Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

‘Me being a submissive’s submissive.’

‘What is there to discuss?’

‘Just the words. Just say the words. Tell me what I am.’

She apprehended me in the end. ‘You are a submissive ‘s submissive.’

‘Thank you. Now will you say, “Anyone can do whatever they like with me, but I can do whatever I like with you. Which makes you the abused of the abused.”‘

She didn’t get it right the first or second time, but ultimately — at the cost of about fifty pounds — she was able to deliver the words in the order I’d requested them.

And?

And nothing. Have I not said that my life was one long sexual disappointment until I met Marisa?

For this reason, my single departure from utter fidelity to Marisa, the one and only time as Marisa’s husband that my lips made contact with flesh that wasn’t hers, must be reported in the third person. It wasn’t me who did what I did.

Felix had of course — because he could not keep his nose out of any of her things — read Marisa’s diary entry relating to the fetish club she’d been taken to in Walthamstow. The event was long ago, a betrayal of Freddy not of him, but he lived it as in present time and imagined taking himself to such a place — preferably not in Walthamstow — and meeting Marisa there, on the night she was supposed to be with the Samaritans, being felt up by strangers.

Other than that, a fetish club held no interest for him. He did not like dressing up and was not in need of a public whipping. Marisa’s sleeping with Marius was flagellation of the heart enough. But she had dismissed him from her sight. Go get your sting elsewhere, she’d told him. In peevish response to which — to pay her back and hurt himself still more — he would allow some other woman to do her worst with him, since his wife had done her all.

He didn’t know how to go about finding a fetish club but remembered seeing shops that advertised them while eating Indian street food with Marisa in Camden Lock. Thereafter it was easy. He collected fistfuls of flyers from a couple of those shops and made some discreet enquiries as to dress. He owned no leather shorts or chain-mail vests and was too embarrassed to try any on, but, yes, if that was all he had, a frilly Hamlet shirt and evening suit would do as well, depending of course on the signal he meant to send. A frilly Hamlet shirt and evening suit, he learned, might well be considered masterful. He flushed a little. Not on me they won’t, he thought.

He found a club that promised more wildness than he believed he could handle, but at least it was in the City and therefore, he reasoned, likely to be classless and clean. In the taxi there he was suddenly overwhelmed by a desire to be taking Marius with him — a Virgil to his Dante, escorting him around an underworld he knew nothing of. Get a load of this, Marius, you narcissistic little cuckoldmaker. Where are your underage Shropshire schoolgirls now?

Queer that he felt a denizen of the scene already, though all he’d done was pick up a flyer.

A bouncer made him open his coat to show he wasn’t wearing street clothes, though they felt like street clothes to Felix. Behind a plastic-coated card table a woman in a nautical hat and with both her breasts exposed like party balloons looked surprised to see him, took his money and told him he was the first.

‘The first what?’ he asked.

‘The first here.’

He consulted his watch irritably. It was eleven o’clock, for God’s sake. In the action he saw what a toff he must have looked in his Burlington Bertie evening wear, amazed to discover that life had still not got going in some parts of town a full half-hour after the theatres had emptied in his.

‘Shall I go away and come back, then?’ he asked.

‘Up to you,’ she said. ‘The bar’s open. But it won’t start to fill up until well after midnight.’

‘Do I get a passout?’

‘I’ll recognise you,’ the bouncer promised.

For an hour, he wandered the warren of streets that enclosed the Bank of England, cutely named to please Americans — Change Alley, St Swithin’s Lane, Throgmorton Street, Austin Friars, King’s Arms Yard — then stopped to buy himself a hamburger. Only unsavoury people were about. Which made him angry with Marisa. And her fucking lover. He read the headlines in the morning papers — LEADING LONDON BOOKSELLER MURDERED WHILE VACATING HOUSE FOR WIFE’S SEXY ROMP WITH UNEMPLOYED TOYBOY. He was flattering himself, he realised. Who’d care he was a bookseller? KINKY HUSBAND MURDERED, more like. KINKY CUCKOLD HUSBAND. In which event the consensus of opinion would be against him. Kinky cuckold husbands only get what they deserve.

Back at the club the bouncer asked him to open his coat.

‘You promised you’d remember me,’ he reminded him.

‘I do remember you. I just don’t remember what you were wearing.’

‘It’s getting going in there now,’ the woman with the balloon breasts said.

Felix pushed open a tattered red curtain and almost fell over a shaven-headed man with no clothes on — just a gold bar, like an elongated cufflink, threaded through the eye of his penis — in the act of stepping into a kilt. There was a cloakroom but no changing room. People transformed themselves from librarians and telephone engineersinto Egyptian goddesses and Nubian slaves wherever they could find a spare inch of space. Felix handed in his coat for which he was given a raffle ticket in return, straightened the frills on his shirt, and propelled himself — he’d been right to invoke Virgil and Dante in the taxi — into hell. Hell — no other word for it. He meant no criticism. There is a hell of the imagination that is simply a good time infinitely multiplied and unpoliced. And though these weren’t Felix’s good times, he felt a distant kinship with them, a fondness for the participants which was at one and the same time what an old man might feel for those learning a trade in which he’s grown wise, and a timid deviant’s admiration for perversions lived out to the full.

We think of Hogarth as the great painter of English debauch but only Bosch could have done justice to the sight that met his eyes — a Garden of Earthly Delights, no one vomiting or defecating, no one, in fact, behaving anything but civilly to everybody else, but otherwise that circus crush of flesh which we always imagine will presage or succeed the apocalypse, that grand carnival of the orifices which no English artist is capable of rendering for all the pride we take in our mastery of the grotesque.

Felix found room at the bar between a figure encased entirely in black rubber, with no means, that Felix could discern, to see or breathe through, and a man wearing one black and one white stocking under a dinner lady’s apron. Why, Felix wondered.

He nodded at both of them, bought a German beer, and watched. Essentially the club was one large room with a dance area in the middle, and several side annexes, some no bigger than cubicles, created by screens and curtains. You could find privacy if you wanted it, but no one wanted it. Why come out to hide yourself away? The dungeon was periodically the main centre of attention, the extremity of the enacted scene determining the level of excitement. Felix wasn’t sure at first what his rights to view were and stayed at the bar. The dance floor filled and emptied. Two transexuals, both modelled on ladies who took tea in the Brighton Pavilion, circa 1922, danced in each other’s arms. An old, headmasterish-looking man, completely naked but for a stout pair of sandals and a leather pouch strapped around his waist, danced alone. His penis, though apparently erect, was minuscule. Therapy, Felix thought. The cure for diffidence was exhibitionism, someone must have told the old man — perhaps Marisa if he’d rung the Samaritans — and now here he was without a care in the world, making a virtue of necessity and gifting his midget manhood to the room. No one made light of him, Felix noticed. Indeed, the only person noticing him was Felix.