Howard Jacobson: No More Mr. Nice Guy

‘I thought you might want to talk.’

‘Talk! What’s the matter with you? Are you mad? Are you completely mad? Aren’t you getting enough trouble?’

And she would get up, leave the garden, leave him standing there with the hand he meant to soothe her with still raised. Another crime on his conscience. That he had ruined her garden for her as well. Ruptured her union with the flower fairies.

But while it’s up there, what about that raised hand …? Had he never been tempted, once in a while, to bring it down upon his lover’s refusing neck? Of course he had. There may always have been a monk in him, but he was never a saint. After the heartbreak the hatred. Like everybody else. Love and murderousness — in their early days, of course, these were never in serious conflict. You fucked, you loved, you killed. At one and the same time. This is what fucking’s for. The reconciliation of opposites. Tearing with rough strife, thorough the iron gates of life. But once you’re not fucking every hour that God sends, you’re at the mercy of the violent contrarieties again.

Will there be any tearing tonight?

Unlikely. He cannot say what’s in her but there’s no violence in him tonight. He’s been driving since dawn, or what would have been dawn in a place more accessible to light. He rose with the buzzer, attended his last vigils and was packed and on the road before six. He was glad to be going and sad to be glad. Nothing stuck. Everything hung by a thread. One good gust of wind and it would all be gone. Hence the success of the rule of St Benedict. Expect nothing. Just day by day remind yourself you’re going to die. Holding on to the wheel of his Saab in the early cold, Frank bled for the poor transient motorway humanity he sped past. The lumpen lorry drivers with their cargoes of crap, pulling out and pulling in, winking and flashing their lives away. The salesmen on the phone, the chauffeurs in their caps, the kids with their faces full of steel, wired up to their sound systems like the dying on a drip. Even the idiot crap-watchers of the summer, still queuing for all-day breakfasts and scratch-cards in the service stations. Back in their winter clothes, shut down for the season, they took hold again on his pity. You can grieve for people so long as they don’t show you their bodies. You can grieve for their immortal souls.

He rings again.

Still there is no answer. This time he tries the door with his key. It opens. Home. He steps inside, knowing she will not be hiding under the stairs, waiting to fling her arms around him, waiting to be swept off her feet and swung around by Daddy, as women who have love in their hearts do on the box with the silver smirk.

He sniffs the hallway. Shaming, but that’s what he does. He sniffs the house for newer, nicer, younger man. Then he notices a large packet on the hall table, a bulging brown envelope, not unlike those she’s been using to send him bills and washing powder samples. Except that this envelope isn’t addressed to Ritz, Poste Restante, Inverness, Scotland. This envelope is addressed to Aphrodite Press, Ladbroke Crescent, London W10. So this is why she’s allowed him back; not because she’s polished off a lover, but because she’s polished off a book. He isn’t sure whether he’s relieved. What’s worse, being in competition with the rest of your sex, or being in competition with literature?

He feels excluded, either way. Something has been happening in this house — his house, his home — that couldn’t have been happening with him in it. And just in case the significance of that should be lost on him, the door to his study is closed. Not ajar, not pushed to, but shut tight.

He opens it, gently. His study! He’d forgotten all about his study. Its winking red and green lights, its digitised allknowingness, like the cabin of a jumbo jet. Seeing it again, listening to it crackle and purr with pleasure at his return — at least someone has missed him — he cannot imagine how he ever survived without it. He counts his electric sockets. Fancy that. Already he is rehearsing the argument for having more. And once upon a time, in another life, he got by with only one.

He goes to his window, and yes, there she is, just as he thought, just as he remembers her, sitting in the garden with her back to the house, not quite looking up at the sky, and because of the blackness of the clothes she is wearing — always black, interminably black — not fully distinguishable from the night. He watches her in silence for a while. She doesn’t move. But he knows that she is aware he is there, at his window, having gone to his machines before he went to her, playing back the messages on his answerphone, all three-and-a-half months of them.

Frank wonders why she holds herself so gravely, so inexpectantly, given that she has had her way, been rid of him and all his noise for so long, and has effortlessly got him to return on her terms. If you think you can be quiet … She is mistress of all sound now, she is sole queen of the night. So why isn’t she rampant with happiness?

Of course he may not have her right. She may only look like a woman grieving to him. This is a discredited act of the imagination, he knows. Anthropomorphism, it is called. Attributing the thoughts and feelings of a man to what is not a man. It is held to be unscientific, emotional, and presumptuous. But what can he do? Anthropos is all he is. He can only feel as a man. And what he feels is that she is sorrowing and sad.

But that’s what Frank thinks about all women — isn’t it? — that they are sorrowing and sad. That they exist for him to pity. Once, to fuck and pity. Now, to pity full stop.

He goes downstairs and steps out into the garden. And shivers.

She doesn’t turn around. Doesn’t move. He is so sorry for her. She is so frightened of what he will do. Try a joke. Attempt a justification. Essay something sexual. He knows how little of a threat he is to her. So her fear smites his heart.

There are no candles or garden torches burning. He cannot see how she is, or what she has done to herself while he’s been away. How she is wearing her hair. Whether she even has hair. No Castro’s beard, he is confident of that. She’s been writing, not sprouting. He would love to put his hand out to touch her, to coax her up out of the soil, straighten her rounded back. But what if she were to say, ‘What now? Are you mad?’ Could he take it? Would he be able to bear it? Never mind on her account, would he be able to bear it for himself?

He must risk it. He has no choice. He drops his fingers lightly on her shoulders, as on a keyboard. Pianissimo. Con amore lamentabile. Tell a butterfly to land more considerately and it couldn’t do it. But the cold in her bones still rises up to him.

How thin she is, he thinks. Is it possible she hasn’t eaten since he left? Or has she upped the number of hours she spends hanging over the bath? She doesn’t return his touch, but she receives it. He feels her take it in, collect it, as a debt that’s owing to her.

Is she right? Is this her due? Or is what he believes right — that his touch is a gift, freely given?

Not a word has been spoken but they are arguing already.

There’s a fox out. Screaming for sex. When a fox screams for sex you think its being killed. You can smell the blood. Foxes do it in reverse order — murderousness then love. Frank isn’t screaming for sex. Frank isn’t screaming for anything. Frank’s going quietly. He would just like what’s given freely as a gift to be accepted as a gift. That’s all. And while he’s on the subject of going quietly, since the game is Mel’s, since she has won, since he’s back emptied of all noise, and since there is a fat envelope oozing juicy pornoscript on the hall table, why this continuing tragedy? Why the grief? Why the garden of fucking desolation, Mel?