The Act of Love (21 page)

No, is my considered answer. There is no continuum of aberration, except in the sense that every act of sex sits at a crossroads which leads to every other. We would all perish ecstatically in sex at last if we had the courage to go on travelling. ‘In the end,’ Bataille said, ‘we resolutely desire that which imperils our life.’ Otherwise, no, I was not companioned in the kitsch of being cuckolded with Lionel. I was a Frenchman, not an American, in my erotic life, seeking carnality’s greatest prize – extinction. No one could have been further removed than I was from the breezy Disneyland of wifeswapping, cocktail nuts and ankle chains. No one.

But I kept an aloof eye, as it were, on these distant cousins in perversion, as an aristocrat enjoying perfect health might note with concern the incidence of rickets among the poorer branches of his family. Though Lionel and Dulcie were not family, I feared they had brought the affliction closer to me than I could tolerate. The thought even occurred to me
as we were talking that Marisa and her lover were having the identical conversation about me. ‘He’s sick, Miles. He needs help.’ And Miles, I was pretty sure, would not be championing me, as I’d vainly championed Lionel, as one of masculinity’s pioneers, scouting for what was out there beyond the phallic pale. Dentists don’t think like that.

Enough. To the degree that it was within my power to rescue Marisa from the category of hot wife, and me from the category of spermsnuffling sissy, then I should do it. Enough. We had gone far enough. But no sooner did I make the decision to parley with Marisa and put it to her that we were in mortal danger of looking like the thing we both despised, that while morally we were sainted and heroic, aesthetically we had sinned, and so, my dear, enough – at that precise moment of resolution I heard the vitality leave my body in a rush. The psychoanalyst Theodor Reik describes what comes over a masochist ‘patient’ as he closes in on what might be termed ‘recovery’. ‘He notices that life loses some of its rich-ness, its interest and colour. Life is felt as dreary, the day is trivial; life seems to have lost its substance. It becomes numb and meaningless.’

Which was exactly how ‘recovery’ felt to me as I envisaged it.
Enough
?

I couldn’t say the word.

Enough
trivialised the day.

Enough
made life numb, dreary and meaningless.

Enough
promised nothing that had any richness, interest or colour in it.

There was no
Enough
.

Something else occurred that lunchtime which should have sent me in one direction, had I been a sane man, but which sent me once and for all, since I was not a sane man, in the other.

The something else was a look Marisa threw me across the restaurant, a look that bypassed her one-time Irish millionaire lover, now a dentist, bypassed Dulcie, and simply rested on me like a torch-beam in an empty room. Only two people who knew the complexions of each other’s souls and knew what compassion the one could call on in the other, would have
been able to exchange what we exchanged in a single glance. I read Marisa’s meaning in her eyes, but it was the expression of her whole face that spoke to me. She opened her eyes wide, emphasising those serious teabag stains which I had always regarded as the site of all that was philosophic in her nature. Such a serious and reflective face, and yet kind and mirthful too in the wide, pearl-shadowed spaces above her eyelids.
How
are you getting on with Dulcie?
her expression asked.
She looks as though she is having a hard time of it for whatever reason. I hope you are being gentle with her. You can be ironic and impatient, Felix, so please don ’t be. I don’t think she is strong enough for that. Few people are. You underestimate the strength of your personality and will. I intend no reproach by saying that. What you will you will and what I do I do. You exercise no tyranny over me. Perhaps you try to, but in so far as I submit to it I do so for my own reasons which are not necessarily my own desires. You sometimes, I think, confuse the two but they are not the same. You can have a reason for doing something that doesn’t answer to a desire to do it. I will say no more. I am a fictionaliser like you, and I know what truth can spoil. You look, by the by, very nice sitting there. It gives me immense pleasure to see you across a room, I don’t always get the opportunity to see you in this way. And seeing you looking so nice I wish we were at the same table, you and I, talking. We have always talked so well together. Sad, isn’t it, that we can’t be doing it. Or at least that we can’t be doing it at this instant . . .

