The Act of Love (26 page)

Opposite, as conceived by the academic painter Thomas Couture, an exact contemporary of Merle, the poet Horace partying with his mistress Lydia.
A Roman Feast
. The poet, reclining on a couch, holds out his
goblet for a servant to refill. Naked down to her toes, Lydia snakes into her lover, one arm flung about his neck, her breast pressed into his chest, her flanks arced in sinuous luxuriance towards our scrutiny. The opulence of her haunches is shocking. Though she is bold and faithless in Horace ‘s Odes to her, she hides her face in Couture ’s painting, embarrassed by the proximity of her lover’s water boy. For a woman is of necessity more naked in the presence of two men than she can ever be with one.

Let me be plain. Nothing in the lusciously immodest shame of Lydia’s posture would have made any man not intimate with her think specifically of Marisa. But if one started from the other end of the proposition, anyone who knew Marisa only in her clothes and imagined her without them would have pictured her much like this. Of a flowing voluptuousness that was beyond bearing.

Whether one of these paintings would have been enough, without the other, to stop in his tracks a man hunting down a love token, I doubt. Manchester Square is swollen with erotic invitation. But together, eyeing each other from opposite walls of the staircase, they were irresistibly garrulous.

I caught my breath when I found myself between them. Without a shadow of a doubt this was the place – hidden from the eye of any other person – where Marius’s searching, if he could be prised out of his den, would come to an end.

But I was uneasy. Uneasy for Marius, and by extension – for my future happiness waited exclusively on his – uneasy for myself. There was a choice on offer here, between a chaste virgin to be educated in the ways of God, and an insatiable mistress to be peeled naked before the eyes of men. I knew where my preference lay; but it mattered that when Marius’s time came he should not be made to feel he ’d chosen grossly.

What I proceeded to do, I did with the best intentions. It wasn’t intrusion. It was kindness. For their sake I could not leave anything to chance. They were not the sort of people you could rely on chance to help. They were both too easily knocked off course
.

I slid my fingers behind
A Roman Feast
. No bell went off. Nor was there anything from Marisa. Only a thread of spiderweb. I turned to
Reading the Bible
and did the same. Still no bells. But this time my fingers found a folded sheet of plain A4 notepaper, defiantly impersonal, on which Marisa had written the name of her favourite restaurant, her mobile telephone number, and a brief message. Had the painting been alarmed it would not have been my hand that set it off, it would have been my heart. The message was:
There is no pleasure sweeter than surprising a man
by giving him more than he had hoped for
.

I won’t pretend those words weren’t hurtful. Jealousy, as I have remarked before, is incalculable in its ferocity and reasoning. Though I had imagined them in each other’s arms a thousand times, the thought of them joined in Baudelaire disgusted and upset me. Did she have to cuckold me in literature as well? The word-fucker she was! I breathed hard, as green-eyed as the next man. But no jealousy ever remained itself for long in me. Soon I was able to picture them in each other’s arms reading Baudelaire together, and to feel again in the pit of my stomach the grief I’d learned to alchemise into gratification.

I could see why Marisa had decided against posting her offer of
more
than he had hoped for
behind the Roman orgy. Too brazen. Without doubt the better joke – and in its own way the lewder invitation to violation – was the one she’d made, reminding Marius of her as a young girl in convent clothes. But there was something I knew which she didn’t. She didn’t know that Marius had an inclination, albeit a mortuary inclination, for the underaged. Who was to say that the allusion, however unintended, wouldn’t sting him into a retreat? There was risk either way. Invite Marius to take his fill of an unclothed Lydia and he might well turn prudish on you. Like all sadists, he feared forwardness in women. But of the two I thought the Quaker girls carried the greater offence. It’s possible I was rationalising my own preference. I could not see past Marisa offering Marius the promise of her company at his table, peeled naked to her toes.

Whatever my motives, what I did was not so terrible. How big a crime was it to move an already outrageously immodest come-on a mere
armstretch from one wall to another, and have Marisa inflame Marius with the prospect not of a Bible class but a debauch? A debauch that contained the prospect, what is more – for it was not my intention to deny Marius anything – of the Bible class deferred.

