The Act of Love (31 page)

He came to my house three afternoons a week, my wife’s lover, and stayed from four until seven. These hours suited them both, emotionally no less than practically. Each liked to keep a lid on things. From four until seven, Marius believed, he was in no danger of losing his head. And the idea of daylight robbery appealed to him. His life would have been different had he done that with Elspeth all those years ago. Had he gone to get the professor’s assessment of his essay, and stayed to borrow the professor’s
wife. ‘My turn, Professor,’ it would have pleased him to say. ‘You can have her back when I have finished with her.’

Instead of being stuck with her while she turned into an old lady.

As for the handover conceit, I malign him. It was mine not his.

Much of what I attributed to Marius was mine not his. They take your wives, these marauding melancholics, but they seldom give you the scurrilous vocabulary you long for in return. Which justified, I thought, the occasional ventriloquism. ‘Watch it,’ Marisa warned me when I let ‘handover’ slip one afternoon as I was putting on my coat. ‘If you think you’re playing pass the parcel, I ain’t no parcel.’ She was genuinely angry. I tried to explain that it was I who was being handed over, tossed out of my own house while my wife was wifed by another man, and then permitted to return when there was nothing she could want from me. But she was not so easily mollified. Any suggestion that I was playing push-me pullme with Marius enraged her. What she now did, she did for herself. ‘Pleasing you, Felix,’ she shouted as I opened the front door, ‘is a thing of the past.’ Which terrifying thought warmed my insatiably topsy-turvy cuckold’s heart as I walked the streets.

Otherwise the four o’clock slot fitted in well with Marisa’s other arrangements. She didn’t want to change her hours at Oxfam, and she would not have gone without getting her nails done or her feet massaged at the usual time. By four o’clock she was able clear her day for Marius, and by seven, when he left, she was ready to think about something else – dinner with one or other of her half-sisters, the theatre, the Samaritans, the Wallace, dancing. Or, if I was lucky, if I hadn’t called her wrath down on me, she might re-enact her afternoon’s abandonment for my unholy delectation, in language as graphic as she could bear to make it. My ear in such proximity to her mouth they might have been a single organ.

I won’t pretend, as Marisa herself did not pretend, that this came easy to her. ‘I find it embarrassing,’ she told me, ‘I find it ludicrous, I find it disloyal, and I find it upsetting.’

‘Tell me, tell me slowly about disloyal,’ I said.

‘Good joke, Felix.’

I thought so, too. But I really did want her to tell me about disloyal. ‘If it were you,’ she said, ‘you would not want to be talked about afterwards.’

‘If it were me,’ I said, ‘I would not be going to another man’s house three afternoons a week.’

‘Does that absolve me of all obligation to respect his privacy?’

‘Privacy! I am not asking you to describe his dick, Marisa.’

We were in bed – our bed. We had the lights off. And – my idea – we were burning incense. My back was turned to her, to minimise the embarrassment she’d spoken of. But I could sense her looking at me quizzically. They always wonder, women, whether it’s the dick you’re really interested in. Because they don’t do jealousy as men do jealousy, because they take the Othello murder route themselves, and cannot imagine where the pleasure part comes in, they conclude it must be the deviancy they understand that explains it, rather than the deviancy they don’t.

Leaving that, she said, ‘Whatever I tell you is a violation of confidentiality.’

I agreed with her. ‘It is,’ I said. ‘But sometimes a person loses the right to confidentiality. You climb over another man’s wall, you take your chance what happens next.’

‘I’m not your wall, Felix.’

‘Wall, wife . . . He likes the transgressive element.’

‘And you don’t?’

‘We’re not talking about me.’

‘We are, actually. What you ask of me violates you too, doesn’t it.’

It was my turn now to say, ‘Good joke.’

‘A violation of your ear, was what I meant,’ she said.

I told her she needn’t worry about my ear. That it was a robust, inviolable organ.

