The Act of Love (18 page)

And if this was a spur to my understanding her when I was with her, how much the more so was it when I thought of her with someone else.

On the nights Marisa left me to myself, not saying whether she would return before morning or not (I always knew when she would not) I turned
our bedroom into a cathedral. When I played music, it was always Schubert, the great agoniser –

Ich frage keine Blume,
Ich frage keinen Stern,
Sie können mir alle nicht sagen
,
Was ich erführ so gern

– not asking flowers or stars to tell him what he burned to know because the thing he burned to know he burned
not
to know as well. But mostly my excruciations needed no accompaniment.

At about nine o’clock I locked the house up, not to keep Marisa out but to keep me in. For my cathedral was a prison too. Thereafter I didn’t leave the room, or do anything except by the light of two church candles which burned on either side of the bed. Incense, too, I burned. Opium was the aroma that suited me best. By ten I liked to have changed out of my business suit or whatever I was wearing that attached me to any purpose other than Marisa. In the days before she ’d taken ill in Florida, Marisa had bought me white pyjamas in a shop in Key West that sold only garments Hemingway might have worn. Hemingway’s connection to white pyjamas was a mystery to us, but they were certainly more suited to the damp and heat than those I’d brought with me. Marisa had laughed, I remember, on discovering I had brought
any
pyjamas to Florida. Why pack such things to go on honeymoon? ‘So that you can laugh at me,’ I told her. There was no laughter associated with my white pyjamas now. These were sacrificial garments, the vestiture which signified the abnegation of my virility and independence. I was Marisa’s to do with as she willed, and let my icy blood stain the garments I wore in her service until every corner of them was incarnadined. Thus robed and eviscerated, I lay myself down to keep vigil through the night.

There is a word used by those who practise suspensefulness as a calling: subspace – the ritual abandonment of your will to another’s sexual caprices, the nirvana stillness of complete submission. In subspace you receive with joy and gratitude whatever punishment is meted out to you – a private
insult, a public humiliation, a flogging, a blade, a flame, the torture of your choice or your torturer’s.

The subspace I entered was ruled over by Marisa’s absence. With joy and gratitude I suffered her being somewhere, and that cut deeper than any blade.

Sometimes I got some sleep – short, fitful lapses of moral duty – most nights I did not. When I did sleep I woke in guilt, believing that not to have stayed awake was disrespectful and ungrateful to Marisa who was out there labouring, in a sense, for me. But I forbade myself sleep on other grounds, too, for you do not squander subspace on unconsciousness. You are alert or you are nothing when you choose submission to your wife ’s caprice as your vocation. You are Henry James’s novelist on whom nothing dare be lost. And every second I slept was a second lost of the torture of being awake. Sleep through the nights of your wife’s unfaithful absence and you might as well embrace the consolations of common men – drink, gambling, sport, suicide.

Besides, I could never be sure which night of wounded wakefulness would be my last. Not in the suicide sense, but allowing, as I had to, for the volatility of human passion. Marisa might do anything. Might take it into her head to return to our life as it had been, in which case no more sickly vigils kept by me. Or might do the very opposite and leave me al-together, in which case again my devotions would be over. For make no mistake: this ritual was a celebration of our singular togetherness, a marriage sacrament that would lose all point and savour were we to part. The exquisite peace of subspace – the peace that passeth all understanding – was predicated on a happy union.

As for the other privation which I owed Marisa in the course of these cathedral nights, I will not speak of it here. Whatever else it may be, this is not a fluidal narrative. But no is the answer, I did not. To have done so would have been to take from Marisa what was, by the terms of our marriage contract, hers whether she had use for it or not – more hers, paradoxically, the less use she did have for it: hers to declare void.

In the blackest corner of my soul I would have wished her to secure me against treasonable temptation before she left the house, perhaps by binding my hands behind me. Or even – for there was nothing in my fever I dared not contemplate – by hacking them off at the wrists. And that wasn’t the end of it either. Once you allow amputation into your erotic imagination there is only one conceivable conclusion. The man must be constrained, the man must be unmanned, the man must die without a trace of manhood left. But if Marisa knew of these longings, she never satisfied them. Perhaps on the grounds that she was doing enough for me already.

And so I lay there, in the stretched silence, as on a slab of stone, imagining how it would be when one day, as a gift, she consented to dismember me, though she had to all intents and purposes gifted me dismemberment already, by virtue of her absence. I held myself very still, impatient of any noise or movement that wasn’t Marisa’s. As if attached to her by tenuous threads of love, like a fly caught in the web of his desiring, I vibrated to every sound she made and every thought she had. Marisa whispering, laughing, confiding, gasping. Marisa opening her body – it didn’t matter to whom, it mattered only that she felt the shock, the shame, the rapture or whatever of it, and sent the silken message back to me, from however far away she was.

I would not be true to the condition – neither to myself nor to the love I bore Marisa – if I did not admit that even so complete a trance as this was subject to whimsicalities. Strange fits of passion did I know . . .

What if something bad should happen to Marisa when she was out on the wing? What kind of husband allowed his wife to wander unprotected through a feral city? Erotic transport even when it is as extruded as mine enjoys close relations with superstition in its moral guise. Centuries of puritanism cannot be thrown off in a single night. How could I not ask myself, under pressure of that puritanism, whether Marisa wasn’t courting
danger? Didn’t she
deserve
to come to harm? And didn’t I deserve to lose her, whether to mishap or another man? You cannot play fast and loose with the conventions of a disapproving, vengeful world and not expect it to exact its payment in dire consequences. The wages of dull sublunary sin is death. What then the price of wickedness as weird as ours?

