don’t know what to give you. Go get yourself whipped.’

So I did.

But not before a couple of odd events occurred, one on top of the other, neither of which improved my temper.

The first was the arrival of an anonymous communication. It was a postcard of Edvard Munch’s Self Portrait, the Night Wanderer , was addressed to me at the shop and said GET A LIFE. I was at my desk, going through mail, when I found it. I raised my eyes to Dulcie who was at that moment bringing me tea and biscuits. She shook her head. ‘Nothing to do with me,’ she said. Had she got to it first she would probably have destroyed it.

I should have destroyed it myself but I could not. Every ten minutes or so I would set aside what I was doing and reinspect it as though expecting to find a clue I’d missed. I didn’t recognise the handwriting, but that meant nothing. Who sees anyone’s handwriting any more? Marius was the obvious candidate in that he was the only person I could think of — given our last encounter — who might wish me ill, that’s if telling me to get a life was wishing me ill. But Marius didn’t know my name or my address, and Marisa sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him. Besides, GET A LIFE wasn’t his locution. Even when Marius told you to get lost he couldn’t manage it in so few words.