‘Don’t dare me, Felix,’ she said. And we lay there a long time, listening to her weighing up what she might do to me if I dared her.

But little by little, after a number of false starts, and bouts of nervous laughter – that salve to our conscience which we call a sense of the
ridiculous, that spoiler of sin and sex and sensuality, that strategy for keeping our feet on the ground – we got around to it. But always – which was never the way when we danced, though this too was dancing of a sort – always with me leading.
And then and then and then . . . ?

The questions, as in all ages and in all places, time-worn, tattered, tragicomic.
And then and then and then . . . ?
No matter whether the man is a metaphysician or an illiterate fool, the questions will be the same.
And then and then and then . . . ?
Thus does jealousy, like fear of death,iron out our differences. Some men are more exacting in their curiosity, that is all. They want the knife to cut a little deeper.
And then and then
and then and did you look at him did you look into his eyes and did he look into your eyes and what did your eyes say and what did his eyes say and did you kiss him where did you kiss him how did you kiss him or did he kiss you who initiated it who kissed the first kiss and were your lips parted did you part them or did he part them with his tongue did you let him part them did you invite the parting or did he part them forcefully and then what were you thinking did you feel at that time did you feel what did you feel were you happy were you eager how eager were you how eager was he what did he say then and what did you say then or were you past words was there nothing more you wanted to say to him or he to you nothing you wanted to hear were you past hearing and then what did his hand caress your breast did it explore the roundness of you and did your nipple harden and did you say harder and did your hand what was your heart going like mad and yes did you say yes you would Yes?

And did Marisa, in reply, orchestrate her re-enactments? Did she do to me what she had done to Marius?

I take that line of questioning, since we are being candid, to be no better than mine. Wherein lies the difference between the cuckold’s transports of uncertain wondering – tell me tell me tell me tell me – and the reader’s?

The wanting to know what happened next –
and then and then and then
: what is that but the spur to curiosity that drives us back, again and again, to our oldest and greatest stories?

Listen, Menelaus – what is Helen whispering to Paris? What Trojan
promises lull her to her sleep, what Trojan laughter stirs her from her bed of shame?

What are her suitors, Odysseus – more suitors than she has ears to hear them with – saying to your wife Penelope while you dawdle on the high seas?

Thus literature, pandering to our unclean desires. And thus the reader, in his eternal wanting to be told –
what next what next
– as unclean as any cuckold.

As for what Marisa re-enacted, that is between her and me. Suffice it to say that I never loved her artistry more than when she swooned in Marius’s arms while she swooned in mine. And never did I – a man who had read too much – approach any text with more attentiveness.

Soon, Marisa was saying such things to me, I couldn’t be sure she remembered Marius had gone, or noticed that it was I who was lying beside her and not him. Such things I almost pitied Marius for missing out on.

This was a story, though, that couldn’t end. One Thousand and One times One Thousand and One Nights, and always more to anticipate and dread. How long before Marisa would plunge her nails into my neck and whisper in my ear, like a lick of flame, ‘Love me, Marius’? And then ‘Fuck me, Marius’? And then, and then, ‘Marius, I love you’?

How long before my bodice-ripper’s reader’s heart would crack asunder with the madcap all-consuming joy of it?

Go on – ask.
How long how long how long . . .

And Marius?

If he was the loser by these violations, he was only the loser in someone else’s eyes. Unaware, he grew more airily handsome the more four o’clocks he notched up.

