The Act of Love (42 page)

I asked if I could speak to her but they said she would be sleeping. I was pleased about that. She would not have wanted to hear my voice. And I would not have made a manly job of hearing hers.

But in the morning I sent a taxiload of flowers to the ward. No sooner did the taxi leave than I jumped into a second taxi and told him to follow it. By the time I reached Putney I realised my mistake and got the driver to turn round. What would I do at the hospital if she wouldn’t see me, and I knew she wouldn’t see me? Hang around the waiting room? Run into Flops? Sit with my head between my knees, smelling death?

Marisa was right about me. I couldn’t cope.

We ’d had the conversation many times. ‘You entertain me but God knows how you’d be in an emergency,’ she ’d said.

‘Right behind you,’ I’d replied.

‘Exactly,’ she said. Only she wasn’t laughing.

She half severed a finger once, chopping vegetables. ‘Ring an ambulance,’ she said calmly. When I saw what she ’d done I fainted. So she rang her own ambulance.

Couldn’t cope.

Not coping, of course, was part of my condition – no one knew that better than I did. Like all masochists, I called pain down on myself in order to bring it under my control. My whole life was a protest against the blind chance and malevolence of real cruelty which strikes where and how it chooses. Let those who accuse me of cruelty to Marisa remember this: I sought to shield her, too, from the harsh contingencies of living.
And yes, when those harsh contingencies eluded the art I made of them, I couldn’t cope.

Such high ambition for us I’d had. So grand an adventure I’d thought to take us on, far from the timidities of the ordinary marriage. And now here I was, unable to cope with the commonest contingency of all. Years before, sitting in a café in San Francisco reading Charles Bukowski’s slapdash, drink-sodden, fag-end novel
Notes of a Dirty Old Man,
I’d been struck by Bukowski’s great tragicomical barroom wail of masculinist frustration – ‘I could not as one man change the course of sexual history, I just didn’t have it.’ What had struck me about it? I don’t know. I wasn’t, when I read it, planning to change the course of sexual history myself. That ambition only devolved upon me when I set eyes, or when I set eyes on someone else setting eyes, on Marisa. But the lines of your failure are always waiting for you if you know where to look. And those were mine.
I just didn’t have it
.

Wasn’t ever going to change the course of sexual history and wasn’t ever going to help Marisa with her half-severed finger. Wasn’t ever going to cope.

But you have to cope, don’t you, when your wife has what Marisa had?

On an impulse that surprised and disgusted me, I went looking for Marius. Not because – not
consciously
because – I wanted him to do the coping for me, but because he should be told. That was my reasoning, anyway.

But what if he
had
been told? What if he was sitting by Marisa’s bed right now, as my flowers arrived? What if he was telling her about our conversation, or planning where they’d run off to when she was well?

I didn’t welcome these wonderings. I held them to be inappropriate to the occasion. Death and desire might have been closely bound in me, as they are bound in any pervert, but death had a right to clear a space for itself too. Death deserves to be left alone sometimes.

Marius didn’t answer his door and when I asked after him at the button shop they said he ’d gone.

‘Gone out?’

‘No, gone. Left. There were estate agents taking photographs of the flat yesterday.’

I thought my heart would stop.

‘Do you know gone where?’ I asked. If they said Richmond – well, if they said Richmond, I didn’t know what I’d do. I held on to one of the tables, fearing for the buttons if I fainted.

I had not previously seen the girl who was answering my questions. New here. Everyone in London was new there. She called into the back of the shop. A voice called out in return, ‘Shropshire, I think. He said back to where he was before. I’m sure Shropshire. Shropshire, yes. He’s left us a forwarding address if you want it. Are you a friend?’

A friend? Absurdly, I felt like the last rat left on a sinking ship.

I became a recluse.

I closed my windows, shut the blinds and waited for news. Had I been waiting for instructions I could not have behaved more passively.

All memory of desire vanished. And with it all anticipation of desire. Cuckoldry bequeaths one this: after it, nothing. Sad and sacrilegious to remember what I had felt for Marisa at the height of my irreligious rapture, when the bloom of health was on her, and sadder and more sacrilegious still to want her well so that she might do it to me all over again. And if not her, who? Who else could I possibly desire now? What other eroticism was there that could hold a candle to what ours had been?

Yes, I thought too much about myself. But every day began with my thinking about her. My first impulse every morning took the shape of a resolve – I would go to Richmond and climb the gates of my half-sister-in-law’s house, or I would attempt a sea-assault from the Thames. Flops’s house enjoyed a river frontage: what was to stop me hiring a barge or motorboat and calling to Marisa from a loudhailer? Or even scaling the
walls of the house and rescuing her by force? But I never got past making the resolution. The fact that I imagined such intervention absurdly only showed how absurd all action felt to me. Everything I thought of doing ended in farce. The great comic heroes of literature, I had always believed, were of necessity of the school of Masoch. No comedy ever flowed from de Sade or the sadistic impulse. Cruel satire, perhaps; but satire isn’t comedy. Wasn’t the proof of a novel’s expansiveness (speaking of the classic novels I cared about) the author’s willingness to let his hero be a clown? Not to punish him with his clowning but to luxuriate in it. Of all great clowns not a one isn’t a masochist to his soul, and very few aren’t cuckolds as a consequence. So why wasn’t I prepared to live out the logic of my nature and risk whatever foolishness might befall me? Why wasn’t I shinning up the drainpipes of Marisa’s hospital and pulling her from her bed? Why wasn’t I climbing dripping from the Thames and chancing fisticuffs with Flops and Rowlie, and possibly their children, on their lawn? So I fell off the drainpipe, broke every bone in my body and had to be admitted to hospital myself! So Flops’s youngest child laid me out with a blow to my kidneys! So what?

