The Act of Love, page 30
‘I will,’ he said at last, ‘accept another glass of your wine.’ I hesitated, worrying for the rug. Would he throw wine at me? I decided not. He had struck me once. Attacking me twice would, for Marius, have been to make himself predictable. Instead, he raised his filled glass to me. ‘I drink to you,’ he said. ‘I have never met a man who disgusts me more.’
I raised my glass in return. ‘Not for the first time,’ I said, ‘you have made my day. From the moment I clapped eyes on you all I ever wanted – no, not all I ever wanted, but much of what I wanted, was to turn your stomach. My only fear now is that like Othello my occupation’s gone.’
He put his wine down and rubbed his face with his hands, almost as though he were washing me off him. ‘What the fuck have I ever done to you?’ he said.
It was a fair question and I gave it the consideration it deserved. I covered my face. Maybe we had to do this blind.
‘“Done”? Nothing,’ I said. ‘But nor have I acted as though you had. After all, to put this at its crudest, what have I “done” to you but given you my wife? I know, I know, Marisa was not mine to give. Any more than you were mine to give to her. But I laboured, when you were getting nowhere with each other, to bring you forth. Without me you would both be still discussing Baudelaire on the High Street. So I have nothing toapologise to you for. But yes, it pleased me, man to man, to think I was doing what would appal you to your soul, and you a man without a soul. A thoroughgoing masochist will always be an affront to a sadist. He takes away the sadist’s raison d’être.’
‘I’m at a loss to understand why you have me figured as a sadist. This isn’t the first time you’ve accused me of a brutality I must tell you I don’t find in myself.’
‘That’s because you’re looking in the wrong place. Your brutality is the brutality of the rationalist. You’ve said you are not unusual and indeed I see you as very much a man of our time. Nothing surprises or disappoints you, you boast. You have seen through to the bottom of human nature. And then a respectably dressed husband with a quiet manner hands you his wife and you’re disgusted. One night you must let me take you to a club I know. That will test the strength of your world-weariness. What you don’t seem to understand is that I like you. I feel we have something in common. We are both trying to survive the death of God. Only I think I survive it better. I don’t pretend to disillusion. I say, when there is nothing else left to believe in, believe in the erotic life. If you’ve truly nowhere else to go, then let it take you on a journey of its choosing.’
‘If you’re telling me this is a contest between belief systems, you’ve been fighting with yourself. In relation to your wife I never knew of your existence until the other day.’
‘Your incuriosity does you no credit.’
‘And you think your obscene curiosity does you any? In all your nosing about your wife ’s life and mine, did it ever occur to you we might feel sincerely for each other?’
‘All the time. It was what I wanted.’
‘Why? So that you could rub your itch?’
‘So that I could love her better.’
‘You can only love a woman beloved of someone else?’
‘I could ask the very same question of you. I said we had much in common. But no – I loved Marisa fine when there was no one else, not you or those who preceded you. Since you, however, yes, I have loved her more.
‘You are hooked on loss, my friend.’
‘And you are hooked on victory. We both know that love will die at last, turn tepid and perfunctory, decline into mere companionship and affection, if there is not cruelty in it. Not physical harm or violence, but cruelty. The cruelty of loss. Of dread. Of jealousy. Whatever the counselling professions tell us about trust, where we are not jealous we are not in love at all. Othello was within his rights, though it is not fashionable to say so, to claim he loved too well. His mistake was not to see that suffocating his wife was not the best way to express it. Inviting Cassio to his bed would have been the infinitely preferable option for all parties.’
‘Provided he could watch?’
‘Maybe. He was a simple soldier. But being told, as Iago very nearly taught him, is more rewarding. Words excite far more than mere vision ever can.’
He looked at me evenly. Had circumstance been otherwise I would have said with compassion.
‘Words can deceive,’ he said.
‘Are you saying Marisa deceived me? Perhaps I’ve disgusted you enough for one day, but I must tell you that ours has always been a highly verbal marriage. When she deceives me, she tells me.’
