Authors: Howard Jacobson
‘Oh Christ, you,’ he said, when at last my face did swim back into his recollection. ‘My Nemesis.’
I threw him a self-deprecating smile. I wasn’t going to tell him he was mine.
‘French Guinea,’ I said.
‘What about it?’
‘I see you’re planning a trip. French Guinea is said to be nice.’
‘And what the hell has it got to do with you?’
‘As your Nemesis, a great deal. It’s important I know where you are every moment of the day. I can’t have anyone else determining your fate.’
‘I think you’re taking me a trifle literally. Nemesis as in fucking nuisance was what I had in mind.’
‘Not a usage I’m familiar with,’ I said. ‘But when we first talked and you described to me your four o’clock heartlands you never mentioned French Guinea.’
‘I’m not mentioning it now. I don’t owe you an atlas of my movements.’
‘Of course you don’t. But I wouldn’t have picked you for an Africanophile.’
‘I wouldn’t have picked you for someone who had a right to an opinion.’
‘I don’t have an opinion. All I was going to do was recommend you
further reading. Robbe-Grillet – you read him? I’d have thought he was up your street.’
He looked at me at last, or at least he looked at Robbe-Grillet. He was like me in this – he couldn’t say no to an author or a title. It wouldn’t have surprised me if in his mind’s eye he could see the jacket of the first edition. Poor bookish bastards we both were.
‘Robbe-Grillet? I don’t know about up my street, but certainly of my persuasion in that he made objects more important than men. Which you’ll forgive me saying – since you seem to want a man-to-man conversation – is precisely the ordering I favour at this very moment. I count on you to understand me when I say I would rather be talking to this bookcase than to you.’
‘Absolutely follow you . . .’
‘Yes, you do absolutely follow me, don’t you. Is it just me, or are you following around other readers of Robbe-Grillet as well?’
‘Ah, there are very few of us. As you don’t need me to tell you, he’s not in fashion. But honestly I’m not following anybody. I’m out and about a lot, that’s all. I find it hard to stay inside. There is so much to see on the streets. Wasn’t it Barthes who said that with Robbe-Grillet the novel becomes man’s experience of what’s around him without the protection of a metaphysic? Well that’s me. I am that novel.’
‘Oh, Christ yes,
The Voyeur
. You’ve tried to tell me this about yourself before, if I’m not mistaken, though why you think your voyeurism might interest me a second time when it didn’t the first—’
‘You remembered! I’m flattered. But I never told you I was a voyeur exactly. A general pervert was about as far as I was prepared to go with it to you, on the strength of a brief acquaintance and all that. Though now we know each other better . . .’
‘No, please don’t. General pervert is fine.’
‘Haven’t read
The Voyeur
, anyway,’ I said. ‘Though I will now you’ve recommended it. Is that set in French Guinea? I’ve always reckoned, you see, though I don’t think we’re ever really told, that French Guinea is where
Jealousy
is set. You know
Jealousy
, I don’t doubt. It’s the one where
the main character – if you can call him a character – sits and counts the rows of banana trees between his house and the house he suspects his wife of carrying on in. The best novel about the banality of suspicion ever written. It’s so authentically tedious in its minuteness of observation it’s unreadable.’
‘That saves me, then, the chore of having to read it.’
‘But then again,’ I said, as though he hadn’t spoken, ‘that’s what it’s like. You count the trees, you note the different heights of the trunks, you distinguish between the tangle of the fronds, you measure the unevenness of the rows, and then you start to count again, over and over because jealousy is the harshest taskmaster, demanding from its victims a punctiliousness that your average obsessional tap-twiddler would find deranging.’
‘I think,’ he said, ‘that you’ve just put me off French Guinea.’
‘But not, I hope, Robbe-Grillet.’
‘Him too. You have a way about you of putting me off just about everything.’
‘Jealousy as well?’
‘I have never been
on
jealousy.’
‘Never experienced it, or never approved of it?’
‘Both. It’s invariably an indulgence. We have the strength to walk away.’
‘But one might not want to walk away.’
‘Exactly, one might not. That, I think, is what indulgence means. You can but you won’t.’
