The Act of Love (7 page)

The surprising thing is that I was the other man – the rival, the dread alternative to the man she had – before I became her husband. The best cuckolds are always those who have cuckolded first. They know from the inside the enormity of that betrayal which is no betrayal, though in
our case it
was
a betrayal since the other party was unable to take any pleasure in my supplanting of him. In the psychopathology of everyday life there are such casualities: men who miss out on the most exquisite sensations love has to offer because they cannot accommodate jealousy in their hearts.

He was a collector of antiquarian books. I am a seller of antiquarian books. I found him what he wanted and we became friends. Let that be a warning: don’t befriend the antiquarian who satisfies your bibliomania, for the next thing is he ’ll be satisfying your wife.

I’m aware that my tone of voice changes when I remember myself as the lover. I get taken over by a gross levity which I frankly don’t much care for. This proves – had it needed proving – that the role of seducer, or however else you choose to describe the offending party, doesn’t suit me. I am myself only when I am the offended. In this one instance, however – perhaps because I foretold where at last it would take me – I played the cuckold-maker.

It was impossible to tell from Marisa’s demeanour when I first met her whether she was happy in her marriage or she was not. She looked impermanent, that was my strongest impression of her. She looked as though she hadn’t settled, as a butterfly never settles; indeed had someone told me that, like the butterfly which accompanied Thanatos, she would die before the afternoon was out I’d have believed it possible, for all that she had the bloom of health upon her. Though absolutely of the here and now in her dress, never not elegant in the steely heeled, city-woman style, a powerhouse capable of taking on any man at his own game, she somehow wasn’t with us. When she smiled at something one of us said – we were just the three, Marisa, her husband and I, taking tea at Claridge ’s, the four o’clock ritual – it was as though she were playing catch-up, smiling at something that had been said the last time she was here. She wasn’t slow, far from it, she was simply operating in another dimension, thinking her thoughts and saving up whatever was said for an hour when she would be more receptive to it.

Women who slip time in this way find a direct route to my heart. Their
slippage suits my desire to be expected by them before they know me, and then to be postponed by them once I am known. They deny me temporal reality in a way that excites and energises me. They bear the promise that I will at last be lost in them.

And, to be plainer about it, they solicit my pity. In the split second before I imagine being lost in them, I imagine doing them some good. Protecting them from I don’t know what. Terrorists, the melting ice caps, cynicism, Marius, myself.

It’s wrong of me to speak as though such women had trooped through my life. They had not. If I generalise from Marisa it’s because I learned from her, in the very first moment I saw her, what I had all along been looking for in woman, or, to put it another way, I no sooner saw her than I saw my fate.

What was it that I saw? A grey light in her eyes. Not ruthlessness exactly, but a sort of surety born of seriousness. She smiled, she laughed, she looked elsewhere and wasn’t with us, but no one could have given less the impression of frivolity. Was she a puritan? I believed she was, and only puritans are worth bothering with sexually, for there is no eroticism where there is not a grave weighing of consequences.

I had been aware, also, when I gave her my hand, that she had taken it as though it were hers by right to possess. There was nothing remotely forward or flirtatious about this, nothing of what my father used to call the ‘old whore’s claw’. It simply appeared natural to her to accept what was on offer and hold on to it for as long and with as much sense of proprietorship as she chose. Whatever of mine she touched hereafter, would be hers. I sat there, watching her, enumerating my losses.

