Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

‘Why would I want to fuck you?’ she asked him at the conference farewell party where he was re-doubling his efforts to make her aware of him. ‘You’re shorter than I am. You dress like a secondary-school hit-man. And you eat like a pig.’

‘I could buy Cuban heels,’ he told her.

‘You’re already wearing Cuban heels.’

‘No, these are Sicilian heels. Cuban heels slope, and they’re higher, and they’re generally made of cow leather, unlike these which are part crocodile, part snake, part 9 carat gold. You can tell Cubans from Sicilians because they’re altogether less subtle. I’ll show you.’

And he did. First thing the very next morning he purchased a pair of tooled cowboy boots with three-and-a-half-inch sloping heels from a shop that looked like a wild-west saloon — not difficult to find in Birmingham, where a five-foot man is considered tall — and towered over her in the sandwich queue on the train back to London. Make ‘em laugh. That’s always the way to do it.

In return for which she made him well. She got him out of his Brioni two-tone suits. She threw away his Stefano Ricci shirts with their mobster collars. She cut him down from seven curries a night to one curry a fortnight. She reduced his wine intake. She told him that what he was previewing for a living was crap but if he was going to do it he should do it in style. She pulled his hair out of his eyes and tied it in a pigtail. She taught him how to do stubble. She bought him a decent watch. And she refused to be mechanically fucked by him.

Every morning, before either of them was properly awake, he prodded her with his dick. His dick, at least, didn’t need to be built up. On mornings when she pretended not to notice what was doing the poking he insisted on showing it to her. ‘Look, Mel.’

‘Why do I have to see your dick, why do I have to acknowledge your dick, why do I have to have your dick inside me every morning?’ she wanted to know.

‘Because it’s there,’ he told her.

She punished him by making him fuck her day and night. On the stairs. In the kitchen. On the bathroom floor. In the garden. In the back of a taxi. In the washrooms of a Chinese restaurant. Bang in the middle of Blackheath, with Sunday traffic hooting at them. ‘OK, big boy, give it me now.’ She wore him out. She had him begging for mercy. She reduced his manhood to a bleeding stump. And still she went at him. ‘That’s it, you hot fucker, ram it up!’ Until he had to hide. Lock himself into the toilet for hours at an end, while she stood outside on the landing with her skirt up, describing what she was doing to herself and what she would be expecting him to do to her the minute he came out.

She made him well.

‘Enough?’ she asked him at last.

‘Enough,’ he conceded.

‘Well that’s tough because it’s not enough for me. Here, suck on my tit.’

This was another of their disagreements. He thought she had perfect breasts and that the only way he could adequately attest to their perfection was to put them in his mouth. For her part she found the sight of a grown man suckling her grotesque.

‘Go on,’ she ordered him. ‘Guzzle me. Get those lips around. Go on, suck. Suck like a baby.’ She made him do it in front of a mirror so that he could see what he looked like. He agreed with her. The spectacle was unedifying. It made him look like a retard. He didn’t say that that was the whole point, that you did it in order to feel like a retard. He was going along with the treatment. He was taking the medicine.

She drove him out into the country, blindfolded like O, a mystery tour, down a lane, up a lane, off the beaten, on to corrugations, along a logger’s track (was it?) deep into a forest (was it?) the light dappling and dying through his blindfold, the trees at one another’s throats, his heart swinging like the shafts of sun — was she bringing him here to kill him? ‘Out,’ she said, when the track finally came to an end. She led him along warm gravel, foliage nudging at him, lime the only smell, the only sound leaves breathing. She took off his blindfold. ‘Strip,’ she said. She produced a camera. His camera. The old Brownie box camera with which he’d won the school junior photography prize, for a series of studies of the Manchester Ship Canal in winter. The same Brownie box camera he thought she’d confiscated after he’d tried to snap her climbing out of the bath. ‘But don’t take everything off,’ she told him. ‘Nudity is always heightened, wouldn’t you agree, if something is left to the imagination. Keep your socks on.’ She draped him around a tree. She sat him on a stump and got him to put a finger in his mouth. ‘Not your thumb, your forefinger.’ She arranged him on the forest floor like a stricken nymph, with everything akimbo. ‘Lovely,’ she said, ‘now moisten your lips.’ He knew he had to take it like a man. He didn’t have a leg to stand on. She’d found his photograph collection. She’d seen what he could do, compositionally, with a camera. She got him to crouch on all fours and then pout at her, upside down between his knees. ‘One for the mantelpiece, that,’ she said. He heard the clop of a tennis ball, saw through the trees a pair of lovers on a tandem. Suddenly he knew where he was. ‘Jesus Christ, Mel, this is Dulwich Park! We live here!’

‘So don’t draw attention to yourself,’ she said. ‘Now reach for your member. Make as if you’re picking a flower. You’re a creature of the woods, don’t forget. Wild and untameable, yet curiously innocent.’

He couldn’t.

‘Enough?’

‘Enough.’

But it wasn’t enough for her. ‘Just a couple with your legs up around your ears then, and we’ll call it a day. And try to look as if you’re at home in nature more.’

She made him well. She showed him that he was suffering from a common compulsive order known as man — M.A.N. — and that contrary to popular belief there was a cure.

‘And how will I know when I’m better?’ he asked her.

‘You’ll know that you’re getting better when you wake up in the morning and your first thought isn’t a fuck or a photo.’

Now he knows that there’s another cure. They could have just waited till he was fifty.

But of course his hard-on was only the tip of the polluted iceberg that was his nature. ‘I wouldn’t mind if your appetites were cheerful,’ she told him. ‘But you don’t fuck to feel good, you fuck to feel bad. You drink to feel bad, too. You watch crap all day on the television to feel bad. You even eat to feel bad. That’s why you want a curry every night, so that you can punish your stomach and feel like shit in the morning.’

He took this hard. When all else was said and done, he considered himself to be a Rabelaisian man. He drank, he fornicated, he pigged out, he belched, he farted, he slept, he rose on the arched dolphin back of his dick, ready to breast the wild waves of existence all over again. He was a force of nature, wasn’t he. He was the functions disporting themselves. ‘According to the great Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin,’ he told her, ‘no meal can be sad.’

‘Well it can in your case,’ she said. ‘In your case no meal is ever anything but sad.’

He couldn’t deny it. If he feasted at midnight he woke with a broken heart. Whatever he did upset him, and whatever upset him, he did.

She came home earlier than expected from a meeting with her publishers one afternoon and found him bending over the ironing-board, spitting on his shirt.

‘How can you do that?’ she cried.

He explained that his shirt was badly creased but that he couldn’t be bothered with the palaver of setting the iron to steam.

‘Why can’t you treat your things with some respect,’ she asked. ‘Why can’t you take time over yourself? Why do you have to spit on your own life?’