The Act of Love (40 page)

He had the tact not to comment on the decor in my study being different from the rest of the house. Apart from stuffing it with technology I had barely touched the room since it was my father’s study, and he had barely touched it after his father died. We liked a little continuity in our family, though no earlier Quinn, I suspected, ever entertained his wife ’s lover here. The women in our family might have had a better time of it if only one had.

I poured him wine which he sipped with an unsteady hand. Whatever he wanted, I didn’t think he was here to throw his weight around.

His attention rested on a photograph on my desk of an elderly gentleman on a couch eyeing off a woman’s legs with an intensity which the photographer clearly found both comical and touching. Heroical as well, I thought – hence my owning it – on account of its obsessiveness. If it was an erotic photograph it was so partly in despite and partly by virtue of its domestic setting: a normal bourgeois sitting room, the man in pyjamas and dressing
gown, the woman – not in the first flush of youth herself and somewhat manly in appearance – dressed like a secretary (think Dulcie without the ankle chain, though an ankle chain would not have been amiss) and, with the knowingness of a practised secretary, raising her black skirt infinitesimally, no more than to show a suggestion of knee, but that can be enough to keep the right sort of man enthralled. Whether he is looking at the knee itself or the action of lifting the skirt it is impossible and probably pointless to determine. What the photograph celebrates is the heat which can be generated by a marriage, even a marriage of some duration, when the husband is sexually uxorious to the point of madness, and the wife indulges him.

‘Takes one uxuriator to know another, wouldn’t you say?’ I said.

A guest in my house, Marius deferred to my greater knowledge of the subject. ‘I don’t know what I’m looking at,’ he admitted.

‘Helmut Newton. The subjects are the artist Pierre Klossowski and his wife Denise. You are obviously not familiar with Klossowski’s work or you would recognise Mrs Klossowski. She was the model for many of her husband’s most obsessive paintings and sculptures and for the heroine of his philosophical and pornographic novel
Roberte Ce Soir
, the story of a wife who obeys the oldest laws of hospitality, as adumbrated by her husband, and offers her body to any house guest who cuts the mustard.’

‘I think I can see why the photograph is of interest to you,’ Marius said.

‘And not to you?’

‘Well I have never myself been married.’

‘No, but you are not indifferent to the appeal of a wife.’

‘That’s true, but only as it concerns the wife in question and myself.’

‘You like to keep what you have found entirely to yourself, is that what

you are saying?’

‘I do. Am I to apologise for that? I don’t think I am unusual in my preference.’

‘You might not be, but one never knows what people really think. It is a taboo subject still, wife-sharing, for reasons to do with economics, machismo and the equivocal nature of jealousy. That aside, you are in fact
unusual in one regard, and that is in the amount of cooperation you have received from husbands.’

He did not reply to this at once. He was deciding, I could only imagine, on the heat of his response.

‘In another place I would challenge your use of the word cooperation,’ he said at last, keeping his eye firmly on the worn but still beautiful bestiary carpet that had once covered the floor of a state room on the
Queen Mary
and which I wouldn’t have put it past my grandfather to have stolen and smuggled back from New York in his luggage.

‘How’s assistance then?’ I helped out. ‘Or aid, or abetment. Abetment has a nice ring.’

‘Call it what you like – I never sought it. But you speak of husbands as though there were more than one. Who else am I to discover has been palming his wife off on me?’

Now it was my turn to be annoyed. ‘Palming, as I understand
your
use of the word, implies unwanted. Let me assure you there has never been anything unwanted about Marisa.’

‘Indeed there hasn’t. And I am more than willing to be educated in the appropriate vocabulary for an activity to which until recently I have been a stranger. But who are these other magnanimous husbands you claim to know something about?’

‘I once did a little book business with a Shropshire professor,’ I said. ‘It was what took me to his funeral some years ago, and subsequently brought you to my shop. We are, you see, joined in books, you and I.’

We were back where we had been, and where no doubt we should always have remained, with him loathing me to death.

‘You were at Jim Hanley’s funeral?’

‘I do funerals.’

‘Why? Are they a happy hunting ground for you?’

‘For what?’

