The Act of Love (2 page)

He was thirty-five – though he looked and sounded older – tall and hazardously built, with a face suggesting ecological catastrophe: lost city of Atlantis eyes, blasted cheeks, a cruel, dried-up riverbed of a mouth. Women found the look attractive, mistaking their precariousness for his. Me too, though I was in every respect his opposite. I was the ecstatic he thought the world had done with. I am the one whom love consumes.

We’re all fundamentalists now, regardless of whether we’re believers or we’re atheists. One way or another you have to be devout. Marius worshipped at the altar of Disbelief. I at the altar of Eros. A god’s a god.

Faith is said to make you strong. My faith was of a different sort. I believed in order to be made weak. Love’s flagellant, in weakness I found my singularity.

Four o’clock it was, anyway. The handover hour. A conceit so lewd I can barely breathe imagining Marius imagining it.

As for who was handing over what, that is not a question that can be settled in a sentence, if it can be settled at all. The beauty of an obscene contract is that there’s something in it for everyone.

The wife, the lover, the husband.

I was the husband.

Here he is. In his black velvet jacket sumptuously lined with dark fur, he is a proud, handsome despot who plays with the lives and souls of men . . . Under his icy gaze I am again seized with a deadly terror, a premonition that this man will capture and enslave her, that he has the power to subjugate her entirely. Confronted with such fierce virility I feel ashamed and envious.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch,
Venus in Furs

I FIRST SIGHTED MARIUS, LONG BEFORE I HAD ANY INKLING I’D HAVE USE FOR
him – or he for me, come to that – at a country churchyard funeral in Shropshire. One of those heaving-Wrekin mornings the poet Housman made famous – rain streaming on stone and hillock, the gale plying the saplings double, a sunken, sodden, better to be dead than alive in morning. It didn’t matter to me, I was from somewhere else. I could slip on galoshes before I left my hotel, put up an umbrella, endure what had to be endured, and then be gone. But others at the graveside chose to live in this hope-forsaken place. Don’t ask me why. To assist in their own premature interment, is my guess. To be done with life before it could be done with them.

Such a lust for pain there is out there. Such apocalyptic impatience. I don’t just mean in Shropshire, though Shropshire might have more than its fair share of it, I mean everywhere. Bring on the dirty bomb, we cry, and publish instructions for its manufacture on the Internet. Blow winds and crack your cheeks: we scorch the earth, pitch our tent at the foot of a melting iceberg or disturbed volcano, sunbathe in the path of a tsunami. We can’t wait for it to be over. The masochists we are!

And all the while we have the wherewithal to suffer exquisitely and still live, if we only knew where to look. In our own beds, for example. In the beloved person lying next to us.

Love hard enough and you have access to all the pain you’ll ever want.

Not a thought I articulated at the time, I have to say, not having met, not having married, not having lost my heart and mind to the woman
who would be my torturer. Marisa came later. But in the vegetative dark that preceded her, I never doubted that my skin was thinning in prepsaration for someone. Easy to be wise after the event and see Marisa as the fulfilment of all my longings, the one I’d been keeping myself for; but of course I didn’t fall in love only
provisionally
before I met her. Each time I lost my heart and mind, I believed I had lost them for good. Yet no sooner did I regain my balance than I knew that the woman who would finish me off completely – make me hers as I had never so far been anybody’s, a man possessed in all senses of the word – was still out there, waiting for her consummation as I was waiting for mine. Hence, I suppose, my interest in Marius, before I apprehended the part he would play in that consummation. I must have seen in him the pornographic complement to my as yet incompletely formed desires.

It was impossible to tell from his demeanour at the funeral whether he was one of the principal mourners. He looked sulkily aggrieved, scarfed up and inky-cloaked like Hamlet, but somehow, though he gave conspicuous support to the widow – a woman I didn’t know, but to whom there clung a sort of shameful consciousness of ancient scandal, like a fallen woman in a Victorian novel – I didn’t think he was the dead man’s son. His distress, assuming it to have been distress, was of a different order. If I had to nail it in a word, I’d say it was begrudging – as though he believed the mourners were weeping for the wrong person. Some men attend a funeral jealously, wishing to appropriate it for themselves, and Marius struck me as such a man.

I’d known and done a spot of business with the deceased. He had been a professor of literature with a large library. I had travelled up from London to value it. Nothing came of our negotiations. The library was ill-cared for and crumbled into dust before I could come up with a figure. A fortuitous event in its own way, since the professor did not really want to part with his books, whatever their condition. He was a sweet man, out of time and place, who expostulated against life’s cruelties in a squeak, like a mouse. One of life’s, now one of death’s, disappointees. But I hadn’t known him so well that I could move among his family and friends and
ask them who the Black Prince was. As for striking up an acquaintance with him directly, that was out of the question. He was as obstinately sealed from eye contact or introduction as the corpse itself.

Observing him later, in the little centrally heated village hall to which we’d trooped after the service, plied double like the saplings, I wondered whether the bleak weather had been responsible for his appearance at the graveside, so much less saturnine was he, divested of his coat, his scarf and, if I wasn’t mistaken, the widow. To say he was merry would be to go too far, but he’d turned animatedly unapproachable, as opposed to simply unapproachable. A cold fire seemed to come off him, like stars off a sparkler.

He was handsome, if you find high and hawkish men handsome. As a non-predatory man myself, I felt intimidated by him. But that’s part of what being handsome means, isn’t it: instilling fear.

