Howard Jacobson: No More Mr. Nice Guy

They have towel rings in their bathroom, one above the other, to save space. On these they hang the identical chaste white dimpled French table napkins she insists on calling bath-towels. ‘What do you think it means,’ she asks him, ‘that in the twenty years I have known you I have always hung my bath-towel below yours?’

It is, of course, an ideological question. One that he knows better than even to attempt to answer.

She shakes her head, disgusted with herself, with her education, with her sex’s long connivance in the rituals of deference. ‘It’s utterly humiliating,’ she says. ‘I can’t assert myself sufficiently to put something of mine above something of yours.’

A string snaps in his brain. The buzzards have cut through a vein or an artery. He lurches past her, blood pouring out of his ears — blood must be pouring out of his ears; he can hear the rush — and pulls the towel from the higher ring. It is so light it floats like a rose petal before it lands. Even before it’s settled he is jumping up and down on it, treading it into a rag, mopping the bathroom floor with it like a curler sooping the ice. ‘OK?’ he says. ‘That better? That do? Or would you like to shit on it now?’

She wants to know why he is treating her towel like that.

‘What do you mean your towel? How can it be your towel? You’ve just seen me take it from the top ring.’

‘Exactly. That’s where mine has been hanging since this morning. I’ve started to assert myself.’

‘Started —!’ But he is not able to finish. A fax is coming through and he has to fly down the stairs to suffocate it.

He sits among his startled, twitching machines, like a shepherd calming his flock after a thunderstorm, and wonders whether it will be towels that finally do for the relationship — whatever that fucking word means. He considers himself hard done by around towels. When he steps out of a shower he doesn’t want to have to dab himself dry with a kitchen roll. Going from wet to dry should be a voluptuous experience. The towel he has always wanted wraps itself around you like a courtesan. In his mind’s eye he sees the towel he would have were he allowed a choice in the matter; it is as voluminous as a sail; it is as soft as a cloud; ribbed like an acre of Santa Monica beach; fluffed up like a Playboy bunny’s tail; the colour of a Pasadena sunset, all pouting carmines and molten golds …

‘To go with the gold chains around your neck …’

‘I don’t wear gold chains around my neck …’

But of course she means ideologically. Ideologically he is gross. A used-car salesman. An arriviste. A crap-watcher. His taste in towels proves it.

As does his taste in bathrooms. He would have liked a sunken bath. A spa system. A star’s dressing-room mirror, lit by a thousand winking bulbs. A Moorish tiled floor. Black silk blinds. And yes, yes, gold taps. What he gets is a Shaker chapel: plain white bath with its legs showing, hinges on the outside of the cupboards, tongue-and-groove walls, and communion cloths for towels.

But then he would have liked a penthouse or an apartment in a huddled mansion block to sink his Babylonian whirlpool in. Something with a Malibu terrace giving out on to the odours of the city, the fried food, the petrol fumes, the screams. Life. Life with a whiff of death in it. And what does he get instead? A whitewashed cottage on a village green in Dulwich. Dulwich! A garden. A wooden fence. Space. Death with a whiff of life in it.

So why doesn’t he assert himself?

‘Ha!’ Ask her. She knows. ‘You may not think it,’ she tells him, ‘but you are living, in every particular, the life you want. That’s why you stay. It’s what you understand. This is the domestic universe you were brought up in — you and the rest of your sex. A mad woman with an eating disorder hidden away in the bowels of the house, getting madder every minute, while you complain, bang your forehead, and get on with your work. You couldn’t live any other way.’

Couldn’t he?

Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe his know-all painstaking feminist pornographer of a companion, Wittgenstein-the-Fucking-Wise, is right: this is the only life he understands. There’s a deranged woman concealed in the attic, the bedroom, the kitchen, the scullery, the hen-house; there’s a lunatic loose — wasn’t that the terrible unspoken truth that the men in his family had passed down to him through the generations? He remembers his grandfather smiting his forehead whenever his grandmother opened her mouth. And didn’t his father do the same? Woman — mouth — speak; man — forehead — bang.

His father’s father’s brother, great-uncle Noam, used to rise from his rocking-chair, button up his waistcoat and leave the house the moment the mother of his children so much as gestured at him. As a young man he had enlisted to fight the Kaiser, took a wound in his knee and was photographed in gaiters. That gave him the right never to work again and never to be spoken to by a woman in his own home. Greataunt Isadora was permitted to clean for him, screw the heads off the chickens for him, raise sons for him, but not otherwise make a sound. Only let her look as though she might be thinking of saying something and Noam would put up his hand to indicate the desirability of silence, touch his head to denote the presence of craziness, and be gone limping through the door. Where did he go to every night? No one knew. Some said he had another woman. But who? A mute? Others claimed they saw him going into the local pub, and that he was known to sit over a single half pint of ginger beer and water, talking to no one, until closing time. Wherever he went, he went there every night of his married life for close to fifty years. And when Isadora died — with her lips sealed — it broke his heart. A month later he was dead himself. He couldn’t bear the loneliness.

Has he, Frank the crap-watcher, ever lived in a house, visited a house, heard of a house that doesn’t have a mad woman — a Mrs Rochester from whom you have to keep the matches, a Lady Macbeth from whom you have to hide the knives — sequestered away in it somewhere? These days it’s the keys to the drinks cabinet or the freezer you have to hide from them. The restaurant critic for his newspaper doesn’t leave for work until he’s marked the level of every bottle in the house with a hair plucked from his wrist, and even then he has to ring home from whichever eatery he’s scoffing in at fifteen-minute intervals, just to boost morale. ‘Hang on, sweetheart. Back soon. I don’t know, soon. Soon! All right, but only halfway up. Good girl. Love you.’ The books editor is herself a woman, never at home except at weekends. But she can do as much damage to herself on a Saturday morning in the kitchen before sun-up as any conventionally crazed Hausfrau can do in a week. Frank knows the hubby. Come Friday evening he has to remember to take the light bulb out of the fridge. ‘It doesn’t stop her,’ he explains to Frank, ‘but it slows her down.’

Woman — mouth — drink; man — forehead — bang. Alcohol, cigarettes, pills, penises, ice cream — if it fits into their mouth they’re in trouble. What does Mel weigh right now? Six, seven stones? Fresh out of Belsen. Her friends all look the same. Big staring eyes. Sunken cheeks. Rickety, uncertain limbs. Down in Mel’s kitchen, where they huddle, heroin-haggard, with their backs to the fridge, complaining about noise and shaking with hunger, it’s like Battersea Dogs’ Home. And last week they were all the size of Oliver Hardy.

He knows she is putting her finger down her throat again. The usual tell-tale signs. Blotches on her neck. Sinks clogging up. The liver-coloured nail polish on the finger in question corroding. But he doesn’t crack on he’s noticed. Live and let live is his philosophy. Which only underlines what she’s been saying: a house with a woman going mad in it is a perfectly acceptable phenomenon to him. He couldn’t live any other way.