Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

‘Yeah, but that leaves out where the man is and what he’s doing when he’s reading about it.’

‘On his knees, with his dick out.’

‘Exactly. In the supplicant’s position, with his back to danger, with his cheeks red, with his eyes popping, with his self-esteem shot to pieces, with a pain about to arrow through his anus and his testicles, with his heart leaping out of his throat, with hot sperm about to jerk through the hole in his cock and mess up the carpet, and with the knowledge that in thirty seconds from now he’ll be wishing he were dead. Tell me about degradation of women, D. Tell me that it’s time a man was made to suffer.’

‘Who wants a man to suffer? Most of us just want him to give us a decent shag. If he’d get up off his knees for five minutes we’d all be in with a better chance.’

‘If you don’t want anyone to suffer, what do you want porno for?’

‘Pleasure, Frank.’

She isn’t serious. He can’t get her to be serious.

‘Are you telling me that when I burst in upon you this afternoon you were experiencing nothing but pleasure, sheer contextless unassociated free-floating keep-your-nose-out never-met-you-before born-yesterday pleasure?’

‘Why do you find that so hard to believe?’

He can’t do it. However much she deserves it, he can’t give it her between the eyes, he can’t ask her why, if she was experiencing nothing but pleasure, she looked so much as though she were in pain, why she lay in the bed like a shot elephant, why she made noises like a dying family of chaffinches, why she was sobbing, why she was hissing, why the pillow was dyed cheese yellow by her perspiration, why there was so much tension in her body that the glass in the hotel windows was shrieking.

She’s no use to him. She isn’t serious. She isn’t like Mel who, although she has resented having to write her crap as much as he’s resented having to watch his, has always known that you can’t do porno unless it tends to death. Mel’s a moralist. That’s why she hung Lorenzo. That’s why she kicked Frank out. A moralist can’t live with another person. Nor can another person live with a moralist. Least of all if that other person is also a moralist. But of what possible use to you is someone who is so little of a moralist that she thinks she’s covered sex when she calls it pleasure — and this in the face of the fact that she doesn’t have any sex — and who won’t admit that a wank is an act of wilful damage to the self? What’s the matter with this D? Is she Dutch, or something?

The arrival of cappuccinos saves him from having to tell her why it’s hard to believe anybody who doesn’t own up to the universal blackness. D has been to this restaurant before. They do wonderful cappuccinos. Organic.

It feels like a secret. Just something shared by the gay community of Torquay and D. Where to get the best camp cappuccino in the south west.

A waiter with a face pitted like the moon dances the coffee to their table. Mops up the spillage in Frank’s saucer. Sugar for her, sugar for him? White, brown, raw, lump? Oh, he’s forgotten the mints. Away he goes, back he comes. Mints for him, mints for her. How he laughs when D makes a grab for Frank’s. Now, now. How he knows about greed.

It’s D who notices what’s been done to the cappuccinos. ‘If I were you …’ she warns, using the side of her hand to tip back Frank’s chin as it’s on its way to the cup.

‘What? Is there something in it?’

Frank once belonged to a gentleman’s club in W I. Under a high Mediterraneran blue ceiling the waiters spat freely into your coffee. Gay merchant seamen, ex, most of them were. At home only in a world without women. But with an inexplicable grudge against toffs. That was the reason he relinquished his membership in the end. He couldn’t justify a thousand a year for the privilege of swallowing marine faggots’ spittle.

‘Look,’ D says. She shows him hers. No chocolate has been sprinkled on hers. ‘Now look at yours.’ On Frank’s a small and quite perfect brown circle, painstakingly, even artistically, formed.

He peers from her cup to his and back again. ‘Chocolate.’

‘Keep going.’

‘Me chocolate yes, you chocolate no.’

‘Keep going.’

At the best of times he hates tests. But tonight, after she has failed all his … ‘What are you showing me?’

‘Well, there’s no accounting for taste, but I suppose you’d have to call it a mark of their admiration for you.’

He narrows his eyes and stiffens his shoulders, a diver preparing a leap into the foaming ring of chocolate. But he can’t jump. He shakes his head. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t get it. Unless it’s supposed to be a bull’s eye.’

‘Why would they give you a bull’s eye?’

‘Why would they give me anything?’

She throws him one of her waiting for a heckler to hang himself looks, lips cockled, neck sprung, what are we going to do with someone as slow as you. Wait no longer, is the answer. ‘It’s an anus, dickhead,’ she shows him. ‘They’ve made you a sweet little milk and chocolate anus.’

Have they? He peers in. Is that an anus? How would he know? How would she know, come to that?

Sounds of strangulated manly mirth emanate from the kitchen. Frank looks up in time to see the waiter with the cratered complexion peering through the porthole in the swinging door, gasping for air.

It’s an anus.

But that’s just for starters, isn’t it? The next part of the joke will come when Frank lowers his lips to it. Gets froth on his lips. Browns that nose.

He pushes the cappuccino from him. Spoilsport. ‘Did you put them up to this?’ he asks.

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Why would they do that?’

‘Maybe they fancy you, Frank.’

‘Poofs don’t fancy me. Poofs have never fancied me. They never did when I was young and rangy; why should they bother now I’m old and slack?’

‘Maybe you excited them with your description of what you look like tugging at your todger. Maybe they found the picture of you on your knees with your cheeks red irresistible.’

It was her. Getting her own back. For being found in bed in the middle of the afternoon cheerfully re-discovering her own body parts. She’s paying him out, measure for measure, diddle for diddle. But just in case it wasn’t her, or wasn’t only her, he requests that she sees to the bill. He’ll put in his share. He’d rather not be involved in the transaction, that’s all. In fact he’ll wait for her in the street.

‘Fancy you …!’ she says, as they walk home. ‘Fancy you being embarrassed!’

They return to her room to find a tribute to the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald on the telly. They keep the box going twenty-four hours so they can walk in and out of it. Wallpaper. Ella’s almost finished, but they just make Every Time We Say Goodbye. They smooch. One hand on the small of the back, the other hand grasping a bottle of brown ale by the neck. Frank dodging the Cio-Cio-San chopsticks which protrude dangerously from D’s coiffure. Moonlight on Tor Bay. They die, little by little. The fat lady sings and it’s all over.

They both know it’s all over. Or rather, what they both know is that it’s never going to start.

He’s too heavy for her. Too touchy, too censorious, too pedantic. She says tomato and he says she’s missed the point.

And she’s not serious enough for him. Sure, she’s a comedian, but a comedian, of all people, you expect to be serious. There’s not the whiff of death about her that he needs in a woman. You can’t smell the grave when she laughs and you don’t fear for your life when you fuck her. Of course he wouldn’t know what you feel when you fuck her. But then that too is part of the problem. It’s not the fuck he misses, it’s the trip to the underworld that accompanies it.