The Act of Love (13 page)

Once, someone she worked with in the Oxfam shop suggested she accompany him to a wife-swapping club he had himself, in other circumstances, frequented.

‘But I’m not your wife,’ she ’d objected, mildly. She was not being prudish about it; merely precise.

‘Wife-swapping is a manner of speaking,’ he explained. ‘It’s more fetish.’ ‘Fetish as in voodoo?’ She couldn’t help herself: she could only imagine

he was proposing taking her to West Africa or Haiti. ‘More as in chains and leather.’

She explained she owned no leather clothing, other than shoes and belts and a jacket that was too good to wear for clubbing in Haiti. And her only chains – the only chains she kept – were eighteen-carat white gold necklaces bought by lovers from Asprey’s or Garrard’s.

He offered to find her something on the rails at Oxfam. She told him she had never worn second-hand clothing. ‘In that case just select a skirt and jacket from your own wardrobe,’ he suggested, ‘then lose the skirt.’

‘I look my best in skirts,’ she told him. But met him halfway, losing the jacket.

He hadn’t told her stilettos but she assumed them. She could do stilettos. And liked wearing them. They made her taller than most men.

The club was in fact the living room and kitchen of a semi-detached Victorian house in Walthamstow. Some of the men wore shorts with crossed leather braces, a bit like lederhosen; others hero shirts and riding breeches. A few had dog collars round their necks. One had come as a Druid. The women, by and large, wore what she imagined prostitutes must wear under their coats. A tall blonde girl in a diamanté eyepatch and choker danced by herself in a pink and purple rubber cocktail dress which Marisa thought she ’d like to own were she to do this more often, which she didn’t suppose she would. The atmosphere made her think of a taxi drivers’ Christmas party, though she ’d never been to one.

She danced with an unattached young black man in PVC trousers who put her hand on him and proposed intercourse either where they were or in the bathroom. She didn’t mind what he did with her hand. She was dancing and what happened when you were dancing was not governed by any of the usual laws of good behaviour. He wasn’t a bad dancer either. But intercourse, in either place he’d suggested, she was not up to. She had seen the bathroom and would not have wiped her nose in it. As for where they danced, she was reminded of a boarding house in Bournemouth to which her mother and one of her faux-daddies had taken her not long after her real daddy walked out. The carpets were green and there had been bowls of crisps and peanuts on the mantelpiece. ‘Don’t ever,’ her mother had admonished her, grasping her wrists, ‘take crisps and peanuts from a bowl where God knows who have had their fingers.’ Marisa, wishing her mother were only half as particular about herself, cried the whole time they were there. The carpets in Walthamstow were green and there were bowls of crisps and peanuts on the mantelpiece. Marisa left her hand where the young black man had put it but shook her head. ‘Let’s just dance,’ she said.

He shook his head. If he’d wanted to just dance he ’d have gone to the Hammersmith Palais.

‘Then I can’t help you,’ she apologised. ‘It’s not personal. I can do debauch, I just can’t do crisps and peanuts.’

She went looking for the Oxfam colleague who’d brought her. A very
fat woman in a riding coat was sitting astride his face, reading the racing pages of a newspaper.

‘Home time,’ Marisa called down. He wasn’t able to answer.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I’m perfectly happy to leave on my own if that’s what you’d prefer. Just bang once on the floor if you’re staying, twice if you want me to wait for you.’

The man banged once. ‘Then I’ll see you in the shop next week,’ Marisa said.

She wasn’t in the slightest bit scandalised. No vagary of the sexual life was ever scorned or rejected by Marisa. What people did they did. But for herself, as she wrote in her diary, where she was unable to feel free with the savoury snacks, she was unable to feel free with her body.

She wasn’t at all frigid, withholding or non-orgasmic. She didn’t wonder whether there was any experience of the senses she was going without or needed to experiment with further. What women were supposed to feel she felt. What
she
was supposed to feel – which might have been a different matter – she felt. But none of it occupied her beyond the moment in which she felt herself feeling it. As a discrete event, she looked neither forward to congress, nor back on it.

In so far as she anticipated with eagerness any aspect of this netherworld of her existence, it was the conversation. She liked verbal fluency in men and would not have sought physical intimacy with anyone, no matter what his rival attractions – unless he was the best dancer in the world, of course – whose mind was not a source of interest and amusement to her. She had to like a man to exchange bodily fluids with him, but she had to have exchanged intellectual fluids with him before she could like him.

Some nights she found herself thinking about someone she had stretched out alongside in the day, some nights she did not. The ‘thinking about’ bore no correlation to any sexual excitement she’d happened on. Something they’d said about their lives might have intrigued her, an idea they’d had, a sentence they’d formed. She quite enjoyed hearing about their work. Or
where they’d been. She didn’t at all mind hearing about their wives so long as they were not demonised or airbrushed to spare her feelings. She could sleep with a man who loved his wife. If pressed, she would probably have accepted that a man who loved his wife was the better option. Less chance of his turning up on her doorstep with his eyes moist and his cases packed.

In this way, you could think of her as conservative, not to say reactionary, where the institution of the family was concerned. She wanted everybody to stay together. It was not unknown to her to think about her lovers’ children if she ’d been shown photographs of them or they had in others ways been made vivid to her. So much so that on more than one occasion she considered ‘doing something’ for them – contributing to their schooling, say, or opening a small trust fund for their later years. This, as a means, perhaps, of compensating for the absence in her of anything like a maternal instinct, which absence she of course attributed to the poor example of parenting to which she herself had been exposed.