The way back. There it was – the retreat into normalcy.

As always, at such a time, the hobgoblins of the ordered world gath-ered to congratulate me on my narrow escape.
Thank your lucky stars you
didn’t get what you were after
, they gibbered.
Now you can live as the sane live
.
And be careful in the future what you ask for
. And just as reliably, the other voice – the voice of my addiction – shouted the impossibility, the undesirability (quite literally that which answered to none of my desires), of giving in to reason. I could even taste it on my tongue: the savourlessness of living as the sane live.

He didn’t matter to Marisa, her Irish lover. If that wasn’t what she was telling me, it was what I saw. Throughout my conversation with Dulcie I had kept track of Marisa and her lunch companion and no, they weren’t tearing at each other’s throats or grabbing handfuls of each other’s flesh beneath the table. I took note of who put whose hands where, and no, they didn’t. Call that crude, but there was necessity in it. I also took note of whether they whispered under cover of conversing about food, leaned cheek to cheek, met noses or kissed with their lips parted, and no, they didn’t do that either. In most regards they looked no different from me and Dulcie. What I thought I’d seen when they raised glasses I probably hadn’t. Maybe Miles was her lover, maybe he was just her dentist, taking her out to monitor her bite, maybe he was both – it didn’t signify, one way or the other. This much I knew for sure: she wasn’t hot for him. Very probably she liked him well enough – certainly she ’d have approved his tailoring and spotless scalded fingers – but she didn’t long to be with him, didn’t conjure up his body or his features when he wasn’t there or count the hours before she could be with him again or keep a curl of his hair in a locket worn around her neck. And certainly didn’t tango with him like a mare in heat.

Excuse the frilly language, but that’s jealousy for you. If you refuse to descend into the cesspit with Othello or roll around the comic brothel with Leo Bloom, snickering at the keyhole of your own cuckoldry –
Show!
Hide! Show! Plough her! More! Shoot!
– then all you’re left with is the bodice-ripper or the girly mags. Nothing I could do about it: the minute I put my mind to Marisa on the loose, I either had her swooning in the arms of a highwayman in tight breeches, or stripped naked and fucked until her brains bled. I accept no personal responsibility for this. When it comes to finding words for sex, the narrowest no-man’s-land separates the most refined imagination from the coarsest. Literature and popular romance the same – the border between them is invisible and unpoliced. Is
Jane
Eyre
a novel of serious intent or an exercise in sentimental pornography?At the moment Anna Karenina weeps over the loss of her honour to Vronsky, are we in a tragedy or a penny dreadful? We are in both, is the
answer. Because desire itself inhabits that same narrow strip of unclaimed territory between sacrament and slush.

Consider this scene. A youth, sick with love for an unattainable woman, goes riding with his father. When they reach a ‘tall stack of old logs’ the father dismounts and tells the boy to wait where he is. Eventually, when the father does not return, the boy goes looking for him. At last he finds him, standing by the window of a small wooden house, talking to a beau-tiful woman. The woman, of course, is the object of the boy’s unrequited love. Something – ‘stronger than curiosity, stronger even than jealousy’ – stops him from running away. (We know what that ‘something’ is: the ecstatic anticipation of proof oracular.) Then an ‘unbelievable’ event takes place before his eyes. The father lifts his riding crop and strikes the young woman a sharp blow across her arm, which is bared to the elbow. She quivers, looks silently at her assailant, then raises her arm slowly to her lips, and kisses the scar which ‘glows crimson upon it’.

Phallic logs, sons sexually envious of their fathers, riding crops, crimson scars, women of spirit made to cower and quiver – of what work of monumentally melodramatic tosh is this the climax? Ivan Turgenev’s
First Love
. And it is a masterpiece.