IT WAS DISAPPOINTING TO COME OUT INTO THE CLEAN AIR OF THE ACTUAL
World and to realise that in fact nothing had changed. I had inhaled the poison of their adultery in the gallery – sucked on it and emerged alive – but out on the streets Marius and Marisa were still far apart, orgiasts only in a future I’d been rearranging for them.

If leaving things a week had been a bad idea for him, it had been a bad idea for her as well. A game was fun for Marisa, and then it wasn’t. A man was hot, and then he wasn’t. The two great lessons of her childhood. This is not to say it didn’t irk her not to hear from him the minute he had her number. At first she ’d have enjoyed the idea that he was having trouble finding it, going through the gallery on his hands and knees, a fool to her ingenuity – he who thought he knew what made her tick. But when a further week went by, and then another, she had to face the possibility that he didn’t have her number because he hadn’t put himself to the trouble of looking for it.

I was sorry for her. I am, as I have said, a connoisseur of fine insult. ‘Well I had fun finding it, anyway,’ I’d have liked to tell her. But I too was a prisoner to our subterfuge.

The wondering didn’t agree with her. She no more cared for being toyed with than did Marius. I bloom under indifference, she turned pale. I glow, she looked sicklied over. She would go out, forget what her errand had been, return home and then immediately go out again. She had her nails painted, decided she didn’t like the colour, and had
them painted again that same afternoon. She bought shoes she didn’t need, and started letters to friends she hadn’t corresponded with in years.

I grew seriously worried for her when one of my staff mentioned he’d seen her entering a church. It turned out she had gone only to hear an organ recital. I say
only
but in fact her being there was still a matter for concern. She hated the organ.

At last her native impatience with infatuation took over and she was out dancing again, spiking the paving stones with her shoes, and reading an extra morning a week to the blind man.

I entertained a fancy about Marisa and the blind man. She read to him, I believed, naked. She would be naked beneath her coat when she arrived. He would help her off with it, not a word exchanged. He knew that she was naked. The blind can smell such things. I don’t refer to the body’s natural odours and secretions, or to Marisa’s perfume; what he would smell was her nakedness itself. In the dark – in his dark but also in the darkness of the room, for we always conceive the rooms of the blind as being sightless too – he would smell the abstract idea of it. But wouldn’t touch her. Then she would read to him. Softly, beneath her words, she would feel the ebb and flow of his breath on her flesh. ‘And her erectile tissue?’ Reader, you ask too many questions.

An hour later the blind man would help Marisa on with her coat, his fingers careful not to touch her skin, and she ’d go home, forgetful. Marius? Who was Marius?

More to the point, as far as I was concerned,
where
was Marius. He didn’t leave his flat for days, not on my watch anyway. There was no sign of him at the fromagerie and on the couple of occasions I nipped back to the gallery, there was no sign of him there either. I asked Andrew whether he ‘d seen or heard anything, but he had nothing to report. They were not, he reminded me, bosom friends. Marius didn’t do bosom friends.

A taxi called for him one morning when I was ambling in the lane.
Presumably to take him to the railings at Hyde Park. He descended with a number of framed paintings in cardboard boxes, looked at the weather, appeared to smell rain, or simply the disillusion in his soul, and sent the taxi away. Later that day – the rain having cleared and a clean, sunny breeze blowing through Marylebone – I found him drinking coffee on the High Street. It was four o’clock – Marius’s vampire hour. His face looked sealed off from human commerce. It was not impossible that the taxi driver he’d sent away was the only person he ’d spoken to since Marisa had thrown down her challenge to him.

Since death and desire had been our subjects the only other time we ’d talked, and I could smell death on him today, I made no bones about sitting myself at a table next to him and steering us towards desire. Talk of desire, I mean, not actual body-to-body desire of a sort neither of us could possibly have felt for the other.