Thus, the men she had the leisure to devote the secret hours of her life to were secret only in the literal sense, and didn’t answer to any unconscious needs or unacknowledged longings in her. Other than the pleasure she took in being secretive. They were consistent with the rest of her life; they could have been invited to her dinner table but for the conventions that said they couldn’t. When they were out of her sight, they were out of her mind. She might have reflected on their marriages, their children, and even their job prospects, but the one thing she did not find herself going over when she was unable to sleep was
them
: how much she did or didn’t love them, how much they did or didn’t love her. She loved her husband. Then she met me. Another husband. And loved him. End of story.

Or should have been end of story.

In so far as I didn’t know whether it was or it wasn’t, I was happy. As I have said, the uncertainty suited me.

And yet it didn’t.

My skin shone all right, but within the tense cocoon of silent expectancy which passed as contentment, I yearned for some repetition or equivalent of the scene I’d beheld all trembling at Marisa’s bedside. If she was not to be touched by other hands just yet, could she not at least be seen by other eyes? Though I was not yet Victor Gowan’s age, I understood his desperation. Marisa was not running out of time, nor was I come to that – indeed I’d been told I’d gained time – but you never know what’s going to happen. I feared that the comfortable unblemished conventionality of our life together, with much promised but nothing ventured, would swallow us if we weren’t careful. A wife can grow accustomed to her husband not undressing her for another man.

So how did we ever get to where at last we got to? How did we negotiate our silences into an action as loud and incontrovertible as Marius?

Impossible to trace a progression – some, I acknowledge, would call it a descent, though they’d be wrong – as infinitesimally refined as ours. You might as soon attempt to paint the second by second changes in light that mark day’s disappearance into night.

But every day has its pivotal four o’clock and a marriage is no different. Imperceptibly but decisively we yielded to those equinoctial hours when relations between lovers quiver on their axes. And where we didn’t quiver as perilously as I wished, I applied my weight. An old acquaintance of mine would come to stay and I would feign indisposition in the middle of the evening, leaving Marisa to do the entertaining. I would make myself scarce at Marisa’s Oxfam and Samaritans parties, watching from the shadows while she talked and laughed with whom she chose, to all intents and purposes a woman who had only her own engagement book to consult. I danced with her less than in the days of our courtship, either missing out on the school’s social nights, so that she could mingle freely with those against whom she’d earlier pressed her body, or arriving opportunely late
for one of our periodic classes, in the hope of finding her tangoing like a mare on heat with the newest teacher, an Argentinian with punched-out eyes and a ponytail.

Nothing was referred to during and after these events, if they could be called events, but a change was mutely noted – that change being my removal by another notch, like a fading ghost, from the adventurous scene of Marisa’s life.

Ghostly as this progression was and had to be, we could not avoid discussion of sexual turbulence altogether. We went to the theatre, the cinema, the opera, the ballet, we bought tickets to hear singers sing and writers read from their work. You cannot live a civilised life and not have your nose rubbed in art’s eternal telling of inconstancy and sorrow. But we did not crudely apply what we had seen to who we were. Only in the discursive and purely intellectual aftermath of some masterpiece of erotic despair such as
Dido and Aeneas
or
Winterreise
, only in language as impersonal as it was chaste, did we lay down what was necessary to our comprehension of each other.

One occasion in particular comes back to me. We had been out with Marisa’s youngest and least pleasant half-sister Flops and Flops’s husband Rowlie to see
Othello
at the National Theatre, a passionate and uncomfortable production because the actor playing Othello gave such energy to the jealousy that it was difficult to imagine how any man could think himself alive who did not suffer the torments he did. Very much my inter-pretation, I concede, but if I had to hold back at the theatre as well as in the bed, when was Marisa ever going to know me for who I was? But it was not only
my
interpretation, hence the heated discussion between the four of us in the Mezzanine restaurant afterwards – ‘Anyone would think from the performance we’ve just seen,’ Marisa’s half-sister’s husband protesting, ‘that Othello
wanted
Desdemona to be unfaithful to him, which I have to say isn’t the play as I understand it.’

I liked Rowlie, partly because his wife didn’t, and I didn’t like her, partly because there was nothing about him to dislike. I wasn’t sure what he did.

Real estate, I think. But what he did was of less importance than where he’d been. Rowlie was one of those Englishmen about whom the only thing to be said was the school he’d gone to. There was a touch of that about me too, only I was several thousand pounds a term less interesting. And I no longer carried around with me what Rowlie carried around with him, in his clothes and in his hair – not just the good manners and the assurance of being somebody in particular, but the odour of housemaster and prep and school song and chapel and playing fields and fagging and flogging.

Flops raised a ginger eyebrow to him – that was part of what I disliked, her peppery aggression – as though to say ‘And since when have you, my dear, had an understanding of any play?’ From which I deduced that jealousy in some form was an issue between them, hers of him, I thought, but you can never be sure.

‘Isn’t it in the nature of the marks jealousy leaves upon your soul,’ I ventured, ‘that you are unable at last to remember what it was like to be without them?’

‘That doesn’t mean,’ Flops said, blinking – she was a blinker, too – ‘that you don’t long for the time before jealousy began. Othello’s tragedy, as
I
understand it, is that he knows he will never again enjoy the peace of mind he used to.’

‘Not poppy nor mandragora,’ Marisa said dreamily, ‘shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep which thou owedest yesterday.’

A tremble of apprehension, as though of a joy or pain to come, ran through my blood and pricked my heart.

‘Yes, but that’s Iago,’ Rowlie objected. ‘The Othello we’ve just seen didn’t want sweet sleep.’

‘Who does?’ I managed with great difficulty not to ask.

‘Funny, though, don’t you think,’ Marisa said, ‘that Iago should be both the architect and the poet of Othello’s fall. I’m always struck by how poignantly he speaks of his victim and how much sorrow for him he feels.’ ‘But isn’t he talking about himself?’ Flops replied. ‘Isn’t it his own sweet