‘Now it’s my turn to express philosophic disappointment in you. Words aren’t always, as you know as well as anybody, messengers of truth. Even when they mean to be honest they are bound by the crookedness of their nature. I’m surprised it has never occurred to you that Marisa might have deceived you in her deceptions.’
‘You are too subtle for me.’
He shrugged and rose. ‘Then let’s agree we have out-subtilised each other.’
I scrutinised him. A host’s prerogative – to take a long, insolent and uncontested look at an unbidden guest. A handsome man without a doubt, Marius, but dry. Squeeze him and nothing would come out. Just a little dust. And he was more haggard when one really looked. Had they always been there, those dark impermeable circles round his eyes, each like therim of an eclipsed moon? Mustn’t it have made Marisa sad, looking into those?
‘So why did you come here?’ I asked him.
‘Old times’ sake.’
‘I see you intend to leave on a victorious note. Well I’m not hard to vanquish, as you know.’
‘I’ll let you into a secret. I don’t feel victorious. And I never felt victorious over poor Jim Hanley, though that is your view of me. Amor vincit omnia. Love ruins us all.’
‘Only if we let it.’
‘It’s a dice with death, and you know it.’
‘Better to say a dance with death. Enjoy the dance, is my view.’
‘Well that’s your lewd romance.’
‘And, don’t forget, Klossowski’s,’ I said, noticing that he had given Helmut Newton’s photograph a final glance. ‘In fact I think you’ll find that half the men in the world are of my party – the half that’s not of yours. There’s no other way to be. Your way or my way. The hammer or the anvil. Finito.’
‘And who’s having the better time, would you say?’
‘Depends how you measure. But if we’re talking rapture, the anvil. The hammer strikes, the anvil feels the blow. The hammer does, the anvil feels. Hammers don’t paint paintings or write novels.’
‘Of the Henry James type?’
‘Of any type. Art happens on the anvil, beneath the hammer.’
‘Look,’ he said suddenly, as if he didn’t want to get into any of that, his voice finding another key entirely, ‘forgive this intrusion into your marriage—’
I could have snorted, but I didn’t. I too was suddenly in another mood. ‘That,’ I said, ‘since we are being candid, is if I have a marriage.’
He looked away momentarily. Not a subject for him to enter into. Funny how a man can sleep with your wife and still be nice about whether you do or do not have a marriage.
‘What I was going to say,’ he said, ‘was just this. My reputation mightbe of no concern to you, but Marisa’s well-being surely is. Punch me on the nose if you like – no doubt you believe you owe me one – but I think – and as the subject of your conversations I have a right to think – that you should listen less to what you want her to tell you, and more to what she wishes to say.’
‘What is that supposed to mean?’
He extended his hand to me and then held mine a moment longer than was necessary. A shocking act, I thought. It made me catch my breath. So this was what Marius felt like. Would he kiss me next? Had he come on an ironic mission, to fill me in on the few things I didn’t know about him that Marisa did? Such as the fleshly texture of him?
But if so, that was all he intended to fill me in on. He offered no answer to my question.
‘Words deceive,’ he said again. And then was gone.
I sat a long time wondering what, if anything, he ’d been trying to tell me.
The next time we met – if I may put it fancifully – was in a cemetery.
The following afternoon – I took the timing to be coincidental – I received a call from Flops saying that she and Rowlie were on their way to me from Richmond to collect some of Marisa’s belongings and would I arrange to be at the house for them.
‘So she ’s with you,’ I said. ‘Is she all right?’
‘We ’ll talk when we see you, Felix.’
‘So is she all right?’ I asked again when I opened the door to them.
Rowlie looked away. Flops stared at me with what I thought was loathing.
‘Of course she ’s not all right,’ she said.
I took that to refer to the degree of upset I’d caused Marisa, the nature of which she might well have conveyed to her half-sister. Once the family is involved, the pursuit of sexual ecstasy by whatever means can never be made to sound good. Perversion never travels well across the in-laws.