(A word about that. I accept that I must ask myself, for someone else is sure to ask it if I don’t, whether I didn’t at some subterranean level – and maybe not all that subterranean – lust vicariously after Marius through my wife, or at the very least hanker for him to call me, as he ’d called the fromagerie woman, ‘doll’. I registered it after all, and have drawn attention to my doing so. All things considered, and allowing that I’m in some respects more passive than a man is meant to be, I have to say I doubt it. I recognised in myself no ambition to lie with Marius or have him call me ‘doll’ – no ambition to have a doll, to look like a doll, or to be a doll. I am not a doll-associated man. But as homoerotic feelings are sometimes adduced as the underlying motive for my brand of deviancy, I wish to show I’ve given that diagnosis its due consideration. Could have been, but no – always granting that every deviancy contains the seeds of all the others.

But that I was more substitutively sensitive, so to speak, to the slights and caresses implicit in Marius’s vocabulary than was good for me – yes. Ask me how I’d have felt about Marius trying ‘doll’ on with Marisa and I’ll confess it would have been like having someone with long fingernails feeling around in my stomach. Not something you ever think you want until it
happens. And then you start thinking about wanting it again. But it was a hypothetical sensation. Marisa would never have allowed him to address her in that fashion.

More’s the pity.)

‘And which faraway place of the senses are you inhabiting today?’ was how I tried my luck this time.

If a look could kill, I would not be alive to tell this story now. ‘I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else,’ he said. ‘You appear to be continuing a conversation we ’ve never had.’

‘Well, it was a long time ago,’ I said. ‘You told me about Thanatos.’

He shook his head. ‘Thanatos? Nah. Never been there, guv’nor.’

I was tempted to tell him he didn’t talk in this goonish fashion to my wife. Though that would hardly have served my cause. Interesting, though, in the light of what has been said about homoeroticism, that he reserved his serious self for women. Unless it was only me he chose to fool about with, and was perfectly direct with other men. In which case was his manner with me something I invited? Did I want him not to take me seriously?

‘How about Eros, then?’ I persisted.

‘Wrong again, squire. ’Aven’t been up to the West End in years.’

‘Every man,’ I said, pietistically, because his needling skittishness left

me few conversational options, ‘knows something of love and death.’

‘Before you start – if you’re looking for someone to discuss your

marriage or your love affairs with, I’m not your man. I dwell alone.’

‘But I’ve seen you in the company of women, I think.’

He turned in his seat to look at me, his face tight. ‘Do you want me to knock your block off?’

I laughed one of those crazy laughs that hangers-on in Dostoevsky laugh. A beat me, hurt me, humiliate me, do whatever you want with me but you’ll never shake me off laugh. Pavel Pavlovitch is probably who I’m thinking of, the Eternal Husband in the short novel of that name.

‘I was merely making polite conversation,’ I said. ‘You look like a lover
of beautiful women to me. I am a lover of beautiful women myself, in my own way. I felt like a talk.’

‘Have it with your friends. Though it will come as no surprise if you tell me you have no friends.’

‘I have no friends.’

‘Then count yourself a lucky man. Friends only ever let you down. Women too . . . Will that do you for the talk you wanted?’

‘Your experience is different from mine. No woman has ever let me down.’

He sat back in his seat, stretching out his legs and chortling – that was the only word for it – into his moustaches. Disconcerting in its incongruity, Marius’s chortle, as though some crazy half-aquatic creature were suddenly to snort at you in a zoo, a sea lion turned mad by too long a confinement, a walrus with a bitter sense of the ridiculous.

‘I hope you aren’t expecting me to ask the secret of your felicity,’ he said.

‘Putting oneself at all times in the wrong. If you’re in the wrong you can’t
be
wronged.’

‘Giving up all expectation of a happy life must work just as well.’

‘They aren’t the same. I
have
a happy life.’

‘Then why are you stalking me?’

‘Who said I was stalking you? I mentioned I’d seen you with a beautiful woman, that’s all.’

‘And what’s that to you? Are you a private investigator?’

‘No. I’m more what you’d call a pervert if you really want to know what I do.’

‘And you think telling me this will make me feel better about talking to you? What would you do if I told you to get lost?’

‘If I thought you meant it, I’d get lost.’

‘
If you thought I meant it!
Is this what a pervert does? Hangs around people who tell him to get lost while he decides whether or not they mean it? Why don’t you just call yourself a glutton for punishment and have done.’