J by Howard Jacobson Read Free Book Online

than sorry. But at what point does he decide it’s safe?’
    ‘You should have asked him.’
    ‘I did. But his answer was unilluminating. “Never,” he said.’
    ‘Never?’
    ‘Never. Isn’t that terrible?’
    ‘Yes. But he has to stop sometimes. The man sleeps, for God’s sake.’
    ‘I asked him about that, too. Presumably you sleep, I said. So when do you call it a day? At what point are you able to close your eyes? And his answer to that was more unilluminating still. “When I can’t stand it any more,” he said. And how do you know when that is, I asked. “I just know,” he said.’
    ‘Maybe it’s when he gets tired. He has the air of a man who tires easily. Men do, you know.’
    This irritated her. ‘And women don’t?’
    Which irritated me. ‘Of course they do, but we aren’t talking about women,’ I snapped. ‘Or about you.’
    We stared angrily into each other’s faces.
    Why did she, I thought, have to bring her sex into everything?
    Why did I, I saw her thinking, have to be so critical of her?
    Why were her eyes, I thought, so quick to water up?
    Why were mine, I knew she thought, so quickly fierce?
    Why did I marry her, I wondered. What had I ever seen in that pallid skin and impertinently, stupidly, retroussé little nose? How could I stop myself, I wondered, from striking her?
    Why did she accept me, the witterer I was, I heard her askherself. How had she let those ugly crossed teeth of mine ever nibble at her breasts? Why had she ever allowed any part of me to come near any part of her? How much more would it take for her to strike me?
    I slunk away.
    She followed me into my studio.
    I wondered if she was carrying a knife from the kitchen. The carver she’d recently had sharpened. I closed my eyes.
    ‘I’m sorry, Phinny,’ I heard her say.
    I turned around abruptly. She started. Was she afraid of what I might be carrying? A trimming knife? My razor? A hammer?
    ‘Me too, Demelza,’ I said.
    We were both sorry, and made love whimpering how sorry we were into each other’s ears. I kissed her lovely little nose. She gave me her breast to nibble. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry for what, exactly? Neither of us knew. But without doubt a baseless irascibility had begun to be a fact of our marriage. Had we fallen out of love? I didn’t think so. Friends of ours were reporting the same. A querulousness that appeared suddenly from nowhere and vanished just as inexplicably, though each time the period it took for lovingness to return extended itself a little more. We had a formulation for it: things just seemed to be getting on top of us. But why? Why, when we lacked for nothing, when beauty accompanied us wherever we went, when every source of discord had been removed?
    It was shortly after this particular exchange of unpleasantries, anyway, that the file code for Kevern Cohen changed from grey to purple. Purple isn’t vermilion. We weren’t in danger territory. But others, I was now to understand, were reliant on what I knew as a sort of confirmation, let’s even say – to be plain about it – as a cognitive intensification, of what they knew or didn’t know themselves. Kevern Cohen was becoming a precious commodity.

THREE
    The Four Ds
    i
    I T WAS A ILINN who had been ringing him. Against her own instincts. But in line with her companion’s, though her companion thought she could go a little further and actually leave a message. ‘Even just a hello,’ she said.
    ‘When you know me better, Ez,’ Ailinn told her, ‘you will discover I am not the sort of woman who leaves hellos on men’s phones. They pick up or they lose me.’
    ‘And when you know me better,’ Ez told her, ‘you will discover I am not the sort of woman to egg people on to do what they don’t want to do. But this is different. You aren’t yourself. I’ve never seen you so down in the mouth.’
    ‘That’s because you haven’t seen me often. Down in the mouth is not what I do, it’s who I am.’
    ‘That isn’t