‘You’re a lucky man,’ I said, ‘to be able to exert so much self-control.’
‘If this is a prelude to more pervert talk,’ he said, ‘I’ll leave you to it.’
‘I’m off perversion now. That was yesterday’s interest. Today all I want to speak about is love.’
‘Then I will definitely leave you to it.’
‘Just one word before you do.’ I was almost pulling at his jacket, so eager was I to continue the conversation. ‘It is not of course my business but could the reason you do not feel jealousy be that you have never been in love? If there’s no one you care about losing, then it stands to reason you won’t care about losing her. Or him. Whereas when you are smitten
to your soul . . . but you’re a reader, you must know all this from books. Don’t you ever want it, though? Don’t you ever envy those whom jealousy makes so alive that they register – well, like Robbe-Grillet himself – the minutest resonance of every object that is witness or confirmation of that which they suspect, every hair on the loved one’s head, every button on the lover’s jacket, every banana on every banana tree if we happened to be in French Guinea—’
‘No,’ he said, and without a further word of goodbye he strode out of the shop.
I offered an apology to Stefan, who managed the shop. We keep a friendly eye on each other across the book trade. ‘Sorry, Stefan,’ I said, ‘I seem to have talked you out of a sale.’
‘Well you’d have talked me into buying Robbe-Grillet. Which one should I start with?
Jealousy
or
The Voyeur
?’
‘You were listening.’
‘Felix, the whole shop was listening. You wouldn’t pop in and do this on a regular basis?’
‘What, and lose you a customer every time I do?’
But I decided, in the circumstances, that the least I could do was buy
The Rough Guide to West Africa
.
‘Do you want it gift-wrapped?’ Stefan asked.
‘Of course,’ I said. But didn’t dare ask him to address it, much as I’d have loved to – for the pleasure of seeing the look on his face as much as anything, in order to suck on his pity for me –
To my wife’s lover. In
appreciation.
‘I’ll pop round and buy a book from you one of these fine days,’ Stefan said. Comical in his bookshop check suit and round David Hockney glasses.
‘Not without an appointment, you won’t,’ I reminded him.
But the merriment of booksellers aside, what the hell did I think I’d been doing talking jealousy and banana trees to Marius?
Could it have been that I wanted him to know I knew?
And why had I bought him
The Rough Guide to West Africa
?
Did I just want to give him things?
Or did I want him to start making those associations I’d been so careful to blur? Discover me? Lose that fuzzy halo of happiness he carried above his head like a medieval saint? Feel used and cheated? Get the fuck out of my marriage?
I WASN’T ALWAYS OUT OF THE HOUSE WHEN THEY THOUGHT I WAS. THE FIRST
time I stayed in when they were there was accidental. I’d been working in my office at home as I occasionally did even on workdays. I forgot it was a Marius afternoon. I realised when he rang the doorbell – a commanding, emasculating ring – that I couldn’t escape without being noticed. So I quietly locked myself in. That was all. It wasn’t as though I could hear anything, so I couldn’t be accused of eavesdropping.
Though that’s how I remember it, there is one thing wrong with this account. I would not have forgotten it was a Marius afternoon. I wore the almanac of his comings and goings in my flesh. So I must assume I lied to myself in order to be closer to them.
Thereafter I made a practice of it, by which I mean I did it about one visit out of six. Say once a fortnight. There was a queer comfort in it. Call that sinister if you will, but I meant them no harm. I simply wanted to occupy the same physical space they did. I would have preferred being alongside them in their bed, the same silent and ignored figure I’d have cut at their table had they let me, but as that was out of the question my study was the next best thing. I would lock my door, pull down the blinds, lie on the carpet at the time I calculated Marius would be lying himself beside Marisa, and remain there for the duration of his visit.
Subspace, but without the High Church ceremonials. Subspace pure and simple, subspace Calvinistical even, just me stretched out on my floor,
gone from the world of the living, breathing only by courtesy of Marius and Marisa, so that had they stopped, I’d have stopped with them.
