The Act of Love by Howard Jacobson Read Free Book Online Page B

mistress who was too old, so I wasn’t sure what changes to look for in him. But I saw him take hold of the ends of his moustaches and shape them into a pointed beard. Short of his making goat’s horns with them I don’t know how he could have signalled his interest more plainly.
    It was all over in a second – just a flicker of acknowledgement between them, such as high-bred cats exchange when they pass on the common street.
    Had they been cats I could have left them to it. They would have known what the next move was. But they were an over-civilised pair. On their own, no matter how often they eyed each other off in the fromagerie, they would not have proceeded further. They were too alike – they stimulated the romance of impossibility in each other.
    I, on the other hand, proceed more quickly than is considered decent from the subtlest intimations of sex to the grossest couplings. Jealousyoperates at a speed beyond the capabilities of adultery, no matter how licentious the adulterers – from a dropped handkerchief to the act of shame a thousand times committed, all in the blinking of an eye. And jealousy when it is a hunger is faster still. No sooner did I remark the catlike hauteur of their exchange of glances than I leaped all intervening stages to Marisa quivering, head down, hindquarters raised; Marius, claws out, parting her fur, obscenely scarlet like a line of blood . . .
    I was not insane. I knew I’d have to wait a while for that.
    But at least we were up and running. And in the meantime I did not lack resource. I knew their weaknesses. In Marisa’s case, conversation. In Marius’s, women who already had husbands, and – so long as it was not wonder-touched, so long as there was corruption in it – art. All I had to do was get them to a gallery and start them talking.

PART TWO
MARISA
    He didn’t like dancing. He didn’t like gambling. He didn’t even like
drinking. His only pleasure was jealousy. He loved it, he lived by it.
    Joseph Roth, The Tale of the 1002nd Night
    In the East Indies, though chastity is of singular reputation, yet
custom permitted a married woman to prostitute herself to anyone
who presented her with an elephant . . .
    Michel de Montaigne, Essays

NO MAN HAS EVER LOVED A WOMAN AND NOT IMAGINED HER IN THE ARMS of someone else.
    I repeat the sentence not only for the pleasure it gives me to imagine Marius appalled. I repeat it as a categorical, unwavering truth, though I fully expect it to be contradicted. You will sooner get a man to give away his money than admit he longs to give away his wife. (Or better still – for we are dealing, if only we’d come clean about it, in nothing but degrees of good – to have his wife give away herself.)
    Of course imagining is not the same as longing; what you see in your mind’s distempered eye you might not welcome in your heart. But then again you might. What else is imagination for if not to lure the heart away from safety?
    Here’s a simple test for husbands: Do I fear another man is fucking my wife or do I hope another man is fucking my wife? And of the two, which do I prefer?
    Take as much time as you need to think about it. Close your eyes. Do a little picturing of the scene. You are filled with dread, of course. But what if part of what appals you is the degree to which you want the thing you dread? Are you not as much energised as terrified by what you see?
    The more you love a woman the more you fear her loss. Is it not a sensible strategy – of the imagination and the heart – to practise losing her?
    Call it self-protection: we do it in every other sphere, we shore up against tragedy and destruction, we take out insurance, we make provision.
    If you know you cannot bear what is going to happen, if your heart is pulp – and what man’s heart is not as pulp? – then surprise it before it surprises you.
    Against the swollen river of molten jealousy there is, as far as I know, no other defence. Throw yourself in. At least that