I had turned too passive even to be a clown, that was what kept me at home with my blinds drawn. I had cuckolded myself out of the grand folly of my calling. I was reduced to standing on the dignity of my sadness.

A little late for that, Felix, I thought. But it was a little late for everything.

Marisa’s operation went as well as such operations could be expected to go and she was recuperating in Richmond. Rowlie was good enough to ring me with the details but I failed, or chose not to grasp them. I did not want to think of Marisa as other than she ’d always been. Complete and dangerous. So she had me figured out again. ‘How will you be when the surgeon’s finished with me?’ she had asked long before there was any surgeon in our life. ‘Fine,’ I’d answered. But she ’d been right not to believe me. I was fine so long as I didn’t know.

She texted me a couple of times.

All OKish
, was the first.

Please don’t
, was the second. This in response to my text to her –
This ridiculous. Coming to see you
.

And once she phoned me. We both cried a little during that. No, I cried a lot. Who knew, was the gist. Who knew how well she was or how well she would go on being. But she wasn’t who she ’d been. She felt terrible and looked worse.

‘I bet you don’t,’ I said.

‘I do. But what about you? Are you looking after yourself?’

‘Of course I’m not. There isn’t a me to look after if you’re not here. When are you coming home?’

‘Don’t ask me that, Felix.’

‘Well when can I come to see you?’

‘Don’t ask me that either.’

My punishment.
Don ’t ask me that
.

Was it a test? Was it a trial of my resolution? Exert your will, Felix. Exert it over mine. If it was a test, I failed it. What she asked me to do I did. Passive. The old failing. A passive husband when what she needed was an active one.

The only thing I took like a man was my punishment.

I told her of course that I loved her and missed her. That I would never forgive myself for not being by her when she needed me. She told me not to reproach myself with that. The decision was hers. And yes, she loved me. But she never said she missed me. Which I took to mean she didn’t.

‘How long are you going to insist on this?’ I asked her.

‘Don’t ask me that.’

‘Don’t ask you because you don’t know, or don’t ask you because you think I will not be able to bear the answer?’

‘Don’t ask.’

I wondered if it was up to me to tell her Marius had upped sticks and returned to Shropshire, scene of the most miserable time of his life. But I had to work on the assumption that she knew.

‘Heard from anyone else?’ I said inconsequentially.

But she wasn’t going to be fooled by that. There was silence in the course of which I fancied she was holding the phone away from her, letting its toxins fall where they could do no harm to her already poisoned body. ‘This,’ she said after a moment or two, ‘is why I can’t consider coming home.’

I couldn’t change – that was why she wasn’t coming back to me. I was stuck in who I was. Marius, I believed, was stuck in four o’clock, and I, Marisa believed, was stuck in Marius. I wasn’t but I could see it looked that way. I was just stuck in myself, and myself needed a Marius, which was not quite the same thing.

I wished I could have cried ‘I’ll change, Marisa’ and meant it. But a pervert worth his salt knows that that’s where his perversion really lies – not in chasing underage schoolgirls or inviting other men to have congress with his wife and give her babies, preferably black, but in his unchangingness. Not in the menace posed by his obsession, but in its monotony.

‘I might as well be a hermit, Marisa,’ I told her, ‘if I can’t see you. Or at least know how soon I can start looking forward to seeing you.’

‘You wouldn’t enjoy seeing me right now. You wouldn’t cope. I can’t imagine how you’ll cope with being a hermit either. You enjoy talk too much.’

‘Then ring me up and talk to me.’

‘No, Felix. You’ll have to try to do without. You’ll fail, but you’ll have to try.’

‘Then I’ll show you you’re wrong,’ I said.

And I did. I locked myself away and exchanged words with no one.

Dulcie excepted. She came over to the house a couple of times a week with mail.

‘I’m worried,’ she said.

‘For the business or for me?’

‘Both. But mainly you.’

‘Don’t. I’m serving out my time.’

‘Until when?’

‘Don’t ask.’

She invited me over to dinner but I refused. ‘I don’t want to have to talk,’ I said.

Once only I accepted one of her suggestions. A Sunday Schubert sherry morning at the Wigmore Hall. Not lieder. I couldn’t have risked that in a public place. Just wordless chamber music. She had a ticket for me. ‘Are you going?’ I asked. She was. ‘Then if you see me don’t speak to me. I’ve stopped conversing.’

I’d stopped listening to music as well. And reading. Art is good for softening a hard heart, but when you are already pulp, art is not what you need. Silence is what you need. A wordless dark . . .

So probably not a smart move, risking Schubert’s String Quintet in C, even if there were no words. One too many cellos in it for a man reduced as I was. I sat with my head in my hands and wept through every movement. Dulcie, I recalled, had seen Marisa and Marius both tearful in this very room. The thought of which only made me weep the more. I wept with jealousy, because it is unbearable to imagine your wife weeping for another man, far more unbearable than imagining him enjoying every of inch of her sweet body. But I wept with plain old grief still more. The grief that remains when jealousy has no more flesh to feed on.