The Act of Love, page 20
The day Marius began belatedly to take up Marisa’s challenge was the start of a new adventure for me too. I sat in the back of the taxi barely able to hear myself think, so loud was the lecherous chattering in my brain. ‘Goats and monkeys!’ I must have said aloud.
‘I thought you wanted Paddington,’ the driver said.
I told him I’d changed my mind. I was meant to visit a retired headmaster in Gloucester to give a valuation. But how could I concentrate on old books? ‘Back to Marylebone,’ I said. For I wanted to be close.
He was reading her note, or he soon would be. I read it again with him. It was some invitation. More than he had hoped for, all right. More than I had hoped for too. Marisa curled into the chest of the poet. Naked to her toes. And the water boy smirking.
God almighty!
He was as good as inside her.
He took her to her favourite restaurant (hitherto our favourite restaurant) where they sat as two cemented into one. They didn’t notice what they ate. Afterwards they strolled out into the evening air, heavy that night with thunder, first arm in arm, then hand in hand, and then, a mere block from where we lived – Marisa and I – mouth to mouth, pausing to savour each other more – Marisa and he – under a street lamp that illuminated them as though from the glow of their hearts.
He looked more than usually handsome and very nearly in good temper in a tweedy suit that gave him the air of a country solicitor. He was the sort of man who excited romance in the hearts of farmers’ wives and daughters, and of course the wives of red-brick university professors. But it goes down well with city women too, that suggestion of wind-blown provincial pitilessness. As though there are cruel country assurances of which soft men who work in international banks or inner city antiquarian bookshops are incapable.
Marisa, too, appeared animated. Conversation suited her. For conversation she wore her highest heels.
They ate out again, at the same restaurant, indeed at the same table – our table, naturally – until it became as much a tradition for them to eat there as it had been for us. Eventually – though this is to hurry anticipation forward – she invited him to the house we shared, and subsequently into her bed. Not our bed – she wouldn’t permit confusions of that sort though she must have known I’d put up no objection. It was in the daytime and I was out at work. I’d been neglecting the business for Marius and was glad of the chance to get back to it. Sometimes I walked the streets, liking to walk where I knew they had walked.
It is highly romantic, haunting the place from which you’ve been removed. It is like living your life between mists and mirrors. I breathed with difficulty some days, but I put that down to elation. I didn’t quite have what I wanted yet, but I was on the way. The ball was in their court. I’d done my bit for them, now they had to do the same for me.
I wasn’t asking much. Only that they love each other.
PART FOUR
THE WIFE, THE LOVER
‘. . . my heart dances;
But not for joy; not joy.’
William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale
FOUR O CLOCK SUITED US ALL. L’APRèSMIDI D’UN FAUNE. SUITED THE FAUN, suited the nymph, suited the cuckold.
I liked him being in my house. There are men who would kill for less reason. They are in denial. Their funeral. They don’t know what they’re missing.
Marius was not of course aware whose house he was fauning it in, other than that it was half Marisa’s. So I cannot accuse him of triumphing over me personally. That he enjoyed being in some man’s house, though, I was certain. It sauced the afternoon up for him. He could throb to a woman for her looks and qualities alone, but he could throb to her to even greater effect if he was taking her from someone else. I’m not sure if that someone else had also to be someone older. But it wouldn’t have surprised me. His track record suggested no less. And who’s to say that we are not all cut from the same cloth? We cower before our virile fathers, like the boy in Turgenev’s story, or – and it is only the same impulse reversed – we behead them. Marius was a beheader.
He hadn’t wept at the funeral of the man whose wife he stole. He had picked up two underage girls instead.
Whatever their age, and whatever their bruising, girls had been his undoing. I have not been able to uncover categorical proof of why he left the university that employed him in a junior capacity not long after he ’d eloped with Elspeth. Some whiff of scandal was in the air, but it was unlikely that Elspeth’s husband had anything to do with it. He was too honourable and too doddery to bear a grudge. If anything it was probably him that got Marius the job in the first place. Professors like placing their students, whether or not they’ve run off with their wives. It satisfies a dynastic longing. Marius was gone, anyway, for whatever reason, before he’d made any lasting mark at least on the countenance of the university. The marks he ’d made on the girls he taught was another matter. They idolised him, some of them. He was, as a teacher, as he ’d been as a student – inspirational, brilliant, over-confidential, disposed to idealise and then despise. Where he thought he saw real aptitude, he brought it on. He liked winning unlikely converts to culture. When the grandiose mood was on him he thought, Pygmalionly, that he could animate what was lifeless and bring half humanity – the female half, that is – around to Baudelaire and Céline if he could only be granted sole access to it. No doubt he gave reading lists to the underage schoolgirls he had his way with in the cemetery before he found the loose change for their bus fares and packed them off home to their parents.
