Free The Act of Love by Howard Jacobson Page B

which I sometimes had to sit on the edge of the bed to get a second wind and look at her, the dress over her head, still caught on her arms, her glisteningthighs and belly unprotected from my stare. But on the fifth afternoon she was too feverishly weary for any of this conjugal horseplay. At first I took it to be merely one of those butterfly malaises to which she was subject. Lassitude. Loss of temporal bearing. Not unhappiness exactly, more a mislaying of happiness, as though she was happy in some other place but couldn’t remember where. The fever, however, was real enough. And she wasn’t sweating for my pleasure. The hotel called a doctor who examined her in our suite. He was a Cuban with an avaricious mouth, brown teeth the length of a horse ‘s, and exaggerated good manners. I wondered if he wanted me to leave the room. He put an arm around my shoulders, noticing my concern. ‘Stay,’ he said. ‘Pour yourself a drink. And pour me one while I see to Mrs.’
    He had, I observed, the most beautiful long hands, with inordinate fringes of silky fur on every knuckle, and a wedding ring on both his little fingers. I poured us a drink then sat myself down in an armchair and watched as he took Marisa’s temperature, shone a light into her ears, looked deep into her open mouth, felt under her armpits and examined her chest. The moment was decisive. Not the beginning of a new sensation but a revelation of it in its entirety, like coming out of a dark room and being met by the brilliant orb of the sun. Whoever I had been before – whatever luxuriating oddities had marked me out from other men in the matter of love and loss (and I had only ever felt marginally odd, just a trifle too given to losing my heart and ending up at the suffering end of passion) – all equivocations were finally at an end: I was now someone who was aroused by the sight of another man’s hands on the breasts of the woman he loved. Henceforth, given the choice, I would rather Marisa gave her breasts to a man who wasn’t me. That was to be the condition, the measure, of my love for her. At a stroke I was freed from the fascination of Freddy’s jealousy. I was now liberated into my own.
    You know it when you walk into the torture garden of your own disordered nature. You recognise the gorgeous foliage, overgrown and fantastical. You know the smell. The smell of home.
    ‘Overexposure to the sun,’ the doctor told me, looking round but keepinglonger than was necessary I thought, his hand on my bride ’s breast, allowing the nipple to swell unseen inside his palm.
    Did he exchange a glance with me, in which the proprietorship of those breasts passed briefly from me to him, or did I imagine it? I am not blind to the politics of a woman’s breasts; I knew then, as I know now, that Marisa’s breasts were the property of Marisa and no one else. But familiarity confers the illusion of possession, however impertinent, and it might have been the rights to that familiarity that we exchanged. The sight of those silken-furred fingers on Marisa’s breasts precipitated in me, anyway, the desire to see them elsewhere on and, yes, in her body. A generalised desire which, over time, took on a less opportunistic, more sophisticated colouration. Marisa did not have to be feverish or otherwise at the mercy of a man. We did not have to be in Florida smelling the Everglades. And at last I did not have to see with my own eyes. Hearing about it, learning about it, and ultimately simply knowing about it, would be enough.

ON TOP OF THE TWO AFTERNOONS A WEEK SHE GAVE TO PRICING ART BOOKS at the Oxfam bookshop, the four Friday nights out of five on which she manned a hectic phone line for the Samaritans, the occasional day she put in at the Wallace Collection, not quite telling visiting ladies from the provinces what she thought Fragonard was really painting, Marisa read to a blind man once a fortnight and four times a year bundled up the clothes she no longer wanted to