The Act of Love (33 page)

There were a thousand retorts to that, and I rejected them all. ‘I’ve said I surrender. I won’t do it again. It was wrong of me. But it’s hard, all this. So near to me, Marisa, and so far.’

‘Is that a joke?’

‘I don’t do jokes within an hour either end of your lover.’

‘Isn’t it enough that I tell you all you want to know? That’s hard, too. But I do it. Now it would appear that I don’t do it well enough.’

‘You couldn’t do it better,’ I said. ‘I live to have you whisper your infidelities in my ear. It’s what my ear is for. I ask for nothing else. Just every now and then, I wish I could be with you, that’s all.’

‘With me?’

‘With you both.’

‘You’re mad.’

‘Of course I’m mad.’

‘With
us
?
Here?
’

‘Here, in the restaurant, in the park. Anywhere. I’ll take you both away for the weekend if you like. The seaside would be nice.’

‘It’s not appropriate, Felix.’

‘Oh,
appropriate
! Do you call ours an appropriate household? What I propose – no, what I beg, Marisa – is as appropriate as you want it to be.’

‘And I don’t want it to be.’

‘Then there ’s an end of it. But he doesn’t have to know I’m your husband, if that’s what’s worrying you. I could just run into you. You could introduce me as your friend. I’d join you for a drink and then piss off.’

I watched the scene unfold before her eyes. She shuddered. I don’t mean shook her head, or rolled her eyes, I mean shuddered.

‘Why do you want this, Felix?’

‘I’m lonely. I feel excluded.’

‘I thought exclusion was what you sought.’

‘I seek palpable exclusion.’

‘Felix, there is no such thing.’

‘There is. There is the exclusion of being there and not being there. The exclusion of your being oblivious to me. Allowing his hand access to your breasts, kissing without inhibition in my presence, as though I am beneath your notice.’

‘Has it occurred to you that kissing without inhibition in your absence might be more fun?’

‘For you.’

‘Can’t you consider yourself excluded by virtue of your exclusion – or is that too straightforward?’

‘I want to be a witness to my ignominy. I want to suffer the sting of disregard.’

(I could have added, but decided it was unwise, that I wanted to be the
water boy to their Horace and Lydia, a witness to their naked Roman revels, Marisa coiled into Marius’s chest, naked to her toes.)

‘Want, want, want.’

‘Yes, want, want, want.’

She looked at me without pleasure. ‘Then if the sting of disregard is what you want, you’ve got it. I disregard you. And if that’s not enough, I don’t know what to give you. Go get yourself whipped.’

So I did.

But not before a couple of odd events occurred, one on top of the other, neither of which improved my temper.

The first was the arrival of an anonymous communication. It was a postcard of Edvard Munch’s
Self Portrait, the Night Wanderer
, was addressed to me at the shop and said GET A LIFE. I was at my desk, going through mail, when I found it. I raised my eyes to Dulcie who was at that moment bringing me tea and biscuits. She shook her head. ‘Nothing to do with me,’ she said. Had she got to it first she would probably have destroyed it.

I should have destroyed it myself but I could not. Every ten minutes or so I would set aside what I was doing and reinspect it as though expecting to find a clue I’d missed. I didn’t recognise the handwriting, but that meant nothing. Who sees anyone’s handwriting any more? Marius was the obvious candidate in that he was the only person I could think of – given our last encounter – who might wish me ill, that’s if telling me to get a life was wishing me ill. But Marius didn’t know my name or my address, and Marisa sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him. Besides, GET A LIFE wasn’t his locution. Even when Marius told you to get lost he couldn’t manage it in so few words.

