Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

Mel had not put herself to that kind of trouble. Her rage never stooped to precision revenge. She was a blanket bomber. Whatever dropped on the mat and wasn’t addressed to her she simply swept into the bag and sent him. He wasn’t worth making distinctions over. She hadn’t even bothered to stick a stamp on the envelope.

Such ferocity. Such a fury they’re all in. D too is a volcano ready to blow. Not because she isn’t fucking. Frank wouldn’t be so gross as to suppose that a woman who isn’t fucking is bound to explode. Who was ever kept calm by fucking, anyway? No, not fucking isn’t what’s making them all sore, it’s a sense of individual injustice. It’s as if they’ve arrived at an idea of self late — later than Frank’s sex, certainly, and probably later than the amoebas and the bivalves, come to that — and don’t know what to do with it now they’ve reached it. Take D’s objections to being thought of as cunt. Why so sensitive? Frank would love to be thought of as cock. ‘I wouldn’t mind a piece of that,’ he once overhead one woman saying to another in a theatre queue. If he wasn’t mistaken he was the that she wouldn’t have minded a piece of. He’d never been more complimented in his life. He never has since. If someone were to think of him as a that today, and were happy to take any piece of him that was going — a piece, she said she would have settled for, any piece — who knows, his garden might bloom again. He’s easy about being objectified, that’s his point. He’s not self-sensitive. Everything in the world is wrong, but its wrong-ness isn’t a personal affront to him. As it is to them. As it is to D who won’t look under the apron of fat God gave her; as it was to the one who posted off the giblets; as it was to the Ethiopian whore who would rather suck his car upholstery than his balls; as it is to Mel who has made herself a successful pornographer on the strength of it. She gets a shiver up, the way ladies like it, because every act of sex appals her and shocks her. And why does it do that? Because it some how takes from her. A fuck committed on her in person takes from the her that doesn’t fuck; a fuck committed on another takes from the her that does. Hence she finds it an act of infidelity, a betrayal and a vilification, either way. Hence she writes it filthy. Hence she excites her readers. Frank has seen the instructions which the new publishers of women’s filth put out to would-be exponents of the smutchy art — under no circumstances, they all warn, make a joke, for a joke interrupts the erotic trance. Well no joke ever interrupted Frank’s erotic trance. But then it was never a trance of the vilified self, was it? When they went on ynaf hunt, he and his china plates, they went in the expectation that they would come first and laugh later. But any other order would have done as well. A man can come when he’s laughing or laugh when he’s coming, it doesn’t matter. The cosmos is a joke to him, not an act of spite directed at his person.

He saunters about in the festive brightness of Torquay like a truant. ‘Don’t go looking for a knocking shop while you’re out,’ D had told him. ‘Come straight back after banking and we can have an oyster lunch in bed.’ He thinks he’ll skip the oysters. And maybe bed as well. Not in the mood. It’s the maleficent bag of bills from Mel that’s done it. And standing waiting at a poste restante counter once again. Too cruel the contrast. No beating heart this time. No has she, hasn’t she. When it’s Mel you’re expecting to hear from, you know the answer to that — she hasn’t.

He sits on a bench, the last in a row of old men, and gazes at the masts of sailing ships. The masts clink lightly in time with one another, as do the sagging scrotums of the old men. Chink, chink, chink. Soon he’ll be ready to join a bowls club.

It’s too sad in the sun. The cosmos is not an act of spite directed at his person, but if it were this would be the means of its perpetration — sunshine. The full mocking glare of sunlight. Frank’s lost track of time. He thinks it might not be August any more, but it’s still a long way to winter. Roll on the dark days.

Walking away from the sea, he finds himself in a municipal park. Men with remote-controlled power boats are gathered around a pond. They have the look of husbands who have left the house early, like anglers, to escape the violence and pornography of their womenfolks’ conversation. Every two or three minutes they haul their craft out of the water, because they’ve capsized or crashed or gone aground on an island of floating litter. Frank has never seen creatures more engrossed. Or more united in a common purpose. The bottom of one man’s boat is the bottom of all their boats. They aren’t men as he knows them. They aren’t conversationalists or ironists or fuckers. They are an earlier species; perhaps what men would have been like in the garden had heaven not come up with the concept of a helpmeet. Yes, that’s what defines them — they aren’t helpmet. Which for some reason touches Frank to his heart.

He takes a cab back to the hotel and unthinkingly lets himself into D’s room. He’s been coming and going from it in the normal way, popping out to clean his teeth, popping back to grab a chocolate. But in the normal way she’s expecting him. This time he’s been out, and been out longer than he said he was going to be. So this time he should consider himself a formal visitor. He should knock. He should wait to be let in. But he’s lost in a world of toy boatmen. He forgets. He puts the key in the lock and turns it. And as a consequence disturbs D, lying on her side with her fingers busy beneath her custodial apron of fat, exciting herself, as though she is both pianist and grand piano, into little ricocheting arpeggios of exquisite pain.

By the time he has identified the cheeping it is too late for him to withdraw.

She is furious with him for bursting in on her like this. She is flushed and shamed and thwarted and angry. ‘You were supposed to come back for oysters,’ she cries. She rights herself in the bed. ‘What was I to do? Sit here twiddling my thumbs until fucking Newsnight?’

‘It looked to me as though twiddling your thumbs was exactly what you were doing,’ Frank says. For the cosmos is a joke to him.

She looks for something to throw at him. The closest thing to hand is the book she’s been reading, the paper-pornoback woman’s rut- roman whose rude romanticism was responsible for rolling her on to her side and turning her thoughts to impurity in the first place. It catches Frank a glancing blow on the forehead. He is not unduly discommoded by that. What unduly discommodes him is the novelette itself. He recognises it even before it hits him. He knows the look of it well. The blatant high-gloss art-work — purple on black, woman in marvel-bra on top, man with bruised eyes and soft mouth under, helpless to resist despite arms that could raise Titanic . There is a stack of them in his house — in what was his house — in Dulwich. It is called Coming Is Too Good For You and its author is his partner — was his partner — Melissa Paul.

So how does he feel, as they ask on the box? What are you meant to feel when the woman with whom you are sharing a bed, albeit chastely, is discovered playing Rachmaninov on her cunt as consequence of reading what your estranged lover has to say on the subject of fucking and its attendant folderols, which are not matters she has had anything to say to you about for some considerable time? Can there be a sexual advantage to yourself anywhere in this?

If anyone can find it, Frank can.

OUTSIDE THE PALAZZO the snow fell in heavy flakes. Before She’d met Lorenzo, before this afternoon, her existence had been as cold as that dead ground, as colourless as that leaden sky. Now everything had meaning. His jutting penis. Her wet clitoris. His savage thrusting. Her gorged vagina. Everything.