Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

Freudian? Did I see my father in him, competing with me for my mother? I wouldn’t bet against it. I see my father in most men and no doubt my mother in most women. She was permanently in distress, he was a swine — as archetypes go, you won’t go far wrong in life with those to guide you.

Mystery of my absorption in Marius solved, anyway. He was one of those . He had what Sacher-Masoch saw in that dark-furred, shuddermaking Greek — ‘the power to subjugate’. It wasn’t because I’d desired either of the underage girls myself that it had made me uncomfortable to watch him toy with them in the bone-freeze cemetery damp of Wootonunder-Whateveritwas; nor was it because I envied him the professor’s widow that I felt her pain as he tormented her with his detachment. No doubt the latter was just part of their age-discrepancy ritual of cruelty and cringing anyway. No, what had got under my skin was that he’d done what he’d done because he could get away with doing it. They enjoy an exemption, these non-delivering libertines with sad faces. Or they do in my fears. Which might mean only that I’m the one who exempts them.

First I attribute almost impossible powers to them. Then I set them free. Free to do what?

Free to do whatever a pervert’s delirious fancy wishes them to do. Free to do damage. Free to take what’s yours. Free to whistle your wife away from you. Free to make a slut of her. Free to make a nothing of you.

Whatever else there is to be said about the subject, that was where my interest in Marius ended. He was a character in a salacious fiction I wrote in imitation of all the salacious fiction I’d ever read (and what fiction isn’t salacious?) only when his image was before me. Once he was out of view, the fiction went unwritten. And it would have stayed unwritten had he not turned up entirely unexpectedly but opportunely some five or six years later — the years in which I’d fallen hard for Marisa — on an errand of the heart. Not normally where a normal person’s heart takes him, Felix Quinn: Antiquarian Booksellers, but Marius was no more normal a man than I was.

He wanted us to retrieve a number of volumes of personal significance that had passed into our hands some years before. That was the gist of it. Not the volumes the professor had accused us of purloining on his deathbed, but others that had been the property of the professor’s wife and which she had not had time to take away with her when she eloped. It wasn’t with me that he made his appointment, indeed he had no reason to connect me with the shop, but Andrew, remembering my interest — he remembered everything: every book that anyone had ever wanted, every book that we have ever sold, every book that anyone had ever written — informed me Marius was coming in. I was in my office when he called and recognised him immediately, though heavy glass separated us and he was much changed. He carried his height differently, less imperiously, more as an excuse for abstraction. He had grown moustaches, great sealion excrescences which he wore, like a Swedish adventurer’s, as though to give himself the look of someone with something to hide. But which to me gave him even more the look of a bodice-ripper sadist. From the number of times Andrew had to incline towards him, sometimes going so far as to pull his ponytail clear of his face and tug the tip of his ear, I gathered that Marius had become a mumbler too.

He didn’t see me and if he had he would not have remembered me. I was beneath his notice, in all senses.

Though he’d already written to us with his request, there were still procedures to go through before we could find him what he wanted. We don’t, at Felix Quinn: Antiquarian Booksellers, hurry clients, nor do we like them to hurry us. You come in, you talk, you go away, and then we send you a parcel or we don’t. Even if the books you seek are visible on the shelves we still write out an order form and institute a search. In the age of Amazon these virtues are appreciated by our customers. Marius left us his address. Out of idle curiosity — another interpretation would say out of suicidal curiosity — I checked to see where he was living now. Surely not in sodden Shropshire still. And in this I was right again. The countryside was no place for a flower of evil such as Marius. What I hadn’t expected, though, was to find that he’d moved to all intents and purposes next door, into the purlieus of my marriage.

For a moment or two everything went very still about my heart. Peace, was it? The peace the gods send you on the eve of certain destruction? Just to be sure I was not destroyed already I went up into the street and looked into the faces of people going about their business. Blank, most of them. Ignorant of the sort of secret I was carrying. But they might have thought the same about me. You never know what’s lying still about the heart of anyone.

According to the Elizabethans, Fortune is a whore. You have to take that with a pinch of salt. The Elizabethans saw whores everywhere. They were besotted with the word’s hoarse and poxy music and grew drunk on that disenchantment with women — indeed that disenchantment with the sexual life in general — which it denotes. Horn-mad and whoreobsessed, they fornicated, contracted syphilis, feared that every smile concealed a lie, and thought no woman chaste. I, who am no less intemperate but view the falseness of women differently — let us say as an opportunity rather than a bane, and certainly with greater understanding — see Fortune more as pimp than whore. Explain otherwise why Marius, with all the world to choose from, and at a time when I was in urgent need of his particular genius, was impelled to come and live so close to me that, even leaving aside our shared interest in antiquarian books, our paths were bound eventually to cross, and I was bound eventually to reel him in.

HE WAS LIVING, I DISCOVERED, ABOVE A BUTTON SHOP IN A LANE OF small romantic restaurants and chic boutiques at the epicentre of the action, as though to show himself each day what he was missing. To one side of him was a curtain-maker, to the other a stain removalist’s. Left and he was in Wigmore Street, right he was in Harley Street. Day or night there was nothing a man needed that he couldn’t immediately find — art, music, cheese, shoes, sausages, specialists of the spine, the brain, the cardiovascular system, new books, antiquarian books, the bored wives of retired professors — except that there was nothing he believed he any longer needed. Other than the stain removalist.

He was as disordered sexually as I was, in his way, only he couldn’t get out of bed to enjoy it. It wasn’t laziness, it was torpor. He had done a terrible thing and wanted nothing more to do with the world in which he’d done it.

He woke early, often before dawn, with a worm of bile coiled around his gut. Some mornings he wondered if the worm of bile was his gut. He would think of going to his desk to write something, epic or epigram, but automatically reached out instead to turn on his bedside lamp by the light of which he would go on reading whatever had occupied the previous night’s vacant hours before he had slid, neither willing nor unwilling, into sleep. Usually what he read was modern foreign literature in translation — the chill eroticism of Czech or Italian rendered into plainsong English being all he could digest, like cold weak tea.

The sort of prose, incidentally, which I feel I should write when I describe Marius, rendering him as the type of heartless English libertine the French love to fantasise about, like Sir Stephen in Story of O , a man in whom O detects ‘a will of ice and iron’. But that’s one falsity of porno I cannot swallow: its chastity of expression. In my fear of Marius — in my greed for Marius — I teemed with words.