Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

She has to be in St Austell for a show tomorrow night. He’ll drop her there and call it quits. He’ll have a few days on his own in Cornwall, remembering the time he spent there with Mel, going placid amid the din, then he’ll have to think about returning to town, dumping his stuff at the Groucho, going round estate agents, finding an apartment with enough plugs, all that. Charming, to have come to this at his age. Thanks, Mel. Thanks, girls.

And thanks, boys?

Back in his own room — for that’s the rule: beddy-bye byes time and he has to tinkle back to his — he frets about the scummy chocolate anus bobbing on the surface of his cappuccino. What if it wasn’t D’s idea? What if the gay caballeros were whispering him a message on their own say-so? Passing him their calling card because they believed he would not be altogether unreceptive to it?

What he told D was true. He had never been an object of deviant attention. He had so not been an object of deviant attention, in fact, that it sometimes hurt him, not where he was hungering or needy, let it be clearly understood, but in the area of cold commodity valuation, in his idea of himself as an aesthetic object. As far as conscious desire went — as far as his conscious desire went — he had never come close to understanding what anyone could want with something that didn’t have a cunt. He had no principled objection; he just couldn’t see the point. But he is a little more than half as old as the century, five per cent of the millennium; lay twenty men his age end to end and there’s a wait before William the Conqueror arrives — you can’t go all those years and not occasionally wonder about yourself. As when a pitted waiter sculpts a chocolate anus in your coffee, for example, or when you dream of having someone’s penis in your mouth.

He has had the penis dream twice that he knows of. He’s prepared to accept that he may have had it more than twice and has wiped the memory. It is always possible, though he thinks unlikely, that he dreams it every night and wipes it every morning. More pertinent to his state of mind is his fear (if fear it really is) that he is about to have it again. This is an entirely rational expectation, quite separate from the cappuccino incident, based on his conviction that the two dreamed penises were in fact the same penis, that they were not fictional penises but strict representations of an actual penis, and that he has seen the actual penis of which they were representations dripping shower water only recently in the bathroom of an undistinguished cottage in Lynton, unless it was Lynmouth, but in a place he had no right to be in either way. When Frank says he dreams of putting someone’s penis in his mouth he means he dreams of putting Kurt’s penis in his mouth.

There is a very ordinary explanation for this. Though it is based on a most wonderful fact. Referring only to aspect now, and setting everything to do with emission and flavour aside, Frank and Kurt have identical penises. Alike in the challenge presented by their length, in the consideration shown by their thickness, in the divine harmony suggested by their curvature and colouration, the penises of Kurt Bryll and Frank Ritz could have been swapped in the night, whether by a skilled surgeon or a bad fairy, without either party, or any party to either party, being the wiser in the morning. In the parlance of the times when Frank and Kurt routinely had their penises out in company, their own grandmothers wouldn’t have known the difference. Speaking ordinarily, then, when Frank dreams of sucking Kurt’s penis, he is only dreaming of sucking his own. And there’s nothing deviant about that.

What an ordinary explanation fails to honour, though, is the immensity of the grief Frank experienced when he awoke from the dreams and found his mouth empty. The first time, he was sleeping alone. He knew the minute he came out of the dream that he was mistaken, that the bed was cold around him, that he had been on an exciting and unaccustomed journey and would have to lie there a long time to recover from it. He had loved the sensation, he couldn’t deny that. He had loved opening his mouth and receiving. The texture of what he had received shocked him, but the experience of recipience itself shocked him even more. This was what was new — opening, waiting, submitting, being filled, taking not giving. Sucking, not pushing. Very interesting. Very. Whatever else he was going to get up to that day, or for the rest of his life come to that, there was no question of him allowing his mouth to be used in quite that fashion again. No sir. Absolument pas. So he’d had a contrary experience — so what? You can’t pursue every fugitive bodily whim that seizes you in your sleep. He’d murdered in his dreams on occasions. That too had left him feeling pretty good. Was he to arm himself with an axe and get cracking as a consequence? No. No to the mouth. He was sure about that, but lying there in the penumbral aftermath of the dream, he was sad about it too. Very.

The second flight from conformity was even more turbulent. Mel was with him that night. What had been given him in the dream he never remembered, only what was taken away; so the dream and the waking spilled dangerously into each other. The dream had done with him, wanted to beach him, wanted to spew him out. His desperation to stay in it became the nightmare. There’d been a dick in his mouth and now it was gone. So where was it? He writhed in the bed, scouring Mel’s body with his lips. He was bereft, but he was also angry. Where was the bastard thing? His mouth found her belly, coils of snapping hair, the swampy moistness of that bourne from which no traveller wishes to return. It had to be down there, there was no other place it could be. But it was gone. Forever gone. Nothing was down there. Nothing but loss. He hung from the dream like an injured climber clinging to a rock face. If he woke, he fell. If he woke, the person by his side fell with him. For she too had been brought into the shadowland of loss. The dick that was missing was missing between them. Their child. He cried to dream again.

She woke irritably, to find him the wrong way round in the bed, mewling. He lied about the cause. He said he’d been dreaming a death. He would rather not say whose. He preferred not to talk about it.

Hardly surprising. What if he’d been dreaming about the death in his heart of heterosexual love?

For one whole week he sat abstractedly in his office, surrounded by his neutered machines, unable to push out any work that pleased him. Had there been a litmus test for these things he would have braved the doctor’s surgery, shown him his tongue, and allowed science to decide. Blue you’re straight, pink you’re gay. When he finally ventured into the waking world it was with no other intention but to look at men.

But what was he meant to look for? He knew what aroused him in a woman. Everything aroused him in a woman. When it came to women he was in the last stages of chronic erotolepsy. Certifiable. For the thoughts he harboured about the tension of a skirt across a woman’s buttocks, for the labour he expended discerning the impression of a nipple through a bodice, a blouse, two cardigans and a winter coat, he could be locked away for life. Now his dreams told him he was a lunatic in quite another direction, and yet he didn’t have the first idea where to direct his eyes. Muscles? Shoulders? Waists? Loins? Or was it a warm personality he was meant to be winkling out? What did daytime telly girls say they looked for in a man — a sense of humour? a tight bum?

On a blustery November Friday in London he set his senses loose. He strode along Oxford Street, eyeballing policemen, postmen, traffic wardens, bus drivers, cab drivers, van drivers, street-sweepers, builders, newspaper vendors, dispatch riders, delivery men, window cleaners, hot chestnut sellers, mock auctioneers, fly-by-night perfume pedlars, shoppers, husbands, lovers, fathers even; he sauntered through Covent Garden, sticky-beaking street clowns, jugglers, wine-waiters, silversmiths, potters, Africans, vegetarians, cheese-eaters, overdressers jabbering in fashion alleys; he took a cab to the Chelsea Barracks to get a load of dough-faced corporals in berets, knobby-headed privates in weekend civvies, lads with rifles at the ready, inchoate ruffians with hard chests and glistening moustaches of the sort Lawrence liked sitting next to in trains and who might just have given poor unconnected Forster the thick ear he forever craved; then up to Knightsbridge for the moneyed tourists, the Germans in their animal skins, the Iranians with their black-masked trains behind, the easily bruised Frenchmen in their existential scarfs — stereotypes, as D would have called them, but what was he to do? he didn’t design or dress them. He didn’t want to undress them either, that was the outcome of the exercise. Not with his eyes, not with his heart, not with his dick, was he attracted to a single person of his own sex.