The Act of Love (38 page)

Now add to these considerations the fact of Marius being Marius. A man in whom aloofness was a moral principle. A man who took pride in being beyond surprise or disappointment. A man who had been able to go for weeks knowing Marisa had secreted something for him among the inkstands and escritoires of the Wallace Collection without attempting to find it, and who in all likelihood would never have gone looking for it at all but for the intervention of yours truly.

What reason was there to suppose that he would take the bait?

Only this: whatever we say about suspicion, it is not in our natures to be above it. Honest Iago, false Iago – it doesn’t matter who whispers in our ear: we are framed to listen. There is a template of falseness down there, in that place that can be reached only through the porches of our ears, that patiently awaits the confirmation of experience, so that every broken promise we hear of is a broken promise we’ve been expecting.

From which it had to follow that if Marius got as far as opening my envelope, I had him.

But why would he take even that risk? What I have just said is true only if we allow it to be true. Men and women of the tribe of Masoch cannot wait for it to be true. Best to get to the bottom of their fears and have done. Men and women of the tribe of de Sade – and we are all the heirs of one or the other, whether we are poets, painters, writers of unwritten books or just booksellers – know it to be true only in the sense that they know every baseness to be true. We are vile at every level, they say, which saves them from being curious. In effect, their cruelty is a mask to protect themselves from what they would otherwise be unable to bear. They are the cowards. The children of Masoch are the brave.

So, unless he loved Marisa as I had wanted him to love her – as I loved her, with that jealous desperation that must make everything it fears eventuate, and as I had wanted her to love him, blindly, with unquestioning devotion and submission – he would neither pick up the book I’d sent him
nor bother with the envelope. He would simply put himself back to bed above the button shop.

As for his going to the park, there was as much hope of that as of his becoming my bosom friend.

FOR THE TANGO I WORE ALL BLACK ‒ BLACK MULTIPLEATED TROUSERS FOR
easy moving, black silk shirt, and for the fun of it a black bandana. Some of the other men my age wore squashed pork-pie hats, in the style of Argentinian procurers. I envied their loucheness but knew it was beyond me. On me even a bandana was chancy. But it was a hot day in the park and a bandana could pass for a sweatband.

Latin American music was not my thing, but Marisa loved it and from the start I had aspired, however unsuccessfully, to love whatever Marisa loved. In fact, of all Latin American dances the tango pleased and suited her the least. Marisa danced to lose herself in movement, but the rhythms of the tango worked against the sort of self-abandonment she danced to experience. They demanded too many changes of direction. They were too abrupt. Too sardonic, perhaps, certainly too consciously deliberate for someone who loved to flow like water when she danced.

To me the steps made no real difference. I too liked to lose myself in music on the dance floor, but I’d have been just as happy to lose myself without moving my feet. If anything, the tango made immobility easier for me to get away with. At the highest reaches of achievement the male tango dancer has much to express, but down at the Regent’s Park level most men found the steps so difficult they walked more than they danced and left the fancy footwork to the women. Besides, in my view – though I spoke without knowledge of Argentinian culture – it behoved the male tango dancer to simulate a raffish indifference to the woman who was just
some common seaport slut anyway and whose job it was to lure her partner out of his cold machismo. As part of this ritual, not only must the man take his time responding, he must also put obstacles in the way of the woman, blocking her foot – a
parada,
this spiteful step is called – so that when she kicks and crooks her heels, she does so, as it were, in a halfimploring, half-skittish attempt to break free of his command.

I hadn’t paid much attention during tango classes in our little church hall, mainly because I was more interested in watching Marisa pressed close to someone else, but I’d learned enough of the theory to understand it was a dance in celebration of sexual teasing and even cruelty, a choreographed invasion of intimate space, in which the woman hung on to the man in an embrace – an
abrazo
– more desperate than it was always comfortable to observe if the woman was your wife and you were not the dancer – unless you happened to be a pain-chaser of my sort. In no other circumstance, outside the preliminaries to fornication, does a woman close her eyes, press her chest hard against a stranger’s, hook her arm about his neck (sometimes even loop her fingers in his hair), and kick her feet in frustrated desire.

Not Marisa, though, for whom it lacked, as I have said, the prerequisite of dance. She was too masculine for it, was my guess. She would lose herself if she could but not at the say-so of some gaucho who blocked her feet for fun.

She had entered, though, into the urgency of my request, whatever it was about, and looked the part. I was even treated to a fashion show before we left the house, so that I could choose the part
I
wanted her to look. I chose predictably – a silvery grey leopard-skin skirt in a clingy material, smooth on the hips, and slashed on each side to show off her legs, one of those items of clothing that Marisa was somehow able to winkle out of a cheap high-street store but which looked expensive the minute it was on her. On her feet, steely-black strumpet high-heeled shoes – the highest I could persuade her into – with a strap around the ankle as the dance demanded. Above, a white shirt tied at the midriff. No point in that look if you’re a girl with a cardboard stomach. But Marisa was just the right
side of fleshy, and the tango is a fleshy dance. Trashy too, in token whereof she wore her trashiest white hoop plastic earrings.

No truly trashy woman ever did trashy as Marisa did. In trash, as in everything else, sophistication is the first essential.

Dancing with her as we had not danced for a long time, and she so voluptuous – her arm coiled about
my
neck, her chest hard against
mine
– I wondered how I’d ever persuaded myself to part with her. I pulled her closer to me, the still centre of her turning world, and let her kick her feet around me as she pleased. I was not sure which of us was keeping the other up. I knew her eyes were closed. I had heard them shut. I heard her heart. Heard its chambers open and close. What a fool I’d been! Never again. Sort this all out once and for all and then never again.

