The Act of Love (20 page)

Marisa told me this. Or at least I deduced it from the little Marisa did tell me. And I plied Dulcie with the essence of Marisa’s wisdom. ‘What do you think a psychiatrist might do for Lionel,’ I asked her, ‘that you, just by humouring him with an ankle chain, cannot?’

‘Make his mind right.’

‘Dulcie,’ I said, ‘there is no right.’

‘You don’t think it’s wrong then that I should encourage his fantasy that I’m a hot wife?’

‘I think it would be more wrong of you not to . . . so long as it doesn’t otherwise entail your doing something you would rather not.’

‘Wearing it is something I would rather not!’

‘Well then,’ I said, throwing open my hands, defeated by the perfect circularity of her logic.

‘Would you ask this of your wife?’ she suddenly asked.

I looked at the ground. ‘An ankle chain, no,’ I said. ‘But that’s just an aesthetic thing. And you have more slender ankles than Marisa.’

‘Then, tell me,’ she said, ‘why a man would want this. Lionel says it’s common. All over America, he says. And all over the Internet. If it’s common, explain to me
why
it’s common. What’s happening to our society? I was brought up to believe a wife’s job was to be faithful to her husband. Once upon a time Lionel went to bed and wouldn’t speak to me for a month if I looked at another man. Now I’m supposed to be a hot wife.’

‘Well I suppose the one is simply the other side of the other,’ I said. ‘If Lionel hadn’t experienced the pangs of jealousy, he wouldn’t be wanting to try them again in another form. No one who isn’t by nature jealous is going to be interested in having a hot wife for a wife.’

She shook her head. They are very sad to behold, these well broughtup women with cat faces, when they are holding back the tears. And in the pink light of the snug she looked a very wan and melancholy sight indeed.

‘You don’t think,’ she asked, ‘that he is only wanting me to be a hot wife so that he can pay me back by being a hot husband?’

I told her I didn’t believe there was such an animal, though thinking about his womanly side I didn’t completely rule it out.

‘Why don’t you just humour him and wear the chain,’ I said, ‘on the understanding that the hot wife remains as fantasy. It’s not an insult to you that he finds you an attractive woman and likes the idea that other men will find you attractive as well.’

‘I did that. I humoured him. I wore the chain. Thank heavens you didn’t notice, but I even wore it to work. But it’s not enough. Now he wants to take photographs of me and post them on the Internet. Mr Quinn, I have children. What will they say if they open up their computers and find their mother smiling back at them in an ankle chain?’

‘It’s unlikely,’ I said, ‘that they would go looking on those sites.’

‘You know those sites?’ For a moment I thought she would tear her

hair. ‘You’re my employer. What will
you
think if you find me smiling back at you wearing an ankle chain and, if Lionel were to have his way,
precious little else? What if the trade sees me? What will that say about Felix Quinn: Antiquarian Booksellers?’

We both had the grace to laugh at that.

‘So you’ve told him no?’

‘I’ve told him no and removed the chain. He can like that or he can lump it.’

‘And if he lumps it?’

Whereupon she cried upon my chest again.

And now here we were, six months on, lunching a mere three tables away from my hot wife, as Dulcie was bound to consider her, discussing the latest developments. We had got to the point of Dulcie ‘s telling me that things had all got worse when Marisa and her Irish horse-breeder showed up. It took her a while to pick up her thread after that, so distracted was she by the horse-breeder, unless all that distracted her was what distracted me. Though she would not have dared, of course, to allude to it, she did put her hand on mind a second time and wonder if I wanted to call lunch off.

‘No, Dulcie, why on earth should I?’ I said.

She dropped her head and drank some water. ‘What a world,’ she said.

I waited and took the opportunity to ask the waiter to bring more bread.

‘I have recently heard from my daughter,’ she went on. ‘She thinks she might be a lesbian.’

‘Is that problematic for you?’

‘It’s problematic for her. She’s studying theology.’

‘Theology’s different now,’ I said.

‘My family is going to pieces.’

‘Because of your daughter?’

