Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

I took advantage of Marisa being draped about my neck, and kissed her. Kissed her cheek, her neck, her ear. She raised her face, her eyes still closed and kissed me on the mouth. Time fell away from us. We were ourselves as we had been, not a hundred years ago, but yesterday.

Not exactly in the spirit of the occasion — on a laid wooden floor in the middle of Regent’s Park, with children present, and a hundred dancers concentrating on their steps, tracing figures with their toes, as though in the dust of the callejuelas of Buenos Aires — to be kissing as voraciously as we kissed; but we couldn’t stop and nobody, in all likelihood, noticed or cared. ‘Libertango’ for God’s sake! When such music plays and pulls your chest apart, there is nothing you might not do. Indifferent, anyway, to what anyone thought, we devoured each other.

And when at last I did look up I saw Marius watching.

Given where he was standing when I saw him, and assuming he hadn’t changed his position to get a better view, I calculate that Marius had entered the park from St Andrew’s Gate, having walked along Wimpole Street with his ears roaring, past the specialists in back pain and throat infection and madness, crossing Marylebone Road where the traffic never stops and wondering, as I had wondered on my own behalf only days before, whether he wouldn’t be better under its wheels. At St Andrew’s Gate he must have paused, knowing it was run away now or proceed to ruin, and he had not run away. Then the Broad Walk, a stroll in the park at any other time but today like the last walk to the scaffold. Didn’t King Charles I take a turn about a London park with his favourite dogs an hour or so before they removed his head? No less gravely, as I conceive him, Marius proceeded,a step at a time — for he was not a man to quicken his pace for anyone — the electric green of the grass after rain hurting his eyes, his overwrought senses offended by the fussy garden furniture: the overfilled urns and three-tier fountains, the troughs and beds of gaudy flowers, the plinths of coral geraniums, as violent as a migraine, held up by wild-faced griffins, the colours of everything that grew turning more vulgar, gross violets and psycho reds, the closer he got to the knot of dancers. On either side of him, under the lime trees, people sprawled on picnic blankets, odious, laughing, opening champagne. Not a bend in the path, nothing to shield the view or refract his wondering, just the undeviating walk in the direction of the mocking music, foredoomed, inexorable. And then the spectacle of us.

I didn’t know how long he’d been there, but sometimes when you see a person in a crowd you know he’s just arrived. At what early stage in his disordering perceptions was he, I wondered, as I met his eye. Had he seen Marisa yet, or just me, his nemesis and joker, just me tangoing innocently on a weakly sunny, threatening to be watery Sunday afternoon in the park, tormenting him, as I’d tormented him before, to no effect or end, with a woman he neither knew nor cared about? And in the moment of his recognising Marisa, what then, what horrid thoughts? He wouldn’t, all at once, understand what he was seeing for there was too much to understand. That it was I who’d sent the letter he could never have entertained a single doubt; that for reasons of my own I wished him ill and hoped to hurt him with the spectacle of Marisa in the arms of someone else, that too all added up; but I could not be the ‘someone else’, not me and Marisa, not Marisa betraying him for me, unless, unless — and I would not have wanted to be inside Marius’s head at that moment of éclaircissement — unless I was the one she had originally betrayed for him. The husband — me! The husband — that self-confessed pervert who had hung around him like a bad smell! But if I were the husband, a person with whose wife and in whose house he had made free, whose existence had never presented the slightest impediment to Marius’s pleasure, nor to Marisa’s come to that — if I were the faceless quiescent handover husband Marius had supposed him to be,whoever he was — why this intense embrace, why this deep, desperate kissing in the park as the ‘Libertango’ shook our hearts?

It does sometimes give me an advantage, my living as other men dare not. It enables me to confound rational explanation.

Whatever conclusion Marius reached, he reached quickly.

I had time for one profound regret as I saw him move away, and that was that Marisa would always think I’d staged our kiss for him. Whereas the absolute truth of it was that I’d never expected him to come and had forgotten him — all but forgotten him — under the influence of Marisa’s closeness, the love I bore her, and the bandoneón, breathing as humans breathe when their lungs are fevered.

Did I want to tell him that, since I couldn’t tell her? This was not for you, Marius, this was for us. Was that what made me release Marisa as though I’d suddenly seen my own death and go after him? Or was it another impulse entirely?

By the time I’d fought my way first through the dancers and then through the crowds of people watching — none of them pleased to be pushed aside while the music played — I’d lost him. Had he turned on his heel with the intention of going home, or was he determined to keep on walking in the same direction, as though seeing me and Marisa had been an incidental interruption to his journey and he would continue now without stopping until darkness fell and there was no road left to travel?

I looked this way and that, and even asked a couple of people if they’d seen him, a tall, parched man with walrus moustaches. When at last I did think I’d spotted him he was too far away for me to call his name, though I called it anyway. Then I ran. In a park full of strollers I was the only person breaking sweat. In fifteen seconds or so I caught up with him. He, long and aloofly handsome — for it became him to look drawn — like a plantation owner, in a pale, crushed colonial linen suit; I, puffing and impertinent, like his runaway slave, in a black bandana.

‘I congratulate you,’ I said. ‘You are a man of your word. We have the strength to walk away, you said, and here you are, walking away.’

He did not slow his pace or turn to look at me. I had to hurry to keep up with him.

‘But then,’ I continued, ‘it’s not hard to walk away from jealousy when you don’t feel it.’

I thought he hesitated a fraction. Would he seize me by the throat? Would he fall into my arms?

‘I’m surprised,’ I said, ‘that you haven’t stopped to say hello to my wife. But given the hour of the day I presume your mind is already somewhere else. I’ll convey your greetings to her, shall I, and tell her not to be concerned, for you are a man indifferent to anything that jealousy can throw at him. Same time as usual next week?’

I’m not sure if he did pause at that moment, or whether his blow was the more effective for being delivered on the move. But without quite knowing how, I was on one knee holding the side of my face. It hadn’t been a punch, more a lunge with the elbow, as when you are shooing away a pickpocket. And I’d say it was the surprise of it, as much as the force, that knocked me off balance.

A man playing football with a dog smaller than the ball stopped to see if I was all right. ‘Shit, what did you say to him ?’ he asked.

‘Just a domestic. I’m fine, thank you.’

But I did act on his suggestion and sit down on a bench.

I could not say how long afterwards — minutes? hours? days? — Marisa appeared, holding her shoes.

‘What happened?’ she asked. Though from her expression I believed she knew. Some events you dream in advance of their happening, so inevitable are they.