Howard Jacobson: The Act of Love

‘I don’t hunt anything. I would rather say, if we must stay with your metaphor, that I am the hunted. They find me.’

‘I didn’t find you.’

‘Well you did, by virtue of your attractiveness. “I have it,” you as good as shouted. I was there to mourn a nice old man, nothing else, and there you were, shouting that you had it.’

‘Had what?’

I laughed. When one man tells another what he ‘has’, laughter is a necessary accompaniment. Unless he is meaning to take the tragic route, which I wasn’t.

‘The sacred terror,’ I said.

‘And what’s that when it’s at home?’

‘You don’t know the sacred terror? I must say I’m surprised. But maybe you don’t need the term seeing as you have the thing. It’s how Henry James describes what every kindly, mild-mannered and perhaps impotent man wishes he had — the wherewithal to make a woman tremble.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’

‘I know. Sounds pouffy. But a husband such as I am has to try to see the way a woman sees.’

‘And you think Henry James will help you do that?’

‘Well he didn’t lead me far astray on this occasion,’ I said.

So where is Marisa, I suddenly found myself wanting to say. Where is she? And in the end, though I would rather have asked any man than Marius, I couldn’t help myself. ‘Where is she?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You really don’t know?’

‘I really don’t know, though it surprises me that you’d think I’d tell you if I did.’

‘Just an ordinary expectation of candour,’ I said. ‘I’m used to people telling me everything. I have always hated secrecy. Marisa too.’

Silence between us as I made to refill his wine glass, an offer he declined. My father’s motto: never trust a man who doesn’t drink as much wine as he is offered.

I watched him think hard about how he phrased his next question because it was the question, when all was said and done, that had broughthim to my front door. But he took too long about it for my taste. I had things I needed to get off my chest, since he ’d called. ‘So did Marisa tell me absolutely everything, you are wondering. Well, some wondering we must take with us unanswered into hell. If I were to tell you all Marisa told me I would be betraying her confidence, and that would jeopardise your future happiness together. Which is not something I would want. Not for you, not for Marisa, and least of all for me. I have enjoyed myself since you and she finally. .’

My smile, as I let it hang there, was Mephistophelean in all it encompassed. Beneath our feet a bestiary carpet in lurid colours, and in my eyes the bestiary of Marius’s wild afternoons in my house, he and my wife locked like animals in each other’s embrace. I kept my gaze on him so he could drink it in, my possession of their coupling, until he choked on it.

‘I will,’ he said at last, ‘accept another glass of your wine.’ I hesitated, worrying for the rug. Would he throw wine at me? I decided not. He had struck me once. Attacking me twice would, for Marius, have been to make himself predictable. Instead, he raised his filled glass to me. ‘I drink to you,’ he said. ‘I have never met a man who disgusts me more.’

I raised my glass in return. ‘Not for the first time,’ I said, ‘you have made my day. From the moment I clapped eyes on you all I ever wanted — no, not all I ever wanted, but much of what I wanted, was to turn your stomach. My only fear now is that like Othello my occupation’s gone.’

He put his wine down and rubbed his face with his hands, almost as though he were washing me off him. ‘What the fuck have I ever done to you?’ he said.

It was a fair question and I gave it the consideration it deserved. I covered my face. Maybe we had to do this blind.

‘“Done”? Nothing,’ I said. ‘But nor have I acted as though you had. After all, to put this at its crudest, what have I “done” to you but given you my wife? I know, I know, Marisa was not mine to give. Any more than you were mine to give to her. But I laboured, when you were getting nowhere with each other, to bring you forth. Without me you would both be still discussing Baudelaire on the High Street. So I have nothing toapologise to you for. But yes, it pleased me, man to man, to think I was doing what would appal you to your soul, and you a man without a soul. A thoroughgoing masochist will always be an affront to a sadist. He takes away the sadist’s raison d’être .’

‘I’m at a loss to understand why you have me figured as a sadist. This isn’t the first time you’ve accused me of a brutality I must tell you I don’t find in myself.’

‘That’s because you’re looking in the wrong place. Your brutality is the brutality of the rationalist. You’ve said you are not unusual and indeed I see you as very much a man of our time. Nothing surprises or disappoints you, you boast. You have seen through to the bottom of human nature. And then a respectably dressed husband with a quiet manner hands you his wife and you’re disgusted. One night you must let me take you to a club I know. That will test the strength of your world-weariness. What you don’t seem to understand is that I like you. I feel we have something in common. We are both trying to survive the death of God. Only I think I survive it better. I don’t pretend to disillusion. I say, when there is nothing else left to believe in, believe in the erotic life. If you’ve truly nowhere else to go, then let it take you on a journey of its choosing.’

‘If you’re telling me this is a contest between belief systems, you’ve been fighting with yourself. In relation to your wife I never knew of your existence until the other day.’

‘Your incuriosity does you no credit.’

‘And you think your obscene curiosity does you any? In all your nosing about your wife ’s life and mine, did it ever occur to you we might feel sincerely for each other?’

‘All the time. It was what I wanted.’

‘Why? So that you could rub your itch?’

‘So that I could love her better.’

‘You can only love a woman beloved of someone else?’

‘I could ask the very same question of you. I said we had much in common. But no — I loved Marisa fine when there was no one else, not you or those who preceded you. Since you, however, yes, I have loved her more.

‘You are hooked on loss, my friend.’

‘And you are hooked on victory. We both know that love will die at last, turn tepid and perfunctory, decline into mere companionship and affection, if there is not cruelty in it. Not physical harm or violence, but cruelty. The cruelty of loss. Of dread. Of jealousy. Whatever the counselling professions tell us about trust, where we are not jealous we are not in love at all. Othello was within his rights, though it is not fashionable to say so, to claim he loved too well. His mistake was not to see that suffocating his wife was not the best way to express it. Inviting Cassio to his bed would have been the infinitely preferable option for all parties.’

‘Provided he could watch?’

‘Maybe. He was a simple soldier. But being told, as Iago very nearly taught him, is more rewarding. Words excite far more than mere vision ever can.’

He looked at me evenly. Had circumstance been otherwise I would have said with compassion.

‘Words can deceive,’ he said.

‘Are you saying Marisa deceived me? Perhaps I’ve disgusted you enough for one day, but I must tell you that ours has always been a highly verbal marriage. When she deceives me, she tells me.’

‘Now it’s my turn to express philosophic disappointment in you. Words aren’t always, as you know as well as anybody, messengers of truth. Even when they mean to be honest they are bound by the crookedness of their nature. I’m surprised it has never occurred to you that Marisa might have deceived you in her deceptions.’