The shame – an especial shame for Elspeth – was that he couldn’t leave it at converting his women students to culture. He had to convert them to him as well. There is reason to believe that he was whispered out of his job by campus feminists. I unearthed a couple of articles about him in the student newspaper, dated about the time of his resignation, which implied (careful of lawsuits) not only that he was the most lecherous member of a lecherous department (literature: it goes with the territory), but that women had been circulating letters among themselves and to freshers warning that he was the worst kind of teacher: not only a breaker of hearts but a rewarder of favourites, a teacher who starred your essays not for what you wrote for him on the page but for what you did for him in the bed. I doubt that. He had far too strict a sense of himself to go messing up the categories. If anything, he would have marked down any student he slept with to demonstrate his intellectual probity. And of course to show how little passion had moved him. So I take this to be a hysterical calumny of a sort that was rife on university campuses in those days. But a bounder is a bounder whatever the details and I presume him, on this account, to have been blackmailed out of his tenure.
Would he have brazened it out and dared the feminists to do their worst had it not been for Elspeth? Possibly. He could have lived with being the Lord Rochester of a West Midlands university. A bad reputation – particularly of that kind – never did a bachelor harm, no matter what warning letters circulate. But to Elspeth, who had once enjoyed the status of being married to a professor and had looked down sweetly on students as a species of orphan or foundling, it was humiliating. So they packed their things and left. For which – though this is only my theory – he was never able to forgive her.
Nor she him. To her friends – those that remained – she referred to him as the Dark Lord Morgoth. As a girl, she had sat on Tolkien’s knee, had met him again in the company of her husband who trembled making the introduction, and subsequently read every word he’d written. So it’s possible that the choice of Morgoth was tempered by her affection for the work; like Morgoth, Marius had fallen from airy grace into evil darkness, yet she still loved him. That she continued to call him Morgoth, however, knowing how much he despised her for confusing Tolkien with literature, suggests her anger towards him was real.
They rowed continuously, her temper all flounce and self-exposure, like the clothes she wore, his ice-cold and reserved, like water from a spring of scorn.
‘If I’d known it was going to be like this,’ she ’d say to him, not finishing the sentence, her girlish puffball sleeves showing too much sway of slackened skin.
‘How did you think it was going to be, Elspeth?’ he ’d ask. Hurting her with her name. Putting spit and spite into it.
‘Lovely. Is there anything wrong with that?’
‘Lovely. We tore at each other’s flesh. Was that lovely?’
‘We loved each other, Marius. We made promises.’
‘That was in another country,’ he ’d say, leaving her to complete the quotation.
It was the mark of how bad things had got between them. Neither could finish what they’d started.
She didn’t walk out on him, however dead to him she feared she had become. She’d left one man and saw no future for herself in leaving another. Presumably, too, she was unable to believe, having maddened him into desire once – he spoke the truth, he had torn at her flesh – that she couldn’t do it a second time. Marius’s turning niggardly where once he had been profligate served him well in his relations with women, at least in that they found it hard to drag themselves away from him until his profligacy returned. It’s one of the cruellest laws of the erotic life that meanness in either sex, provided there ’s the remotest promise of generosity returning, never fails to be effective. We all cower in disgraced gratitude, like trained dogs, in anticipation of whatever scrap of love is going.
Even my mother, who knew perfectly well where my father had been, would welcome him back from his Grand Tour of the bordellos of France, Germany and the Low Countries provided he had Belgian chocolates for her.
And I am the same.
Behold Marius and Elspeth, anyway, in their peregrinations around the Welsh Marches, looking for something for Marius to do, the picture of marital unhappiness – though it was an unhappiness that transfixed Elspeth and kept her a sexual being, on edge and watchful, wanton even, when it might have served her better to notice she was ageing fast and make the appropriate adjustments of dress and expectation. ‘He ’s “the great enemy” but he ’s good for me,’ she told herself. Good for her erotically, she meant. Marius was a man who went deep into women, as though pursuing something not to be found on the surface, perhaps not to be found at all. With Elspeth when he bothered with her he went deep in the wounding as well as the exploratory sense. Out of a job and out of cash he kept his distance, looking at anything but her, but when he got work helping to put together a local newspaper in Ludlow, or driving a school bus from Stourport to Shrewsbury, or plastering cottages in Church Stretton where they finally settled – ironic work was how he thought of it, a joke against himself and all his early promise, a ludicrous life lived in a ludicrous part of the country – he returned to her with passionate vindictiveness, recalling how in their early days it had excited him to see her perfect House and Garden features screwed into a grimace, her wife-of-a-professor’s mouth puckered as for a scream. And of course every time this happened, Elspeth believed that things were all right with them again, and would be until their ship at last reached the shores of the Uttermost West, dwelling place of the lords and queens of the Valar.
Marius was not all at once installed in my house after claiming his prize from Marisa – or, to speak plainer, his prize of Marisa. There was an intervening courtship period of several months – call it an interregnum – in the course of which all three of us had a number of adjustments to make.
I linger over this period perversely, though I hasten at the same time to get Marius under Marisa’s sheets. Were my intentions sadistic, I’d have put them to bed together chez moi long ago; for the sadist hurries to the place of pain. As a masochist I obey a more complex and delicious chronology. It is always too soon to be there, for the masochist, no matter how long it’s taken. There is always more of the run-up to torment to undergo before it can be enjoyed in its completeness.
So there are further details to be recorded of this ‘interregnum’ before Marius’s cuckooing of me can be completed.