He was standing by a table of sausages and pork pies, making access to it difficult for other people, flirting icily with two poochy-looking girls who, for no other reason than that he appeared to wish to divide them, I took to be sisters. He gave the impression, fairly or not, of a man who would cross any boundary if there was gloomy mischief in it. It was this same impression that made me wonder whether the girls were quite of an age to be spoken to with such freedom, all things considered. Exactly how old they were I couldn’t tell – when you don’t have children of your own (and I am not a breeding man) you lose the power to distinguish twelve from twenty-seven – but they wore the nakedly raffish expressions of girls who know they can get you a prison sentence.

For his part, though Marius allowed them to feel they had exclusive use of his attention and were exclusively the beneficiaries of his brilliance, he succeeded at the same time in holding them up as a sort of reproach to the gathering, as though it was their dullness that reduced him to whiling away his time with chits in black lipstick and nose rings. But I might have misread him. Perhaps he was deeply affected by the funeral, consumed by a grief which only indiscreet intercourse with the young and the provocative could assuage.

What did they see in him, I wondered, that dissolved the usual indifference young girls feel towards lugubriously clever men nearly twice their age. They laughed with a responsiveness that would have been flagrant at a coming-out ball let alone a funeral breakfast. They raised their bare, flushed, perilous pixie faces to him, ablaze with the consciousness that there was an audacity in his starry attention that demanded a reciprocal boldness from them.

Quite suddenly, as though he feared a scene, he called it to an end, recalling himself to what he owed the dear departed and his widow, however dull their conversation. But in the moment before he left the girls I caught him mouthing a phrase at them – half secretly, half not. I, for one, had no difficulty interpreting the communication, but then I miss very little that has a promise of impropriety in it. And yes, I admit it, will find impropriety where impropriety isn’t. Not this time though.

‘Four . . . o’ . . . clock,’ he said without making a sound.

So what was he doing? Arranging to meet them after school?

Four o’clock.

The tremble hour.

If it
was
an assignation, he didn’t keep it – that was my guess. The jailbait, yes; one, or more likely both of them, each egging the other on as they stood at whatever corner Marius had instructed them to meet him, pulling back their frilly sleeves to consult their Mickey Mouse watches every other minute, laughing into their handkerchiefs, while their pulpy hearts pounded inside their blazers. But not Marius. What he wanted from the girls he had already taken.

How you can tell on so brief an appraisal (and most of it from behind) that a man is an absentee libertine, that he lights fires and doesn’t stop to see them blaze, that at the last he’d sooner withhold a sexual favour than confer one, I can’t explain. Perhaps that sort of sadism shows in the curvature of the spine. Perhaps I’m just good at seeing what I want to see. However you account for it, I felt, in advance, the ‘sting of his disregard’
– I steal the phrase from Leopold Bloom, Bloomuponwhom, the patron saint of the subjugated and deceived – as acutely as those girls would have felt it at four o’clock on whatever day in whatever place Marius did not turn up to meet them.

My territory – sexual insult. I’m a connoisseur of it. I could write you a treatise, a thousand pages long, and in a dozen languages, some of them dead, on the difference between a sting and a smart. It comes, partly, from an extensive and perhaps over-collaborative reading of that category of classic novel (English, French, Russian, whatever) whose subject is humiliation. I’m tempted to ask what other category of classic novel is there. But I accept – if with bewilderment – that there are some readers who open books in order to be mystified by extravagant event, or stirred by acts of prosaic heroism. I must have been born without a taste for mystery or heroics.

Love, that is all I’ve ever cared to read about. Love and love’s agonies.

Love afflicted me.

I draw no distinction between literature and life. In the stories I precociously devoured I gravitated naturally to the pain – to the sorrows alike of Young Werther and the older Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, to the easily bruised boyish prickliness of Julien Sorel and the deep womanly contemplative sadness of Anne Elliot. But it had never been any different for me in life. I was born lovesick – unrequited, highly strung, quiveringly jealous, with a morbid yearning to give my heart long before there was anyone to give my heart to.

That I too would be spurned, left to pine away like the heroes and heroines of my reading, I never doubted.

The first girl I could ever truly call a girlfriend – the first girl whose fingers I was allowed to interlace with mine – betrayed me the second time I took her out. We went into the cinema together and she left two and a half hours later with someone else. How and where she found him
when there appeared to be only she and I sitting alone in the darkness and I had never once let go of her hand, what she saw in him with the lights down wherever she found him, why she preferred him to me, what I lacked or had done wrong that could explain that preference or her cruelty in making it so plain – none of this I understood. I was fifteen, she the same. She had a cascade of black hair, eyes like a fortune-teller’s and long, slender brown arms which I imagined wrapped around me twice. She had kissed previously, I had not. But she came from a family of teachers – her father taught cello at the Royal Academy of Music – and she said she would enjoy teaching me to kiss. Now, inexplicably, she was enjoying teaching another pupil more.

I stood outside her house after school for weeks, imagining that she would relent, that what had happened had been a mistake, a confusion that conversation or just the sight of me would clear up, but she never showed her face, not even at a window. I hoped her father might come out. As a cello teacher he would surely have understood my desolation. But he too never appeared. Eventually a girl emerged from the house, I assumed Faith’s sister, to inform me of the situation. ‘Faith says she’s going out with Martin now. She says would you please go home and leave her alone.’

I put my satchel down as though I meant to stay rooted to that spot forever. What did I want? The earth to open up and take me? A retraction from Faith of her sister’s words? A glimpse of Martin that would at least show me what I didn’t have?

The sister must have been moved by the spectacle of thwarted love I presented because she found a kinder tone in which to say, ‘These things happen. You’ll get over it.’