Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

‘Marius,’ I said, assuming that would be enough. But as it was not enough, I added, ‘I thought he might like to see how well we dance together. It would appear he didn’t.’

She put her fingers to her temples. ‘Felix,’ she said, ‘don’t come home tonight.’

I nodded.

She began to say something else, but changed her mind. She had turned quite white, the planes of her face giving her a monumental gravity, like one of Picasso’s demoiselles. For a moment I thought she was going to faint, but it could just have been the music still pumping blood too quickly through her body. She seemed distraught, like a woman who might tear her hair, or scream. I couldn’t tell, from the way she was moving her head, whether she was trying to rid herself of all memory of the day, or looking for Marius.

‘He went that way,’ I told her.

My words seemed to help her gather her wits. Without looking at me she put on her shoes, then went in the other direction to which I’d pointed.

I stayed on the bench for about an hour, regardless of the light rain that had begun to fall. A bird hopped out of the tree above me. A magpie — what else could it have been but a magpie! ‘Hello, Mr Magpie,’ I said. ‘How’s Mrs Magpie?’

Which could have finished me off had the man with the football-playing dog not reappeared that very moment. I smiled at the dog. Nothing beats having a dog to smile at when you don’t have a woman. He was a dachshund or something like. Though he had no legs to speak of, he kept the ball under perfect control. No doubt he thought he was kicking a badger.

‘That dog of yours sure can dribble,’ I said to his owner.

‘You think that’s good? You should see him in goal.’

I laughed until the tears ran down my cheeks.

AND NOW THE COMEUPPANCE. .

Isn’t that meant to be the way of it? After the wrongdoing the retribution. Anna Karenina must throw herself beneath a train. Don Giovanni must go to hell. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, though in fact the Lord couldn’t give two hoots. What we ascribe to moral justice is merely the guilty conscience of the reader, the viewer, the observer, the eternal voyeur of art, demanding payback to justify the salaciousness that’s kept him curious. In reality, punishment if it comes at all is usually more prosaic. Anna Karenina is as likely to find herself another civil-servant husband who makes her no happier than the first, and Don Giovanni, bald now and without his teeth, will go through his address book on the longest night of the year and discover that of those still alive none wants to come out and play. But we haven’t asked and then what and then what only to learn that sex runs out of steam. It is on the condition that indecency must await a grand and terrible finale that we turn the pages, pornographers in the early chapters on the strict understanding that it’s as puritans that we ’ll read the last. In this way the good citizen is every bit as apocalyptically dirty-minded as the deviant — each imagining sex to be so consuming it will leave not a wrack behind.

So here’s a scene to warm the hearts of puritans and pornographers both: a man much like me, in a cemetery again — for it was in a cemetery that his sordid tale began — standing by an open grave, grieving for the wife he ’s lost, knowing he will never be able to forgive himself for ignoringwhat she tried to tell him, because he had ears only for something else. Another man, too, bent over the grave — another haunter of cemeteries, he too with a taste for death — the pair of them joined in a remorse that must stay forever mute.

Neat. And I won’t say a million miles away from truth. But not what happened.

Depending on your point of view, what happened was worse. But I will not have it that anyone got his or her comeuppance. Whether our desires are foul or fair, it is mortality itself that thwarts them, because our bodies are frailer than our fantasies.

I did as Marisa told me, and stayed away from the house that night. In fact I stayed away for two nights to be on the safe side. I’d remembered there was a hotel near the park in Primrose Hill. Not much of a place but I didn’t care to be seen anywhere better. Not feeling as I felt. And not in my tango clothes. I had them bring me food up and never left the room.

Extremity has its consolations. There was nothing I could think because every thought was too terrible. It was like being a schoolboy again on the eve of his examinations. I had prepared all I could: now what would be would be. Such moments, when we can do no more for ourselves, are among the calmest we enjoy. We pass or we fail — it’s in someone else ’s hands.

But for the occasional, intense descent into sleep out of which I awoke in sheer terror, not remembering where I was or how I’d got there — but for these black amnesic interludes that must have lasted only ten or fifteen minutes but felt like days, I lay wide awake. Not in subspace. Subspace was a festival compared to this. Those nights when Marisa left me without a word, sometimes appearing briefly to show me what she wore — a silent twirl for my approval when the situation amused her, a smile and then gone — were sumptuous, a feast of smell and colour, my every nerve alive to the subtle music of abandonment: the sound of her not there, the sound of her adventuring in the world, the sound of her returning, full of traveller’s tales, which I awaited as amazed as Adam in the moments beforethe creation of Eve. The hours lying awake in the Primrose Hill dosshouse were a cruel parody of this — austere, odourless and bleak.

The worst of it, when, in the taxi back, thought insisted itself upon me finally, was knowing that Marisa must have supposed me to have arranged it all, to have arranged her — and in that way to have abused every last feeling we had for each other — in order to get at Marius. Unless worse still was knowing I would never be able to convince her this was not the case, not if we crept back into what passes for a normal marriage and lived to be a thousand.

Marisa was not there when I got home. I can’t say that surprised me. I went to her wardrobes to see if she’d cleared herself out completely. She hadn’t. But much of her make-up was gone from the bathroom. I checked the suitcases. Had she taken an overnight bag or something bigger? She had taken something bigger.

There was no note. No message on my phones. I went into work, avoiding everybody, not because I was capable of work but because I wanted to be where Marisa knew she would be able to find me on a Tuesday morning. No message from her there. I made no attempt to contact her for another twenty-four hours. This might or might not have been the right thing to do. I didn’t go looking for her shape in the windows above the button shop either. That was the right thing to do. At last I decided I had to know, at least, that she was all right. I rang her mobile but she didn’t answer it. I composed a simple, non-committal text — r u safe? The uncharacteristic r u from me — she knew I hated text abbreviations — denoting a bare urgency that didn’t intend to trap her into a conversation she didn’t want to have. And who could say? — perhaps denoting a changed and much-improved personality as well.

Later that night I got my reply. I am . Well, that was something. But I was disappointed. I had hoped she would tell me where she was, and perhaps thank me for not bothering her. Safe had its own exquisite tact, I thought. A husband who had forgotten to keep his distance remembering to keep it now. But then, as I consoled myself with thinking, so had her reply. Tactful of her not to reproach me for what I’d done. Tactful not totell me I could go to hell for all she cared. It was only after brooding on it further in the dark that I realised she hadn’t reciprocated my concern and asked if I was safe.