‘For whatever it is you hunt?’

‘I don’t hunt anything. I would rather say, if we must stay with your metaphor, that I am the hunted. They find me.’

‘I didn’t find you.’

‘Well you did, by virtue of your attractiveness. “I have it,” you as good as shouted. I was there to mourn a nice old man, nothing else, and there you were, shouting that you had it.’

‘Had what?’

I laughed. When one man tells another what he ‘has’, laughter is a necessary accompaniment. Unless he is meaning to take the tragic route, which I wasn’t.

‘The sacred terror,’ I said.

‘And what’s that when it’s at home?’

‘You don’t know the sacred terror? I must say I’m surprised. But maybe you don’t need the term seeing as you have the thing. It’s how Henry James describes what every kindly, mild-mannered and perhaps impotent man wishes he had – the wherewithal to make a woman tremble.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’

‘I know. Sounds pouffy. But a husband such as I am has to try to see the way a woman sees.’

‘And you think Henry James will help you do that?’

‘Well he didn’t lead me far astray on this occasion,’ I said.

So where is Marisa, I suddenly found myself wanting to say. Where is she? And in the end, though I would rather have asked any man than Marius, I couldn’t help myself. ‘Where is she?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You really don’t know?’

‘I really don’t know, though it surprises me that you’d think I’d tell you if I did.’

‘Just an ordinary expectation of candour,’ I said. ‘I’m used to people telling me everything. I have always hated secrecy. Marisa too.’

Silence between us as I made to refill his wine glass, an offer he declined. My father’s motto: never trust a man who doesn’t drink as much wine as he is offered.

I watched him think hard about how he phrased his next question because it was
the
question, when all was said and done, that had brought
him to my front door. But he took too long about it for my taste. I had things I needed to get off my chest, since he ’d called. ‘So did Marisa tell me
absolutely
everything, you are wondering. Well, some wondering we must take with us unanswered into hell. If I were to tell you all Marisa told me I would be betraying her confidence, and that would jeopardise your future happiness together. Which is not something I would want. Not for you, not for Marisa, and least of all for me. I have enjoyed myself since you and she finally . . .’

My smile, as I let it hang there, was Mephistophelean in all it encompassed. Beneath our feet a bestiary carpet in lurid colours, and in my eyes the bestiary of Marius’s wild afternoons in my house, he and my wife locked like animals in each other’s embrace. I kept my gaze on him so he could drink it in, my possession of their coupling, until he choked on it.

‘I will,’ he said at last, ‘accept another glass of your wine.’ I hesitated, worrying for the rug. Would he throw wine at me? I decided not. He had struck me once. Attacking me twice would, for Marius, have been to make himself predictable. Instead, he raised his filled glass to me. ‘I drink to you,’ he said. ‘I have never met a man who disgusts me more.’

I raised my glass in return. ‘Not for the first time,’ I said, ‘you have made my day. From the moment I clapped eyes on you all I ever wanted – no, not
all
I ever wanted, but much of what I wanted, was to turn your stomach. My only fear now is that like Othello my occupation’s gone.’

He put his wine down and rubbed his face with his hands, almost as though he were washing me off him. ‘What the fuck have I ever done to you?’ he said.

It was a fair question and I gave it the consideration it deserved. I covered my face. Maybe we had to do this blind.

‘“Done”? Nothing,’ I said. ‘But nor have I acted as though you had. After all, to put this at its crudest, what have I “done” to you but given you my wife? I know, I know, Marisa was not mine to give. Any more than you were mine to give to her. But I laboured, when you were getting nowhere with each other, to bring you forth. Without me you would both be still discussing Baudelaire on the High Street. So I have nothing to
apologise to you for. But yes, it pleased me, man to man, to think I was doing what would appal you to your soul, and you a man without a soul. A thoroughgoing masochist will always be an affront to a sadist. He takes away the sadist’s
raison d’être
.’

‘I’m at a loss to understand why you have me figured as a sadist. This isn’t the first time you’ve accused me of a brutality I must tell you I don’t find in myself.’

