Shylock Is My Name

by Howard Jacobson

  She called the restaurant Utopia and envisaged it as the centrepiece of that experiment in idealistic living her father had often talked to her about but never got round to putting into practice. Guests would be invited to stay the night, or even the weekend, go on treasure hunts, play croquet, fall in and out of love, treat one another beautifully, avail themselves of therapies of various kinds from Ayurvedic massage to marriage guidance—Plurabelle herself excelled at mediating between stressed partners, having practised for many years on her parents—inveigh against wealth, though only the wealthy could afford to attend, and of course enjoy food that bespoke honest endeavour combined with profligacy. Cottage pie washed down with Krug Clos d’Ambonnay. Or white Alba truffle with tap water. Eventually, she told a reporter from Cheshire Life, she would put her own ornamental virginity on the menu but as yet had not devised a method for distinguishing the right buyer from the wrong.

  Though highly photogenic in the gamin style, with a retroussé nose, a Daisy Duck mouth, golden tresses, a throaty voice that brought to mind a bee buzzing in a windowpane in late summer, and a Scandinavian weather girl’s figure, Plurabelle Shalcross had her father’s fascinated mistrust of the media. No, she wouldn’t make a television programme about her Utopia weekends, but then again, if it were to be a series, maybe she would. To the idea of bartering her virginity on screen she brought the same complex of scruple and consent, with both finally winning out. Better, surely, from the point of view of audience interest, to keep the question of her finding the right man forever in suspense. Week in, week out, she could set new challenges and, week in, week out, suitors would fail them. Thus she laughed, cried, frolicked, cooked badly and, as episode followed episode, adjudicated—not just between lovers prepared to joust to win her, but between the affairs of others among her guests. Soon, imperceptibly, her programmes came to be about judgement as much as food and love. A new series entitled The Kitchen Counsellor became an overnight success. Couples, friends, even lifelong enemies, would bring their disputes to Plurabelle’s table where, as she served them delectable dishes prepared behind the scenes by someone else, she would deliver verdicts held to be binding at least in the sense that all parties had agreed to abide by them in their release forms.

  Not only was this a cheaper option than going to law or even arbitration, it gave combatants a taste of passing fame and, still more alluringly, Plurabelle’s incomparable sagacity. Who cared, after that, whether they had won their argument or lost it!

  For those for whom fame was less important than vindication, Plurabelle, flushed with success, initiated a live interactive Webchat facility called Bicker. Here, the contentious would submit their grievances to the arbitration of the British public. “I can’t be the one who decides everything,” Plurabelle told her friends. But the British public turned out to be too vitriolic an arbitrator even for its own taste, the site consumed itself in rage, and Plurabelle was once again the person who—in the humane spirit of it not mattering whether anything was decided or not—decided everything.

  Life was a game and Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever Wiser Than Solomon Christine its master of ceremonies.

  —

  Oh, but sadness is a curse.

  Plurabelle’s mother told her it was natural in a girl who had recently lost a father. But Plurabelle sought a deeper cause. Or maybe a more superficial cause. A different cause, anyway.

  Her mother couldn’t help her with that. “Philosophy exceeds my maternal brief,” she said. “Why don’t you go to sadness classes in Wilmslow?”

  “Because I don’t need to be taught it. I need to get rid of it.”

  “That’s what they do there,” her mother said. “I put it wrong. It’s like Alcoholics Anonymous only for sad rich people.”

  “Will I have to stand up and say, ‘Hello, my name is Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever Christine, I have a personal fortune in excess of twenty million pounds and I am a saddist’? Because if I do I’m not going.”

  Her mother shrugged. In her view what her daughter needed was a lover. When you have a lover there’s no time to be sad.

  Plurabelle went anyway, despite her initial reluctance. It’s possible that she too secretly hoped to find a lover there. Though God knows she didn’t need any more sadness around her. In order not to be recognised she wore a headscarf that made her look as though she had toothache. Most of the others were in disguise too. We are sad because we’re famous, Plurabelle thought. But the convenor told the gathering not to look for reasons right away, not to attribute it to ambition or stress or the spirit of competition and envy prevailing in the Golden Triangle. They were sad because they were sad. The only important thing was not to be in denial.

  Over coffee, after the first session, she discussed this idea of not looking for a reason for their sadness with an older, elegant man whom she’d noticed at the meeting, sitting somewhat apart and staring ahead of him as though the sorrows of ordinary mortals were not to be compared to his. He introduced himself, in a manner that was part apologetic and part disdainful, as D’Anton, and close up seemed to her to be sad because he was homosexual (or at least not definitively heterosexual), for which, as she understood it, they were also not to look for reasons. They talked at length in a serious vein, after which she asked him to one of her Utopia house parties. It was up to him whether he wanted to be filmed or not. Bring someone, if you like, she told him. But he arrived alone, bearing an enormous glass paperweight in the centre of which was a teardrop. “That’s beautiful,” she said, “but you shouldn’t have.” He made light of the gift. Among the objets d’art he made a living from importing, he explained, were glass paperweights. This one came from a small village in Japan where they’d been blowing glass since the fourteenth century and no one knew how to do anything else. She wondered if the teardrop was human or animal. They say it’s the teardrop of whoever beholds it, he told her. Whereupon they both cried a little and held on to each other as though they meant never to let go.

