The Act of Love (30 page)

But then, as Marisa said would happen if I persisted, I struck lucky.

‘Samaritans, can I help you?’ The deep, when I am laid in earth contralto in which, only five years before, she had consented to be my wife.
Yes, she
said, yes she will Yes
, only not like Molly Bloom. Not
then
like Molly Bloom.

Curiously, it wasn’t the fact of my ringing her that seemed most duplicitous, but the fact of my ringing her from our house. I should be speaking from a phone box, I thought. I should be in the street. She would not be able to identify the street, but the silence of our house, what if it was obvious to her immediately? And wasn’t it a sort of betrayal?

I pushed a paper handkerchief into each cheek as we ’d done at school to change our voices. ‘I’m having trouble with my marriage,’ I said, sounding like Brando in
The Godfather
.

I could hear her listening hard. Much of your time, she ’d said when talking to me about her work, is spent deciding whether anything the caller is telling you is true.

‘What sort of trouble are you having with your marriage?’ she asked after a decent period.

‘I don’t appear to have one.’

Again she waited. Then she said, ‘In what sense don’t you feel you have a marriage?’

I sounded so old she must have expected me to say, ‘In the sense that my wife died sixty years ago.’

I moved the wads of paper with my tongue, trying to shed a few years. ‘In the sense,’ was what I finally did say, ‘that people tell me by their looks I don’t. Strangers regard me with compassion. The crueller of them laugh at me. And friends have started to enquire how the divorce is going, though I didn’t know we were separating, let alone divorcing.’

Paranoid, I heard her thinking.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ I went on. ‘You’re thinking I’m paranoid. But I have the evidence of my own eyes. Yesterday I found an envelope containing two theatre tickets on the hall table.’

Three weeks before, I had found two ticket stubs for
Don Giovanni
on our hall table. Along with a credit card voucher in Marisa’s name. It was not a performance to which she had invited me to accompany her.

‘Theatre tickets don’t necessarily prove anything.’

Now I was the one listening hard.

‘They do to me,’ I said. ‘They prove fornication, adultery, betrayal – those sorts of things.’

I waited for her to slam the phone down. But there was only a long, deep silence. ‘Felix,’ she said to me at last, ‘why are you doing this? You know you can’t ring me here.’

‘Can’t I? Then where can I ring you?’

‘Felix . . .’

‘I’m ringing the Samaritans, not you. I have to talk to someone. I have a wife who is too sophisticated to communicate with me in the normal way of words. So I’ll talk to whoever picks up the phone. You just happen to be the unlucky one.’

‘Felix, we can’t go on with this conversation here.’

‘Then just tell me one thing –’ I was astonished by how upset I’d suddenly become. My hands were shaking like an old man’s. My eyes were wet. And I didn’t recognise the place my tears or my words were coming from.

‘No, Felix, not like this.’

‘– have you fucked him yet?’

And this time, with the faintest of clicks, the phone did go down.

That night we talked.

I will not reproduce the conversation because I cannot. Though I’d begged her for words it’s not the words that I remember. Even in extremis we were too good at talk, too slick, too oiled, for talk to have got us anywhere. Perhaps people who do not as a rule speak much to each other can use language to break through into candour. Not us. For all that I’d
complained of the web of reticence she ’d spun around me sexually, we were worded out. Silent or not, we suffered from a surfeit of articulation and literature. What we needed to help us break through into candour, Marisa and I, was not more Medea or Menelaus but raw emotion. We needed to weep awhile together. Throw things. Maybe do violence to each other.

It goes without saying that neither of us raised a hand or threw a plate. Though I – for reasons that were then and still partially remain inexplicable – shed tears.

Marisa cradled me like a mother. ‘Hush, Felix,’ that I do remember her saying. ‘Hush, Felix.’

Where did it come from, all that emotion? What was I crying for?

Marisa was too good and intelligent a woman to point out to me that there was illogic in these tears, if true tears of regret they were. But it was palpable between us that I had rubbed the lamp in full knowledge of what would emerge from it, and been granted the first and maybe even the second of my three wishes.

‘No going back on it now, Felix’ – that, at least in so many words, she did not say.

But she did leave me with the sense that there was no going back on it for her. ‘I did warn you about me,’ she said, or something of the sort.

In fact Marisa had never been one of those women who present themselves as monsters of sexual volatility, warning men to beware that matrix of immoderation which is their heart. So her doing it now filled me with alarm. What was I to make of it – that she was lovesick? That Marius was for keeps now? That he had become, for her, unrelinquishable?

‘I am not asking you to relinquish him,’ was something else I didn’t say.

But I was being cradled like a child, and like a child felt all of life ’s cruel opposites.

I took the opportunity, while I was on her breast, to tell her at last about the Cuban doctor. Maybe it would explain or extenuate me.

She laughed. ‘The dirty devil,’ she said.

‘Him or me?’

‘Both.’

‘It’s your fault for having a chest which is so beautiful.’

‘Beautiful chests are ten a penny, Felix.’

‘Beautiful ones, maybe, but yours is more than beautiful. Yours is eloquent. It announces you. Your chest is your prologue, Marisa.’

‘Prologue to what?’

‘To you. To the mystery of you. That’s why you are so shocking to look at. You should enter a room backwards. Front on, you promise too much. You hurt my eyes. You always have.’

‘Then close your eyes.’

‘I’ve tried that. But all I see is the Cuban unlocking you. It’s a sight, Marisa. Another man’s hands . . .’

‘Hush, Felix.’

‘No, I won’t hush. Once you’ve seen that sight you can’t rest until you see it again.’

‘Well you’ll just have to use your imagination.’