‘I’ll get some things together for her then,’ I said in quasi-shame.
‘No, Felix. She asked me to do it. Please make this easy for us all.’
‘Us all?’
‘She ’s given me a list of what she wants and where I’ll find them. She said you wouldn’t object.’
‘Object! Of course I won’t object. What do you think I am?’ She didn’t answer.
Rowlie stayed in the kitchen with me. We barely spoke. It was almost as though he was there to keep an eye on me, to be sure I made it easy for them all. I offered him tea. He shook his head.
‘Something stronger?’
‘I’m driving,’ he said.
And then, emboldened by the sound of his own voice, he said, ‘It’s not good, old man.’
‘What’s not good?’
‘Marisa.’
‘What about Marisa isn’t good?’
‘Her health.’ He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Sorry.’
And that was how I learned the doctors had found a malignant tumour in Marisa’s breast.
She had half promised me this once, not long after I’d come clean about the Cuban. We were both exhausted after a night of narrative – I exhausted into exaltation, she into the grey remorseful sleeplessness of second thoughts.
‘What will become of us?’ she said.
‘We will grow old and love each other forever.’
‘Will we? When my flesh falls into folds and my knees have gone?’
‘I’m not him. The ageing of the body doesn’t repel me.’
‘Doesn’t now.’
‘Won’t ever.’
‘How do you know it won’t?’
‘I’m not a man who changes with the seasons.’
‘That’s just what frightens me, Felix. You’ll still be you, lying here waiting for me to come hobbling home in the early morning with stories of men falling at my feet. But I won’t still be me. The men won’t go on falling, Felix.’
‘They’ll always go on falling, Marisa. You possess the secret of eternal beauty.’
‘I don’t,’ she cried, sitting up in bed, ‘I don’t possess the secret of eternal anything.’ She took her breasts in her hands, exactly as my Aunt Agatha had done when I was a boy, to shame every man who bore the name of Quinn. ‘It won’t be the men that fall, Felix, it will be these. That’s what they do. If you’re lucky that’s all they do. You must face that. Anything can happen. And where are we then? How will you be when the surgeon’s finished with me?’
‘Don’t start invoking surgeons.’
‘How will you be, Felix?’
‘I will be concerned for you. That’s all.’
She shivered as though an icy blast had blown through her. ‘Easy to say. But you need me whole for what you like. It’s a tyranny, Felix. I don’t deny it has its compensations. And it must speak to something in me otherwise I’d have walked away from you long ago. You have influenced me too much. Men always have. I’m like my mother. I don’t blame you. You could have influenced me in other ways. You could have painted a different picture of me. Mother Teresa, say. I’d have been good as her. But what I do I do. I don’t complain. But I’d be insane not to worry where it will end.’
‘Not with a surgeon. Don’t wish surgeons on us.’
‘There you are! Don’t wish surgeons on us. It would be me he’d be chopping up, not you. But already it’s you who’s being mutilated.’
‘I’m speaking about my feelings for you, Marisa.’
‘Yes, you might be. But you are also thinking about your desire for me.’
‘Any husband or wife must learn to deal with what the surgeon does
to desire.’
‘But your desires are not the desires of any husband, Felix. You’d bedealing with what the surgeon does to every other man’s desire for me as well. I can’t say it is isn’t flattering sometimes to be the mistress of the world in your eyes. I go with the pretence. But what follows is that I’ll be the hag or amputee of the world in the end.’
‘Marisa, what is this? You’re a young woman. The world will have melted or blown itself up long before that time.’
‘That time, Felix, could be any time.’
But I was sleepy now, wiped out by all she ’d told me of the afternoon she ’d spent with Marius, her untainted limbs entwined with his, her eyes rolling in her head like a bacchante ’s, her breasts bathed in a cold quicksilver sweat.
