The Act of Love, page 12
The doorbell rang. I could see a blue light flashing outside. ‘I think,’ I said, taking Marisa to one side, ‘that you should go with him in the ambulance.’
She stared at me. ‘Felix, this is not a joyride. The boy’s fallen down the stairs. He might have broken every bone in his body for all we know.’
‘That’s why I think you should go with him.’
‘He’s your relation.’
‘Yes, but distant. You’re much closer to him.’
‘I?’
‘You.’
She backed away from me. Something she had never done before. ‘You’re insane,’ she said. ‘Are you sure it isn’t you that’s fallen down the stairs?’
I didn’t say I had no reason to fall down any stairs because it wasn’t I who’d been locked in a wild embrace at the top of them. ‘I can’t see what’s insane about my suggestion,’ I said instead, which better proved my mental stability. ‘If you won’t go with him I will, but I don’t know what I’ve said that’s insane.’
She shook her head. ‘Does it never stop for you?’ she asked.
Shocking in itself, for what it posed, the question shocked me still more for being put at all. This was the most direct Marisa had ever been with me on a subject that burned between us, but which we had tacitly agreed never to address in words.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, not looking at her. Had I met her eyes they would have roasted me alive.
‘Yes, you do, Felix. Does it never stop? Does nothing more important ever intervene?’
It was a great temptation to seize the moment and admit it – no, Marisa, nothing more important ever intervenes because nothing more important exists. But that would have been the end of everything. She already thought I was crazy and she didn’t know the half of it. When the moment presents itself to a masochist he dare not seize it unless he wants to pull his world down around his ears, which he thinks he does and boasts he does, but which of course he doesn’t. More even than the sadist, the masochist craves infinite repetition.
I took a step back from the precipice so that I might stand over it again.
THINGS WERE BOUND TO BE DIFFERENT BETWEEN US AFTER THAT.
But not on the surface. And not all at once.
I’d gone with Quirin in the ambulance and could see there was not much wrong with him. Not in body, anyway. He was released from hospital after a couple of days of observation, and was thereafter, so I heard, to be seen limping around town with a silver-topped cane. He didn’t show up for further work experience. He dropped us a card to thank us for our hospitality and conversation – the word conversation underlined for some reason which I thought only Marisa would understand – and sent round a friend with an even more untrustworthy air than his own to collect whatever he ’d left lying about our house (toys, as far as I could tell) and return the key. The end. Marisa did not mention him and nor did I. Our conversation sealed over him, as it sealed over the dangerous eruption of frankness he had precipitated. He hadn’t taken a suspicious tumble down our grand triumphal staircase. I hadn’t asked Marisa to travel in the ambulance and hold his hand. Marisa hadn’t said to me what she ’d said.
We were in good shape. We denied it all to each other, therefore none of it had happened.
But, whatever we pretended, our precious pact of implicitness had been broken.
And with it our still more precious pretence that the wounding doubt in which I lived was no figment of my disordered brain but answered to an actuality – Marisa’s wounding, never to be mentioned infidelities.
When my love swore that she was false, I did believe her though I knew she lied.
Not any longer.
Now Marisa would have to be false to me in earnest.
Hard to explain the moral logic of that, but we both sensed it was how it had to be. It was as though we accepted the necessity to move down a philosophic plane – as it were from the beauty of abstractions to the ugliness of deeds – and would be coarser with each other from now on. Not because Marisa had to punish me with who I was – hers was not a punitive or vindictive nature – but because there was nowhere else for us to go.
Without doubt, she could not have done what she went on to do had she not been an adventuress with a deep instinct for concealment. But she could not have done it had she been an adventuress only. What she did she did because she loved me. I see her forerunner not in Guinevere or Messalina or Moll Flanders, not in Sacher-Masoch’s fur-wrapped Wanda or any of the libertine women in de Sade’s The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, but in the highly respectable Mrs Bulstrode in Middlemarch who stayed loyal to her disgraced husband. Good wives do this. They shoulder the burden of us, they espouse our sorrows. I wasn’t disgraced, but I wasn’t weighted down with moral honours either. Mrs Bulstrode took off her ornaments and put on a plain black gown; Marisa touched up her lipstick – otherwise they were acting out of the same sense of duty. That Marisa didn’t suggest the separation route, and that I never threatened her with it – that divorce never entered into either of our minds – proves how devoted to each other we remained.