Somehow or other we had it settled, before we went to sleep, that Marius would come to the house while I was at the shop. This was intended to answer the uncertainties from which we’d both been suffering. He would come to us and put both our minds at rest. But I would have to be sure I knew what I was doing.

‘What
I
am doing?’

‘Yes, Felix. What
you
are doing.’

‘It’s you, surely,’ I said. Which, after a long and fearful pause, she took to mean that yes, I did know what I was doing.

Whether or not Marisa also intended it as a sort of parental assurance that I would not be left alone, that I’d know where she was, that she would remain as my wife, under my roof, I couldn’t have said for certain. But that was how it felt. Like breaking a child in slowly to the fact of separation.

And yes, though it would have to be on her terms, subject to her
restrictions and within the limits of what she considered permissible – ‘What
I
consider permissible, Felix’ – she would set aside a ritual time to include me, to the extent that language can ever be inclusive, in the progress of her feelings for Marius and of his feelings for her. Henceforth, she would be as wife to Marius, and as storyteller to me. We would stay married, but our conjugality would begin and end where her narrative began and ended.

We shed a final tear together and turned over. I was not proud of myself. I had hardly behaved like the revolutionary of sex I believed myself to me. But the means sometimes justify the ends. Looked at all round, I thought things had worked out pretty much the way I wanted them to. And I went to sleep anxious but exhilarated
.

THUS OUR LITTLE FAMILY. MARIUS AND MARISA IN BED TOGETHER IN MY
house, I – unless I had business to attend to, and I made sure I rarely did – out walking the streets of Marylebone, understanding what Marius meant by the hairspring hour, the day not yet spent, the wheels of evening just beginning to turn. People did look different at four o’clock once you knew what to look for, as anyone with that knowledge would have thought looking at me, a successful antiquarian bookseller by day but by afternoon a husband whose wife was lying naked with her lover.

Everything, at four o’clock in Marylebone, was in flux. There was an agitation in the shops I frequented that matched my own. The assistants were not as they had been earlier; what they weren’t excited about, they dreaded. Their hearts fluttered. You couldn’t get their attention. They were counting up or checking till rolls. At the fromagerie they were worrying about food going off. In the patisseries they were running out of cakes. Outside the restaurants the chefs and waiters were in the street, smoking their last cigarettes before the night’s business began. I exchanged vaguely criminal looks with them as I passed. We were in something underhand together. Even the taxi drivers drove without looking for fares, reluctant to be flagged down in case someone mistook the hour and asked to be taken too far, or to the wrong part of the city. No one quite knew what it was they wanted – only that it wasn’t this.

If the wind was right you could smell the park. A bitter, muddy smell as from a churnedup boating lake. Sometimes I thought about walking
to the park but I never did. I wanted to remain hemmed in by buildings. When the days were short the lights were comforting, like a cage. I had never been a pub-goer but now I made a point of dropping in to one or other of them – I didn’t bother to distinguish – for a glass of wine. I spoke to drinkers when they talked to me. But when I told them why I was there – ‘I try to stay out of the house, as an act of decency, on those afternoons my wife entertains her lover’ – they were inclined to leave me to my own company.

Once, sitting up at a bar, I fell into conversation with a businessman from Atlanta, visiting Marylebone to settle his daughter into the American InterContinental University which had a campus on the High Street. He’d have talked politics to me had I let him. Bush. Iraq. Guantanamo Bay. But I hadn’t left Marisa in the arms of Marius to discuss America’s policy on the Middle East. ‘See her over there,’ I said, pointing to a woman whom I took to be a producer at BBC London across the road – she had that bare-faced flirtatious manner undeterred by plain appearance and no dress sense I’d observed in women who worked for the BBC. She was in earnest conversation with a wild-haired man in a black T-shirt and leather jacket, presumably a presenter, and almost certainly married to someone else. Every now and then they leaned into each other and kissed with open mouths. ‘She,’ I said, ‘is my wife.’

The businessman from Atlanta gripped my arm. ‘You allow that?’

‘I can’t stop it.’

‘Hey, I’ll stop it for you.’ And he would have been off his seat had I not held him back.

‘It’s what she wants,’ I said.

‘What about what you want?’

‘I want what she wants.’

‘Does the guy know you’re the husband?’

‘Doubt it. But it doesn’t matter what he knows, does it?’

‘It would to me. I’d hammer him.’

‘What would you hammer him for? He’s not doing anything you and

I wouldn’t do. She’s the one that’s putting out.’

He looked across at her and shook his head. She was leaning forward, her breasts resting on the table, offering up her mouth like a baby bird. ‘And she can do that knowing you’re watching?’

‘She says she forgets I’m there.’

‘Holy shit!’

‘I know,’ I said, getting up. ‘She fucks him sometimes on the livingroom floor, while I’m watching television.’

‘Jesus!’

I shrugged and gave him my hand to shake. ‘Thanks for talking to me,’ I said. ‘It helps.’

It hadn’t helped actually, or it wouldn’t have helped had help been what I was looking for. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. That little bit of humiliation extra, I suppose. Another witness to my ignominy. Another person on whom to try out an indignation I didn’t quite feel. Always something more and someone else. But it wasn’t working. The woman with her breasts on the table wasn’t Marisa and I couldn’t fake it. She was too obviously doing what it was natural for her to do. She wasn’t acting against herself. Whereas whenever I thought of Marisa in the arms of Marius, I saw her at her most philosophically reflective, grave and distant, at odds with her own nudity, and therefore – because sex had to be shocking to her before she could enjoy it – at her most alarmed and most abandoned.

The pity was that I couldn’t take the man from Atlanta home to show him that.