Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

The music was trance-inducing. The lighting low and acidic. A woman of Marisa’s age, with an arrogant alabaster face, smooched with two men, one black, one white, kissing each of them in turn. She wore what Felix took to be a traffic warden’s hat (why, Felix wondered). Just that and a gauze Gstring which showed the outline of her vagina. Though the white man carried a whip he didn’t use it on her. Once he turned her to face his companion and roughly thrust his fingers into her rectum. She arched into the pain while the black man kissed her face tenderly.

Watching them with interest was a person whose sex was difficult to determine with confidence, in a plain white liberty-bodice and matching knee-length drawers, his face/her face covered with a stocking like a bank robber. Why, Felix wondered.

And why the couple dressed as Robin Hood and Maid Marian? The rubber nurse he thought he understood. And the Decline of the Empire centurion in a leather skirt and steel breastplate. And even the man with a wooden clothes peg on each nipple and a bouquet of wooden clothes pegs which appeared to spring like flowers from his testicles. But why the again-indeterminate person in a floor-length duffel coat and black scarf tied around his or her mouth like Tom Mix? Why, Felix wondered. Why, of all the places the sexual urge might arrest and fixate itself, why here?

At intervals, women whom Felix took to be professional whippersin made their appearance and traversed the room. Some, in tight corsets and high-heeled boots, looked like the cartoon dominatrices who had paraded before his father and his uncles in the House of Correction off Baker Street, but most — presumably because they were overweight — wore never-never Edwardian riding mistress habits that covered them from head to foot, or belle époque society dresses with feathers, veils and Merry Widow hats. Wherever a mistress was seated, a man was on the floor before her, kissing her feet, in one instance actually licking the soles of her lace-up ankle boots, an action of such concentrated intensity he must have wanted to lick up every impurity she had ever trodden in.

Sometimes these women took to the dance floor, dangling men on leather collars like the one with which Felix’s red-haired Freudian had failed to make a sexual as opposed to a moral masochist out of him. As then, the conceit aroused him more than its execution. A woman leading a man around like a dog — it should have been exciting, but it wasn’t. Some element was missing. What was it? A proper reduction of man to animal, Felix decided. Had the woman gone on to geld the man, or have his throat cut in an abattoir, then yes, arousing.

He must have said some of this aloud to himself because an almost skinless man with a painted body and curved needles through his cheeks wondered if Felix was addressing him.

‘I’m trying to make up my mind about dog leads,’ Felix said, feeling that he knew the man and then realising that he did — he knew him from Moby Dick . Queequeg, the South Sea fetishist.

‘What about them?’

‘Whether they’re a turn-on.’

‘Not to me they’re not. You?’

‘Can’t decide.’

‘So what do you like?’He had the gentlest voice, and even a slight lisp, though Felix didn’t know if that was an effect of the needles through his cheeks.

‘I can’t decide that either,’ Felix said. ‘Cuckoldage, I suppose.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Submitting to your wife’s infidelity.’

‘How do you spell it?’

Felix spelled it for him.

‘Is that a fetish?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose it must be.’

‘Is that her?’ He pointed to a woman encased in black rubber, dancing with the man encased in black rubber whom Felix had stood next to earlier. They were kissing — though through what aperture he could not tell — entwined about each other like a pair of black snakes copulating.

‘No,’ Felix said. ‘Though if it were I’d be enjoying it.’

The man who reminded him of Queequeg adjusted one of the curved needles in his cheek and scratched his head in a bemusement he could not conceal. ‘I think all this dancing spoils it,’ he said, inconsequently. ‘Too much posing, if you ask me. They’re all just playing around.’

As opposed to what, Felix wondered. But then he noticed that a crowd had gathered in the dungeon and he decided this time to join it. A heavily made-up woman, Scandinavian in appearance, was dripping candle wax on to a man’s penis. He was bound by leather straps into a sort of Bedlam chair. With every molten drop he winced, but could not move his hands to protect himself. Each time, the woman leaned towards him, her hair falling in his face. Felix assumed she was whispering something to him, asking if he was all right. But she was kissing him too. When it was all over they embraced. Felix was new here and had no measure other than his instincts, but other people surely must have known the difference between a transaction and a loving act. And they too, it seemed to him, saw this as a loving act.

There were many such. A beautiful, lithe girl with amber skin was rotated on a wheel by a young man in a leather waistcoat who appeared to think the world of her. That the whipping he administered answered more to her desire than to his Felix believed he could tell from the tension in his shoulders. There were plenty of people here who flogged without inhibition, their bodies at one with the movement of the flogger. But the lover of the girl with the amber skin flogged against himself. Now on her breasts, now on her belly, now on her pubis, he struck, and with each blow he started, as she did not. Perhaps she knew how beautiful she looked spinning naked in the acid light. Perhaps she knew how much he loved her.

Felix fought against the sentimentality of his nature. Not everything he saw was pretty. A man in chaps which bared his buttocks made an occasional nuisance of himself, asking women if they would piss on him. Another, dressed similarly, pushed himself too close, in Felix’s view, to other people’s action and was eventually, though with great politeness and discretion — for you must mind your manners where you are otherwise vulnerable and abandoned — removed from the premises. And often there was no knowing where sentiment finished and opportunism began. A male equivalent to the belle époque mistresses, haughty and preposterous in tight riding trousers and a shirt not a million miles from Felix’s, attended a couple in their sixties in what was surely, though Felix saw no money change hands, a professional capacity. The woman was spread out on a version of a hospital trolley in an attitude reminiscent of labour. In the intensity of his concentration, the husband resembled a medical student, as painted by a Dutch master, attending his first dissection of a corpse. With more flourish than Felix thought necessary, the torturer raised the woman’s skirts, under which she was naked, spread her legs, patted her labia with the handle of his crop which, when he thought she was ready, he inserted, an inch at a time, into her vagina.

The woman made a sound like birdsong — not recognisably human, perhaps the sound of however many thousand years of shame leaving her body.

Had the world ended in flames that moment, the husband would not have drawn his eyes from his wife’s vagina swallowing the crop.

What happened further Felix did not stay to find out. For him the world had already ended in flames. He was not disgusted. There is a magnanimity among perverts which is unknown to those who consider themselves straight. Freed from the fear of their own desires, they do not start in dread from other people’s. But some acts are private whether you approve of them or not, and regardless of the actors’ wishes. For Felix, this performance wasn’t too cruel, it was, simply, too personal. Like the sight of a person at prayer, too devotional to intrude upon.