‘That’s because you’re looking in the wrong place. Your brutality is the brutality of the rationalist. You’ve said you are not unusual and indeed I see you as very much a man of our time. Nothing surprises or disappoints you, you boast. You have seen through to the bottom of human nature. And then a respectably dressed husband with a quiet manner hands you his wife and you’re disgusted. One night you must let me take you to a club I know. That will test the strength of your world-weariness. What you don’t seem to understand is that I like you. I feel we have something in common. We are both trying to survive the death of God. Only I think I survive it better. I don’t pretend to disillusion. I say, when there is nothing else left to believe in, believe in the erotic life. If you’ve truly nowhere else to go, then let it take you on a journey of its choosing.’

‘If you’re telling me this is a contest between belief systems, you’ve been fighting with yourself. In relation to your wife I never knew of your existence until the other day.’

‘Your incuriosity does you no credit.’

‘And you think your obscene curiosity does you any? In all your nosing about your wife ’s life and mine, did it ever occur to you we might feel sincerely for each other?’

‘All the time. It was what I wanted.’

‘Why? So that you could rub your itch?’

‘So that I could love her better.’

‘You can only love a woman beloved of someone else?’

‘I could ask the very same question of you. I said we had much in common. But no – I loved Marisa fine when there was no one else, not you or those who preceded you. Since you, however, yes, I have loved her more.

‘You are hooked on loss, my friend.’

‘And you are hooked on victory. We both know that love will die at last, turn tepid and perfunctory, decline into mere companionship and affection, if there is not cruelty in it. Not physical harm or violence, but cruelty. The cruelty of loss. Of dread. Of jealousy. Whatever the counselling professions tell us about trust, where we are not jealous we are not in love at all. Othello was within his rights, though it is not fashionable to say so, to claim he loved too well. His mistake was not to see that suffocating his wife was not the best way to express it. Inviting Cassio to his bed would have been the infinitely preferable option for all parties.’

‘Provided he could watch?’

‘Maybe. He was a simple soldier. But being told, as Iago very nearly taught him, is more rewarding. Words excite far more than mere vision ever can.’

He looked at me evenly. Had circumstance been otherwise I would have said with compassion.

‘Words can deceive,’ he said.

‘Are you saying Marisa deceived me? Perhaps I’ve disgusted you enough for one day, but I must tell you that ours has always been a highly verbal marriage. When she deceives me, she tells me.’

‘Now it’s my turn to express philosophic disappointment in you. Words aren’t always, as you know as well as anybody, messengers of truth. Even when they mean to be honest they are bound by the crookedness of their nature. I’m surprised it has never occurred to you that Marisa might have deceived you in her deceptions.’

‘You are too subtle for me.’

He shrugged and rose. ‘Then let’s agree we have out-subtilised each other.’

I scrutinised him. A host’s prerogative – to take a long, insolent and uncontested look at an unbidden guest. A handsome man without a doubt, Marius, but dry. Squeeze him and nothing would come out. Just a little dust. And he was more haggard when one really looked. Had they always been there, those dark impermeable circles round his eyes, each like the
rim of an eclipsed moon? Mustn’t it have made Marisa sad, looking into those?

‘So why did you come here?’ I asked him.

‘Old times’ sake.’

‘I see you intend to leave on a victorious note. Well I’m not hard to vanquish, as you know.’

‘I’ll let you into a secret. I don’t feel victorious. And I never felt victorious over poor Jim Hanley, though that is your view of me.
Amor vincit
omnia
. Love ruins us all.’

‘Only if we let it.’

‘It’s a dice with death, and you know it.’

‘Better to say a dance with death. Enjoy the dance, is my view.’

‘Well that’s your lewd romance.’

‘And, don’t forget, Klossowski’s,’ I said, noticing that he had given Helmut Newton’s photograph a final glance. ‘In fact I think you’ll find that half the men in the world are of my party – the half that’s not of yours. There’s no other way to be. Your way or my way. The hammer or the anvil. Finito.’

‘And who’s having the better time, would you say?’

‘Depends how you measure. But if we’re talking rapture, the anvil. The hammer strikes, the anvil feels the blow. The hammer does, the anvil feels. Hammers don’t paint paintings or write novels.’