Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  In this latter, she was no different from her daughter who found all social get-togethers of more than a dozen people of mixed gender sexually deranging, but a party thrown to celebrate the publication of a work of mine a provocation to vengeful licentiousness that threatened our marriage. She would rub herself up against the most junior editors; she would whisper hotly in the ear of journalists who were there only to interview me; on one occasion she even sat on poor Merton’s knee, causing him to turn the colour of the hair she had given him to nibble. But it was when I caught her in a huddle in the garden with a bald writer of novels about the joys and sorrows of single fatherhood that I read her the riot act.

  ‘Not Andy Weedon,’ I said. ‘I draw the line at Andy Weedon.’

  ‘Because he’s big in Canada.’

  Andy Weedon’s Can I Have the Bottle, Daddy? had just won the Prix Pierre Trudeau.

  ‘That’s below the belt, Vanessa.’

  But she had a point.

  It was one of my beefs with my agent that I wasn’t big in Canada, where a number of writers I affected to admire had been born and where I thought they ought in consequence to affect to admire me. I understood that novels about single fatherhood did well in Canada because Canadian women were so bored with their husbands that the majority of them ran off sooner or later with an American or an Inuit. But that didn’t make me feel any better.

  ‘Come clean,’ Vanessa said. ‘Canada is a bleeding sore with you.’

  ‘I am not so petty, Vee.’

  ‘You? Not petty? Next you’ll tell me you don’t admire the feeling way he writes about children.’

  ‘I admire his way with children as much as you do, Vee,’ I said. I didn’t add, ‘You unnatural bitch!’

  There was something else I didn’t add. I didn’t add, though it was the truth, that I couldn’t bear her kissing him because he wore inanition white T-shirts, like the one made famous in the film Trainspotting, and hugged himself in the way Ewan McGregor had, as though whatever he was on had made him shiver. ‘If you’re so cold, wear something more substantial than that fucking T-shirt,’ I wanted to tell him. ‘And when you’re at a party of mine, show some respect and wear a jacket. You’re not in fucking Leith.’

  A further and, if anything, still stronger reason I couldn’t bear to see her kissing him was that he was bald with the baldness of a man who had gone bald before he was twenty. You can always tell. Something indurated about the scalp. Like ground that has long gone unwatered. This wasn’t a prejudice against baldness, or even premature baldness, in itself. It was a prejudice against men who had no natural vitality kissing my wife.

  Later on at the same party I saw him doing it with Poppy. Not kissing exactly – to my knowledge, Poppy had never quite kissed anybody between Washington and Monkey Mia – but engaging her in a prematurely bald man’s idea of intimate relations, holding her in heartfelt conversation about how hard it is for a single father to keep abreast of what’s new in vinyl records, absorbing her attention, in short, bleeding her vitality in order to keep himself alive.

  Ought I to have given him his marching orders? Beat it, baldy! Go suck the life out of some other writer’s women.

  It was my launch party, after all.

  The trouble was, I wanted him to stay. Though in his fiction his broken reeds of men were invariably widowed or otherwise wifeless, in actuality he had a perfectly good wife of his own – Lucia, a Spanish or South American woman, as succulent as a wine gum. And while Andy was sucking the life out of mine, I was sucking – or at least trying to suck – the wine out of his.

  Nothing serious – I didn’t want to lure her away, which I suspect I could have done easily enough by presenting her with a locket containing a single one of my hairs. I simply enjoyed making small Judaeo-Protestant Wilmslow inroads into her Catholicism.

  ‘This party,’ she said, looking around her, perhaps catching sight of Vanessa sitting on Merton’s knee, ‘reminds me of a scene in one of your novels.’

  ‘I have never put you into one of my novels,’ I said.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ she laughed.

  ‘You would illuminate any such scene,’ I said.

  She flushed. Close up I could see she had a darkly downy upper lip – a feature of Spanish women which I happened to love. So in what other regard, or in what other place, I secretly wondered, did she exhibit more of the signs of robust life than her husband?

  ‘And here was me thinking you made it up,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, come on, this is hardly the Satyricon.’

