Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

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Frank Ritz is a television critic. His partner, Melissa Paul, is the author of pornographic novels for liberated women. He watches crap all day; she writes crap all day. It's a life. Or it was a life. Now they're fighting, locked in oral combat. He won't shut up, and she's putting her finger down her throat again. So there's only one thing to do: Frank has to go.
But go where? And do what? Frank Ritz has been in heat more or less continuously since he could speak his own name. Let him out of the house and his first instinct is to go looking for sex. Deviant sex, treacherous sex, even conventional sex, so long as it's immoderate-he's never been choosy. But what happens when sex is all you know and yet no longer what you want?

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See what the promise of a night on a bare mountain can do.

Which reminds him. Time to go. It may only be ten-thirty, but what if Clarice decides to make an early run for it herself? He has learnt from Mel that women have a far lower patience threshhold than men. How many street corners has he lingered on until three, four in the morning, until the dawn breaks, on the off-chance that his date for seven o’clock the night before had missed a bus or got the time confused? You gave a woman every chance. You gave your dick every chance. But in the days when he was meeting Mel at corners she’d be gone if he wasn’t at least thirty minutes early. She wouldn’t even look up and down the street. No Frank? Get fucked, then. I’ve got better things to do. And she was off. What if Clarice is the same?

A cold, ironical bitch of a moon surveys him as he clambers up to Deadman’s Point. Fireflies flash in the gorse. Adders slither out of his way. The sea holds its breath. No Clarice. Good. She can’t have come and gone already. He stretches himself out on the bench and stares back at the moon. They know each other well, Frank and Selene. She’s seen him through many a humiliation. Fifty years’ worth. Though she might be said to be carrying her years better than he is carrying his. She stares him out. He blinks first. Then blinks again. Then nods off Old guys need a lot of rest.

He half-wakes to a pain in his chest. Oh no. Not that. Not now. Not here.

But it isn’t that sort of pain. It’s more exquisite. More precisely located. A pectoral pain. A mammary torment. A burning of the nipple. And what’s this ‘a’? It’s two burnings — a fire in each nipple. Excruciating. As though he’s giving suck to twins.

But twin what? Twin adders?

Fanged, whatever they are.

When he opens his eyes he sees that Clarice is on her knees before him, an expression of intense comic concentration on her face, her fingers in his shirt, squeezing. A vein twitches in her neck. Moonlight elongates and Egyptifies her nose.

‘Hurt?’

(What does she know?)

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

(What does she know?)

‘Why good?’

‘Your punishment for taking so long to come back and see me.’

(She is at play. She doesn’t know anything.)

He tries to sit up, to kiss her, but she uses her weight to keep him down.

‘Uh, uh,’ she says. ‘Mel wouldn’t like.’

Fancy her remembering that. Coming out of the cottage bathroom, half way through day two of their indecorous spree, Mel had found them on the floor playing conventional missionaries and savages, conventionally blowing down each other’s throats. Given the unconventional journey they had been on together, the three of them — losing souls, not saving them — this spectacle had struck Mel as a betrayal. ‘If you’re going to start that,’ she’d complained, ‘I’m out of here.’

Frank had immediately snatched his mouth from Clarice’s mouth and returned it to her cunt, where it gave no offence.

At a level below the pleasure of the pain, Frank is irked by Clarice. Twice now, in the course of the few sentences they’ve been able to exchange, she’s invited him to join her in scorn for Mel’s queer rectitude. As though there’s a freemasonry of insouciance that Clarice believes they share, as though she’s addressing a fellow free spirit. As though she can assume that when it comes to a shoot out, Frank is on Clarice’s side against Melissa.

But by God it’s something to have a sharp-nailed woman tear your nipples off beneath a sneery moon.

She unbuckles his belt and slides one hand inside his trousers. A promissory gesture. Right this minute she wants a cigarette. Even Clarice knows that there’s something to be said for a build-up.

‘What do you look like,’ she laughs.

‘Well? What do I look like?’

‘Like a cat that’s got the cream.’

She’s referring to his abandonment on the bench, his shirt open, his nipples red as roses, his dick magnetised by the moon — a pasha on an ottoman.

‘I sure have missed the cream,’ he says.

She pulls an oh yeah face. But there are no real problems of that sort between them. They were never a pair. They were always part of something larger.

But he would still like to pay her an individual compliment. ‘I often think about it,’ he lies.

‘Me too,’ she says. Then, after a long drag on a cigarette, ‘Does Mel?’

‘I don’t know. She doesn’t allude.’

‘Never?’

‘Never.’

‘You know she came to see me again.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘You didn’t know? I thought you’d cooked it up together. I thought you were waiting in the car to hear all about it.’

‘No. Absolutely not. I’m astounded. When was it she came?’

‘I don’t know. Three years ago. Maybe more.’

‘And what happened?’

Clarice laughs. Tell me, tell me. ‘Nothing happened. She came into the shop, just like you did. Asked me to meet her, just like you did. Asked me to fuck her, actually. You know Mel, no beating about the bush. She said I owed her one. I agreed to meet her up here. But she didn’t show.’

‘You weren’t late? Mel doesn’t wait.’

‘No, I wasn’t late. And the state she was in you’d have thought she’d have waited till Doomsday.’

The state she was in. Frank looks at Clarice in her faded jeans and baby-blue cardigan, takes in her streaming hair, her handsome but shallow face, and feels deeply insulted on Mel’s behalf. Could Mel ever have been in a state for her? Never mind could Mel, should Mel?

Curiosity, though — gross, indiscriminating curiosity — gets the better of him. ‘And then what?’

‘There was no then. She just didn’t show. I sat up here for an hour. Got cold and went home. That was that. She never came back. Never left a message. Never apologised. I suppose she got cold feet.’

‘Not like Mel.’

‘To get cold feet?’

‘To get cold feet or to ask for a fuck. Mel isn’t an asker.’

‘Not true. She asked me for all sorts of things that time. She woke me up while you were still sleeping and begged me to let her suck me. Begged me to tie her up and fist-fuck her.’

Frank’s stomach lurches. Floods with pancreatic juices. This is what he has come to hear. No point fighting it. No point being insulted on Mel’s behalf. Insult is where the thrills are. Insult is what he’s returned to Little Cleverley to confront, suffer, make friends with.

‘And I know how much you love being begged,’ he says. His voice is wheedling. Like Little Red Ridinghood’s making up to the big bad wolf. Little Red Frank. They knew, the vegetarian waiters who sculpted his portrait on the cappuccino, they knew what whipped importunings his voice was capable of. Disgusted, the moon allows a gauzy kirtle of cloud to cover her gaze.

Clarice responds with a further promissory squeeze. Yes, she’ll submit to his submissions. But first she has a fag to finish. And a few more discommendations of Mel to deliver.

‘What I love is having fun,’ she says. ‘You two take everything too hard. Especially Mel. She was so over-wrought, Everything mattered too much to her. She took it all too seriously.’

Too seriously? So it was light, was it? Light, twining his fingers with hers and together making love-knots inside Mel’s cunt? Is there something wrong with him? Is he wrong to think that that was not an especially frothy thing to be doing, not an everyday occurrence, even for country folk, shaking hands with a third party inside your affianced’s cunt? And what about when Clarice inserted the fingers of her other hand into Mel’s anus so that she could make membraneous contact, feel through the wall how she and Frank were doing in the chamber next door — would it be altogether too heavy of him to say that that, too, was worthy of remark, an experience to treasure, one to tell the grandchildren?

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