In recognition of which, and again without words, we threw ourselves into a period of the most intense, romantic love. It was like the honeymoon we had never quite managed to have. We woke smiling into each other’s eyes. I wouldn’t let her leave the bed, whether to go into the kitchen or the bathroom, without me. I watched her dress. I watched her apply her make-up, her head tilted slightly backwards for the final application, as though she were putting eye-drops in her eyes and was careful not to spill any. When she did this her nostrils narrowed and the muscles in her neck tightened. From this angle, too, the grey tea-bag stains beneath her eyes shone silver. Fascinating. I didn’t want to miss a moment of any of it. Which of course made her self-conscious, though that too I didn’t want to miss. Brusque in her dressing normally, like a man, she would slide more sinuously into her clothes with my eye on her, until this struck her as preposterous and she would put the finishing touches to herself hurriedly, without looking in a mirror. Wonderful to me – how colourful and varie-gated she could look with so little ceremony. Even in her younger days my mother had rarely descended before lunch, so much was there to do to her person before she was ready to face the world. Marisa skipped into the day still warm from bed, as though she couldn’t wait for her life to start.
On the afternoons she worked in the Oxfam shop I’d visit and pretend to browse through the books, though all I wanted was to see her, to observe her with other people, to hear her voice and make her smile when I appeared from behind a stack. She was the same. She walked to my premises with me. And she was there, as though she ’d never left, her face illuminated, when I came up out of the basement six hours later. We paused somewhere for tea. Then we paused again for a drink, like lovers not wanting to part, though there was nothing to stop us going straight home and following each other round the house. We burst out laughing for no reason, and this time Marisa laughed in the present tense, overjoyed by the state we were in. We went for long walks all over London, our hands glued. People smiled when they saw us. I am not a person who normally invites conversation from strangers. I am not saying my face repels it, but I don’t make it easy for people to break in on my concentration. Marisa, too, can be forbidding. Though where my face closes down, hers is full of sharp intelligence which you think twice before you brave. But together in this mood we seemed to suck whoever came anywhere near us into our happiness. Old ladies sat close to us on park benches. Children too. Dogs played around our feet. We were not just innocently and good-naturedly in love, we were the cause of innocent, good-natured love in others.
And every day while it lasted Marisa grew more lovely to me. The stains beneath her eyes faded. Her stern, Roman nose lifted infinitesimally. Her lips relaxed and grew softer. A light seemed to have turned on inside her. On one particularly restorative spring morning we went out walking in St James’s Park early, while the trees were still damp with night. One of the pelicans was sitting on a bench, as miraculous and cumbersome as an angel, clacking its plastic salad-server beak. Marisa made me join him and put an arm around his shoulder. ‘Smile,’ she said, as she photographed us with her mobile phone.
And I swear that that was exactly what the pelican did.
‘It’s difficult to say,’ Marisa laughed, ‘which of you looks more incapable of flight.’
‘He does,’ I replied.
I spoke only the truth. This morning I was lighter than any other living creature in the park, Marisa excluded.
A magpie crossed our path. ‘Hello, Mr Magpie,’ Marisa said. ‘How’s Mrs Magpie?’
I asked her what she meant by that. She was surprised I didn’t know the superstition. A single magpie was bad luck. You had to make the pair of them present.
I wanted to weep for her. Other people ’s superstitions affect me in this way. It is as though all their long-ago childhood fragility is distilled into the moment of their revealing them. I love seeing the girl in the woman. It breaks my heart. And that was how I suddenly saw Marisa – as a little girl, skipping through the park, being taught by her skittish mother to say, ‘Hello, Mr Magpie, how’s Mrs Magpie?’
We kissed under the minty, maiden leaves of a willow tree, breathing in their newborn greenness with the rapture of parents smelling for the first time the freshness of their infant’s hair. When we left the shelter of the tree I saw that minute diamonds of moisture hung upon Marisa’s eyelashes like seed pearls. The image is Thomas Hardy’s. Tess in a rare moment of happiness. And that was how I saw Marisa in all her harmed innocence. Enjoying a reprieve.
And then, just as suddenly as it began, it stopped. It was as though we’d been embracing for the last time at the foot of the scaffold, and now one of us had to ascend.
