The Act of Love (41 page)

‘Of the Henry James type?’

‘Of any type. Art happens on the anvil, beneath the hammer.’

‘Look,’ he said suddenly, as if he didn’t want to get into any of that, his voice finding another key entirely, ‘forgive this intrusion into your marriage—’

I could have snorted, but I didn’t. I too was suddenly in another mood. ‘That,’ I said, ‘since we are being candid, is if I have a marriage.’

He looked away momentarily. Not a subject for him to enter into. Funny how a man can sleep with your wife and still be nice about whether you do or do not have a marriage.

‘What I was going to say,’ he said, ‘was just this. My reputation might
be of no concern to you, but Marisa’s well-being surely is. Punch me on the nose if you like – no doubt you believe you owe me one – but I think – and as the subject of your conversations I have a right to think – that you should listen less to what you want her to tell you, and more to what she wishes to say.’

‘What is that supposed to mean?’

He extended his hand to me and then held mine a moment longer than was necessary. A shocking act, I thought. It made me catch my breath. So this was what Marius felt like. Would he kiss me next? Had he come on an ironic mission, to fill me in on the few things I didn’t know about him that Marisa did? Such as the fleshly texture of him?

But if so, that was all he intended to fill me in on. He offered no answer to my question.

‘Words deceive,’ he said again. And then was gone.

I sat a long time wondering what, if anything, he ’d been trying to tell me.

The next time we met – if I may put it fancifully – was in a cemetery.

The following afternoon – I took the timing to be coincidental – I received a call from Flops saying that she and Rowlie were on their way to me from Richmond to collect some of Marisa’s belongings and would I arrange to be at the house for them.

‘So she ’s with you,’ I said. ‘Is she all right?’

‘We ’ll talk when we see you, Felix.’

‘So is she all right?’ I asked again when I opened the door to them.

Rowlie looked away. Flops stared at me with what I thought was loathing.

‘Of course she ’s not all right,’ she said.

I took that to refer to the degree of upset I’d caused Marisa, the nature of which she might well have conveyed to her half-sister. Once the family is involved, the pursuit of sexual ecstasy by whatever means can never be made to sound good. Perversion never travels well across the in-laws.

‘I’ll get some things together for her then,’ I said in quasi-shame.

‘No, Felix. She asked me to do it. Please make this easy for us all.’

‘Us all?’

‘She ’s given me a list of what she wants and where I’ll find them. She said you wouldn’t object.’

‘Object! Of course I won’t object. What do you think I am?’ She didn’t answer.

Rowlie stayed in the kitchen with me. We barely spoke. It was almost as though he was there to keep an eye on me, to be sure I made it easy for them all. I offered him tea. He shook his head.

‘Something stronger?’

‘I’m driving,’ he said.

And then, emboldened by the sound of his own voice, he said, ‘It’s not good, old man.’

‘What’s not good?’

‘Marisa.’

‘What about Marisa isn’t good?’

‘Her health.’ He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Sorry.’

And that was how I learned the doctors had found a malignant tumour in Marisa’s breast.

She had half promised me this once, not long after I’d come clean about the Cuban. We were both exhausted after a night of narrative – I exhausted into exaltation, she into the grey remorseful sleeplessness of second thoughts.

‘What will become of us?’ she said.

‘We will grow old and love each other forever.’

‘Will we? When my flesh falls into folds and my knees have gone?’

‘I’m not him. The ageing of the body doesn’t repel me.’

‘Doesn’t now.’

‘Won’t ever.’

‘How do you know it won’t?’

‘I’m not a man who changes with the seasons.’

‘That’s just what frightens me, Felix. You’ll still be you, lying here waiting for me to come hobbling home in the early morning with stories of men falling at my feet. But I won’t still be me. The men won’t go on falling, Felix.’

‘They’ll always go on falling, Marisa. You possess the secret of eternal beauty.’

‘I don’t,’ she cried, sitting up in bed, ‘I don’t possess the secret of eternal anything.’ She took her breasts in her hands, exactly as my Aunt Agatha had done when I was a boy, to shame every man who bore the name of Quinn. ‘It won’t be the men that fall, Felix, it will be these. That’s what they do. If you’re lucky that’s
all
they do. You must face that. Anything can happen. And where are we then? How will you be when the surgeon’s finished with me?’

‘Don’t start invoking surgeons.’

‘How will you be, Felix?’

‘I will be concerned for you. That’s all.’

She shivered as though an icy blast had blown through her. ‘Easy to say. But you need me whole for what you like. It’s a tyranny, Felix. I don’t deny it has its compensations. And it must speak to something in me otherwise I’d have walked away from you long ago. You have influenced me too much. Men always have. I’m like my mother. I don’t blame you. You could have influenced me in other ways. You could have painted a different picture of me. Mother Teresa, say. I’d have been good as her. But what I do
I
do. I don’t complain. But I’d be insane not to worry where it will end.’

‘Not with a surgeon. Don’t wish surgeons on us.’

‘There you are! Don’t wish surgeons on
us
. It would be me he’d be chopping up, not you. But already it’s you who’s being mutilated.’

‘I’m speaking about my feelings for you, Marisa.’

‘Yes, you might be. But you are also thinking about your desire for me.’

‘Any husband or wife must learn to deal with what the surgeon does

to desire.’

‘But your desires are not the desires of any husband, Felix. You’d be
dealing with what the surgeon does to every other man’s desire for me as well. I can’t say it is isn’t flattering sometimes to be the mistress of the world in your eyes. I go with the pretence. But what follows is that I’ll be the hag or amputee of the world in the end.’