It was as it should be that Marisa took him to our favourite restaurant and sat him at our table. I’m not simply talking symmetry. By turning our haunt into their haunt, by allowing herself to be seen there in his company – ostentatiously and unapologetically with him – Marisa showed that she was a wife who attended conscientiously to her husband’s needs. Humiliate me, I’d been mutely pleading since the Cuban had usurped my role, and had Marisa thrashed me in a public place she could not have humiliated me more.
One of those old family Italians, with pictures of Vesuvius and the Trevi Fountain on the walls, Madeira sauce over everything and caramelised oranges for dessert, Vico’s had a been a home from home for me for years, first in my bachelor days, and later when I took Marisa there, as the conversation-starved wife of a man to whom I sold books. Though we frequented it less once we were married – you either went there on your own or you went there because you were up to no good, it seemed to me – I remained on the friendliest of terms with all the staff, in particular Rafaele the head waiter, a Pole pretending to be an Italian through whom confidences leaked as through a sieve. Marisa knew she could not go there with a man and not be reported the next time Rafaele saw me. Whenever I dined there alone – and the husband of a faithless wife dines alone often – he would roll his eyes into the back of his bald head and mention, if not in words then in looks, the coincidence of his having waited on her only the evening or the afternoon before . . . he had no idea in the company of whom . . . he assumed, for what else was there to assume, her brother or some other family member, so intimate was their conversation . . . A beautiful woman, your wife, Signore. Simpatica.
She was taking a risk, my beautiful, simpatica wife. A man might want his wife to be unfaithful without at the same time wanting all the world to know about it. In Dostoevsky, it is true, to be a cuckolded husband proper is to invite all society to be witness to your shame, but we were living in Marylebone not St Petersburg. For Marisa to have appropriated Vico’s was a measure of her confidence in herself, but it also demonstrated her utter certainty of me. I was like a boxer who would hang on to the ropes and soak up every punch. Without fear of being hurt herself, she could circle me and hit as low and as often as she cared to. I’d double up but not go down.
As was proved by the Rumble in the Jungle, however, this kind of tactic can make things tough on the person doing all the punching. I never doubted that it was harder on Marisa than on me. A husband on the ropes is not every wife ’s ideal, no matter what the usual literature of cuckoldry proclaims. This is where the horn-mad Elizabethans had it wrong – a wife who will make a public fool of her husband is hard to find, because to have a fool of a husband is to be half a fool yourself. In facing that one out in public, Marisa showed herself to be a wife in a million.
But I was a husband in a million too, no matter that millions would have put themselves in my position had they been men enough.
Friday, the night Marisa manned the phones for the Samaritans, was the night I began to dine alone again at Vico’s. On no other night of those first months they went out together could I be sure I wouldn’t run into her on Marius’s arm.
Because Fridays were busy, they were not the best evenings to get the attention of Rafaele, but in the shine of his officious, scandal-mongering face as he went scuttling by my table I saw everything I hoped to see. Pity was what he had decided to feel for me once it became obvious I intended to do nothing Italian (or Polish, come to that) to put an end to Marisa’s affair, neither take a knife to her lover, nor throw Marisa herself out into the street. From the far end of the restaurant, even as he was dealing with other customers, he would shake his head in a dumb show of profound compassion, not unmixed with profound contempt. Once, when I made one of those skywriting squiggles in the air requesting the bill, he made one back to me. CUCU, I believe he wrote. And, if I wasn’t mistaken, on those mornings when I called in for a coffee-fix on the way to work, something very like CUCU began to appear in chocolate on my cappuccino.
Then, after a particularly frantic evening, against all protocol he joined me at my table. He was sweating hard.
‘I have come to the end of the line, Signor Quinn,’ he said. ‘I can take no more.’
I didn’t know what to say to him. You forget when you are engrossed in the deviancy of your own desires what a profound effect your moral vagrancy might be having on other people. I reached out and put my hand on his. Mine cool and dry, his moist and fervid. ‘I’m all right,’ I said. ‘In fact I’m more than all right. Everything is as I wish it. Here, drink some Brunello with me.’
Refusing the wine with a twist of his bear-like shoulder, he stared disbelievingly at me, then decided to go on as though I hadn’t spoken. ‘I have been waiter man and boy for forty years,’ he said. ‘It’s enough. It’s time to hang my hat. My legs are tired. Next week I go back to Umbria to be with my family.’ He made a globe with his hands as though to suggest that though the world was now his oyster, the only world he cared about was Umbria. ‘Sunshine, wine, salami,’ he said.
No mention, I noted, of Polish sausage. But I was relieved not to be the reason he was hanging up his hat.
I shook his hand and told him I would miss him. He insisted that we kiss, as men, and then, perhaps as an association with men kissing as men, he said, ‘Signor Quinn, in my country we have a saying – Jestem czlowiekiem i nic, co ludzkie, nie jest mi obce.’
‘That doesn’t sound Italian to me, Rafaele.’
‘It’s Umbrian dialect. I come from a very remote village. But do you know what that saying means? “I’m human and nothing that is human is to me strange.”’