‘No, just going to pieces. My daughter is part of the going-to-pieces
process. When your mother wears an ankle chain you’re bound to end up a lesbian, aren’t you?’

I decided against asking her how her son was. ‘You still haven’t settled that, then?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes, we’ve settled it. The ankle chain is in the bin. But so is our marriage. Lionel has found me an admirer. He’s an electrician.’

I didn’t know why but I was reminded of one of my father’s pisspot puns.
‘Has Alec been in?’ ‘Who’s Alec?’ ‘Alec Trician
.’ So that was what I decided Dulcie’s admirer must be called – Alec. But I kept the thought to myself.

‘When you say “found you”?’ I asked.

‘I mean “found me”. Picked him up off the street, for all I know. In overalls. Why couldn’t he at least have found me a cellist?’

‘You still wouldn’t have been all right about it, Dulcie, if he’d found you Pablo Casals.’

She had a wonderfully droll way of enacting her despair, throwing her head back and opening the palms of her hands like a preacher. ‘An electrician,’ she said again. ‘Lionel tells me he ‘s bringing a friend home to dinner, asks me to wear something comfortable and cocktaily – wouldn’t you think he ‘d know by now that no garment exists in which a woman can be both comfortable
and
cocktaily, let alone one in which she is meant to cook for her husband and his electrician friend as well? – and then shows me a Frank Sinatra CD he ‘s just bought to “dance to later”. We have never danced after dinner in our house, not ever. Lionel doesn’t dance. But if I remind him of that I know what he ‘ll say. “It won’t be me that will be dancing.” I am married to a sick man, Mr Quinn.’

‘Oh,
sick
,’ I said, waving away the word.

‘What do you mean “Oh, sick”?’

‘Only the sick are healthy,’ I told her.

‘That sounds cleverer than I think it is. What is healthy about being a paedophile or a rapist or a hot wife, come to that?’

‘Or a lesbian?’

‘I don’t, now that I’ve had time to think about it, mind too much Phoebe ’s being lesbian. I’d have liked her to have children because I think she ’d make a good mother, but if she’s happy she’s happy. Being lesbian isn’t what I’d call sick.’

‘People used to think it was. Time chips away at what we think is or isn’t sick. In a hundred years’ time the husband who wants his wife to wear an ankle chain will be considered the picture of health. And with a bit of luck they’ll be locking up all those husbands who think their wives should cook the supper and love only them.’

‘Thank God I’ll be dead then.’

‘But in the meantime,’ I said, ‘you can speed on the revolution. Dance with the electrician. And thank Lionel for the opportunity.’

‘I don’t need Lionel to find me an electrician, Mr Quinn. I can always find my own if I want one.’

‘I don’t doubt that, Dulcie. I mean thank Lionel for releasing you both from sex as a brute possessive instinct. It’s a highly civilised thing he is asking of you. And of himself.’

‘Civilised!’

She expostulated so loudly that half the restaurant turned to look. Though not Marisa and her lover who were too engrossed doing a civilised thing of their own.

‘Yes. Civilised in the sense that it’s a big step forward, for Lionel, from those old jealousies of his you’ve told me about. If he no longer has to put himself to bed every time you look at another man, be pleased.’

‘I would be if it didn’t mean that I had to put myself to bed with the other man.’

‘Nothing’s perfect. But at least you’ve now got a new post-phallic husband. The feminist in you should be pleased with that. Think that you’ve slain the patriarch, Dulcie.’

‘And dance with the electrician? Better the patriarch you know, Mr Quinn.’

‘He might be very nice.’

‘But what if I don’t want to find out?’

‘Ah,’ I said. The old
what if I don’t want to find out
argument. How often modernity founders on that rock.

She could see I had no answer to it. You can’t take people kicking and screaming over the sexual wall if they don’t want to go with you. And yet it was clear Dulcie had hoped I’d be able to show her why she was wrong to refuse the climb. Wasn’t that why we were having lunch?

So I had one more crack at it. ‘There is this,’ I said. ‘If a man concentrates all his sexual curiosity upon his wife’s capacity for misbehaviour, it stands to reason he will have neither time nor appetite for any of his own. Men married to hot wives are said to be as faithful and devoted as Labradors.’