‘Marisa, what is this? You’re a young woman. The world will have melted or blown itself up long before that time.’

‘
That
time, Felix, could be any time.’

But I was sleepy now, wiped out by all she ’d told me of the afternoon she ’d spent with Marius, her untainted limbs entwined with his, her eyes rolling in her head like a bacchante ’s, her breasts bathed in a cold quicksilver sweat.

And now here it was, from the mouth of Rowlie – my comeuppance. Symmetrical and jeering: the Cuban doctor by Marisa’s bedside again, only this time wielding a surgeon’s blade. Except – and this is the trouble with comeuppance – it was Marisa’s comeuppance too, indeed far more Marisa’s comeuppance than mine, and what had she done to call down so terrible a retribution?

I got no more out of Rowlie. When Flops descended, in a cloud of bags and cases, she refused to speak to me. I followed her out of the house and watched her load up the car. ‘So what now?’ I asked. ‘What’s happening next?’

‘To you, I suppose you mean,’ she said, her head in the boot of the car.

‘To Marisa. To Marisa. What’s happening? How do I see her?’

‘You don’t.’

‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘she ’s my wife.’

A sardonic laugh from Flops. I was absolutely certain she said beneath her breath, ‘And how many other men’s, thanks to you,’ but she didn’t say it loud enough for me to challenge her.

Rowlie was already in the driving seat. ‘Text her, old man,’ he said confidentially, as though assisting in our elopement.

‘Text her! Fucking text her!’

But I was shouting at a car that had driven away.

I tried ringing Marisa’s mobile but it was off. I rang Flops’s home number, but if Marisa was there she wasn’t answering. I thought about getting a cab to Richmond then changed my mind; a seriously ill Marisa would not appreciate my making a scene. So text her was what I did.

Darling, what can I do?
I wrote.

An hour later a text came back.
Darling, nothing
.

With the words, it was as though a sheet of tears had fallen. I did not even try to blink their sting away. I succumbed to them as though they had been foretold, tears waiting for me from another life. I lay down on our bed and closed my eyes. Subspace with a vengeance. When I next opened my eyes it was dark outside. I wanted to read the text again but didn’t dare. She had called me darling which was something, more than something, but she had told me I could do nothing, which was less than nothing.

Darling, nothing
. Nothing in the sense that there was nothing she wanted from me? Nothing in the sense that there was nothing
I
could do, whether she would have welcomed my help or not? Or nothing in the sense that there was nothing anyone could do? It was too final to bear, however I read it.

Death came two-tiered for me. There was the death of men and then there was the death of women, and the death of women was immeasurably more painful. I wept over my mother long after my father forgot her name. ‘Pull yourself together,’ he told me when he could stand the sight and sound of me no more, ‘you’ll need some grief left over for me.’

‘You’re just a man,’ I told him.
‘I’m your father.’
‘A father’s not a mother.’
‘That won’t stop me dying.’
‘No, but it will stop me caring.’

I had always known I would not handle my mother’s dying well. I had been preparing for it too long. As far back as I could remember I had been possessed of the utter sadness of it – not just my mother’s death, whenever
it happened, but the death of women, full stop. And later there was not a woman I encountered whose death I did not foresee and grieve for in advance of its occurring. There are women out there in the world today, rosy-cheeked and blooming who have no idea that I broke down before their coffins years ago.

No doubt it goes with my condition. Freud understood the passivemasochistic state as one in which the son takes the place of the mother and desires to be loved by the father. Hard to credit with a father like mine, but that’s the unconscious for you. If Freud was right then I was grieving for the woman I had already killed or intended to kill.

But there must have been another stage, too, in which I disavowed my mother not by killing her but by denigrating her. Grieve for her, prostitute her. Prostitute her, grieve for her. Who’s to say which comes first or where the causation is?

All I know, whether I wanted to be the mother, or wanted to defile her, was that desire had always been imbued with sadness for me. I no sooner fell in love with a woman than I imagined her dead.

IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED I LIVED BEHIND THE SHEET OF TEARS THAT
had fallen with Marisa’s text. I did not go into work. I barely left the house. I rang Richmond ten times a day but always got the answermachine. I left messages but they weren’t answered. I dreaded ringing Marisa’s mobile because I knew that if I heard her voice I’d break down. And how would that help her? Texts, too, I feared, because another like the last and I’d be a dead man myself.

Finally she did text me.
Going into hospital today. Expect to live.
Love, M.

Which hospital?
I texted back.

No need for you to know
.

I’m your husband. I must be with you
.

You wouldn’t cope
.

Cope??

Cope!!

Isn’t that for me to decide

Nope.

For myself, I could have gone on with this. I even punched in
Nope???
before thinking better of it. A sick woman on the point of going into hospital could only do so much texting.

I let half the day go by in morbid self-indulgence – going through the things of hers that still remained, looking at old photographs and letters, blaming myself, imagining life without her, exactly as I had
imagined life without my mother and every other woman I had ever cared for, then retreating again behind the sheet of tears. In the afternoon I pulled myself together and began going through the phone book, systematically ringing every hospital in London to find which one had admitted her. Eventually I located her in a private hospital in Kingston. By then it was almost midnight. They were surprised, when I told them I was Marisa Quinn’s husband, that I didn’t know her operation wasn’t scheduled until the day after next. ‘I’m away,’ I explained, which surprised them more.