Before the willow tree came into full leaf she had a lover.
As for how I knew – well you just know. You cannot be all in all to each other as we had been, and then admit another person, and not know.
To the eye of an outsider we must have looked the same: still a solicitously loving pair, no space between us, at fault – if it could be called a fault – only in our closeness. Certainly there was nothing in Marisa’s appearance, her dress or her demeanour, to suggest her life was even microscopically different to how it had been. I have seen men oblivious to the fact of their wives’ fall from virtue while all the world notes with cruel amusement the shortening of their skirts, their teetering heels, the expansion of their décolletage, their longer nails, their more swollen and empurpled lips. Marisa was not a woman of that sort. She had not departed from any of her customs or from her essential idea of herself in the course of her dishonouring Freddy, nor was she other than she had always been now that she was dishonouring me.
So what did I see that others didn’t?
A new compassion for me was the start of it. A sorrowing look, almost as if she feared what the future held for me – an apprehension of my loneliness – would cross her face, not when we were alone, but in any sort of gathering, wherever our eyes met from opposite ends of the room, across a dinner-party table, or when waving a second goodbye in a crowded street. One sunny afternoon in her half-sister Flops’s garden in Richmond, with Flops’s unpleasant ginger children playing all around us – no hint of Rowlie in their offspring, all Rowlie ’s genes obliterated by the bitter pungency of Flops’s – Marisa held me through the smoke of the barbecue in a glance of such lingeringly melancholy regret that it was all I could do not to burst out crying. Day by day her tone of voice to me altered also. No one else would have noticed, but I lived in Marisa’s voice, as a child lives in its mother’s. And that was precisely the alteration I detected: a sorrowing tone to match her sorrowing looks in which I read the diminution of my status – as a loved person – from all husband to all child. Given everything, she owed me no apology as a wife: as a husband I was the author of my doom. It was in her duty of care – parentally, so to speak – that she was prepared to acknowledge dereliction. An acknowledgement that implied a countercharge, the merest whispering of a reproach: for who, if she was failing to care for me, was caring for her?
That was what I heard in the new music of her tenderness to me – the sad and unexpected reasoning of our arrangement, that when the husband abdicates his responsibility to protect, another must take his place.
And someone had.
Eventually, of course, for all Marisa’s exquisite precautions, he became present to me: an invisible but tangible replacement, on the other end of Marisa’s now too busy phone, at the arrival point of Marisa’s now too many taxis. Late for the theatre one evening and fretting because she ’d mislaid the tickets, she used a pet name for me I’d never heard before. She assured me, on the way out of the house, that it was a name she’d given Freddy. Short of ringing him, which was out of the question, I had no way of confirming the truth of this. But she did not appear concerned whether I believed her or not. Once upon a time, had anything been amiss between us before we took our seats, Marisa would have squeezed my knee during the performance. But on this night she kept her hands folded firmly in her lap.
Had anyone asked me, even in the interval, what the play was about I would not have been able to answer. Perfidy, I’d have guessed. What else is any play about?
Two or three weeks after this freeze-out at the theatre I found an expensive fountain pen I didn’t recognise on a side table in our living room. ‘Had visitors?’ I asked. ‘No, why?’ she replied, not looking up from her book. And that evening she turned her mouth away from me when I tried to kiss her.
There’d been no room for doubt before, but now certainty was screaming in my ear. A lover. Marisa had taken a lover.
The precise locution was important to me. She didn’t have a lover, she had taken a lover.
Had I imagined I would riot orgiastically in the moment when it came? No. I had anticipated it, correctly, as the eventualisation of terror, as when, hearing noises in the dead of night, you descend the stairs and discover that there is indeed a stranger ransacking your home. But I had not anticipated just how devastating this eventualisation would be. In the moments after Marisa refused me her mouth I shook with fear. A bar seemed to lodge itself inside my chest. My rejected mouth dried up. Had someone cut my throat, or had I – as would have been more appropriate to the occasion – taken a knife to my wrists, I’d have bled iced water.
A lover.
A lover such as I had once been to her – and he who was first the lover of his wife knows better than anyone the treacherous transference of affections of which that wife, without betraying it in the movement of a single muscle or the disarrangement of a single hair, is capable.