  Soon D’Anton became a regular visitor, sometimes staying after the rest of the weekend guests had gone home. They found comfort in each other’s melancholy. “You must think it’s ridiculous me living in all this splendour and still being sad,” she said.

  “Not at all,” he answered, shaking his head. “I import beautiful objects from Japan, Grenada, Malibu, Mauritius and Bali, and have a home in each, and yet I am sad in all of them.”

  “Bali is one place I haven’t yet been to,” Plurabelle said. “What’s it like?”

  “Sad.”

  Plurabelle shook her head in sympathy. “I can imagine,” she said. Then, after a moment’s contemplation, she asked him, “Do you think it’s because we have too much?”

  “We?”

  “Us. You and I. People of our sort. The advantaged.”

  “But are we the advantaged?” D’Anton asked. “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”

  “That’s so beautiful,” Plurabelle said. “And so true. It makes me want to cry. Paulo Coelho often makes me want to cry.”

  “A greater man than Paulo Coelho said that,” D’Anton surprised her by saying. She didn’t know there was a greater man than Paulo Coelho.

  “Nelson Mandela?”

  “St. Paul.”

  “So would we be less pierced with sorrows if we gave all we have to the poor?”

  He didn’t know but said he sometimes asked himself whether the sadness problem, for him anyway, wasn’t money but modernity. “Do you never feel,” he asked her, “that you are too modern?”

  Plurabelle liked that idea. “Too modern—yes, you’re right,” she said. “Too modern. I have often felt that, yes I have, though until now I didn’t know I’d felt it. Too modern—yes, of course.” Then she had a thought. “But that doesn’t explain,” she said, “why Aborigines and Ameri
can Indians always look sad on the Discovery Channel. They can hardly be called modern.”

  “No, but that’s a different kind of sadness, isn’t it. The cause of their sadness is that they have been made abject. It’s been done to them. They are sad because they’re victims.”

  Plurabelle remembered seeing photographs of South American tribesmen in colour supplements. They looked thousands of years old. Maoris too. And Pygmies. And Pashtun tribesmen. Why were they all sad, she wondered.

  “Again, they have been exploited and made abject.”

  “And Jews? They’re old.”

  He was less comfortable about Jews. But offered to put his mind, or at least St. Paul’s mind (for he was a confirmed Paulinist), to their sadness. “I’d say they are made abject by their own will,” he declared at last. “They are neither modern nor victims. They have chosen to look the way they do.”

  “Why have they done that?”

  “Whether it’s a flaw or a stratagem I cannot say, but they have always put themselves at the centre of every drama, human or theological. I think of it as a political sadness. The glue of self-pity is very strong. As is emotional blackmail.”

  Plurabelle furrowed her lovely brow. She wanted this conversation never to stop, testing as it was. “So they don’t count, is what you’re saying?”

  “In my view they don’t, no.”

  Plurabelle’s expression was suddenly relieved of its customary dejection. “Oh yes they do,” she laughed. “That’s all they do. They just sit and count…and count…and count…”

  She was so pleased by this that she skipped like a little girl.

  “I hope you don’t think I mean anything unpleasant,” she remembered to say.

  D’Anton assured her that he didn’t.

  She clapped her small hands in relief.

  He thought how pretty she was when she was skittish. Inflamed around the mouth, as though she had a perpetual cold sore, and disconcertingly wide-eyed, which made it difficult for her to look straight ahead, but that could be said of all the women in the Golden Triangle. And she had a girlish expectancy which they didn’t. A desire for happiness shot through with an expectancy that she would never find it. He almost wished he could feel romantically about her.

  She thought the same about him. Such a pity.

  But the absence of romantic feeling made it possible for them to talk freely to each other, or at least for her to talk freely to him. She told him, with clever illustrative imitations of their mannerisms, about the would-be lovers who came and went in her real life, as opposed to those who were found for her by the production company to appear with her on television. Oh God, they wearied her, each thinking that the way to reach her was to spoil her or to flatter her, this one bringing her a Hermès Birkin bag the colour of the lipstick he’d been told she always wore, that one bearing a Guerlain lipstick case made of Swarovski crystals and a solitary diamond, the lipstick itself the colour of what researchers had told him was her favourite handbag. Did they think she was an object to be won by empty words and cash? She even showed him the handbag and the lipstick. What did he think?

  He said he thought she should wear them together.

  She told him that she’d come to that same conclusion herself.

  They both laughed.

  “But this isn’t who I am,” she said.

  They both laughed again.

  He became installed in her house, like a steward or confessor. When he wasn’t popping over to Japan to look at paperweights he didn’t seem to have much to do. “I pay people,” he explained. There was a prematurely retired air about him. On occasions, she would have friends around to listen to him talk about the exquisite things he imported and about beauty in general. In no time at all he was indispensable to her—handsome, sad, chivalric, unavailable, and somehow uncontaminated. It was as though he made clean every space he walked through, just by walking through it.