She subjected me to one of her most precarious, eye-dropping scrutinies. ‘You know that for sure, do you, Mr Quinn?’

‘I deduce it. And I have seen the odd example of it for myself.’

‘And do you think a woman wants that?’

‘A faithful husband? Why ever not?’

‘Not a faithful husband, a Labrador.’

‘You don’t like Labradors?’

‘They dribble.’

I sighed. The old
who wants a dribbling Labrador for a husband
argument.

Dulcie sighed, too. She had, I noticed, been casting increasingly agitated looks in the direction of my wife ’s lover. ‘I’ve been staring at him all through lunch but it’s only just occurred to me who that gentleman is,’ she said at last, with a quick glance at me to be sure I wouldn’t mind her referring to him at all.

‘Who is he, Dulcie?’

‘My dentist. I’ve only ever seen him in a white coat.’

‘Your dentist? You sure?’

‘Sure.’

‘Then I wonder if he’s Marisa’s dentist too,’ I said, as much for my own benefit as Dulcie ’s.

Her green-grey eyes rested on me sadly. They were so wide apart it was almost like being looked at by two people, both of whom felt the same
about me. At last, with a sweeping glance that took in the whole restaurant with all its garrulousness and glitter, all its gluttonous fantasies, spoken and unspoken, she asked, ‘Where will it all end, Mr Quinn?’

‘Where it always ends, Dulcie,’ was the best I could say.

My lunch with Dulcie should have been, like Quirin’s drunken imbecilic tumble down our staircase, a decisive event. To be sane as the world judges sanity is to know when there’s a lesson staring you in the face. But then had I been a lesson learner I would long ago have looked at my father and given up being a man altogether.

I have not sought to hide my snobbishness, so it will surprise no one that I started from the association of my marriage with Lionel’s as from a leprosy. Were we bonded in erotic necessity, that loose-toothed, illfavoured, list-making, effeminately vulpine, vulgar viola player and me?

There is a contradiction here, I know. On the one hand I insist that what I feel all men feel, the only difference between us being that they will not admit it. On the other I no sooner see evidence of a commonality of sexual impulse than I turn against myself. If such wretches as one sees crawling between heaven and earth want what I want then would I not be better among the wantless dead? In the end you have to admit, to quote a foolish poet, that you ‘share your knee bone with the gnat’ or some such fatuity, and get on with scrabbling in the same slop bowl as the lowly. One must eat as other men eat, therefore one must desire as other men desire, too. But I found the idea of libidinal democracy impossible to accept when it came to ankle chains and hot wives.

Was there truly kinship between Lionel’s cheap and cheerful fantasias for Dulcie and the austere religion of Marisa which I practised? I understood well enough Dulcie’s revulsion from her husband’s Americanised proposals. It wasn’t the sex she hated, it was the Disneyfication of sex. I knew about hot wives. I had been to Minneapolis myself on book-associated business, I had even made an after-dinner speech at an Antiquarian
Booksellers Association conference in Milwaukee, and while I hadn’t met anyone I could identify as a hot wife on those trips, I had a sense that they were out there, in the malls and in the shopping aisles of Wal-Mart. There is a significant subculture of wife worship in America, sometimes opportunistic in the way Dulcie feared – a pretext merely for trading an old wife in for a new – but more usually of the classically submissive sort, the husband wanting the wife to emasculate him, ideally, it is embarrassing to report, through consorting with a well-hung black man who pimps her out to his friends and in extreme cases having the black man’s child. Perhaps because of the castrating times we live in, contemporary pornography has more of cuckolding in it than any other deviancy, and race-based emasculative cuckolding would seem, at least for Americans, to be the most popular fantasy of all. I was no stranger to the literature and winced from it: men who wished not to be men, husbands who called themselves wimps and sissies, husbands who could only be happy when their wives laughed at the ineffectiveness of their genitalia, husbands who dreamed of sucking black men’s sperm out of their wives’ vaginas. Was I on this continuum of castration? Was my dismembered trance just a dishonest man’s metaphor for this same longing not to be a man at all?