And now here it was, from the mouth of Rowlie – my comeuppance. Symmetrical and jeering: the Cuban doctor by Marisa’s bedside again, only this time wielding a surgeon’s blade. Except – and this is the trouble with comeuppance – it was Marisa’s comeuppance too, indeed far more Marisa’s comeuppance than mine, and what had she done to call down so terrible a retribution?
I got no more out of Rowlie. When Flops descended, in a cloud of bags and cases, she refused to speak to me. I followed her out of the house and watched her load up the car. ‘So what now?’ I asked. ‘What’s happening next?’
‘To you, I suppose you mean,’ she said, her head in the boot of the car.
‘To Marisa. To Marisa. What’s happening? How do I see her?’
‘You don’t.’
‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘she ’s my wife.’
A sardonic laugh from Flops. I was absolutely certain she said beneath her breath, ‘And how many other men’s, thanks to you,’ but she didn’t say it loud enough for me to challenge her.
Rowlie was already in the driving seat. ‘Text her, old man,’ he said confidentially, as though assisting in our elopement.
‘Text her! Fucking text her!’
But I was shouting at a car that had driven away.
I tried ringing Marisa’s mobile but it was off. I rang Flops’s home number, but if Marisa was there she wasn’t answering. I thought about getting a cab to Richmond then changed my mind; a seriously ill Marisa would not appreciate my making a scene. So text her was what I did.
Darling, what can I do? I wrote.
An hour later a text came back. Darling, nothing.
With the words, it was as though a sheet of tears had fallen. I did not even try to blink their sting away. I succumbed to them as though they had been foretold, tears waiting for me from another life. I lay down on our bed and closed my eyes. Subspace with a vengeance. When I next opened my eyes it was dark outside. I wanted to read the text again but didn’t dare. She had called me darling which was something, more than something, but she had told me I could do nothing, which was less than nothing.
Darling, nothing. Nothing in the sense that there was nothing she wanted from me? Nothing in the sense that there was nothing I could do, whether she would have welcomed my help or not? Or nothing in the sense that there was nothing anyone could do? It was too final to bear, however I read it.
Death came two-tiered for me. There was the death of men and then there was the death of women, and the death of women was immeasurably more painful. I wept over my mother long after my father forgot her name. ‘Pull yourself together,’ he told me when he could stand the sight and sound of me no more, ‘you’ll need some grief left over for me.’
‘You’re just a man,’ I told him.
‘I’m your father.’
‘A father’s not a mother.’
‘That won’t stop me dying.’
‘No, but it will stop me caring.’
I had always known I would not handle my mother’s dying well. I had been preparing for it too long. As far back as I could remember I had been possessed of the utter sadness of it – not just my mother’s death, wheneverit happened, but the death of women, full stop. And later there was not a woman I encountered whose death I did not foresee and grieve for in advance of its occurring. There are women out there in the world today, rosy-cheeked and blooming who have no idea that I broke down before their coffins years ago.
No doubt it goes with my condition. Freud understood the passivemasochistic state as one in which the son takes the place of the mother and desires to be loved by the father. Hard to credit with a father like mine, but that’s the unconscious for you. If Freud was right then I was grieving for the woman I had already killed or intended to kill.
But there must have been another stage, too, in which I disavowed my mother not by killing her but by denigrating her. Grieve for her, prostitute her. Prostitute her, grieve for her. Who’s to say which comes first or where the causation is?
All I know, whether I wanted to be the mother, or wanted to defile her, was that desire had always been imbued with sadness for me. I no sooner fell in love with a woman than I imagined her dead.
IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED I LIVED BEHIND THE SHEET OF TEARS THAT had fallen with Marisa’s text. I did not go into work. I barely left the house. I rang Richmond ten times a day but always got the answermachine. I left messages but they weren’t answered. I dreaded ringing Marisa’s mobile because I knew that if I heard her voice I’d break down. And how would that help her? Texts, too, I feared, because another like the last and I’d be a dead man myself.
