Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

‘You are too subtle for me.’

He shrugged and rose. ‘Then let’s agree we have out-subtilised each other.’

I scrutinised him. A host’s prerogative — to take a long, insolent and uncontested look at an unbidden guest. A handsome man without a doubt, Marius, but dry. Squeeze him and nothing would come out. Just a little dust. And he was more haggard when one really looked. Had they always been there, those dark impermeable circles round his eyes, each like therim of an eclipsed moon? Mustn’t it have made Marisa sad, looking into those?

‘So why did you come here?’ I asked him.

‘Old times’ sake.’

‘I see you intend to leave on a victorious note. Well I’m not hard to vanquish, as you know.’

‘I’ll let you into a secret. I don’t feel victorious. And I never felt victorious over poor Jim Hanley, though that is your view of me. Amor vincit omnia . Love ruins us all.’

‘Only if we let it.’

‘It’s a dice with death, and you know it.’

‘Better to say a dance with death. Enjoy the dance, is my view.’

‘Well that’s your lewd romance.’

‘And, don’t forget, Klossowski’s,’ I said, noticing that he had given Helmut Newton’s photograph a final glance. ‘In fact I think you’ll find that half the men in the world are of my party — the half that’s not of yours. There’s no other way to be. Your way or my way. The hammer or the anvil. Finito.’

‘And who’s having the better time, would you say?’

‘Depends how you measure. But if we’re talking rapture, the anvil. The hammer strikes, the anvil feels the blow. The hammer does, the anvil feels. Hammers don’t paint paintings or write novels.’

‘Of the Henry James type?’

‘Of any type. Art happens on the anvil, beneath the hammer.’

‘Look,’ he said suddenly, as if he didn’t want to get into any of that, his voice finding another key entirely, ‘forgive this intrusion into your marriage—’

I could have snorted, but I didn’t. I too was suddenly in another mood. ‘That,’ I said, ‘since we are being candid, is if I have a marriage.’

He looked away momentarily. Not a subject for him to enter into. Funny how a man can sleep with your wife and still be nice about whether you do or do not have a marriage.

‘What I was going to say,’ he said, ‘was just this. My reputation mightbe of no concern to you, but Marisa’s well-being surely is. Punch me on the nose if you like — no doubt you believe you owe me one — but I think — and as the subject of your conversations I have a right to think — that you should listen less to what you want her to tell you, and more to what she wishes to say.’

‘What is that supposed to mean?’

He extended his hand to me and then held mine a moment longer than was necessary. A shocking act, I thought. It made me catch my breath. So this was what Marius felt like. Would he kiss me next? Had he come on an ironic mission, to fill me in on the few things I didn’t know about him that Marisa did? Such as the fleshly texture of him?

But if so, that was all he intended to fill me in on. He offered no answer to my question.

‘Words deceive,’ he said again. And then was gone.

I sat a long time wondering what, if anything, he ’d been trying to tell me.

The next time we met — if I may put it fancifully — was in a cemetery.

The following afternoon — I took the timing to be coincidental — I received a call from Flops saying that she and Rowlie were on their way to me from Richmond to collect some of Marisa’s belongings and would I arrange to be at the house for them.

‘So she ’s with you,’ I said. ‘Is she all right?’

‘We ’ll talk when we see you, Felix.’

‘So is she all right?’ I asked again when I opened the door to them.

Rowlie looked away. Flops stared at me with what I thought was loathing.

‘Of course she ’s not all right,’ she said.

I took that to refer to the degree of upset I’d caused Marisa, the nature of which she might well have conveyed to her half-sister. Once the family is involved, the pursuit of sexual ecstasy by whatever means can never be made to sound good. Perversion never travels well across the in-laws.

‘I’ll get some things together for her then,’ I said in quasi-shame.

‘No, Felix. She asked me to do it. Please make this easy for us all.’

‘Us all?’

‘She ’s given me a list of what she wants and where I’ll find them. She said you wouldn’t object.’

‘Object! Of course I won’t object. What do you think I am?’ She didn’t answer.

Rowlie stayed in the kitchen with me. We barely spoke. It was almost as though he was there to keep an eye on me, to be sure I made it easy for them all. I offered him tea. He shook his head.

‘Something stronger?’

‘I’m driving,’ he said.

And then, emboldened by the sound of his own voice, he said, ‘It’s not good, old man.’

‘What’s not good?’

‘Marisa.’

‘What about Marisa isn’t good?’

‘Her health.’ He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Sorry.’

And that was how I learned the doctors had found a malignant tumour in Marisa’s breast.

She had half promised me this once, not long after I’d come clean about the Cuban. We were both exhausted after a night of narrative — I exhausted into exaltation, she into the grey remorseful sleeplessness of second thoughts.

‘What will become of us?’ she said.

‘We will grow old and love each other forever.’

‘Will we? When my flesh falls into folds and my knees have gone?’

‘I’m not him. The ageing of the body doesn’t repel me.’

‘Doesn’t now.’

‘Won’t ever.’

‘How do you know it won’t?’

‘I’m not a man who changes with the seasons.’

‘That’s just what frightens me, Felix. You’ll still be you, lying here waiting for me to come hobbling home in the early morning with stories of men falling at my feet. But I won’t still be me. The men won’t go on falling, Felix.’

‘They’ll always go on falling, Marisa. You possess the secret of eternal beauty.’

‘I don’t,’ she cried, sitting up in bed, ‘I don’t possess the secret of eternal anything.’ She took her breasts in her hands, exactly as my Aunt Agatha had done when I was a boy, to shame every man who bore the name of Quinn. ‘It won’t be the men that fall, Felix, it will be these. That’s what they do. If you’re lucky that’s all they do. You must face that. Anything can happen. And where are we then? How will you be when the surgeon’s finished with me?’

‘Don’t start invoking surgeons.’

‘How will you be, Felix?’

‘I will be concerned for you. That’s all.’

She shivered as though an icy blast had blown through her. ‘Easy to say. But you need me whole for what you like. It’s a tyranny, Felix. I don’t deny it has its compensations. And it must speak to something in me otherwise I’d have walked away from you long ago. You have influenced me too much. Men always have. I’m like my mother. I don’t blame you. You could have influenced me in other ways. You could have painted a different picture of me. Mother Teresa, say. I’d have been good as her. But what I do I do. I don’t complain. But I’d be insane not to worry where it will end.’

‘Not with a surgeon. Don’t wish surgeons on us.’

‘There you are! Don’t wish surgeons on us . It would be me he’d be chopping up, not you. But already it’s you who’s being mutilated.’

‘I’m speaking about my feelings for you, Marisa.’