  It must have been at this point that she noticed Andy breathing up Poppy’s nostrils. ‘Well, that depends what you’re used to,’ she said.

  ‘You will have to come to our parties more often,’ I said, tossing first one sumptuous lock of hair, and then a second, out of my eyes. And left it at that.

  It’s a rule of the profession that novelists do not sleep with one another’s wives or husbands. The reason being that you don’t give a rival novelist the material for a book.

  If they want to write about sexual jealousy it isn’t going to be thanks to anything you’ve done.

  And what about a fellow novelist who is not a rival?

  The question is too simplistic to deserve an answer. There is no such thing as a fellow novelist who is not a rival.

  There is a small-pond theory of why writers are an envious breed. So many fishermen, so few fish. But I doubt writers would be any different were the pond the size of Lake Superior. They simply obey the inverse human-kindness law that governs the practice of high-mindedness: the more apparently disinterested, exalted and ‘creative’ the profession, the less human kindness its members show to one another.

  I first set my foot on this extending ladder of illiberality when I left Wilmslow for the University of the Fenlands School of Literature and Creative Writing, Thetford Campus, swapping the small provincial world of ladies’ fashion for the open expanses of the mind they called humanities. Without doubt, people in Wilmslow, and further afield even than that, had been jealous of Wilhelmina’s success. Owners of boutiques nothing like as well regarded as ours would spread unpleasant rumours about us, steal our ideas or try to block our supply chain, one of them, as I recall, going so far as to attempt to bribe Dolce and Gabbana not to let us stock their garments, and when that didn’t work actually resorting to arson. It was to my mother’s credit that when she opened up in the morning and found thirty spent matches on the carpet she didn’t call the police. Anyone who thought to put her out of business with a box of Swan Vestas, she stood on the step of the shop and declaimed, presented no serious danger to her, to her family, or to the success of Wilhelmina’s. But despite such sporadic outbreaks of warfare, a spirit of communal interest and mirth bound the shopkeepers of Wilmslow. We would meet at the bar of the Swan to share the day’s travails; we’d swap notes on well-known local nuisances and time-wasters, or exchange stories about new arrivals in the area – Vanessa and Poppy, for example, aroused intense curiosity – and when a coachload of French schoolboys turned up in Wilmslow for no other reason than to strip our shelves, we were on the phone to one another issuing detailed descriptions of the petits salauds before they’d got away with more than a bar of chocolate and copy of the Wilmslow Recorder, which was free anyway. Then I went to East Anglia and encountered the savage mutual mistrust of scholars. And a few years after that I entered the begrudging, disconfederate world of writing, where every sentence I wrote was as a blade to the heart of every other writer, and where – just to be clear about this – every sentence they wrote was as a blade to the heart of me.

  It was Vanessa, to her credit, who first dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s in the matter of novelists not sleeping with one another’s spouses for fear of giving them material for a book.

  It was after our disagreement about Andy Weedon. ‘Christ, I’ve just worked it out,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t care less about me giving Andy Weedon a fuck qua fuck, what you don’t want is
him putting me in one of his novels.’

  ‘He wouldn’t know what to do with you in one of his novels. He doesn’t do living women.’

  ‘And you don’t want him to start doing them now?’

  ‘If he wants to do one let him do his own.’

  ‘That Spanish piece?’

  ‘She isn’t a piece.’

  ‘Oh Christ, don’t try that on me.’

  ‘I happen to like her, that’s all. She’s got a moustache.’

  ‘Oh yes, the moustache. The Jewess look. I always forget you have a weakness for that.’

  I bridled at Jewess. I’m not sure why.

  ‘I don’t have a weakness, Vee,’ I said. ‘I just happen to like her.’

  ‘I noticed.’

  ‘There is nothing wrong in liking someone.’

  ‘No, there isn’t. Unless it’s me liking Andy Weedon. So I can assume, can I, that she’ll be turning up in your next book?’

  ‘Why would you assume that?’

  ‘From the intensity of your research into her personality and opinions.’

