Free The Act of Love by Howard Jacobson

As cheap as is a woman’s love, which you should also know. That’s my gift to you and, no, I expect no thanks for it: a woman whose loyalty you will never be sure of, not for a single fucking second of a single fucking minute of a single fucking hour . . .’

    He got over it. That is the immutable law of man. The immutable law of that sort of man at least. He and Marisa were divorced without any judge having to look at photographs of the co-respondent discoursing with the wife, and shortly afterwards Freddy married his research assistant – a woman, if he was right in his assessment, of whose loyalty he would never be assured.
    I envied him his uncertainty. Not because I lacked uncertainties of my own, but because I believed you could never have too many.
    At the time Marisa and I were putting him through hell I envied him still more. For her part, Marisa didn’t believe a word of his every single fucking second of every single fucking minute oration. But that, I think, was because Marisa didn’t understand how minutely jealous even an indifferent man could be. I never doubted it. Whenever I escorted Marisa to the theatre or the opera I imagined Freddy imagining us in the dark. When we strolled together through the park I imagined him wondering how many of his friends saw us, what they thought, what conclusions about our intimacy they drew, how our togetherness on benches throwing breadcrumbs tothe ducks reflected on him. Conversing with Marisa in a restaurant, I imagined him at a nearby table in disguise, still as a hare, watching, listening, inhaling, no grain of infidelity in a single syllable lost to any of his senses; or outside taking photographs to show the judge, proof tangible of that betrayal which talk in the abstract represented for him.
    Remember, he had no sense of humour. And men with no sense of humour, who fear and loathe the intimacy which laughter brings because it is unknown to them, experience a jealousy beyond the range of men ordinarily amusable. Or at least – because I admit no rival in jealousy myself and I am, I hope, amusable – they are without the resources to convert it into an emotion from which they might garner consolation, even pleasure. You need wit to get the best out of being a cuckold. For Freddy, the thought or, worse, the spectacle of Marisa and I joking together must have been as scorpions in his brain.
    The lucky devil! (Had he only known how to enjoy it.)
    It might seem strange, my envying a man for what I put him through, but nothing that bears on sex should surprise us. And besides, what is envy of the sort I have described but imagination in the service of humanity? I placed myself where Freddy was because it pleased me to; not triumphantly but sympathetically. Is this not precisely the act of fellow feeling which the world’s religions exhort us to perform? Art, too. We enter into the consciousness of someone not ourselves. As Mozart entered into the clownish jealousy of Masetto, as Shakespeare entered into the fastidiously witty jealousy of Leontes, as Tolstoy entered into the demented Beethoven-driven jealousy of Pozdnyshev. Had they not sought, at the moment of creating these tortured figures, to suffer what they suffered, these artists would not have made the consummate art they did. Of course envy is not the word for it in art. Just as art is rarely the word for it while we envy. But it felt like art, sitting there with my thumb and forefinger looped at last around Marisa’s wrist, creating the turmoil of poor Freddy.
    We married soon after the divorce. They came apart easily, Freddy and Marisa. So easily that it was difficult to see what they had been togetherfor. ‘He was good company when I first met him,’ Marisa told me. ‘And he knew the words of every song I liked.’
    She sat quietly with me in a coffee shop on the morning before our wedding, running her hand through her coppery hair, going through his qualities. ‘I admire him, actually. He has always