Read Online The Act of Love by Howard Jacobson - Free Book Online
Authors: Howard Jacobson
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called that, and only women of principle have ever aroused me.
Man for man – setting aside his modest media fame – there was not a great deal to choose between us, Marisa’s then husband and me. I had more money, he had a more demonstrative presence; I was better-looking, he had a more powerful build, but neither of us was what you’d call a Byron. What I believe swung it my way was talk. I’ve said that Freddy was a conversationalist, but a conversationalist will often leave a woman lonely. Marisa wanted to converse, not be conversation’s recipient. And I was all talk of the sort she needed. Talk that was dramatic, observational and of the moment, talk that was amusing but more importantly amusable, talk that was fed by talk, talk that was listening to talk. I am said to be womanly in this regard, though I confess to not quite knowing what that means.
Oceanic, perhaps. Not rigidly structured. Amniotic. I liked starting without knowing where I was going to finish or be led, I liked letting the current of talk carry me along, wishing neither to deliver a lecture to any woman fortunate enough to find herself ensconced with me (as Freddy always did), nor to curtail her in a flight of her own because I had more pressing matters to attend to (as Freddy always had). I made myself an agreeable but above all an available companion. On days when we’d made no arrangement to meet, Marisa always knew she could ring me up and ask me to accompany her to a gallery opening, to the theatre, to a concert, or to dinner. It helped that we were near neighbours, both residents of Marylebone. Everything we needed for a life of civilised, incipient adultery was there for us to extend a dainty pair of fingers and pluck without appearing obvious or greedy. We looked at art a lot, but we ate out even more. Food was our milieu, restaurants more the medium of our courtship than hotel bedrooms. Marisa’s favourite restaurant – the one to which Marius would one day win the right to take her, the scene of their first kiss (hear the deranging sibilants in it: first kiss ) – was my favourite restaurant first. It was part of my appeal – how many more restaurants I knew than she and Freddy did, and how many more restaurants knew me. I must have appeared sybaritic to her: a man wholly given over to the three great sedentary pleasures – reading, eating, talking. And women like men who sit still for them.
But Marisa also liked men who would, at other hours, dance with her. I was reluctant at first. Not because I couldn’t dance but because dancing was an activity I associated with my mother and my aunts and never remembered I enjoyed until I did it. It was her telling me that Freddy had never danced with her that changed my mind. Whatever Freddy wasn’t, I was. Whatever Freddy didn’t, I did. And the dancing school, incongruously housed in the vaults of a grey steepled Victorian church, was virtually on my doorstep. When Marisa rang me out of the blue and asked me, even in the middle of a working day, whether I was free to dance, I could be quickstepping with her in under twenty minutes. Sometimes she would already be there when I arrived, in the arms of one of those apache dancers shecould conjure up out of a room of cleanly shaven bank clerks. Then I would sit – a more than willing wallflower – on one of the plastic chairs arrayed on one side of the room, among the discarded anoraks and day shoes, and let the man and the movement claim her.
If she left her body when she danced, I left mine just watching her. She wasn’t like the many careworn Japanese dancers who attended the school, precise and anxious in their foot movements, as though dancing was something the body had to learn from scratch and happened only in an area between the ankle and the toes, at the behest entirely of the brain, but nor was she one of those Corybantes who thrash their hair about and wave their hands. Hers was a much more measured frenzy –
Man for man – setting aside his modest media fame – there was not a great deal to choose between us, Marisa’s then husband and me. I had more money, he had a more demonstrative presence; I was better-looking, he had a more powerful build, but neither of us was what you’d call a Byron. What I believe swung it my way was talk. I’ve said that Freddy was a conversationalist, but a conversationalist will often leave a woman lonely. Marisa wanted to converse, not be conversation’s recipient. And I was all talk of the sort she needed. Talk that was dramatic, observational and of the moment, talk that was amusing but more importantly amusable, talk that was fed by talk, talk that was listening to talk. I am said to be womanly in this regard, though I confess to not quite knowing what that means.
Oceanic, perhaps. Not rigidly structured. Amniotic. I liked starting without knowing where I was going to finish or be led, I liked letting the current of talk carry me along, wishing neither to deliver a lecture to any woman fortunate enough to find herself ensconced with me (as Freddy always did), nor to curtail her in a flight of her own because I had more pressing matters to attend to (as Freddy always had). I made myself an agreeable but above all an available companion. On days when we’d made no arrangement to meet, Marisa always knew she could ring me up and ask me to accompany her to a gallery opening, to the theatre, to a concert, or to dinner. It helped that we were near neighbours, both residents of Marylebone. Everything we needed for a life of civilised, incipient adultery was there for us to extend a dainty pair of fingers and pluck without appearing obvious or greedy. We looked at art a lot, but we ate out even more. Food was our milieu, restaurants more the medium of our courtship than hotel bedrooms. Marisa’s favourite restaurant – the one to which Marius would one day win the right to take her, the scene of their first kiss (hear the deranging sibilants in it: first kiss ) – was my favourite restaurant first. It was part of my appeal – how many more restaurants I knew than she and Freddy did, and how many more restaurants knew me. I must have appeared sybaritic to her: a man wholly given over to the three great sedentary pleasures – reading, eating, talking. And women like men who sit still for them.
But Marisa also liked men who would, at other hours, dance with her. I was reluctant at first. Not because I couldn’t dance but because dancing was an activity I associated with my mother and my aunts and never remembered I enjoyed until I did it. It was her telling me that Freddy had never danced with her that changed my mind. Whatever Freddy wasn’t, I was. Whatever Freddy didn’t, I did. And the dancing school, incongruously housed in the vaults of a grey steepled Victorian church, was virtually on my doorstep. When Marisa rang me out of the blue and asked me, even in the middle of a working day, whether I was free to dance, I could be quickstepping with her in under twenty minutes. Sometimes she would already be there when I arrived, in the arms of one of those apache dancers shecould conjure up out of a room of cleanly shaven bank clerks. Then I would sit – a more than willing wallflower – on one of the plastic chairs arrayed on one side of the room, among the discarded anoraks and day shoes, and let the man and the movement claim her.
If she left her body when she danced, I left mine just watching her. She wasn’t like the many careworn Japanese dancers who attended the school, precise and anxious in their foot movements, as though dancing was something the body had to learn from scratch and happened only in an area between the ankle and the toes, at the behest entirely of the brain, but nor was she one of those Corybantes who thrash their hair about and wave their hands. Hers was a much more measured frenzy –
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