It would have been cruel of me to have begrudged him this new lightsomeness. These are hard enough times for men already. Outside the
never-neverwhere of celebrity, men are no longer permitted to fuck for the fun of it, though it is obvious that the activity brings out the best in many of them, as least as far as physical health and appearance go. And fucking my wife three times a week – allow me to say that again for the sheer unholy sweetness of it –
and fucking my wife three times a week
certainly brought out the best in Marius. Whenever I caught sight of him his hair was wet, either from showering before Marisa, or from showering afterwards. The look suited him. Men like me emerge from water blind and dripping like a rat that has gnawed itself out of a sack; Marius belonged to that class of amphibian mammal that rises glistening from the sea, shaking silver droplets from its torso, like Neptune. Or the Forsaken Merman, except that his forsaken appearance had left him entirely. His moustaches were clipped. His eyes had lost their ache. He was speaking audibly. And if I was not mistaken he had bought himself new clothes – a black corduroy jacket I had not seen before, a striped suit that played bohemianly, in much the same spirit as Marisa’s suits, with the concept of the City, and a number of soft Italian shirts that buttoned high and added further arrogance to his already haughty head.

As I have explained, I wasn’t watching him as much as I had before he became my house guest. This wasn’t all precautionary. It was logistical too. If he was lying with my wife at four o’clock in the afternoon, he was not out on the High Street or pacing the floor above the button shop in frustrated creativity. He interested me no less now that I had him, so to speak. Nor did Marisa’s late-night confidences diminish my curiosity. I by no means believed I knew all there was to know of him in report. But I had to be more vigilant than in the carefree past. We all had too much to lose if he discovered me now.

Nevertheless, he was never entirely out of my sight. Above the fray at the best of times, he barely saw where he was going now he had Marisa on his mind. So I could get a long view of him at the Sunday market, buying bread, or from the other side of the road collecting his
Financial
Times
. Once I passed him coming out of the chiropractor’s, and thoughI gasped, fearing the encounter, he strode on oblivious of me.

‘Love her,’ I said under my breath when I saw him. ‘Love her, love her, love her.’

Did that show that my feelings toward him had softened? ‘Fuck her,’ was what I had always imagined saying to him in the course of our early meetings. ‘Fuck her, fuck her, fuck her.’

Was ‘Love her, love her, love her’ the proof of my contention that you can love the man who fucks your wife, if only you are able to sort your mind out?

It might have been this new softening of husbandly feeling that made me start up a conversation with him, many months into the new arrangement, when we ‘happened’ – Fortune is a pimp and all that – to find ourselves in the travellers’ bookshop on the High Street at four o’clock on a non-Marisa afternoon. But mischief can never be entirely ruled out of the motivation of a cuckold. It satisfied me to beard him in this way, he who knew nothing of me, I who knew everything of him. And then there was the frisson of seeing, close up, the aftermath of Marisa on his skin. What was it like to smell the breath of the man who was burgling your wife?

(‘What’s this quasi-biblical talk of his “entering” me?’ Marisa had enquired in the course of one of my earlier encouragements to her to describe her afternoon.

‘I learned it from you. “The moment of entry is visually transfixing” – your words.’

‘Oh, Felix.’

‘What are you telling me, that entry isn’t what he does?’

‘Literally, I suppose he does.’

‘You suppose so? Entry was good enough for me. Why is it too literal for him?’

‘Because you make it sound like a burglary and that’s not how it feels.’

‘So how does it feel?’

‘No, Felix. No you don’t.’

I bit my lip. It isn’t pleasant to be reprimanded at my age. And my question was reasonable enough. If it wasn’t with him as it had been with
me, how was it with him? But since she wasn’t saying, I stuck at burglary. She might not have liked the word, but I – for reasons that were part onomatopoeic, part self-lacerating – did. Hence ‘burgling my wife’.)

He was idling, the burglar of Marisa’s body and affections, before the Africa section, not looking for anything in particular, I decided, but that didn’t stop me wondering: was he thinking of fleeing, and if so was he thinking of fleeing alone or with my wife? He’d eloped before. Maybe it got easier each time.

‘Off somewhere?’ I asked.

He didn’t know who I was at first. He never did. I didn’t think it was personal. He just didn’t know who anyone was at first, unless it was a woman or a girl in whom he had an interest. Part of me would have liked to reciprocate the insult – but it was a bit late for that.