Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

Once, at a dinner party my parents threw, my mother’s sister-in-law Agatha, who was rumoured to be even more unhappily married than my mother, exposed her breasts before all the company and screamed insults, first at her husband, then at another of my uncles, then at my father and then I thought at me, defying us to prove we had what men were supposed to have. ‘Come on,’ she shouted, ‘come on, let’s see what you can do when you’re not with your tarts!’ My mother quickly gathered me up and hid me away between her breasts, but not before the men had guffawed into their port. It was funny, they thought, to see a woman expose her breasts. But it wasn’t in the slightest bit funny to me. I was never able to look my Aunt Agatha in the face again, ashamed for her for what I’d seen, and frightened by the animality of her distress. It had been a terrible thing, I thought, to witness a woman brought to such licentiousness.

This unease around any sign of promiscuity in a woman never left me, not even when I grew to be the age when boys maraud. I did not lust after the girls my friends pursued. I parted with the first girl I took out after Faith when I heard her laughing at dirty jokes. I hated overt sexiness, as I hate itnow when women of all ages swing down Marylebone High Street with their navels jewelled and tattoos up and down their legs. A tattoo holds no seduction for me. I don’t want a woman to look like a sailor. Where’s the pleasure in coaxing wildness from a seven seas adventuress with a pimp in every port? Sex, for it to be worth throwing one’s life away for, lives in surprise and dislocation. In geology the fault line marks the fracture in the vein of rock where movement has already occurred and where future trouble might be expected. Women, too, have fault lines — and no doubt men as well, but I do not study discontinuity in men — which carry the same promise of agitation. Only where there is discrepancy and equivocation in a woman does desire stir in me. Marisa crying ‘Fuck me, Marius’ on her lover’s chest would not have been of interest were she a woman of easy virtue. It was the shattering of her reserve that made me gasp for air.

Perhaps in this way Marius and I shared a predilection. Wasn’t that what drew him, in the aftermath of death, to girls young enough to be his daughters — the unblemish of them? The mark of Marius was the tick his fingers made on unused flesh, the bruised eyes he found, or left, on china faces. Youthfulness held no fascination for me, and I left no marks where I had been, but I too was a despoiler of sorts. The difference was that Marius did it, whereas I only watched or propagandised for it.

And now Lionel, presumably, the same, locating the fault line in Dulcie’s nature.

Though I was hardly in a position to show it, I was shocked by what Dulcie had revealed to me. Dulcie back in ankle chains! Dulcie and the electrician! Dulcie having done the deed!

Yet again, she and Lionel had edged their lives uncomfortably close to mine.

So were we companioned, now, in this too — Lionel turning away from Dulcie in the night, sparing her the nakedness of eye to eye, but extracting from her no less insistently the compulsory oratory of the hot wife? And then what did he do and then what did you do and then what did he say and then what did you say and then what happened and then how did you feel and then what did you say. .

And Dulcie, flushed from head to toe, lying in a pool of perspiration, shameless, wanton, crying ‘Fuck me, Alec.’

Whereupon — whereupon in my meditations, that is — Dulcie popped her head around my door and asked to speak to me. But not here. The snug would be better.

‘So what’s the matter?’ I asked.

‘I did say there were three things I wanted to tell you,’ she said. ‘But in my excitement about myself I forgot the third.’

‘You’re allowed, Dulcie.’

‘Well I shouldn’t be. In fact I’m lying to you still. I didn’t tell you what I was going to tell you because I was frightened to.’

‘Why would you be frightened?’

‘Because it’s not my business, nor my place. .’ ‘What isn’t?’

‘Mr Quinn, you’ll probably never forgive me for this, and I know I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t say something.’

‘Say it, Dulcie.’

‘That is not a good relationship Mrs Quinn is having with that man.’

Now it was my turn to flush down to my toes. I tried to make a joke

of it. ‘You mean your dentist.’

‘You know I don’t mean him.’

‘How do you know I do know who you mean?’

‘Mr Quinn.’ She subjected me to such a scrutiny, as though she were a headmistress and I the worst liar in the school, that if I’d flushed before I was on fire now. ‘Mr Quinn, how long have I worked for you?’

I lowered my head. ‘What have you heard, Dulcie that you don’t like?’

‘Beyond the usual tittle-tattle, I haven’t heard anything. It’s what I’ve seen.’

I went from hot to cold in an instant. The sweat froze on my back. I truly believed Dulcie was going to tell me she’d seen Marius strike Marisa.

But that was the voice of my own deep apprehension talking.

‘I’ve seen them twice now at the Wigmore Hall, once at an evening concert, the second time on a Sunday morning.’

‘I know they go there, Dulcie.’

‘It wasn’t that they were there, it was how they were.’ ‘And how were they?’

‘Together and not together. I wouldn’t like to be in the company of such a man. He looks superior. He turns his head away when she is speaking. He looks at other women, and heaven knows, Mr Quinn, there aren’t many of what you could call “other women” at the Wigmore Hall. He seems to exert some power over her.’

‘Over Marisa? I doubt it. No one exerts power over Marisa. She’d be off if he displeased her.’

‘The last time I saw her she was crying, Mr Quinn.’

‘Crying? Marisa? Are you sure?’

‘I’m certain, otherwise I would not be telling you. Real tears. And I’m sure she was aware that I was watching. So I think she’d have stopped them had she been able to. Real bitter tears.’

And her own eyes filled, describing them.

As did mine.

Love him, love him, love him!

That had been the mantra of my cuckoldom. Not have his baby. Not tell him how much bigger his cock was than mine. Not wear a hot wife ankle chain for all the world to see. But love him. If he favours you, love him. If he wounds you, love him. If he tears your heart to pieces. . love him, love him, love him!

I don’t know why. I am weary of trying to work out why. Because, that’s why. Because it was. Because I did. Because because.

I know the theory — that it was my heart I wanted him to tear to pieces. Well, it was too late for theories, right or wrong. Had he torn my heart to pieces I’d have withstood the pain. My heart was made to be torn to pieces. Marisa’s wasn’t. I’m not saying she was more fragile than I was. Perhaps I’m saying the opposite. That she was built forbetter things. That it was a desecration of her to do to her what he was doing.

The details weren’t important. I’d seen him operate. He’d fascinated her and then shown her he was not himself fascinated. He’d warned her enough times that he was a man who heard the end in the beginning, now he was letting her hear what he had. He’d turned cynic on her, as he’d always said he would. He’d shown her the cold curvature of his spine. But he hadn’t walked out on her. He’d kept her just warm enough to wonder, in the same way that he’d kept Elspeth at the end of his tether, unable to move forward or move back, while the flesh fell off her bones.