‘The way a man takes off his jacket tells you all you need to know about him,’ my grandmother used to say. ‘If you can’t do it with confidence, keep it on.’ When Marisa took off her jacket – beautifully tailored it was, single-buttoned with wide revers and a peplum that graced her hips – she told me all I needed to know about
myself
. I was gone. In fact a waiter helped her out of it, a test of confidence in itself, but she responded to his movements – leaning into him and then shaking herself free – as though
men had helped her out of jackets all her life. Under the jacket she wore a filmy, lovesick satin shirt that seemed more to haunt her body than to clothe it. No cleavage. She was not, as I was to discover, a cleavage type. She owned nothing low-cut. There is always something desperate about women who want you to look down into their breasts. Marisa carried hers with a full-on assurance, knowing that the beauty of her chest was frontal not abysmal, a matter of the harmonious interrelation of thorax and abdomen, of arms and back and shoulders, not the mere shape and protuberance of her mammaries. I stress this because I have never been particularly moved by breasts as discrete objects, to be enjoyed independ-ently of the woman to whom they belong. It was the way Marisa carried her chest as a sort of introduction or frontispiece to herself – at once soft and sculpted, the breasts themselves not large, though the general effect luxurious – that moved me. At the moment of her sitting down, anyway, I had to look away. It was that or go blind. Whether that was why she laughed I couldn’t tell, but she was one of those women who know they must laugh at the disturbance of which their voluptuousness is the cause. And hers was a rich contralto laugh, full of depths, like everything else about her somehow material and evanescent all at once, evoking the laughter of summers long gone or summers yet to be.

Of her husband Freddy – a successful media musicologist who advised radio listeners on their record collections and popped up on television as well on account of the lightness with which he wore his learning and the frenetic way he moved his hands, a man who made too much conversation and tore his food before he ate it – she was absently tolerant, sometimes remembering to brush crumbs off his lap, or to wipe cream from his face, but always with the back of her hand, and without looking at him, in the manner of a mother busy with too many children. Of me, her husband’s bookseller, she took no apparent notice, whatever her treatment of my offered hand (as though it were hers to shake or sever) portended . . . Saving me for another day.

Whether the clandestine appointment she made boldly with me some months later really was about buying her husband a birthday gift of Berlioz’s
Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration
in as beautiful an edition as I could find, or whether it was me she wanted to see, I never asked, even after we married. We were to exchange many confidences that were obscene by the usual marital standards, and it’s true that I subjected her to interrogations for which many a person would have said I deserved to burn in hell, but we were never gross in the intrusive sense. That’s to say she always led me away from intrusion when intrusion threatened the secrecy necessary to a successful union.

I begrudged Freddy his Berlioz, whatever Marisa’s motives in buying it for him. Not the book itself but the circumstances of her giving it – the fact of her putting her mind to what would best please him, her conscientiousness in seeking my advice on the matter, her not caring how much it would cost, and her meaning to present it, as she told me, at a dinner in Freddy’s favourite Roman restaurant to which she was secretly flying out their closest friends. This was a wife with a grand sense of marital ceremony, who meant well by her husband, who followed his passions and cared about his happiness, even if she did have half an eye on another man. Principled, I 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 she
could 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 – concentrated, never not aware, as though the mind she was escaping from was always in the room waiting to escort her home again. So that in the end this state of possession was a sort of defiance – of herself not least. And, I liked to think, of me. She would close her eyes and let her head fall back – and I’d be gone from it.

On summer evenings I allowed her to seduce me into gentler exercise. We walked in Regent’s Park – a home from home for both of us – not hand in hand, not like lovers but like old friends with catching up to do. We sat on benches and watched the ducks, we identified flowers, we got to know the men who fed the birds, the Sikh with his black bin liner filled with crumbs, the squirrel man who held his hands out like a scarecrow, showing the squirrels the nuts he ’d brought for them and for which, with only the quickest nervy look around them, they ran up him as though he were a tree. We observed other couples with tenderness as though we were past all that and fondly recalled ourselves in them. Sometimes I contrived to walk behind her – pausing to tie up a shoelace or throw litter in a bin – so that I could admire the strength of her legs and have a moment to myself to swoon over her. But openly I made no show of what I felt and did not press myself upon her.

This role of friend to Marisa was one I found pleasurable – for Marisa was herself a vivacious talker once unloosed – long before
we
kissed, and
regardless of what would come of it. Indeed, had Marisa offered the two men in her life the compromise of continuing to lie with the one so long as she was permitted to talk to the other, I for my part would have accepted it. Was I not, after all, destined to accept a much poorer bargain on the face of it when it came to Marius, a man with whom Marisa would both lie
and
talk?