Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

I was, I knew, taking a risk. I hadn’t alluded to Marius since our falling out and it was hard to ask if everything was all right without conjuring him into our bedroom, a place from which he was now conversationally banished.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Woman’s troubles.’

‘Nothing I can do?’

‘For woman’s troubles?’ She smiled. A wanner smile than I liked to see. ‘What have you ever been able to do for woman’s troubles?’

‘Be a man?’ I suggested, and no sooner suggested it than I wished I hadn’t.

She kissed my cheek and continued getting dressed. A more private affair now than it had once been. Many of the rituals of our marriage more awkward now, or altered in some other way I regretted. The candour gone. The intimacy dimmed.

We left the house together. I didn’t enquire where she was going. Something else that had changed. Once upon a time we knew the ins and outs of each other’s days as though they were our own. It had been a matter of pride to me that on a Monday morning I could recite Marisa’s week. No longer. Now we didn’t know and didn’t ask.

She walked with me to the shop — ‘for the exercise’ — then left me with the briefest of kisses. I watched her go. Another woman, feeling what I supposed she was feeling, would have shown it in her dress. Previousgirlfriends of mine went lumpy when their spirits were lowered, almost as though they wanted the lines and straps and other indices of their underwear to show, to spite the world. Not Marisa. She might have been off to address a board meeting in the City, she looked so sharp. The slit in her sculpted skirt like a dagger, the man’s jacket formidable with her fullness and authority, her coppery hair insolent with vitality. I smiled to myself, remembering her criticism that I always appraised her from the legs up. But today it was her legs that gave her away. In her stride she was not herself. She did not walk with her usual wide gait, attacking the paving stones with her heels. She was propelled by the momentum of her errand, but she did not, this morning, appear to propel herself.

Just for a moment I found it hard to breathe. Was she struggling to find ways of telling me she was going to leave me? Or was she coming to terms with Marius telling her he was leaving her?

Either way, her heart was torn and I saw that there was no fun left in this for either of us. Only sorrow.

If Marius had done this to her—

What? If Marius had done this to her, what?

What was it I proposed? What is it that a cuckold ever can propose?

Either way — I kept repeating that phrase to myself as though it denoted the only exits, both of which were locked. Either Marius had made her fall in love with him so that they could elope together and go and live in his rat-hole of frustrated ambition above the button shop. Or he had made her fall in love with him so that he could turn his back on her.

By whichever reading, Marisa was in love. And it was my doing. Felix Vitrix — my efforts garlanded with success. I had cuckolded myself to the limits of cuckoldom. I had sought palpable exclusion and exclusion didn’t get more palpable than this. A thunderbolt had struck me and I was as though I’d never been.

Ruination was the only word for it. Ruination as promised to the irreligious and irresolute in the language of the great unforgiving Bible of the Hebrews. .

Thou shalt betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her. . Thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another people and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day long: and there shall be no might in thine hand.

That’s telling them.

I made a fist of my right hand. A baby would have made a stronger.

A masochist seeks weakness and I had found it.

Those husbands of hot wives who set out to demean themselves to the bottom of all demeaning and suck the semen of their rivals out of their wives’ vaginas couldn’t hold a candle to me — I had nothing left to suck out semen with.

I didn’t attempt to settle down to work that morning. I no sooner saw my desk than I knew I had to flee it. I walked the streets for an hour, unsure what to think or how I should proceed. Had I been a braver man I’d have walked into the path of a bus.

Eventually I decided that work would have to be good for me because outside Marisa work was all I had. I’d look at my appointments book, I’d talk to the invoice clerk, I’d check the progress of the new catalogue. I’d turn my mind from misery and when I next looked up maybe misery would be gone. But I wasn’t allowed to do any of this, for sitting in the snug, obviously wanting to talk to me, was Dulcie.

‘Two things,’ she said when I joined her. ‘Well three, actually.’

‘Go on.’

‘A friend of mine told me she’s received one of those GET A LIFE cards. If you look carefully you’ll see they’re not handwritten at all. Apparently it’s a PR campaign for a counselling service that’s just opened in Devonshire Place. So you needn’t have worried.’

To tell the truth, I had been so occupied with other matters I had clean forgot the postcard. GET A LIFE. It was sound advice whether it was directed personally at me or not. If anything I’d have preferred it had Dulcie not disabused me of its intent. But I wasn’t going to tell her that.

‘Indeed I needn’t,’ I said. ‘Though that still leaves open the question of why they think I’m the one that could use a counselling service. Why, for example, didn’t they tell you to get a life?’

‘Because,’ she said, raising her leg to show me that the gold chain was back becomingly around her ankle, ‘I’ve got a life.’

‘That’s terrific, Dulcie,’ I lied.

‘You don’t mind?’

‘Why should I mind?’

‘The firm’s image and everything.’

‘The firm has withstood greater scandal than this. If you’re happy and Lionel’s happy, Felix Quinn: Antiquarian Booksellers is happy.’

‘And they’re not the only ones,’ she said, with an odd catch in her throat.

‘Why? Who else is happy?’

‘Guess.’

Not a day for guessing games. I shrugged.

‘The electrician.’

‘Dulcie, you haven’t!’

‘I have.’ She looked uncomfortably pleased with herself, like someone who has just run her first marathon, but not in a very good time. A deep virginal blush began in her cheeks and spread down her chest.

‘Dulcie!’ I repeated.

‘I know,’ she said.

And this time the blush went all the way down to her ankle chain.

I did nothing for the rest of the morning. Clients came and went, none requiring my attention, Dulcie skipped about the office tinkling, and I sat in my chair and brooded like Electra for her father.

I’d pleaded Dulcie into the arms of her electrician and schemed Marisa into Marius’s. Yet I was a man who, in the abstract and as it bore directly on me, attached the highest value to modesty in women. A cheap woman was to me a thing of horror. That might seem contradictory but it isn’t. For where would have been the point of all I’d done had I regarded women cheaply?

So a Cuban doctor put his hands on my wife’s breasts and kept them there — was that so big a deal? There must be parts of the world — maybe Cuba — where this is standard practice. But it wasn’t standard practice for me. For me, any liberties taken with a woman’s person, or any display of wantonness in women, have always been profoundly shocking.

I don’t know how old I was when my father took me to see a production of Molière’s Le Misanthrope at the Albery Theatre in St Martin’s Lane, but I was old enough to be troubled and embarrassed when the actor playing Oronte placed his hands in the bosom of the actress playing Célimène. No wonder, I thought, that the fictional Alceste walked out on her shortly afterwards. You cannot love a woman who allows another man to touch her there. But what about the actress herself? How could she permit it, even in the name of art? What if her parents or her husband or her children were watching from the stalls? How would she explain it to them afterwards? And to herself what did she say? How could a woman depart, and in so public a way, from what womanly delicacy demanded?