Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

‘Yes, you might be. But you are also thinking about your desire for me.’

‘Any husband or wife must learn to deal with what the surgeon does

to desire.’

‘But your desires are not the desires of any husband, Felix. You’d bedealing with what the surgeon does to every other man’s desire for me as well. I can’t say it is isn’t flattering sometimes to be the mistress of the world in your eyes. I go with the pretence. But what follows is that I’ll be the hag or amputee of the world in the end.’

‘Marisa, what is this? You’re a young woman. The world will have melted or blown itself up long before that time.’

‘ That time, Felix, could be any time.’

But I was sleepy now, wiped out by all she ’d told me of the afternoon she ’d spent with Marius, her untainted limbs entwined with his, her eyes rolling in her head like a bacchante ’s, her breasts bathed in a cold quicksilver sweat.

And now here it was, from the mouth of Rowlie — my comeuppance. Symmetrical and jeering: the Cuban doctor by Marisa’s bedside again, only this time wielding a surgeon’s blade. Except — and this is the trouble with comeuppance — it was Marisa’s comeuppance too, indeed far more Marisa’s comeuppance than mine, and what had she done to call down so terrible a retribution?

I got no more out of Rowlie. When Flops descended, in a cloud of bags and cases, she refused to speak to me. I followed her out of the house and watched her load up the car. ‘So what now?’ I asked. ‘What’s happening next?’

‘To you, I suppose you mean,’ she said, her head in the boot of the car.

‘To Marisa. To Marisa. What’s happening? How do I see her?’

‘You don’t.’

‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘she ’s my wife.’

A sardonic laugh from Flops. I was absolutely certain she said beneath her breath, ‘And how many other men’s, thanks to you,’ but she didn’t say it loud enough for me to challenge her.

Rowlie was already in the driving seat. ‘Text her, old man,’ he said confidentially, as though assisting in our elopement.

‘Text her! Fucking text her!’

But I was shouting at a car that had driven away.

I tried ringing Marisa’s mobile but it was off. I rang Flops’s home number, but if Marisa was there she wasn’t answering. I thought about getting a cab to Richmond then changed my mind; a seriously ill Marisa would not appreciate my making a scene. So text her was what I did.

Darling, what can I do? I wrote.

An hour later a text came back. Darling, nothing .

With the words, it was as though a sheet of tears had fallen. I did not even try to blink their sting away. I succumbed to them as though they had been foretold, tears waiting for me from another life. I lay down on our bed and closed my eyes. Subspace with a vengeance. When I next opened my eyes it was dark outside. I wanted to read the text again but didn’t dare. She had called me darling which was something, more than something, but she had told me I could do nothing, which was less than nothing.

Darling, nothing . Nothing in the sense that there was nothing she wanted from me? Nothing in the sense that there was nothing I could do, whether she would have welcomed my help or not? Or nothing in the sense that there was nothing anyone could do? It was too final to bear, however I read it.

Death came two-tiered for me. There was the death of men and then there was the death of women, and the death of women was immeasurably more painful. I wept over my mother long after my father forgot her name. ‘Pull yourself together,’ he told me when he could stand the sight and sound of me no more, ‘you’ll need some grief left over for me.’

‘You’re just a man,’ I told him.

‘I’m your father.’

‘A father’s not a mother.’

‘That won’t stop me dying.’

‘No, but it will stop me caring.’

I had always known I would not handle my mother’s dying well. I had been preparing for it too long. As far back as I could remember I had been possessed of the utter sadness of it — not just my mother’s death, wheneverit happened, but the death of women, full stop. And later there was not a woman I encountered whose death I did not foresee and grieve for in advance of its occurring. There are women out there in the world today, rosy-cheeked and blooming who have no idea that I broke down before their coffins years ago.

No doubt it goes with my condition. Freud understood the passivemasochistic state as one in which the son takes the place of the mother and desires to be loved by the father. Hard to credit with a father like mine, but that’s the unconscious for you. If Freud was right then I was grieving for the woman I had already killed or intended to kill.

But there must have been another stage, too, in which I disavowed my mother not by killing her but by denigrating her. Grieve for her, prostitute her. Prostitute her, grieve for her. Who’s to say which comes first or where the causation is?

All I know, whether I wanted to be the mother, or wanted to defile her, was that desire had always been imbued with sadness for me. I no sooner fell in love with a woman than I imagined her dead.

IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED I LIVED BEHIND THE SHEET OF TEARS THAT had fallen with Marisa’s text. I did not go into work. I barely left the house. I rang Richmond ten times a day but always got the answermachine. I left messages but they weren’t answered. I dreaded ringing Marisa’s mobile because I knew that if I heard her voice I’d break down. And how would that help her? Texts, too, I feared, because another like the last and I’d be a dead man myself.

Finally she did text me. Going into hospital today. Expect to live. Love, M.

Which hospital? I texted back.

No need for you to know .

I’m your husband. I must be with you .

You wouldn’t cope .

Cope??

Cope!!

Isn’t that for me to decide

Nope.

For myself, I could have gone on with this. I even punched in Nope??? before thinking better of it. A sick woman on the point of going into hospital could only do so much texting.

I let half the day go by in morbid self-indulgence — going through the things of hers that still remained, looking at old photographs and letters, blaming myself, imagining life without her, exactly as I hadimagined life without my mother and every other woman I had ever cared for, then retreating again behind the sheet of tears. In the afternoon I pulled myself together and began going through the phone book, systematically ringing every hospital in London to find which one had admitted her. Eventually I located her in a private hospital in Kingston. By then it was almost midnight. They were surprised, when I told them I was Marisa Quinn’s husband, that I didn’t know her operation wasn’t scheduled until the day after next. ‘I’m away,’ I explained, which surprised them more.

I asked if I could speak to her but they said she would be sleeping. I was pleased about that. She would not have wanted to hear my voice. And I would not have made a manly job of hearing hers.

But in the morning I sent a taxiload of flowers to the ward. No sooner did the taxi leave than I jumped into a second taxi and told him to follow it. By the time I reached Putney I realised my mistake and got the driver to turn round. What would I do at the hospital if she wouldn’t see me, and I knew she wouldn’t see me? Hang around the waiting room? Run into Flops? Sit with my head between my knees, smelling death?

Marisa was right about me. I couldn’t cope.