  ‘I was being hostly.’

  ‘I’d say you were being competitive.’

  ‘With Andy Weedon? Don’t make me laugh. If I wanted to be competitive with Andy Weedon I’d show him my eyelash.’

  ‘Competitive with me.’

  ‘You’re different.’

  ‘How am I different?’

  I wanted to say You’re not a rival novelist, but I knew where that would lead. So instead I just declared my innocence of any predatory intention towards Lucia Weedon. ‘You don’t sleep with a fellow novelist’s wife,’ I said.

  ‘In case your own wife sleeps with the fellow novelist?’

  ‘That’s not the motive, but you’re right, that’s not done either.’

  ‘Such sexual high-mindedness all of the sudden. What’s the real reason, Guido?’

  ‘Let’s just say it’s not my job to research his novels for him.’

  Vanessa stared at me. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘He doesn’t light my fires, I don’t light his.’

  Vanessa stared at me some more. ‘Are you telling me,’ she said, ‘that you’d rather miss out on a fuck with a woman with a moustache than give her husband something to write about?’

  ‘Something like that. Though now you lay out so clearly what I’m sacrificing –’

  ‘That’s sick, Guido. That’s the sickest thing I’ve heard. You’re a fucking weirdo.’

  ‘How can my being virtuous make me a weirdo?’

  ‘When it’s envy that makes you virtuous, Guido, you aren’t being virtuous.’

  ‘Envy makes it sound a mite mean-spirited, Vee.’

  She laughed so loud at that her mother came downstairs to see what the matter was.

  21

  My Hero

  I was asleep in the van when the women returned from the yacht. Vanessa clattered about. She was not considerate around another person’s sleep.

  ‘What time is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Two, three.’

  ‘Had a good time?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Your mother?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Silly?’ Silly was Vanessa’s word for her mother when she’d had a drink.

  ‘Very silly.’

  Too silly to leave Dirk, I wondered. Too silly to keep him at arm’s length? But I put the question slightly differently. ‘She still on the boat?’

  ‘Of course she isn’t still on the boat. Had I left her on the boat she’d be halfway to India by now.’

  ‘You didn’t drag her away, I hope.’ Liar.

  ‘When don’t I have to drag her away?’

  There was a sudden hammering on the van. Desperate, as though a person was being attacked by wild animals – dolphins, pelicans, monkeys.

  Dirk, I thought. Or Tim, doing Dirk’s dirty business again, come to steal my women back.

  Vanessa opened a window. ‘Christ, Mother!’ she shouted. ‘What now?’

  ‘Come quickly,’ Poppy said. ‘There’s something in my room.’

  Dirk, I thought.

  ‘What do you mean, something?’

  ‘Do I have to stand out here describing it? A beetle or a spider, I don’t know . . . a giant cockroach.’

  ‘Tread on it.’

  ‘It’s too big to tread on.’

  ‘Then tell them at the hotel.’

  ‘I can’t find anyone. You’ve got to come, I can’t sleep in there.’

  ‘Just a minute.’

  Vanessa shut the window and pulled the duvet off me. ‘You’ll have to help her,’ she said.

  ‘If it’s too big for her to tread on it’s too big for me to tread on.’

  ‘I can’t leave her out there.’

  ‘Let her come back in here.’

  ‘So she can snore, or sit up all night telling us what a good time she’s had? Go and help her. You’re the man.’

  I thought of saying, ‘Call Dirk, he’s the man.’ But what would that have achieved?

  I threw on a pair of shorts, and remembered to put my feet in flip-flops. The ground writhed with venomous ants and ticks and millipedes out there. Snakes, too, for all I knew. I hoped Poppy in her panic hadn’t mistaken a snake for a beetle.

  She was still vibrating from the good time she’d been having. Her hair trembled like a halo of fire. Her dress steamed. There was so much alcoholic vapour coming off her she’d have gone up in flames had I lit a match a hundred yards away. And yet she appeared to be steadier, in mind at least. I wondered if she’d seen more of de Wolff ’s knob and whether that had sobered her up.

