Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

What explains the number of foreign bouncers is the number of foreign kids. He has always thought of himself as a man who likes crowds, but a crowd is evidently a relative concept. His tolerance level of kids in numbers was determined in more tranquil times, when the world’s population was half what it is today. He finds himself stepping off the pavement to avoid them. Sometimes he doesn’t see them coming. They don’t know they’re coming themselves. They gather involuntarily, inexplicably, like flocks of migrating birds darkening the sun, swoop in a body across the road or into a store, then just as inexplicably disperse. Would these be his students if he were back here doing his old language job, these hard-faced little consumers with writing on their clothes? Where are the lovable ones? Where are the fuckable ones, come to that? The girls are wearing skirts so short they might as well not be wearing skirts at all. But they’re not dressed for pleasure. For his pleasure. They’re actually in uniform, tunics of the puritan revolution; they might as well be Stalinist youth, kitted out for callisthenics, so stern are they in pursuit of … what? He doesn’t have the word for it, but he has the word for what it isn’t. Dialectical. The girls he used to know shortened their skirts in order to pursue a satiric dialogue on the nature of exposure. With these kids it’s straight narrative: what it says is what it means.

What’s done it? Communicable sexual disease? The women’s movement? Is this why Mel and her consumptive chums are vomiting themselves to death, do they know that the next generation has got what they want and never can have — complete freedom from the desire to please?

Or joke. He’s been away from home a half a day and already he is beginning to worry about his capacity for survival. How is he going to make it in a world where people wear what they mean and mean what they say; where the genitals are not a sort of joke about genitals; where there’s no dissonance, no counterpoint, no dramatic irony?

Or is he missing their joke? Are they altogether too ironical for him?

He is in bed by ten. Flat on his back with his head on his fists, staring up at the whorled love-in-a-cottage ceiling with its oaky chandelier, trying not to hear the sounds of riot issuing from the Dewdrop. Not a position that flatters him physically or spiritually. He is at his best upright or on all fours. He needs to be busy. Prone, he is prey to passivity and mawkish sentiments. The pity of it, oh the pity of it, lago. The pity of his unravelling sleeve of flesh. The pity of his dulling senses — remember how it used to be in a strange hotel room, how every sound was thick with promise; how the very doorknobs and window-catches, the swinging keys in the wardrobe, the slightest ripple of the unfamiliar drapes, gave shape to the unimaginable future. Where’s the unimaginable future now?

Imagined. Imagined out.

And more pitiable still, most pitiable of all, the present. What a waste of himself it is, to be lying here in a bed — a bed! — as it were unattached, as it were unemployed, and no one to get the benefit. Of all life’s squandered opportunities, this has always been the one that touches him deepest. A nameless night in a nameless room in a nameless town — going begging.

He made the mistake, once, in their early days, during a period that was meant to be experimentally adult, of trying to explain to Mel how it felt to be out of town and on his own in a begging bed.

‘Even for just one night?’

‘What do you mean, just one night? Like telling someone they were to endure hell-fire, for just eternity.

‘So how does it feel?’

He paused, to give it weight. ‘It feels as though a great prince is languishing in prison,’ he told her.

She rewarded his confidence with a raised-letter feministical-erotic satire — The Great Prince. His consolation was that it took her six years to write and didn’t sell. Her readers didn’t want satire. They wanted cunts, wet panties and Wittgenstein. And they were the bright ones.

He has to change his position; the French pair have begun Je t’aiming again in his head. At a pinch he could always knock himself out by whacking off, give his dick a treat if nothing else. But that would entail finding it. To say nothing of allowing Mel the satisfaction of being right again. ‘Letting the prince out of prison, are we? And how many hours is that he’s been incarcerated? Six? Seven?’

He can’t face television. That too would be a capitulation to the predictable. Dick in his hand, crap on the box — Mel would love that. He props himself up on one elbow and tries the tourist literature provided for more easily amused guests — What’s On Around Oxford, Twelve One-Day Walks in the Cotswolds. When he’s done with those he flicks through an old hotel browsing copy of Oxfordshire Life. Sees a couple of Manor Houses he wouldn’t mind owning, a chair he wouldn’t mind rocking in, a life-style he wouldn’t mind indulging — apartment in Rome, boat off Barbados, the gallery that funds it all in Woodstock. The Josh Green Gallery, specialising in Fine Paintings mainly British of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. His Josh Green? The arse connoisseur? A photograph of the owner in front of an Alma-Tadema Roman bath-house confirms it. The same owlish eyes, red cheeks, receding chin; the same somewhat drowning look. Greyer now, of course, but still just bobbing above the waves, the very Josh Green whose hand he hasn’t grasped since the last bus of the summer pulled away from the Dewdrop in the year of the Finn. Frank remained a regular for several summers after that, partly because language teaching was his only source of income at the time, partly because he couldn’t face not being there when the new bus pulled up. Josh only did it for one season. He was the one with the qualifications; English as a Foreign Language was his oyster. Frank had heard vague rumours that he’d gone to France, gone to Greece, gone to Turkey, then that he’d given up teaching altogether and opened a shop; but a gallery in Woodstock, Fine Paintings mainly British, apartments in Rome and the rest of it, all this is news to him.

Frank is unable to read an article in a magazine or a newspaper from beginning to end, consecutively. He has to skip, jump in at the middle, come out before it’s finished. It’s not personal or judgmental; he would read his own column this way had he not written it. It’s habit. Consecutive reading is for special occasions. Like Middlemarch. So he has to jump back in again to know what else Josh is up to. Once a teacher blah blah. Runs gallery with wife Anna-Liisa blah blah. One daughter blah blah. Largest private gallery outside London blah blah. Finest collection … Frank hauls his eyes back up the page. Anna-Liisa? Was that the wife Frank remembers? Anna-Liisa …? No, Josh Green’s wife was Jean, no, Jill. Could have been his twin sister, owlish eyes, receding chin, air of drowning. They always looked as though they’d made a pact to go under together, but they haven’t have they, quite the contrary, or at least he hasn’t…

So what’s become of Jill and why does he think he knows the name Anna-Liisa? His pores open suddenly; in a matter of seconds he goes from bone dry to wringing wet. Anna-Liisa was the name of the Swede! That was why Josh Green hadn’t returned for another dip in the paradisal lake — the canny little bastard had hot-footed it to Sweden and drunk the paradisal lake!

Dewdrop din or not, it is necessary for him to throw open his windows. He paces the room, shaking his head. Perspiration continues to pour from him. He doesn’t know why he is so disconcerted by what he has learnt. Who’s Josh Green to him? Who’s the Swede? Can he possibly begrudge Josh twenty-five years of having to mop up around those eyes after every fuck? Once was enough for everyone else. Anna-Liisa, oh lovely Anna-Liisa what ails thee so? Except … except that when he recalls embrocating her distress away he doesn’t recall addressing her as Anna-Liisa. Frida, that was the Swede’s name. Frida the Phenomenal.