My compunctions, as you see, were of a moralising, omen-mongering nature, never sexually visceral. I did
tremor cordis
but I did not once do
nausée
. Of course I rose some mornings from my sleepless victim’s bedwith a keen, English sense of the preposterous. I would throw off my white vestments and look with irritation at my reflection in the mirror – a man closer to his middle than his early years, with tired eyes and yet an expression of almost beatific innocence on his face, a washed boyish gratitude which made me angry with myself. But I took this to be a necessary revulsion if I were to get on with the other, lesser business of my life. And it never lasted more than a day or two, or spilled over into a revulsion from Marisa and the dog’s life she was leading me.

The famous words from Dostoevsky’s great novel of moral inversion
The Brothers Karamazov
– ‘What the intellect regards as shameful often appears splendidly beautiful to the heart’ – are profoundly true. But one can rearrange their thrust. ‘What to the heart appears splendidly beautiful the intellect must not regard with shame.’ I have always made it a matter of principle to encourage the intellect to go wherever the heart dares. If it is beautiful enough to feel it, it is beautiful enough to think it. And let reason – which is so often no more than awkwardness before the heart’s excesses – go hang. So, though I turned briefly from the spectacle I was making of myself, I was not for long disgusted by what my life with Marisa had become.

As for the love I bore her, it increased the more reason she gave me to admire her boldness. With every infidelity – actual or imaginary (for the imagination does not suddenly stop working just because reality becomes a match for it) – my devotion to her deepened. No man truly loves a woman, I have said, who does not know her to be lying in the arms of someone else. I do not retract a word of this. When she was away from
me, I pictured Marisa in the greatest, and that is not necessarily to say the grossest, detail. I counted the hairs on her head. I measured the skin between her fingers. I heard the sound her eyes made when she closed them and then again when she opened them. She was so vivid to me I could have put her together, vein by vein, had imagination been gifted with the where-withal to re-create a human life.

Love, of course, does not reside only in the veins. And it wasn’t only the look and feel and touch – the presence – of Marisa that made my heart grow fonder in her absence. I thought longer, too, about the style and courage of her – for hers were no ordinary acts of marital deception. It took strength of mind and intuition and kindness – kindness to me, at least – to balance her affections and loyalties as she did. It required exquisite tact and knowledge of herself, acuity, breadth of understanding, judgement – the quickest discernment of character if she was not to play fast and loose with people ’s feelings, not excluding her own.

So add admiration to my devotion. An esteem for her that grew with every infidelity which in her became infidelity’s very opposite: the proof of how much, how well – how
intelligently
– she loved me.

Practically, of course, these loving infidelities did not consume all our time. Whether she was rationing herself or rationing me I did not know or care to know; but I must not give the impression that Marisa’s life was nothing but one amorous adventure after another. To the eye of an outsider the life we lived must have looked pretty much like the life we ‘d always lived. We still ate out most nights, still went to the theatre and the cinema, still kept up our dancing lessons (for which I continued to be obdurately late), still saw our friends. I worked every day as usual, Marisa read to her blind man, priced art books at the Oxfam shop, made jam to sell at fund-raisers, guided art lovers into the light of comprehension, and on Fridays sweet-talked the desperate out of the deep dark of their despair. Months could go by without a third party intervening in our marriage. But the fact of her unchasteness, however well spaced the incidences of it, did not leave me. I was never for a single moment
not conscious of it. And therefore never for a single moment not in thrall to her.

I would stand at our bedroom window on those evenings which were consecrated to someone else and watch her climb into a taxi or go striding down the pavement with that lovely loose-limbed action, her skirt tight about her flanks, her heels making their characteristically precise attack upon the paving stones, her music case with her credit cards and make-up in it hot under her arm, and I could scarcely breathe for longing for her. Everything about her moved and stirred me in equal measure – the shine of her hair, the strength in her legs and back, the vibration which those clicking heels sent through her frame, and something lonely about her mission. This last always threatened to undo me. Oughtn’t I to run out and bring her back? Oughtn’t I to stop all this? Some nights I waved to her retreating form, wondering whether this would be my last goodbye to her. An apprehension of disaster that should have made me rap on the windowpane and plead with her not to go. But the thought of where she would soon be kept me motionless at the window. The general camp was tasting her sweet body, I knew it, everyone who saw her busy in the world without me knew it, and I was happy.

Whereas . . . Well, whereas if I had broken the silent spell that held us and said, ‘Marisa, my beloved wife, my darling, enough now, I have supped full, I am satisfied and can take no more, come home,’ who was to say that she would not have replied, ‘My dear Felix, my dearest dearest husband, but what does any of this have to do with you? It never was and never will be about you and your wants. It is about me and mine. Now go back to your bed.’

And then where would I have been?

I SAW HER ONCE OUT AND ABOUT WITH A LOVER.

I hadn’t followed her. There was no need to follow her. One way or another, by fair means or foul, sightings of Marisa at her impure devotions reached me. People dropped me hints. I read her diary. It is possible I was meant to read her diary. Letters which she left lying about I opened, as presumably I was invited to open, for Marisa was not a careless woman. Letters which were not left lying about I opened too, for Marisa did not hide things carelessly either. And I saw no reason not to listen to messages for her on the house phone. That I found no tangible proof of any love affair was itself no proof of anything. She would have wanted me to find no proof that she was having an affair as proof incontestable that she must have been. Spying on her in this way – entering her haunts on paper – had become our lovemaking. But I would never have dreamed of dogging her footsteps. It was a matter of honour to me that Marisa should be given the widest topographical latitude for her intrigues, and if that meant the whole of London then I would never leave the house.