But once you’ve gone this far, only practicalities prevent your going further. It wasn’t long before I made the decision to move up a floor. To one side of their adulterous bower was our bedroom, but it would have been impossible to conceal myself there in advance of their appointment without Marisa discovering me. To the other side, though, was a lumber room, full of computers I couldn’t throw away, old photographs of the family, suitcases and ski clothes and ships’ lamps from the thirties which I felt I ought to keep. Hidden in here, a room Marisa never penetrated, I believed I would be able to enjoy a greater proximity to the lovers, and on occasion maybe even hear them. I had thought about getting someone from the spy and surveillance shop on Baker Street to come along on a day Marisa was out and bug the house. Hidden cameras, too, seemed worth exploring, until I faced the fact that my needing to know contained an essential element of needing not to know. I wanted to think and feel myself between them, an altogether more active exercise for jealousy than merely looking on and listening in. Would that the general camp had tasted her sweet body, but not on closed-circuit television.
I was not, you see, your ordinary twopenny-halfpenny voyeur.
Anything I heard while concealed in the lumber room would by this reasoning have belonged to active not to passive jealousy, but I heard very little. Marisa had never been a noisy lover, and Marius at best mumbled his pleasures into his moustaches. Of the three of us I was the only one who bellowed, and I wasn’t here to listen to myself. But I wasn’t interested in hearing them moan anyway. I am not that kind of pervert. It’s talk that does it for me – a single ‘Fuck me, Marius’ knocking the stereophony of fucking itself into a cocked hat. And if I couldn’t hear the words I always had Marisa’s narrative of the night before to remember and peruse. Humiliating though this is to report, I would flatten myself against the wall, not to hear the lovers but to be close to them, to feel, if nothing else, the vibration of their breathing, and then I would mentally
run through all that Marisa had told me of their lovemaking the last time they were in the house. Thus, though I’d contrived to be at their elbow, I was always trailing in their wake – having to make do with the reported kisses of yesterday when I was only a few inches and a wall from the real kisses of today. Yet again, never quite laying hold on the thing I sought.
‘There was always something wanting,’ David Copperfield complained. There always is when you’re slave to the adamantine in women. Though David Copperfield did not know that about himself until he matured into Philip Pirrip.
About four months into the new arrangement – I hiding in my own house while Marius helped himself to what he wanted from it – Marisa found me out. It was always a complex business, getting in before or after her, remembering whether to put the burglar alarm on or off, removing all incriminating trace of myself from the house, staying as silent as the grave, and eventually I made a dog’s dinner of it, leaving a coat I should have been wearing to work on the bannister, and falling over a box of papers as I changed my position in the lumber room. Marius heard nothing. Marisa pretended to hear nothing but must have been a lot less fun to be with for what remained of the afternoon. After she’d let Marius out, she came looking for me. She was wearing a silk negligée I’d never seen before, black with the finest straps, and high-heeled, pubic, boudoir mules. I was surprised to see her looking so conventionally – she who chose her clothes with such meticulousness – the part of another man’s mistress. Pleased, too. Words might have been my medium but the odd visual clue still helped. If I was not mistaken there was a bite mark, or at least a patch of broken skin, just inside the bodice of her negligée, above her right breast.
‘Explain this,’ she said.
‘Explain
that
,’ I felt like saying. But I feared the candour of real life. What if she’d stepped into the negligeé and painted on the bite mark the minute Marius left, in order to tighten the screws of jealousy? And what
if, the moment I questioned her, she owned up to the deception – punitively – in order to loosen them again?
Besides, I was in no position to ask her to explain anything. I put my hands in the air. ‘I surrender,’ I said.
‘I can’t believe you’d stoop to this, Felix.’
I went to embrace her but she held me off. A great pity. I’d have loved to hold her still soft and nuzzled from Marius.
‘I thought by now you knew I’d stoop to anything.’
‘Are you recording us?’
‘Of course not.’
‘How do I know?’
‘You can search me, or search the room for wires. I haven’t been videoing you either. I just like being close to where you are. I love you.’
‘You have a strange way of showing it.’
‘The strangest. But you knew that.’
‘I won’t allow this, Felix. If you can’t keep your side of the bargain I won’t keep mine.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I won’t meet him here any longer. You said you were OK about him coming. You said it would make you feel safer. But you also said you’d be out. I can’t have you both in the same house at the same time.’