And then, as sure as fate, there rose up before me the Cuban doctor with his hungry horse’s face. Not him, of course, or at least I assumed not him, but first one and then another of him, some in flattened porkpie hats worn at jaunty angles, a couple in straw fedoras, one in a Stetson, one in a bandana just like mine, half of London’s South American population come out to tango. Their dance. And as I hung on to Marisa I thought, as I had thought a thousand times before, their woman. Nothing in anything any of them said or in the way any of them looked at her, and certainly nothing in the way she looked at them, that’s if she opened her eyes to look at all, but they no sooner shared a corner of the universe than I joined them in desire, gave her to them, gave them to her – regardless, yes, yes, regardless of
their
desire – and in the giving and the losing felt the sweetness of the rapture run again like honey down my gullet.

Once upon a time this would have been the moment I told Marisa I was tired and suggested she find another partner. But I hung on to her. It’s possible that in the moment when jealousy liquefied my innards my feet discovered how to tango, because suddenly we were dancing. I don’t say pivoting on our axes or performing
molinettes
or
giros,
but dancing. The music had changed – that had something to do with it. They were now playing Ástor Piazzolla’s ‘Libertango’, the great Argentine musician creating the very beat and pain of the human heart itself, the bandoneón
– as agitated as breathing – elaborating on the jangle of the double bass, the violin, the piano, the electric guitar, while something unbearably percussive, I didn’t know whether it was another instrument or the sum total of those I could make out, tore at our nerves, sarcastic and beautiful, brutal and exquisite, exhilarating and doomed.

I took advantage of Marisa being draped about my neck, and kissed her. Kissed her cheek, her neck, her ear. She raised her face, her eyes still closed and kissed me on the mouth. Time fell away from us. We were ourselves as we had been, not a hundred years ago, but yesterday.

Not exactly in the spirit of the occasion – on a laid wooden floor in the middle of Regent’s Park, with children present, and a hundred dancers concentrating on their steps, tracing figures with their toes, as though in the dust of the callejuelas of Buenos Aires – to be kissing as voraciously as we kissed; but we couldn’t stop and nobody, in all likelihood, noticed or cared. ‘Libertango’ for God’s sake! When such music plays and pulls your chest apart, there is nothing you might not do. Indifferent, anyway, to what anyone thought, we devoured each other.

And when at last I did look up I saw Marius watching.

Given where he was standing when I saw him, and assuming he hadn’t changed his position to get a better view, I calculate that Marius had entered the park from St Andrew’s Gate, having walked along Wimpole Street with his ears roaring, past the specialists in back pain and throat infection and madness, crossing Marylebone Road where the traffic never stops and wondering, as I had wondered on my own behalf only days before, whether he wouldn’t be better under its wheels. At St Andrew’s Gate he must have paused, knowing it was run away now or proceed to ruin, and he had not run away. Then the Broad Walk, a stroll in the park at any other time but today like the last walk to the scaffold. Didn’t King Charles I take a turn about a London park with his favourite dogs an hour or so before they removed his head? No less gravely, as I conceive him, Marius proceeded,
a step at a time – for he was not a man to quicken his pace for anyone – the electric green of the grass after rain hurting his eyes, his overwrought senses offended by the fussy garden furniture: the overfilled urns and three-tier fountains, the troughs and beds of gaudy flowers, the plinths of coral geraniums, as violent as a migraine, held up by wild-faced griffins, the colours of everything that grew turning more vulgar, gross violets and psycho reds, the closer he got to the knot of dancers. On either side of him, under the lime trees, people sprawled on picnic blankets, odious, laughing, opening champagne. Not a bend in the path, nothing to shield the view or refract his wondering, just the undeviating walk in the direction of the mocking music, foredoomed, inexorable. And then the spectacle of us.

I didn’t know how long he’d been there, but sometimes when you see a person in a crowd you know he’s just arrived. At what early stage in his disordering perceptions was he, I wondered, as I met his eye. Had he seen Marisa yet, or just me, his nemesis and joker, just me tangoing innocently on a weakly sunny, threatening to be watery Sunday afternoon in the park, tormenting him, as I’d tormented him before, to no effect or end, with a woman he neither knew nor cared about? And in the moment of his recognising Marisa, what then, what horrid thoughts? He wouldn’t, all at once, understand what he was seeing for there was too much to understand. That it was I who’d sent the letter he could never have entertained a single doubt; that for reasons of my own I wished him ill and hoped to hurt him with the spectacle of Marisa in the arms of someone else, that too all added up; but I could not
be
the ‘someone else’, not me and Marisa, not Marisa betraying him for me, unless, unless – and I would not have wanted to be inside Marius’s head at that moment of
éclaircissement
– unless I was the one she had originally betrayed for him. The husband – me! The husband – that self-confessed pervert who had hung around him like a bad smell! But if I were the husband, a person with whose wife and in whose house he had made free, whose existence had never presented the slightest impediment to Marius’s pleasure, nor to Marisa’s come to that – if I were the faceless quiescent handover husband Marius had supposed him to be,
whoever he was – why this intense embrace, why this deep, desperate kissing in the park as the ‘Libertango’ shook our hearts?

It does sometimes give me an advantage, my living as other men dare not. It enables me to confound rational explanation.

Whatever conclusion Marius reached, he reached quickly.

I had time for one profound regret as I saw him move away, and that was that Marisa would always think I’d staged our kiss for him. Whereas the absolute truth of it was that I’d never expected him to come and had forgotten him – all
but
forgotten him – under the influence of Marisa’s closeness, the love I bore her, and the bandoneón, breathing as humans breathe when their lungs are fevered.