Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

‘Such as what?’ (Tell her, tell her sadder and sadder things.)

‘Such as inurement to pain. Which puts paid to all species of expectancy, the expectation of sensuous gratification being merely one.’

They have arrived at this topic because she has heard gossip — not from him, not from him — of his parents’ earlier garden life, and she is curious to know whether it was indeed as paradisal as people say. What he wishes her to understand is that, companionableness aside, his father desired his wife only from the moment he became jealous of her, and that his mother stopped desiring her husband at more or less the same time. Thereafter, their desires went on enjoying this perfect inverse of synchronicity. ‘Paradise,’ he explains.

‘That’s so sad,’ she says.

He doesn’t know what to do about her.

She makes him anxious. She seems to think it is possible to dodge the wheels of careering fate. She thinks he is telling her a bad-luck story. As if, under different circumstances, his father and mother might have torn at each other’s bodies in an ecstasy of unknowing, unprovoked, unperjured cohabitation. Such as they might — she and he. Even though she knows his flesh creeps, and owes the stimulation of her own flesh to that certain knowledge, she is still holding out for a happy ending. Smooth lawns. Birdsong. Grazing deer. Plump fruit. Fangless serpents. Stately oak trees. Gurgling fountains. Moonshine.

Moonshine. He cannot dim it. It is the same wherever he stays long enough to drum up an acquaintance. They request the story of the paradisal garden from him, only they want it told the way they want it believed. They have their own little clearings of paradisal verdancy front and back, and any assault upon the First Garden is implicitly a rudeness to theirs. They either show him their doors or their shrubberies. If it isn’t rejection it’s reform. Zilpah is of the reforming party. She has climbed the walls of her garden in pursuit of the rotting stink that rises from his; but now she would like to take him back with her, over the wall, through the gate, down the path, under the arbour, to where the air is sweet.

Moonshine.

It seems to be her intention to move in with him by stealth.

She leaves hairpins behind. Brushes. Brooches. Bags. Shawls. Eventually she will leave herself.

Whatever she mislays he finds and returns to her. Formally. He doesn’t like there being bits of woman lying around his room. He is as particular about his floor as he is about his appearance. Traveller’s scruples. Fugitive’s fastidiousness. He defies the God who punished him with vagrancy to mistake him for a nomad. He has oiled fingers and well-swept rugs. He shines like a permanent man moving in his proper sphere.

He is surprised how little of this particularity Zilpah has perceived. Not only is she careless with her possessions, she thinks she can win him by slothful habits — intimacies, he assumes they are meant to be — in respect of her person.

She is by nature and upbringing particular herself. One look at her bacillophobic braid had told Cain that. Her clothes are expensive and fussily precise. Her undergarments are made of the best cottons and decorated with beautiful needlework. Where they have ribbons or straps, these are always well-pressed, daintily stitched, and as narrow as the shoulders and waist for which they have been designed. If there is one thing about Zilpah that Cain finds even more repugnant than her plait, it is the fineness of the straps of her undergarments. It is a puzzle to him why he feels this way. Strictly and logically, her haberdashery meets every one of his usual objections. The material is not coarse. The dimensions are not gross. Seams are not frayed, colours are not garish, and there has been no let up in the laundering. So how has Zilpah erred? Cain puts it to himself like this: there is indelicacy in excessive delicacy; there is grossness in too determined a denial, too pretty a denial, of what is gross. That helps him to explain half of his disgust, but gets him nowhere when Zilpah throws all prettiness and delicacy to the wind, scatters her fine embroidery across his floor, refuses the consideration owing to a lady’s toilet, riots in forgetfulness and indolence, and otherwise shows that she has mistaken dereliction of hygiene for abandonment of inhibition.

‘You use your mind for that,’ he explains to her. ‘You should treat your body with more respect. It connects you to the business of life. Please pick up your clothes.’

He cherishes a wild hope that she will be offended by this, gather her disregarded dainties, and go. But she wants him to see that she cannot be offended by anything he says, because in his company, in his time, in his… presence — she searches for the god-like word — she does not consider herself violable. She is without shame and without entitlements — when is he adequately going to grasp this? He can do as he chooses with her. How he uses her is entirely his affair. She does not even want to be consulted on the matter. Should he choose to dishonour her, he, Cain, the great dishonourer of the family, should he raise a hand to her as he raised a hand to his dear brother, why, she will esteem herself privileged, exalted…

It goes — he knows it goes — with the exquisite lace bodices and the eye-ruining needlepoint. It goes with the creaking cotton. The creaseless ribbons. The perfect symmetry of her lacing. The fanatic plait.

It goes with the bows.

But how does it go? And, more to the point, how does she go?

Every discourtesy rebounds on him. Every rudeness is a favour. He orders her out of his room. He remarks on her shapelessness, the protrusion of her bones, the flatness of her thighs and buttocks. He forces her to acknowledge the poor condition of her skin, its greasiness, its inelasticity, rolling collops of it between his thumb and forefinger, like a merchant appraising burlap. He spends whole evenings with his back to her, not uttering a word. He disappears without any explanation, returning in the early hours with common prostitutes — not shuris, but women compared to whom shuris are as unspotted as Eve on the twenty-seventh day — and forces Zilpah to lie beneath the bed among her hairpins while he simulates common sex with them. He threatens to have her removed by the authorities (some joke: she is the daughter of authorities) as a thief or a madwoman or a prostitute herself. One night he sets fire to her. On another he douses her with fouled water. ‘Yes, yes, do that!’ she cries, opening her mouth, extruding her bottom lip to catch the swill, showing him her glistening tongue. ‘Yes, yes, don’t stop!’ she pleads, as flames lick the soft soles of feet she will no longer use or wash. ‘Make me your sacrifice, make me the offering you wouldn’t give your God!’

And then in the morning she wants to promenade with him through the scented gardens — his sweetheart.

He doesn’t know what to do about her.

Sisobk the Soppy does.

Build a temple to her, that would be his advice.

Tear out your heart for her.

Transcribe her utterances on to parchment and wear them on your feet.

Sit her on a little stool and include her in that line of noble matronage that protrudes from both ends of every man’s imagination.

Revere the woman in her.

Hold her to you as you sway together above the precipice.

Don’t kick out.

Sisobk’s own reverence for woman has been boosted by his brush with the barbers. Those… those… boys! Those… those… beauticians! He never thought he would see the day when he was grateful to have no beard in need of barbering, but that day has arrived.

He fingers his ants’-trail moustache with satisfaction. He rubs a pleased plump hand over the smooth globule of Anatolian delight that is his chin. Those… those… Sodomitical sods!