It was here, what I had asked for: the wounding doubt that was doubt no longer, the wound itself, the gouge in the heart, and I was distraught.
Yet at the centre of my distraction, coiled like a baby’s fist, was a promise of the immense and terrible bliss to come, not when I was calm, because I never would be calm, but when I at last learned to take possession of all my fears and accept them as my fate.
Very well then, I would learn and I would accept. A lover. A lover. Like a celebrant of some terrible religion of self-cruelty, I breathed the incense of deception and chanted the unholy words. She has taken a lover. She has taken a lover. My wife Marisa has taken a lover.
A lover – say it, Felix – for whom she was keeping her mouth pure.
And when, many months after this, emboldened by what seemed to me a change in our marital temperature – and remember, I measured on a scale of exactitude unknown to other men – I put out my lips to kiss her and was not rebuffed, I made the only rational deduction: lovers. Lovers in the plural. Too many now to remember which one of them she was keeping her mouth pure for. Like Zelda Fitzgerald who maddened her husband with the boast that she had kissed thousands of men and intended to kiss thousands more. Only with Zelda it was all pampered, Southern States, jazz-age bravado, whereas Marisa . . . Marisa was a reflective being, a woman who didn’t naturally jig about in body or in mind, a woman who weighed the significance of her deeds, who did nothing lightly, and the consequences of whose kisses, therefore, could only be terrible.
And here’s an interesting and I don’t doubt utterly reprehensible question. Was I stimulated in my hurt more by Marisa’s taking many lovers than by her taking one?
Yes and no. That is not prevarication. I answered the question differently every day I woke with it on my mind, and as Marisa’s unfaithfulness became the settled pattern of our life, I never did wake without it on my mind. Each provoked me in his own way, the lover and whatever the collective noun is for lovers. If we are talking simple jealousy, then of course the lover, singular, had me by the throat as the gaggle of them never did. He alone had Marisa’s sole attention, therefore he alone had what belonged to me. And on top of that he was the first. With him I had to learn from the beginning – the Cuban doctor could no more be called a beginning than Quirin could – how to bear what I had no choice but to bear. He took from me – whoever he was – my virginity.
But simple jealousy was only a small part, as I learned – and I was learning as I went along – of what this was all about. Yes, I was the mental voyeur of my wife, lying alone in our vacated bed, picturing in relentless and unforgiving detail the progress of my rival’s every finger as it adventurously traced its stolen ownership of Marisa’s flesh. Pore by pore, I touched what he touched, lived inside his hands, took up residence in his mouth and followed his tongue wherever Marisa permitted him to thrust it. Where he went, I went. Must I go on? I was more him than he was himself. And perhaps more me than I had ever been. Had I ever entered Marisa as rapturously solus as we entered her together? And yet at no point in this intense familiarity I enjoyed with him was I curious to know who he was. I didn’t want to see him, learn his name, discover what he looked like, or find out what he did for a living. I assumed we were not acquainted; Marisa would not have been so vulgar as to take her first lover (her first lover since we had become lovers) from among our friends. But even if we were acquainted I didn’t wish to know about it and would not have reproached Marisa for her choice. This was about her not him. The story that engrossed me was the story of Marisa’s reaching out and taking herself one, and then several, regardless of who any of them happened to be. A story which, in all its essentials, I would rather Jane Austen than de Sade or Sacher-Masoch to have written. How did Marisa feel it at her heart, with what quickening of emotion and perturbation of spirit did she depart from the straight path of our marriage and plunge into that initial infidelity? And with what tumult of feelings, what expectation of felicity or dismay, what augmentation or diminution of self-regard, did she do to Lover Number One – who must surely have been particular to her – exactly as she had done to me and betray him in the careless distribution of her favours now to Lover Number Two, now to Lover Number Three, now to however many more of them there were? Which was the greater indecorum? Which, if any, shamed her more, assuming that shame was what at any time she felt? And if not shame – for she was, as I have said, a serious and reflective being – then what? Love? May the thought perish in the utterance, but could she have lost her heart a little to Lover Number One? Could she even have lost her heart to him a lot? And did the dissipation of her feelings for him, as she spread her net wider, cause her regret? Did she lament her infidelity to Him? Or was lubricity now the element she swam in?
