Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

So was that to be the way she paid me back? Of the man who asked too many questions, not a question would be asked?

The following evening at about seven o’clock the doorbell rang. I was sitting in my study drinking blood-red wine and listening to lieder. The bell startled me. Seven o’clock was not a time when people rang our bell. Too late for tradesmen or deliveries, and in London friends don’t call on you without at least a fortnight’s warning. So it was good news or bad. My first excited thought was Marisa, ringing rather than letting herself in as a way of signalling she did not live here any more. I did not check my appearance before I opened the door. Let her see me looking rough, whether it inspired pity or satisfaction. Just let her see me.

But it wasn’t Marisa. It was Marius.

‘This is not your usual time,’ I said.

His fingers rose to his moustaches.‘I know that.’

‘Marisa isn’t here,’ I said.

‘I know that too.’

How did he know that? Did he know it because she was with him? He read what I was thinking. ‘She is not with me,’ he added.

But that still implied they’d been in touch and that he knew more about her whereabouts than I did. I was not, though, going to ask him what he knew.

‘So what can I do for you?’ I said.

He looked me up and down. ‘So you’re the bookseller,’ he said. ‘You mentioned artist and pervert. But you said nothing about selling books. I should have put the three together.’

‘If you’re here on book business our office hours are ten to six. I believeyou are familiar with our shop. But I remind you that an appointment is necessary.’

‘I am not here on book business. Can I come inside?’

I laughed. ‘Do you want me to show you through or will you make your own way? I assume you know where everything is.’

‘I don’t know why you’re acting the aggrieved husband,’ he said. ‘Could it be because I’m aggrieved?’

‘You have no more right to act the aggrieved husband than I have to act the aggrieved lover. Less, if you want the truth.’

Incorrigible, the thing I called my heart. Even at such a time I had only to hear him call himself my wife ’s lover and I was aflame all over again. Had he called her his mistress I’d have combusted.

I regarded him from the higher step, eyeball to eyeball. Did I want to see what Marisa saw? He eyeballed me back. Did he want to see the same? This close, of course, you don’t see anything in another person’s eyes except the depths of your own looking. For a few seconds we were in a staring competition, like schoolboys. But it was my instinct, still, to let him win. ‘Come in,’ I said, releasing him. ‘We ’ll sit in my study.’

He had the tact not to comment on the decor in my study being different from the rest of the house. Apart from stuffing it with technology I had barely touched the room since it was my father’s study, and he had barely touched it after his father died. We liked a little continuity in our family, though no earlier Quinn, I suspected, ever entertained his wife ’s lover here. The women in our family might have had a better time of it if only one had.

I poured him wine which he sipped with an unsteady hand. Whatever he wanted, I didn’t think he was here to throw his weight around.

His attention rested on a photograph on my desk of an elderly gentleman on a couch eyeing off a woman’s legs with an intensity which the photographer clearly found both comical and touching. Heroical as well, I thought — hence my owning it — on account of its obsessiveness. If it was an erotic photograph it was so partly in despite and partly by virtue of its domestic setting: a normal bourgeois sitting room, the man in pyjamas and dressinggown, the woman — not in the first flush of youth herself and somewhat manly in appearance — dressed like a secretary (think Dulcie without the ankle chain, though an ankle chain would not have been amiss) and, with the knowingness of a practised secretary, raising her black skirt infinitesimally, no more than to show a suggestion of knee, but that can be enough to keep the right sort of man enthralled. Whether he is looking at the knee itself or the action of lifting the skirt it is impossible and probably pointless to determine. What the photograph celebrates is the heat which can be generated by a marriage, even a marriage of some duration, when the husband is sexually uxorious to the point of madness, and the wife indulges him.

‘Takes one uxuriator to know another, wouldn’t you say?’ I said.

A guest in my house, Marius deferred to my greater knowledge of the subject. ‘I don’t know what I’m looking at,’ he admitted.

‘Helmut Newton. The subjects are the artist Pierre Klossowski and his wife Denise. You are obviously not familiar with Klossowski’s work or you would recognise Mrs Klossowski. She was the model for many of her husband’s most obsessive paintings and sculptures and for the heroine of his philosophical and pornographic novel Roberte Ce Soir , the story of a wife who obeys the oldest laws of hospitality, as adumbrated by her husband, and offers her body to any house guest who cuts the mustard.’

‘I think I can see why the photograph is of interest to you,’ Marius said.

‘And not to you?’

‘Well I have never myself been married.’

‘No, but you are not indifferent to the appeal of a wife.’

‘That’s true, but only as it concerns the wife in question and myself.’

‘You like to keep what you have found entirely to yourself, is that what

you are saying?’

‘I do. Am I to apologise for that? I don’t think I am unusual in my preference.’

‘You might not be, but one never knows what people really think. It is a taboo subject still, wife-sharing, for reasons to do with economics, machismo and the equivocal nature of jealousy. That aside, you are in factunusual in one regard, and that is in the amount of cooperation you have received from husbands.’

He did not reply to this at once. He was deciding, I could only imagine, on the heat of his response.

‘In another place I would challenge your use of the word cooperation,’ he said at last, keeping his eye firmly on the worn but still beautiful bestiary carpet that had once covered the floor of a state room on the Queen Mary and which I wouldn’t have put it past my grandfather to have stolen and smuggled back from New York in his luggage.

‘How’s assistance then?’ I helped out. ‘Or aid, or abetment. Abetment has a nice ring.’

‘Call it what you like — I never sought it. But you speak of husbands as though there were more than one. Who else am I to discover has been palming his wife off on me?’

Now it was my turn to be annoyed. ‘Palming, as I understand your use of the word, implies unwanted. Let me assure you there has never been anything unwanted about Marisa.’

‘Indeed there hasn’t. And I am more than willing to be educated in the appropriate vocabulary for an activity to which until recently I have been a stranger. But who are these other magnanimous husbands you claim to know something about?’

‘I once did a little book business with a Shropshire professor,’ I said. ‘It was what took me to his funeral some years ago, and subsequently brought you to my shop. We are, you see, joined in books, you and I.’

We were back where we had been, and where no doubt we should always have remained, with him loathing me to death.

‘You were at Jim Hanley’s funeral?’

‘I do funerals.’

‘Why? Are they a happy hunting ground for you?’

‘For what?’

‘For whatever it is you hunt?’