So who then? Ernesto? Why would Ernesto tell me to get a life when I had recently given him back his? Rafaele? He was in Umbria, eating Polish sausage. Who else knew I had no life? Unless the whole of
Marylebone was witness to my cuckoldry – which I wouldn’t of course have minded. I could think of a few of my more clubbable fellow antiquarians who had grown lecherous over their brandies when I’d let them, offering it as their opinion that I was a lucky devil in my way to be married to a woman with a body as magnificent as her appetite to use it was unquenchable. Not what they could handle in a wife – not got the balls for it, old boy – but if I could, and I wanted it no other way, hats off to me. ‘I’m bewitched,’ I’d confessed to them, and they’d said she was a witch, all right, my wife, and in their orange eyes I’d seen the witch-yearning that lives in every man no matter what he tells you to the contrary.

But in that case it was they who needed to get a life, not me.

There was also something perplexingly incongruous about the choice of such a card for such a message. Munch in his self-portrait would get a life if he could, but life has been mislaid. It is a sympathetic, tormented study, painted sepulchrally, of a hounded, black-eyed man, barely daring to show himself to the night. Whoever chose that card could not have hated me.

Marisa?

My darling, get a life, get your life, get our life back. My dearest husband, do not end up looking as bleak and eyeless as Mr Munch.

Except that sending an anonymous card addressed in someone else’s handwriting was not Marisa’s style. Nor, when I’d last checked, was it her mood. GET A LIFE is not the same as GET A WHIPPING.

I would have gone on fretting about it had I not that same morning received an unexpected visit in the shop – unexpected by me, at least, because of some cock-up in our appointment system – from the most eminent of James Joyce’s biographers, hot from the Oxford college where he resided in intellectual splendour, receiving lesser Joyce scholars as an emperor receives principalities. Professor X, as I will have to call him – for it would be a breach of professional etiquette to give his real name – had contacted me a month or two before regarding a number of Irish fairy stories signed W. B. Yeats (another of his subjects) which had
appeared in our catalogue. I’d sent him the catalogue knowing they were his cup of tea. He was in a position now to inspect them if I still had them.

Of course, I told him, apologising for the cock-up, I still had them. I’d passed over several offers in the hope that Professor X would make his bid for them before too long. Who you sell to is not immaterial in this business. Besides, there was a question I was particularly anxious to put to him – as it were on behalf of the whole family – once our business was concluded. Joyce’s wife Nora – was it true, as rumoured, that Joyce had encouraged her to . . .

‘Put it about?’ the professor obliged.

I bowed, as to his mastery of the vernacular. But blenched from the implicit suggestion that I’d been vulgarly intrusive. I was addressing a biographer, was I not? Isn’t biography
ipso facto
vulgarly intrusive?

‘You will be asking me next,’ he went on, shaking his great woolly head at me, much like a sheep refusing to cross a ditch, ‘whether Nora ever did what Joyce told her in a letter he would like her to do – sit in an armchair with her thighs apart, point her cane towards some imaginary misdemeanour for which he wished to be held responsible, pull him towards her in a simulacrum of rage, throw him face downwards in her lap, pull off his trousers, raise her cane . . .’

I waited. If I was vulgar I was vulgar.

‘Who knows,’ he said. Not a question but a statement, whereupon we both fell silent, listening to the words tumble like stones down a great, dark well.

It appeared he had nothing else to say, indeed I made to shake his hand, but quite suddenly, as though he felt he couldn’t be done with me yet, he found one last stern remonstrance. ‘You will be able to discover fetishism and anality or whatever else you want to call it in the life of any writer who is concerned, as Joyce was, to subject love to intense scrutiny, to break it down, reconstitute and crystallise it. A restless imagination will always be vulnerable to gossip.’

I couldn’t, after that, say, ‘And Nora’s putting it about?’