  She took my arm and led me out of the campsite to her room, trying her key in a couple of wrong doors before she found the right.

  ‘Silly me,’ she said, echoing Vanessa’s verdict, holding onto me in the dark.

  ‘Easy,’ I said, being the man.

  She turned the light on and stood swaying in front of me. ‘Prepare yourself for this,’ she said.

  I was hoping that whatever it was that had frightened her would be gone by now, scuttled out under the door or down the drain in the shower. But it had gone nowhere, whatever it was. It reclined on Poppy’s snow-white pillow, its buggy eyes wide open, its shoulders hunched, its feelers twitching, a disgusting parcel of envenomed black fur like something a gorilla had coughed up.

  ‘Christ!’ I said. ‘It could be a tarantula.’

  ‘Don’t kill it,’ she cried.

  ‘Don’t kill it? It’s him or me, Poppy.’

  ‘Well, don’t kill it on my pillow, I’ve got to sleep on that.’

  I had no idea how I was going to kill it on her pillow or off it. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve anything like a tennis racket or a fishing net?’ I enquired.

  She took a moment to think about it. I could tell she wished her head were clearer. Tennis racket, tennis racket . . . where did I put that thing? In the end, placing a hand on my shoulder, she balanced on one foot and took her shoe off. It wasn’t the first time she’d leaned on me to take a shoe off, but it was the first time she’d leaned on me to take her shoe off so I could kill with it.

  The inside of the shoe was moist from Poppy’s foot. At any other time I’d have put it to my face. It had a platform heel made of coiled rope, like a quoit. I took my cue from that and made a practice throw as though aiming at a spike. A lot hung on this throw. Since Poppy didn’t want the blood and guts on her pillow I had to throw so as to give the spider a glancing rather than a decisive blow, but not so glancing as to let it escape or turn it angry, a blow sufficient to knock it off the bed stunned, ideally unconscious or having lost its memory.

  ‘Don’t hurt it,’ Poppy said, as I was taking aim.

  I imagined hearing her offering her mouth to me and saying, ‘Be gentle. Be gentle with me.’

  She was lopsided, one foot in a shoe, one not, like a heron standing on one leg. What is it about a woman standing on one leg that is so
beguiling to a man? Even a woman Poppy’s age. No, especially a woman Poppy’s age.

  ‘Give me your other shoe,’ I said, ‘just in case.’

  She leaned on me again. Twice in one night, a woman I desired, and had no right to desire, standing on one foot. If only she’d had as many feet as the tarantula.

  Shoeless, she was now lowered almost to my height, our eyes level, our mouths on the same plane. We could feel each other’s blood pump.

  I threw. Whether I hit I couldn’t tell, but the shoe bounced off the bed and there was nothing on Poppy’s pillow.

  There were four, five seconds of silence.

  ‘Now what?’ Poppy said.

  Now we make love on the floor and wait for it to die, I thought. Sex is never better than when something is expiring nearby, and I don’t just mean a marriage. Lust und Tod, the Germans call it, and they should know. No doubt the Dutch called it something similar. Odds on, Dirk had made a film of that name. But in truth I’d have been too afraid of the spider coming to and biting us to have risked our rolling on the floor and taking bites out of each other ourselves.

  Before I could say anything, Poppy screamed. The spider was up and running, still a bit shaken, but heading for the wardrobe on the other side of the bed.

  ‘Kill it for Christ’s sake!’ Poppy cried. ‘Kill it before it gets into my clothes. Quick.’

  It’s not possible to do quick in flip-flops. But I managed to get round to the other side of the bed before the spider disappeared – where I would have liked to disappear – into the silken, aromatic pleats of Poppy’s dresses. There was a moment in which we eyed each other as rivals, then I stamped on it. I could feel its bulk, broken, sodden, but still resistant, beneath my foot. Killing an insect – no, an arachnid – is harder than it’s cracked up to be. Or it is if you’re squeamish and unarmed. I couldn’t bear to press down harder or to release the pressure; I couldn’t bear to look or not look. I thought I might have to stand there for ever.