Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

‘What’s snakes and ladders got to do with anything, Frank? I’m just asking you why everything has to have a warped sexual explanation?’

‘What’s warped? Where’s that word come from? I haven’t described anything warped. What’s warped about shtupping your first wife? Myself, I think that’s rather a nice thing to do. Myself, I think Billy Yuill should hurry back home and join in. I’d have, if they’d let me. If Kurt had been any kind of a friend he’d have been only too pleased that I once shtupped his wife, and if Billy Yuill were any kind of husband he’d be only too pleased that Kurt wants to shtup her again. And they both should be only too pleased that I’d still be only too pleased to join them. It confirms your judgment when another man wants what you’ve got

‘Oh yeah? I saw your face, Frank, when I suggested that you’d been booted out to make room for another man. I saw how confirmed in your judgment you felt.’

‘I’m talking about ideal behaviour, D, not the accidents of the hour. Can’t we have some philosophy around here? It’s a compliment when someone wants what’s yours, that’s what I’m saying. Sure, it may take a little time to see it that way, but when you do, gey gesunterhait, is what you should say. Be my guest, enjoy yourself, go in good health. Here, look, I’ll even hold her legs apart so you can enter her in comfort. That’s how much I love you. That’s how much I love her. Kuk the knish — go on, get an eyeful of the cunt. You’ll never see a finer. And while you’re down there you should listen to it as well. Looks like a shell, sounds like a shell. Splash, splish — the music of the knish. Beautiful, n’est-ce pas? I’ll hold it open while you put your ear to it. And you call that warped? I call it devotion. Devotion, D. Friendship. You want to know what warped is? I’ll tell you what warped is — ’ He bangs the bed, sending the squares of black chocolate flying in all directions. ‘Warped is going to bed in your socks.’ He rips at his pyjama cord. ‘Warped is dressing up to go to sleep. This is what I call warped’ — he punches the duvet — ‘this fucking bolster!’

Woman — mouth — talk.

Man — forehead — bang.

He is dismayed by his own violence. Anyone would think he resents the territorial integrity which her bolster and her bedsocks stand guard over. Whereas he doesn’t in the least. See her diaphanously bagged in her flouncing pig-out night attire, reader; see how ill the crocheted cuffs of those same woolly bedsocks set off her jammy limbs, and you will believe Frank when he swears he has only celibacy in his heart. Now, though, it is open to her to accuse him of regretting and even resenting the undertaking he has given her — not exactly a vow of chastity on his own part, but decidedly a vow to respect whatever she’s vowed.

She’d laid her cards on the table three nights before in a factitious boutique bottle-drinker’s pub in Exeter — The Hole in Gertie O’Reilly’s Bucket, or something like — where he’d persuaded her to meet him after her show to hear the apology owing from Cheltenham and to receive again his offer to be her chauffeur if a chauffeur she still required. Ella Fitzgerald was singing on the factitious nostalgia juke box. All the dreamiest, most aching urban stuff. ‘Stars Fell on Alabamba’. ‘Moonlight in Vermont’. ‘A Foggy Day in London Town’. D loved Ella Fitzgerald. Ella Fitzgerald found her soft side. Frank too. Frank had smooched his first ever smooch to Ella Fitzgerald, not knowing what she looked like. He was surprised, later, to discover that it was a fat woman in glasses who had stirred him to such smoky city-lights eroticism on the floor of the Plaza ballroom on Oxford Road in Manchester, moved his heart and his manhood to dance in that perfect accord. Fancy a fat woman having the power to synchronise him. He was also surprised to discover, later, that the girl he had smooched with had lifted his wallet while they were cheek to cheek. In memory, the lost wallet only increased the ache. A hotel room with a balcony high above the lights of the city, the smell of expensive perfume and guttering candle, neon flashing, a sax playing, champagne in a silver bucket on a silver tray, yourself in a tuxedo, an unfamiliar golden head on your shoulder — petty larceny too belonged to the experience. And why stop at larceny? Let the golden top go ahead and plug you with the pearl-handled forty-five she’s got concealed in her Gucci evening purse, the night can only get better. So powerfully does it come back to him — not anything he’s ever had, but everything he’s always wanted to have — that he takes D by her pleated wrists and pulls her up from the beery table and puts his arms as far around her as he is able. It may only be The Hole in Gertie O’Reilly’s Bucket in downtown Exeter, but music speaks to all time and all places, does it not? D wouldn’t disagree with that. Ella Fitzgerald awakens tawdry new world longings in her as well. There is no room to move, but then who’s moving? Cheek to cheek’s hard; nose to nose, though, they can just do. ‘I behold your adorable face,’ the fat woman in the glasses croons, and as long as the song lasts D and Frank agree to behold the adorable in each other.

It was immediately after this, back down among the brown ales, and returned to her loud laconic stage-shagger’s intonations, that D took him into her confidence.

‘I’m not,’ she told him, ‘on the best of terms with my cunt.’

Frank was man enough not to look around. ‘Who’s to blame for that?’ he asked. ‘Or is it six of one and half a dozen of the other?’

‘We’re just not in comunication. If you want to know, I’ve seen neither hide nor hair of my genitals since I was a sixteen-year-old comprehensive schoolgirl.’

‘Is that so?’ Frank said. He hadn’t wanted to appear too inquisitive. Like the cunt-fearing devil in fairy stories, he wondered if she bore some terrible deformity between her legs.

‘I have an apron of fat,’ she told him (there you are, he was right), ‘which covers my genitals completely. I can’t see myself.’

‘Well I could always lift it for you,’ Frank had ventured philanthropically, ‘while you look …’

She showed him her tongue.

‘Alternatively — ‘

‘It isn’t funny to me, Frank,’ she’d said, despite the sacred responsibility she owed, as a professional comedian, to find everything funny.

She didn’t like herself, surprise surprise, that was what it came to. She told fat slag shagger stories on the stage which were of practical help, surprise surprise, to everyone but herself. She reconciled two thousand women a night to the grossness of their bodies, but she hated her own too much ever to trust it to a single act of love.

‘It’s like being the captain of a sinking ship,’ Frank said, understandingly, ‘or a member of the priesthood. You’re expected to save every soul but your own. Telly critics are the same. You expiate every other fucker’s sins of time-wasting and triviality, but there’s no one to square things up for you. They’re back on dry land, sleeping the sleep of the righteous, and you’re still stuck on the burning deck, having to watch crap on the box all day.’

Having said which, he sat back in his round-armed bar chair with the look of a man who had revived a corpse. That was the cunt problem solved. Next.

But she didn’t want her cunt problem solved. She was relieved not to be on good terms with it. There was a bright side to not having to see it, not having to be reminded of it, every day. She was liberated. She could have friendships with men. An ulterior motive was at a stroke removed.

OK by Frank. He’d read about friendship with women. And he wasn’t doing anything else.