Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

‘Carissima.’

‘Don’t talk,’ she said. Just go on filling me with meaning.’

But he had to talk. It was her talk he had originally fallen in love with. The way she shaped her lips to make words. The darting movement of her lizard tongue whenever she used a word that began with L. Love. Lick. Liquid. Long. Lorenzo. If he talked to her, Italian custom demanded that she talk back to him. He had to get her to talk to him. He had broken into every other part of her, now he had to break into the maidenhead of her silence.

‘Tell me you love me, Sabina.’

Hush, my darling. I want to listen to the snow fall while you fuck with me.’

But Lorenzo wanted to hear a word that began with L.

‘Ask me to lick you, Sabina.’

‘I don’t need to, my darling. You will when it feels right for you.’

‘Describe my cock, Sabina.’

‘Wonderful.’

‘What about its size?’

‘Thick.’

‘I mean the other way.’

‘Interminable, my darling.’

‘Do you know what I am going to fill you with, Sabina?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Say it, carissima.’

‘Meaning.’

Inside the Palazzo Lorenzo’s liquid fell in heavy droplets, lubricating her longing labia.

If only the moron would shut his fucking trap, she thought. If only he’d put a lock on his ludicrous lips.

Or something like that.

Frank will have remembered it, naturally enough, from the man’s point of view. Will have disobeyed the publisher’s express instructions and slipped mirth into it. Will have missed the intensity of Sabina’s struggle to be mistress of her own destiny. If he remembers rightly, Sabina gets control of the Palazzo and Lorenzo ends up being hung from a hook in Sabina’s study, a gag in his mouth and a leather strap separating his balls, so that Sabina can choose which of them to flick, at whatever time of the day she chooses to flick it. His penis is attached by two fine gold chains, one to the mouse of her computer, the other to the keyboard — that way it inclines towards her every movement, like a sunflower following the sun, traces every word she writes at the very moment that she writes it. Eventually he will learn to understand, the only way a man can, what it is she is thinking. When she wants him to come — and his coming is entirely at her discretion and bidding — she types the word come on to her screen and he comes. Sometimes she opens her mouth to swallow him while he’s coming and she’s working, sometimes she doesn’t. He, of course, because he is blindfolded as well, has no way of knowing whether her mouth is open or not. But if he guesses wrongly, or misses, he is beaten.

He knows he cannot cry out or otherwise make a sound. If he otherwise makes a sound he knows Sabina will cut his tongue out.

But not even that will give Sabina any real pleasure. Whatever she does to a man, still, in Wittgensteins’s words — Ich kann mich nicht selber aufwecken - she cannot awaken her true self. Her dream body, her Traumleib, moves, but the real her does not stir. Mein wirklicher rührt sich nicht.

Something stirs in her panties. Is it real or is it a dream? She puts a hand under her skirt. It is real. She is wet. Thinking of Wittgenstein always causes her to wet her panties.

Perhaps tomorrow she will stab Lorenzo in his heart with the silver knife she uses to open envelopes. Perhaps that will bring her out of her dream body, back to herself.

She will see.

Tomorrow.

The End.

‘Where I think it falls down,’ Frank says, ‘is in the characterisation of Lorenzo.’

Yes, they are talking. Just. But they are not talking in bed. As the scene of the shame and the incursion, bed is out. They are in a gay vegetarian restaurant of D’s choosing, overlooking the bay, watching the sun go out. Frank has not told her that the Melissa Paul who wrote Coming Is Too Good For You is the same Melissa who booted him out of his house. You can tell too much sometimes. He simply admits to knowing something of the plot, having found the lurid treatise on top of a paper towel dispenser in the lavatory of an inter-city express train.

‘How long ago was that?’

‘A year or two ago.’

‘Where was the train going?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Glasgow, or somewhere.’

‘I don’t believe you. You wouldn’t be going to Glasgow. I’ve heard you on the subject of Glasgow. And if it was a year or two ago you wouldn’t have remembered the characters’ names. I bet you’re a secret porno reader. I bet you’ve got piles of the stuff at home.’

Too true. He smiles weakly. Is he prim? Why does he hate being implicated in the universal comedy of wanking? It’s the breeziness. That’s what it is, it’s the chirruping. Once she’d got over the shock of being crept in upon and had returned her bedwear to something like its proper order, D had defended stoutly her right to paddle in her snatch since there was nothing on the telly and he was out mooning in the park, watching men playing with their boats. Frank had no attitude to that other than surprise that Melissa Paul’s prose could so much as remind her that she had a snatch.

Don’t take a tone with me, D had warned him.

A tone, he’d told her, was the last thing he was taking. He was all for making oneself feel sick with porno.

Who, she’d wanted to know, was making themselves sick? She was enjoying her body, that’s what she was doing. She was getting to know herself. She was treating herself lovingly. It was a change — and she had Melissa Paul, among others, to thank for that — to read eroticism that had women’s parts in view.

Bully for you, he’d told her, but he didn’t see why her sex had to go in for all that flowery self-discovery vocabulary when they were in it for the debasement, just as the blokes were.

Debasement! Did he say debasement?

He most certainly did: wanking debases you, that was his point; wanking debases you, that’s why you do it. And pornography — while he’s on the subject — degrades you, and that’s why you do that. Sex and death, D, sex and death. I’ll jump into the flames with you any time, D. I’ll lift your apron and describe whereupon I look and we can go to hell together, but don’t pretend we’re doing it to get to know our bodies better.

This is how they have got on to Lorenzo. Frank reckons that he’s the one who’s getting the most out of this revisionist fantasy — Lorenzo, the man, yet again the man, just as in all those instances of pornography that Ms Paul is meant to be revising. What does it change, hanging him up, dividing his balls, stuffing his mouth, pulling his dick, computerising his come, cutting out his tongue, sticking him with a paper knife? It’s just the same old porno in a nutshell. If Melissa Paul thinks she’s reversed the formula she’s mistaken. Death of the man has always been what it’s about.

D shakes her head. She is got up like Jessye Norman doing Madame Butterfly tonight, with chopsticks in her hair. When she shakes her head Frank has to look out for his eyes.

‘You’re just trying to provoke me,’ she says. ‘First of all you’ve made that up about Lorenzo. No one sticks him. She just hangs him where she can get at him. It’s a joke. You’re always saying you want jokes. Now you’ve got one. Hang the bloke up where you can get at his dick when you need it. A woman’s joke, Frank. And for me, whatever you say, a nice change from the usual splayed female. Death of the man is not what it’s always been about. The carcass is invariably a she, Frank. It’s always a woman left shagged on the slab.’