Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

Art hung about her like a halo. She was transfigured by it. The refulgence, when she came home from a concert or a gallery, hurt Marius’s eyes. Art was not the reason he left her; the deterioration of her body was the reason he left her. But who’s to say that loving being around art, especially art of an overly imaginative sort — her most favourite exhibition of all time had been Pre-Raphaelite Fairy Painting at the Victoria and Albert, and she owned, or had owned, signed first editions of everything by Tolkien, a one-time acquaintance of her father’s and husband’s — who’s to say that fevered art in whatever form she favoured it had not been instrumental in loosening her flesh from the bone?

Otherwise, Marius proved to be a difficult customer to tail. The one routine of his I could count on — four o’clock coffee at whatever tin table he could find vacant on the High Street, by preference one of those outside the Greek café opposite the travel bookshop — was too risky to take advantage of. I doubted he’d recognise me from Shropshire, but I couldn’t take the chance. It was important, for what I wanted of him, that he didn’t know of my existence.

I began to haunt the button shop simply in order to be beneath him. If the shop was empty and I listened hard I fancied I could hear him pacing the floor. Still searching for that opening sentence. I bought far more buttons than I needed in the course of this operation, but I felt I was getting the smell of him this way, and would subsequently know, if we happened to be shopping in the same supermarket, say, or visiting the same doctor, that he was near.

It could have been pure chance or it could have been his odour that took me to the local fromagerie one lunchtime when Marius was deliberating over cheese. That bread and cheese was just about all he ate I had figured out already. I felt certain there was no table in his flat. He would eat his lunch, I imagined, sitting on the edge of his bed, slicing the cheese with a sharp fruit knife and ripping the baguette apart with his hands. There was something satanic in this image, by virtue of its suppressed explosiveness. No man his size and temperament could go on living like that.

You could feel the tension he emitted in the fromagerie. Everyone fell quiet around him as he muttered into the cheese, asking for one rat-trap-sized portion after another, leaving increasingly long silences between each selection.

‘Will there be anything else?’ the young woman behind the cheese counter not unreasonably enquired, Marius having abstracted himself so completely at last that he appeared not to be there in mind at all.

The question produced a wheeze of brokenhearted merriment from deep inside his moustaches. ‘ Will there be anything else? I certainly hope there will, but when there will, or what there will, I’m damned if I have an earthly. Time being unredeemable, what else there will be, no less than what might have been, is an abstraction remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation, as the poet he say.’

‘That’ll be seventeen pounds and thirty pence, then,’ the young woman said. I gathered she was used to his nonsense.

Another of his tragic Old Man of the Sea wheezes, and then he peeled off a twenty-pound note from a wad he carried in the back pocket of his corduroy trousers, like an Oxford don who’d gone into the protection racket.

‘Ta, doll,’ he said, shining his icily heartache, opal-blue eyes into hers as she gave him his change. He had no desire to make a fool of her. On the contrary. The meek shall inherit the earth, Marius believed, the haughty having made such a mess of it. Then the meek shall do the same.

Doll , for Christ’s sake!

Who called a woman doll any more?

I didn’t know how she felt, but I turned a little queasy for her, hearing it.

Doll!

I wasn’t sure it was still allowed to address a woman in that way. I wasn’t sure it should ever have been allowed.

He didn’t buy his bread and cheese at the fromagerie every lunchtime, but he did so frequently enough for me to hope that they would see each other there eventually — he and Marisa — since she too was a cheese eater and the fromagerie, at least on the days there was no farmers’ market, was the place to get it.

And eventually — though I had to keep my wits about me to ensure it — they did.

As an expert on them both, I saw what they saw. He, as dusty as a snake, a scarf about his neck in defiance of the warm weather — the eternal student, just down from Wittenberg, not going anywhere in particular, thinking about his satanic lunch. She, in a high-waist pencil skirt so tight he would have wondered how her skin could breathe inside it, her sunglasses in her hair, her earrings rattling as she paced the shop in her punitive stilettos, an alien presence in so organic a place. She was, to my heightened senses, more than usually absented, her lovely Diana-the-huntress head slightly to one side, as when she was weighing up a proposition. I knew when Marisa registered a man. I had watched her register enough of them. She cleared her throat. I had seen Marius only with prey that was too young and a mistress who was too old, so I wasn’t sure what changes to look for in him. But I saw him take hold of the ends of his moustaches and shape them into a pointed beard. Short of his making goat’s horns with them I don’t know how he could have signalled his interest more plainly.

It was all over in a second — just a flicker of acknowledgement between them, such as high-bred cats exchange when they pass on the common street.

Had they been cats I could have left them to it. They would have known what the next move was. But they were an over-civilised pair. On their own, no matter how often they eyed each other off in the fromagerie, they would not have proceeded further. They were too alike — they stimulated the romance of impossibility in each other.

I, on the other hand, proceed more quickly than is considered decent from the subtlest intimations of sex to the grossest couplings. Jealousy operates at a speed beyond the capabilities of adultery, no matter how licentious the adulterers — from a dropped handkerchief to the act of shame a thousand times committed, all in the blinking of an eye. And jealousy when it is a hunger is faster still. No sooner did I remark the catlike hauteur of their exchange of glances than I leaped all intervening stages to Marisa quivering, head down, hindquarters raised; Marius, claws out, parting her fur, obscenely scarlet like a line of blood. .

I was not insane. I knew I’d have to wait a while for that.

But at least we were up and running. And in the meantime I did not lack resource. I knew their weaknesses. In Marisa’s case, conversation. In Marius’s, women who already had husbands, and — so long as it was not wonder-touched, so long as there was corruption in it — art. All I had to do was get them to a gallery and start them talking.

NO MAN HAS EVER LOVED A WOMAN AND NOT IMAGINED HER IN THE ARMS of someone else.

I repeat the sentence not only for the pleasure it gives me to imagine Marius appalled. I repeat it as a categorical, unwavering truth, though I fully expect it to be contradicted. You will sooner get a man to give away his money than admit he longs to give away his wife. (Or better still — for we are dealing, if only we’d come clean about it, in nothing but degrees of good — to have his wife give away herself.)