My curiosity struck me, in the presence of the distinguished man, not just as bad form on the personal level but as an intellectual offence also. Quite how he squared his grand sniffiness with his profession of muckraker I wasn’t sure, but it was right of him, I thought – particularly as he knew nothing of my grandfather’s shady encounter with Joyce and Nora in the Zunfthaus zur Zimmerleuten, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell him now – to tick me off for an inquisitiveness that was inaesthetic. The life is not the work, the work is not the life. Joyce the novelist is Joyce the novelist, and Bloom the exblotting paper salesman is Bloom the ex blotting paper salesman. But then Professor X didn’t have to save either of them from me. I love a man, whether he is what he is in the name of art or not, who refuses to be in a permanent war over possession with other men, who prefers absorbency to power, who abdicates the imperiousness of his will and allows his wife to do with him as she pleases.

Which begs, I accept, a fairly large question. What if the thing she does with him is less what pleases her than what pleases him? Is his will, in that case, not so much abdicated as exerted in another form?

A row of this sort, I suspected, was brewing between Marisa and me, whether or not she was the one who had sent me the postcard of Munch’s
Night Wanderer,
exhorting me to get a life. It is standard in the clinical literature on perversion that the masochist inscribes a tyrannical script, that wherever you find a submissive and a dominant entwined, it is the submissive who calls the shots. The bullied who does the bullying. The slave that dominates the mistress. A nice little paradox of the twisted life.

Much of this, I have to say, bores me profoundly. Anyone who has spent a moment considering the role of partners in a sadomasochistic relationship notices the topsy-turvy nature of their power exchange. But I am not interested in the person who has considered the subject for a moment; for the purposes of conversation, at least, I am interested only in the person who has studied it for a lifetime. So Professor X should have been my man. But the intense scrutiny of love he ascribed to Joyce seemed a touch
abstract and yellow-bellied to me, an apology for unhusbandly behaviour when what one wanted was a celebration. Like so many biographers of the unconventional, he was too conventional adequately to do the job. Too conventional for me to jabber to, at least.

So much of what a pervert knows he cannot say because he cannot find anyone to say it to.

And yet I was the one they dared tell to get a life!

WHICH RETURNS ME, BUT AT A PERVERT’S PACE, TO THE WHIPPING.

As my father’s son I knew about such things. All the men in our family my father’s age had themselves whipped as a matter of course. Preferably on the Continent where the subtleties of temporary sexual metamorphosis were better understood. For whatever purposes he employed them, my father held British prostitutes in the highest contempt. They were a cause for national shame, he never tired of saying. He didn’t mean for being prostitutes; he meant for being prostitutes with so little
joie de vivre
or
élan vital
. That he could express what they were lacking only in the French tongue was no accident: like his father before him, he packed a light bag and took himself off to France or Germany whenever he felt the rise of urges which marriage could not satisfy. ‘You find a wife to clean your house this side of the Channel and a mistress to dirty your mind on the other,’ he told me once when he was drunk. In this again, as a deliriously happy husband, have I broken with family tradition. I haven’t needed to leave home to have my mind dirtied.

When my father and my uncles couldn’t get away, however, they made do with what was round the corner.

I accompanied them once to a house on Baker Street, not far from Sherlock Holmes’s address, as a sort of bonding exercise. It was my twenty-first birthday. ‘You can have a thrashing or a cake,’ my father had said.

‘I’ll have a cake,’ I told him.

‘That settles it,’ he said, ‘you’ll have a thrashing.’

They viewed it as therapeutic, like going to the barber’s for a hot towel or having a foot scrub.

We sat together on a long couch, all four of us, with crocheted antimacassars behind our heads, and inspected the women who paraded before us. Anyone watching would have said we were auditioning kitchen maids, albeit unconventionally attired kitchen maids. Each of the women reeled off her specialism according to its geography of origin or practice – Greek, French, Moroccan, English – which my father decoded for me in the grossest terms. ‘She’ll piss in your mouth – do you want that? Supposed to be very good for your gums.’ None of the girls was extraordinarily good-looking, but they weren’t dogs either. I mentioned that fact to my father years later during one of his tirades against the condition of venery in England. ‘That’s because you’ve never been down the Reeperbahn,’ he said.