Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

Of course imagining is not the same as longing; what you see in your mind’s distempered eye you might not welcome in your heart. But then again you might. What else is imagination for if not to lure the heart away from safety?

Here’s a simple test for husbands: Do I fear another man is fucking my wife or do I hope another man is fucking my wife? And of the two, which do I prefer?

Take as much time as you need to think about it. Close your eyes. Do a little picturing of the scene. You are filled with dread, of course. But what if part of what appals you is the degree to which you want the thing you dread? Are you not as much energised as terrified by what you see?

The more you love a woman the more you fear her loss. Is it not a sensible strategy — of the imagination and the heart — to practise losing her?

Call it self-protection: we do it in every other sphere, we shore up against tragedy and destruction, we take out insurance, we make provision.

If you know you cannot bear what is going to happen, if your heart is pulp — and what man’s heart is not as pulp? — then surprise it before it surprises you.

Against the swollen river of molten jealousy there is, as far as I know, no other defence. Throw yourself in. At least that way you have a hand in your own destiny. And sink or swim, it may prove exhilarating.

A great endeavour lures me on — the words are not mine but those of another deviant on a moralising mission. Pervert Pervert, as I recall a sneeringly buttoned-up English teacher calling him when I mentioned I’d been reading Lolita in the vacation. Takes one to know one, was what I should have said, but I didn’t want to lead him on. In my school you only had to look at a teacher to have him leaving you love letters in your satchel. His — Pervert Pervert’s — great endeavour bore on girls even further below the age of consent than Marius would have been prepared to entertain, though with Marius it was more a case of being horrified by old flesh than revelling in young. My endeavour, which is strictly legal, is less threatening to society. It is to make the case for cuckolds, though I have to say I hate the comicality of the word. And when I say ‘make the case ’ I don’t mean win publicity for our cause. I’m not looking to form an association. What lures me on is an altogether more pastoral ambition — to extend the great arm of brotherhood around the millions upon millions of husbands who would invite their wives to wrong them if they could only find the courage for it. Cuckolds of the World Unite! You have everything to lose but your chains.

By someone else — the someone else whose arms we imagine wound around our wives — I mean another man. The fancy which some husbands entertain of seeing their wives carnally embracing another woman is something else entirely. I’m not such a puritan as to deny titillation its place in the erotic life, or to pretend that the sight of two women kissing isn’t sometimes pretty — my father more than once announced he had a taste for it — but titillation is not what I’m about. Hell doesn’t wait on the soft-focus experimentalism of an age that will try anything once and in the process let all danger (other than disease) drain clean away from sex. The nymphs climb off the bed, bow gracefully to their audience, get dressed, and normal life resumes, unless they discover they like too much where they’ve just been, but that too is another story.

No, the love of which I speak, love desperate and bloody, the only love that deserves to speak its name — the last erotic adventure left to us as we await extinction — requires another man. A rival. Not a companion in enjoyment of your spouse’s favours, not a Jim to your Jules or a Jules to your Jim. Not a vacation from you or a variation of you, or even the Heathcliffif-all-else-perishes rocky-eternity beneath you, but the dread, day and night and in all weathers alternative to you. You as it hasn’t fallen to you to be. You who might efface you and make you as though you had never been.

But such imaginings come and go, sometimes acted upon, more often not, until the imagination cools and finds other errands for itself outside obsession. For the lucky (or the daring) few, fancy is transfigured into fact. You unlatch your nature. You welcome Pandemonium into your heart. You do not have to wonder, you know. You do not have to beg, as Othello begs, ophthalmic proof. You have the proof. And now the love you bear the woman who betrays you — except that it is no betrayal, for a consummation cannot be called betrayal — flowers into adoration.

No man has ever adored a woman who does not know her to be lying in the arms of someone else.

No man ever adored his wife as I, Felix Quinn, adored Marisa Quinn, already the lover of other men, but soon — soon, soon, if desires have wings — to be the mistress of Marius.

The surprising thing is that I was the other man — the rival, the dread alternative to the man she had — before I became her husband. The best cuckolds are always those who have cuckolded first. They know from the inside the enormity of that betrayal which is no betrayal, though in our case it was a betrayal since the other party was unable to take any pleasure in my supplanting of him. In the psychopathology of everyday life there are such casualities: men who miss out on the most exquisite sensations love has to offer because they cannot accommodate jealousy in their hearts.

He was a collector of antiquarian books. I am a seller of antiquarian books. I found him what he wanted and we became friends. Let that be a warning: don’t befriend the antiquarian who satisfies your bibliomania, for the next thing is he ’ll be satisfying your wife.

I’m aware that my tone of voice changes when I remember myself as the lover. I get taken over by a gross levity which I frankly don’t much care for. This proves — had it needed proving — that the role of seducer, or however else you choose to describe the offending party, doesn’t suit me. I am myself only when I am the offended. In this one instance, however — perhaps because I foretold where at last it would take me — I played the cuckold-maker.

It was impossible to tell from Marisa’s demeanour when I first met her whether she was happy in her marriage or she was not. She looked impermanent, that was my strongest impression of her. She looked as though she hadn’t settled, as a butterfly never settles; indeed had someone told me that, like the butterfly which accompanied Thanatos, she would die before the afternoon was out I’d have believed it possible, for all that she had the bloom of health upon her. Though absolutely of the here and now in her dress, never not elegant in the steely heeled, city-woman style, a powerhouse capable of taking on any man at his own game, she somehow wasn’t with us. When she smiled at something one of us said — we were just the three, Marisa, her husband and I, taking tea at Claridge ’s, the four o’clock ritual — it was as though she were playing catch-up, smiling at something that had been said the last time she was here. She wasn’t slow, far from it, she was simply operating in another dimension, thinking her thoughts and saving up whatever was said for an hour when she would be more receptive to it.

Women who slip time in this way find a direct route to my heart. Their slippage suits my desire to be expected by them before they know me, and then to be postponed by them once I am known. They deny me temporal reality in a way that excites and energises me. They bear the promise that I will at last be lost in them.

And, to be plainer about it, they solicit my pity. In the split second before I imagine being lost in them, I imagine doing them some good. Protecting them from I don’t know what. Terrorists, the melting ice caps, cynicism, Marius, myself.