Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

Much more in this vein did Felix see and think. What he did at last, he did because he thought he should do something. It was almost like showing solidarity, though it wasn’t only that. He was also motivated by a boredom which had begun to creep over him. There is a monotony in flogging, for the viewer at least, no matter how outlandish the flogger, or how exquisite the flogged. Such beauty, such lewdness in the exposure, and yet how quickly the lewdness runs out of ways to express itself. In the end, only so much you can do with an anus or a vagina opened by an instrument of torture to the scrutiny of men and women who are beyond surprise or shock. But he was most motivated, of course, by his irritation with Marisa for refusing him so small a thing as he had asked, while out here in this netherworld of hellish passions, love showed itself as all-accommodating. He took off his shirt and tried a whipping, just for old times’ sake as it were, but the woman he had approached, on account of her being built on a similar scale to Marisa, had no feeling for the subtleties of whipping as Felix understood them, chief among which was whipping him without hurting him. After that he joined the corpus of the sissy prostrate, waiting for a boot to lick. As it happened he struck lucky, finding a mistress of Mediterranean appearance who allowed him to kiss her ankles and then her legs and then her thighs, way up beyond her stockings until he reached a point he was not permitted to pass. She instructed him with her fingers — here, here, here! — then pulled his head back by the hair whenever his lips were guilty of trespass.

He enjoyed it not one bit. He found the pretence tedious and fatuous. In no real circumstance was he the servant of this girl. He resented her pulling his hair, telling him which parts of her body were forbidden to him, as though he gave a tinker’s curse about her body. He hated her air of queenly complacency, never mind that it was assumed for his benefit. He hated the taste and odour of her. And finally he hated her for not being Marisa.

When they had finished with each other he went in search of a lavatory where he washed out his mouth. Not an act against the woman but against himself. He wanted his fetish back: he wanted to feel faithful again.

The last sight he saw before he left the club was the old headmaster with the penis the size of a pencil stub dancing rhapsodically with himself.

After his night in hell, Felix returned more than ever in love with his wife.

SOME ACTIONS IT IS WISE TO KEEP TO YOUR YOURSELF, NO MATTER WHAT your commitment to honesty. I decided against telling Marisa where I’d been. Now that she’d jerked the tears out of me once, I couldn’t be certain she wouldn’t jerk them out of me again. And yes, kissing the thighs of another woman struck me as a crying matter.

We didn’t discuss the altercation that had precipitated my fall from grace. I didn’t again ask to be the water boy at her Roman feast, didn’t put a name to any of my wants, and was careful to be out of the house at Marius’s appointed hour. For her part Marisa did not ask why I had returned home at four o’clock in the morning in a frilly shirt, smelling of smoke, and did not again reproach me for my neediness. Instead, we did what we were good at and changed the subject.

Normal life resumed. We were a happy family once more. The three of us.

Much talked about, no doubt, as time went on, but that was the way I liked it. Indeed, had the world turned into a sound box reverberating to our scandal, I could not have asked for more, so long as it reverberated, too, with admiration for Marisa. People were slow to understand I welcomed this, needed it even to counteract the conformism that will spread like suburban ivy over even the most outrageous ménage . I am not — apropos conformity — saying that we had settled into a serene imperturbability. Such a condition is impossible for a cuckold, who awaits in suspended agitation each new indignity. But with every passing week routine takeshold, until it is only through other people that you go on registering the strangeness of your life and the remarkable character of the woman who holds its continuance in her hand.

There was no shortage of concerned looks of the Dulcie sort, expressions of obscure compassion, or enquiries, from the more intrepid of my friends and business associates, as to the progress of my divorce since they assumed we must be separating. At the merest hint that I was ready for such opinions, some would assuredly have told me they had thought my marrying was unwise from the beginning, Marisa never striking them, if I wanted to know the truth, as a settling-down sort of person. Andrew was to be numbered among those who subtly let me know they had disapproved of Marisa from the start. But it’s possible he was simply jealous of Marius for bagging the boss’s wife just as he’d bagged the professor’s. He left my employ, anyway, about six months into our arrangement. ‘Sometimes you just have to know when to let go, Mr Quinn,’ he said as we parted, though whether he was referring to me or to himself I couldn’t decide.

Appreciation was far harder to come by. A writer of ecstatic tales who lived next door, well past her prime now but once a sort of bluestocking de Sade for women undergraduates — indeed, in her heyday a prolific buyer of eighteenth-century French pornography from us — made a prune of her face whenever we passed each other on the street.

‘Your house!’ she exclaimed one morning, as it were over the garden fence.

‘What about my house?’

‘Well you tell me what about your house.’

‘I’m not sure I am obliged to. But since I think of us as coming from the same space erotically, Mariana, wouldn’t you say my house exemplifies those freedoms your stories have always claimed for your sex? Is not Marisa one of yours?’

‘Freedoms! Freedoms are taken, not given.’

‘Ah, so you are privy to our negotiations.’

The word ‘negotiations’ caused her face to assume its prune shape again.

‘“Fuck or be fucked” — wasn’t that your exhortation to your readers? Well, my wife fucks. You should be fucking pleased for her. Unless you think she’s thereby bringing down the tone of a respectable neighbourhood.’

‘Well she’s certainly not raising it,’ she said. A high priestess of the sexual mysteries worrying about the value of her property.

I doubted that property was on the mind of the retired media lawyer who lived in widowered sadness the other side of us — a sweet man with broken veins in his cheeks who, when the sun shone, invited us into his garden for sherry he imported from Portugal. But he too, I thought, was watching Marius’s comings and goings without knowing what to make or say of them.

‘How’s Marisa?’ he would ask me some days. He was worried for her, he wanted me to see.

‘Look,’ I said to him one evening, sitting in his garden listening to the Marylebone bells striking six, the pair of us sipping sherry like a pair of old bees. I was without Marisa who was somewhere else. ‘You’re approaching this the wrong way. Imagine we’re in Rome discussing Cleopatra. I’m Agrippa, who’s never left the city, and you’re the muchtravelled Enobarbus impressing me with tales of the Nile. So. . the barge she sat in . .’

He tried, but lacked the amplitude of vocabulary. ‘She’s a peach,’ he said, refilling my glass and blushing, ‘there can be no two opinions about that.’

Leaving me to pine for descriptions of how she was adorned, what wild Asiatic scents came off her body, how sick with love for her the winds were.

At last it was Marisa’s own sickness that began to cause me concern. Something, I could tell, was eating away at her. I hadn’t noticed it coming on, but suddenly she was looking hollow-eyed. She left food on her plate, a thing she ‘d never done in the whole time I’d known her. She would stub out a cigarette barely before she ‘d drawn on it, then immediately light another. She started conversations she couldn’t bebothered to finish. She missed appointments, two weeks running letting down the blind man and even failing to turn up to her precious dancing lessons, which I often thought she ‘d skip my funeral to attend. This latter omission I took to be especially significant with the summer coming round and London’s open spaces getting ready for all those al fresco festivities Marisa loved — tea dances in Covent Garden, ballroom and old-time in front of the National Theatre, tangoing in Regent’s Park.