Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

What reason was there to suppose that he would take the bait?

Only this: whatever we say about suspicion, it is not in our natures to be above it. Honest Iago, false Iago — it doesn’t matter who whispers in our ear: we are framed to listen. There is a template of falseness down there, in that place that can be reached only through the porches of our ears, that patiently awaits the confirmation of experience, so that every broken promise we hear of is a broken promise we’ve been expecting.

From which it had to follow that if Marius got as far as opening my envelope, I had him.

But why would he take even that risk? What I have just said is true only if we allow it to be true. Men and women of the tribe of Masoch cannot wait for it to be true. Best to get to the bottom of their fears and have done. Men and women of the tribe of de Sade — and we are all the heirs of one or the other, whether we are poets, painters, writers of unwritten books or just booksellers — know it to be true only in the sense that they know every baseness to be true. We are vile at every level, they say, which saves them from being curious. In effect, their cruelty is a mask to protect themselves from what they would otherwise be unable to bear. They are the cowards. The children of Masoch are the brave.

So, unless he loved Marisa as I had wanted him to love her — as I loved her, with that jealous desperation that must make everything it fears eventuate, and as I had wanted her to love him, blindly, with unquestioning devotion and submission — he would neither pick up the book I’d sent him nor bother with the envelope. He would simply put himself back to bed above the button shop.

As for his going to the park, there was as much hope of that as of his becoming my bosom friend.

FOR THE TANGO I WORE ALL BLACK ‒ BLACK MULTIPLEATED TROUSERS FOR easy moving, black silk shirt, and for the fun of it a black bandana. Some of the other men my age wore squashed pork-pie hats, in the style of Argentinian procurers. I envied their loucheness but knew it was beyond me. On me even a bandana was chancy. But it was a hot day in the park and a bandana could pass for a sweatband.

Latin American music was not my thing, but Marisa loved it and from the start I had aspired, however unsuccessfully, to love whatever Marisa loved. In fact, of all Latin American dances the tango pleased and suited her the least. Marisa danced to lose herself in movement, but the rhythms of the tango worked against the sort of self-abandonment she danced to experience. They demanded too many changes of direction. They were too abrupt. Too sardonic, perhaps, certainly too consciously deliberate for someone who loved to flow like water when she danced.

To me the steps made no real difference. I too liked to lose myself in music on the dance floor, but I’d have been just as happy to lose myself without moving my feet. If anything, the tango made immobility easier for me to get away with. At the highest reaches of achievement the male tango dancer has much to express, but down at the Regent’s Park level most men found the steps so difficult they walked more than they danced and left the fancy footwork to the women. Besides, in my view — though I spoke without knowledge of Argentinian culture — it behoved the male tango dancer to simulate a raffish indifference to the woman who was just some common seaport slut anyway and whose job it was to lure her partner out of his cold machismo. As part of this ritual, not only must the man take his time responding, he must also put obstacles in the way of the woman, blocking her foot — a parada, this spiteful step is called — so that when she kicks and crooks her heels, she does so, as it were, in a halfimploring, half-skittish attempt to break free of his command.

I hadn’t paid much attention during tango classes in our little church hall, mainly because I was more interested in watching Marisa pressed close to someone else, but I’d learned enough of the theory to understand it was a dance in celebration of sexual teasing and even cruelty, a choreographed invasion of intimate space, in which the woman hung on to the man in an embrace — an abrazo — more desperate than it was always comfortable to observe if the woman was your wife and you were not the dancer — unless you happened to be a pain-chaser of my sort. In no other circumstance, outside the preliminaries to fornication, does a woman close her eyes, press her chest hard against a stranger’s, hook her arm about his neck (sometimes even loop her fingers in his hair), and kick her feet in frustrated desire.

Not Marisa, though, for whom it lacked, as I have said, the prerequisite of dance. She was too masculine for it, was my guess. She would lose herself if she could but not at the say-so of some gaucho who blocked her feet for fun.

She had entered, though, into the urgency of my request, whatever it was about, and looked the part. I was even treated to a fashion show before we left the house, so that I could choose the part I wanted her to look. I chose predictably — a silvery grey leopard-skin skirt in a clingy material, smooth on the hips, and slashed on each side to show off her legs, one of those items of clothing that Marisa was somehow able to winkle out of a cheap high-street store but which looked expensive the minute it was on her. On her feet, steely-black strumpet high-heeled shoes — the highest I could persuade her into — with a strap around the ankle as the dance demanded. Above, a white shirt tied at the midriff. No point in that look if you’re a girl with a cardboard stomach. But Marisa was just the right side of fleshy, and the tango is a fleshy dance. Trashy too, in token whereof she wore her trashiest white hoop plastic earrings.

No truly trashy woman ever did trashy as Marisa did. In trash, as in everything else, sophistication is the first essential.

Dancing with her as we had not danced for a long time, and she so voluptuous — her arm coiled about my neck, her chest hard against mine — I wondered how I’d ever persuaded myself to part with her. I pulled her closer to me, the still centre of her turning world, and let her kick her feet around me as she pleased. I was not sure which of us was keeping the other up. I knew her eyes were closed. I had heard them shut. I heard her heart. Heard its chambers open and close. What a fool I’d been! Never again. Sort this all out once and for all and then never again.

And then, as sure as fate, there rose up before me the Cuban doctor with his hungry horse’s face. Not him, of course, or at least I assumed not him, but first one and then another of him, some in flattened porkpie hats worn at jaunty angles, a couple in straw fedoras, one in a Stetson, one in a bandana just like mine, half of London’s South American population come out to tango. Their dance. And as I hung on to Marisa I thought, as I had thought a thousand times before, their woman. Nothing in anything any of them said or in the way any of them looked at her, and certainly nothing in the way she looked at them, that’s if she opened her eyes to look at all, but they no sooner shared a corner of the universe than I joined them in desire, gave her to them, gave them to her — regardless, yes, yes, regardless of their desire — and in the giving and the losing felt the sweetness of the rapture run again like honey down my gullet.

Once upon a time this would have been the moment I told Marisa I was tired and suggested she find another partner. But I hung on to her. It’s possible that in the moment when jealousy liquefied my innards my feet discovered how to tango, because suddenly we were dancing. I don’t say pivoting on our axes or performing molinettes or giros, but dancing. The music had changed — that had something to do with it. They were now playing Ástor Piazzolla’s ‘Libertango’, the great Argentine musician creating the very beat and pain of the human heart itself, the bandoneón — as agitated as breathing — elaborating on the jangle of the double bass, the violin, the piano, the electric guitar, while something unbearably percussive, I didn’t know whether it was another instrument or the sum total of those I could make out, tore at our nerves, sarcastic and beautiful, brutal and exquisite, exhilarating and doomed.