Great Expectations
, of which my father once, for a small fortune, sold a copy signed by Dickens to his mistress Ellen Ternan, binds us into the same near-Gothic tale. In both novels a boy etherialises a woman out of her corporeal existence. In both instances he must suffer the spectacle of another man or men violently returning her to it.

Grand guignol
, I grant you. But that’s the temperature at which a man’s erotic imagination functions.
Mal
functions, you might say. I won’t argue the toss. But pity us anyway, clattering between the extremes of believing that a woman is beyond the gross contaminating touch of man, and fearing that the brute male assurance of which we are incapable is what she ’s really after.

But where was the brute male assurance in Marisa’s life? Not sitting at her table – anyone could see that. Whatever else Miles had going for him, he wasn’t mastering my wife the way mastering works in Turgenev and
the bodice-ripper. Didn’t have the muscles. Didn’t have the dirty eyes. Didn’t have what Henry James, that sad voyeur of one primal betrayal after another, called the ‘sacred terror’. Good. For that relief, muchibus thankibus. Another hurdle in the steeplechase of dread negotiated.

But after the relief, the let-down. For if Miles was no threat to me, who was? What if all Marisa’s lovers were like him, doctors or dentists or accountants, no more capable of wielding the riding crop than I was? Worse – what if Miles
was
all Marisa’s lovers? My cathedral bed of jealous agony was a fraud in that case. I had no one to be agonisedly jealous of.

And perhaps that too was what I read in Marisa’s expression across the restaurant – that she felt she ’d let me down. That she’d done her best for both of us, but this was the limit of her iniquity. Reality had blown away illusion, and now the game was up.

I meant what I’d said to Dulcie about the faithfulness a wife can rely on from a husband who finds his fulfilment in her unfaithfulness to him. I didn’t stop looking at other women when I first met Marisa. She hadn’t, by simple virtue of her beauty and her presence, removed me from the field of promiscuous desire. But the moment I saw the Cuban doctor’s fingers on her and conceived her infidelity, I became hers only. No other woman was remotely interesting to me. I neither looked at them nor thought of them. Not once. What could any of them have given me that would be anything like as engrossing – engrossing of every aspect of my attention – as
this
? False to me, Marisa occluded all her sex. I lived only to be faithful to her.

But fidelity of this sort – eroticised fidelity, by comparison with which the gadfly vacillation of the libertine is as gruel to wine – extorts its price. It aroused me to be faithful on the condition that she was not. I am not saying I would not have gone on being faithful to Marisa had she not gone on being faithless to me, but the arousal was in the inequity. For me to burn for her, Marisa had to burn for someone else. I could not lie transfixed in subspace, imagining her out in the abandoned night, if she were merely enjoying an orderly conversation with someone at the very sight of whom she did not go up in flames. If I were to continue extinguishing
myself as a man, it had to be in a higher cause than this. Marisa had to frighten me with greater recklessness, of heart and body, and with a rival far more destructive of my peace of mind, and far more menacing to her erotic self-composure, than Miles.

Someone who would bring the both of us to our knees.

Enter, courtesy of that pimp Fortune, Marius.

Is it any wonder I made a grab for him? A vaguely troubling presence when I’d had no need for him, a distant figure agitating me at the margins of my masculinity, here suddenly he was, deranged and dangerous, an abstemious immoralist, a sadist at his wits’ end, and on my doorstep. Just the man to save my marriage.

‘Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces . . . love her, love her, love her!’

Charles Dickens,
Great Expectations

OF THE SOCIETY BEAUTIES WHOSE PORTRAITS HANG IN THE WALLACE
Collection, the most palpitatingly lovely is Margaret, Countess of Blessington, painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence. She is positioned prominently, as she deserves to be, in a brothel-red damask and velvet chamber, to your right as you enter the gallery. I was introduced to her initially by my father who, whatever else there was to say against him, believed his son should have an art education, the more particularly as there was such a capital collection around the corner from where we lived. The old reachout-and-grab principle.