Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

We ’d had the conversation many times. ‘You entertain me but God knows how you’d be in an emergency,’ she ’d said.

‘Right behind you,’ I’d replied.

‘Exactly,’ she said. Only she wasn’t laughing.

She half severed a finger once, chopping vegetables. ‘Ring an ambulance,’ she said calmly. When I saw what she ’d done I fainted. So she rang her own ambulance.

Couldn’t cope.

Not coping, of course, was part of my condition — no one knew that better than I did. Like all masochists, I called pain down on myself in order to bring it under my control. My whole life was a protest against the blind chance and malevolence of real cruelty which strikes where and how it chooses. Let those who accuse me of cruelty to Marisa remember this: I sought to shield her, too, from the harsh contingencies of living. And yes, when those harsh contingencies eluded the art I made of them, I couldn’t cope.

Such high ambition for us I’d had. So grand an adventure I’d thought to take us on, far from the timidities of the ordinary marriage. And now here I was, unable to cope with the commonest contingency of all. Years before, sitting in a café in San Francisco reading Charles Bukowski’s slapdash, drink-sodden, fag-end novel Notes of a Dirty Old Man, I’d been struck by Bukowski’s great tragicomical barroom wail of masculinist frustration — ‘I could not as one man change the course of sexual history, I just didn’t have it.’ What had struck me about it? I don’t know. I wasn’t, when I read it, planning to change the course of sexual history myself. That ambition only devolved upon me when I set eyes, or when I set eyes on someone else setting eyes, on Marisa. But the lines of your failure are always waiting for you if you know where to look. And those were mine. I just didn’t have it .

Wasn’t ever going to change the course of sexual history and wasn’t ever going to help Marisa with her half-severed finger. Wasn’t ever going to cope.

But you have to cope, don’t you, when your wife has what Marisa had?

On an impulse that surprised and disgusted me, I went looking for Marius. Not because — not consciously because — I wanted him to do the coping for me, but because he should be told. That was my reasoning, anyway.

But what if he had been told? What if he was sitting by Marisa’s bed right now, as my flowers arrived? What if he was telling her about our conversation, or planning where they’d run off to when she was well?

I didn’t welcome these wonderings. I held them to be inappropriate to the occasion. Death and desire might have been closely bound in me, as they are bound in any pervert, but death had a right to clear a space for itself too. Death deserves to be left alone sometimes.

Marius didn’t answer his door and when I asked after him at the button shop they said he ’d gone.

‘Gone out?’

‘No, gone. Left. There were estate agents taking photographs of the flat yesterday.’

I thought my heart would stop.

‘Do you know gone where?’ I asked. If they said Richmond — well, if they said Richmond, I didn’t know what I’d do. I held on to one of the tables, fearing for the buttons if I fainted.

I had not previously seen the girl who was answering my questions. New here. Everyone in London was new there. She called into the back of the shop. A voice called out in return, ‘Shropshire, I think. He said back to where he was before. I’m sure Shropshire. Shropshire, yes. He’s left us a forwarding address if you want it. Are you a friend?’

A friend? Absurdly, I felt like the last rat left on a sinking ship.

I became a recluse.

I closed my windows, shut the blinds and waited for news. Had I been waiting for instructions I could not have behaved more passively.

All memory of desire vanished. And with it all anticipation of desire. Cuckoldry bequeaths one this: after it, nothing. Sad and sacrilegious to remember what I had felt for Marisa at the height of my irreligious rapture, when the bloom of health was on her, and sadder and more sacrilegious still to want her well so that she might do it to me all over again. And if not her, who? Who else could I possibly desire now? What other eroticism was there that could hold a candle to what ours had been?

Yes, I thought too much about myself. But every day began with my thinking about her. My first impulse every morning took the shape of a resolve — I would go to Richmond and climb the gates of my half-sister-in-law’s house, or I would attempt a sea-assault from the Thames. Flops’s house enjoyed a river frontage: what was to stop me hiring a barge or motorboat and calling to Marisa from a loudhailer? Or even scaling thewalls of the house and rescuing her by force? But I never got past making the resolution. The fact that I imagined such intervention absurdly only showed how absurd all action felt to me. Everything I thought of doing ended in farce. The great comic heroes of literature, I had always believed, were of necessity of the school of Masoch. No comedy ever flowed from de Sade or the sadistic impulse. Cruel satire, perhaps; but satire isn’t comedy. Wasn’t the proof of a novel’s expansiveness (speaking of the classic novels I cared about) the author’s willingness to let his hero be a clown? Not to punish him with his clowning but to luxuriate in it. Of all great clowns not a one isn’t a masochist to his soul, and very few aren’t cuckolds as a consequence. So why wasn’t I prepared to live out the logic of my nature and risk whatever foolishness might befall me? Why wasn’t I shinning up the drainpipes of Marisa’s hospital and pulling her from her bed? Why wasn’t I climbing dripping from the Thames and chancing fisticuffs with Flops and Rowlie, and possibly their children, on their lawn? So I fell off the drainpipe, broke every bone in my body and had to be admitted to hospital myself! So Flops’s youngest child laid me out with a blow to my kidneys! So what?

I had turned too passive even to be a clown, that was what kept me at home with my blinds drawn. I had cuckolded myself out of the grand folly of my calling. I was reduced to standing on the dignity of my sadness.

A little late for that, Felix, I thought. But it was a little late for everything.

Marisa’s operation went as well as such operations could be expected to go and she was recuperating in Richmond. Rowlie was good enough to ring me with the details but I failed, or chose not to grasp them. I did not want to think of Marisa as other than she ’d always been. Complete and dangerous. So she had me figured out again. ‘How will you be when the surgeon’s finished with me?’ she had asked long before there was any surgeon in our life. ‘Fine,’ I’d answered. But she ’d been right not to believe me. I was fine so long as I didn’t know.

She texted me a couple of times.

All OKish , was the first.

Please don’t , was the second. This in response to my text to her — This ridiculous. Coming to see you .

And once she phoned me. We both cried a little during that. No, I cried a lot. Who knew, was the gist. Who knew how well she was or how well she would go on being. But she wasn’t who she ’d been. She felt terrible and looked worse.

‘I bet you don’t,’ I said.

‘I do. But what about you? Are you looking after yourself?’

‘Of course I’m not. There isn’t a me to look after if you’re not here. When are you coming home?’

‘Don’t ask me that, Felix.’

‘Well when can I come to see you?’

‘Don’t ask me that either.’

My punishment. Don ’t ask me that .