  THREE

  How long will a man lie i’ th’ earth ere he rot?

  And a woman? Will she not rot even sooner?

  Shylock, broken-hearted, beloved husband of Leah, feared so. The skin so much finer, the bones so much more fragile.

  It was in order to delay the process, to keep her alive to herself as well as to him, that he visited her grave every morning, taking her violets or forget-me-nots, talking to her, listening to her, exactly as he had when she’d lived. He breakfasted in her company, a flask of Turkish coffee—she loved the smell of coffee—and a cheese panino wrapped in a linen handkerchief. He wasn’t careful to avoid crumbs falling on to her. It was almost like feeding her. And he did feed her, in another sense, selective gossip about the goings-on of their friends, sustaining her with news of Jessica. The latter more selective still: only the best things, how womanly she was becoming, how like her mother. Some mornings, when he thought it advisable to spare her the details of his business affairs altogether—the catastrophe in waiting, the threat of destitution hanging over him—he read to her. Not about Jacob and his sheep, nor about Laban and Hagar and the prophet Daniel. Those references he reserved for the Gentiles, knowing how troubling they found Bible stories issuing from the mouth of a Jew. Their actual reading, and they had read together most evenings, was much wider. They too could quote Virgil and Ovid, knew who Scylla and Charybdis were, and discussed Pythagoras’ philosophy of the soul. To prevent Leah from freezing over he read Petrarch to her, and Boccaccio. Also, as time went by, Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, as well as Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion.” Eventually he would progress to Dr. Johnson, Wordsworth, Dickens, Dostoevsky, the great novelists of the fag-end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and ditto of the American. It was important he kept Leah informed and didn’t allow her to grow bored. She too had always had a taste for the lyrical, the sarcastic, and some days even the preposterous. “Read me the comedy about the person who’s made to think he’s vermin,” she’d say. “Do you mean Metamorphosis?” “No, my love, Mein Kampf.” And they would laugh together like demons.

  To those in his community who thought his devotion morbid he argued that the opposite was the case, that it was only Leah’s company that kept him from falling into that dejection of spirits that was such a common affliction of the times and to which he had more reason than most to be susceptible. This one unaccountably sad, that one inexplicably weary—well, he had his own thoughts about the roots of so much fashionable moping, but for him, and he could speak for no one else, life would have been unbearable had he allowed himself to forget, even for the smallest particle of time, the woman he had loved from the moment he first saw her. You made your vows and you stuck to them. There had been no one else and there would be no one else. If that made him heavy company sometimes, so be it. Who decreed that life was to be one long rowdy masquerade (punctuated with those little pets of melancholy indulged by a crowd who made a religion of their feelings)?

  And if this mourning without end put intolerable pressure on his daughter Jessica?

  He denied that he was in mourning. Quite the contrary. Spending so much of his time with Leah meant there was no reason to mourn. He was celebrating his marriage, not lamenting it. Where was the sackcloth? Where the ashes? Didn’t he go to the cemetery every morning as spruce as a bridegroom?

  But this, as he knew well, was ultimately an evasion. Jessica was, as he told Leah proudly, growing up. Sometimes when he passed her on the stairs he even mistook her for his wife. She had the right to be the giver and the recipient of just such an adoration as her parents had enjoyed, and were still—no doubt unnaturally to her—enjoying. It was her turn.

  He would look away when this matter was raised. Even when he raised it with himself he would look away, into another corner of his conscience. Her turn! What father wanted to think of his daughter enjoying her turn?

  And with whom?

  She should, by the logic of their society, have been safe. The daughter of a repugnant Jew!—why, with such blood in her veins
the problem should have been to find her suitors, not protect her from them. Who wanted what appertained to Shylock? Yet just as they would take his money, no matter what they thought of him, so they would take his daughter. Did commerce wash the obloquy away? Did desire?

  Or was the obloquy the very thing that added savour to what they desired and borrowed or, where they couldn’t borrow, stole?

  His daughter was a fine-looking girl. She would assuredly have attracted admirers on her own behalf in a less envious and grasping society, where every man not already married to a rich wife was on the make. He intended no disrespect to her by suspecting the motives of those who wooed her. Quite the opposite: it was because he loved her and saw—often much to his embarrassment—what others saw in her, that he stood guard over her happiness. It was his appreciation of her, as much as anything else, that made him clumsy. A mother would have known better how to do it, but Jessica had no mother. Yes, she deserved to be wooed. But a Jewess was a commodity, the times were acquisitive, and these people were collectors.

  Well, the moral confusion was theirs, not his. It went with their religion and they were welcome to stew in it. But his contempt for the prevarications of Christians who professed one thing and did another didn’t help him when it came to working out what to say to Leah. He couldn’t tell her that Jessica had left. That she had become a turncoat, a liar and a thief. Least of all could he tell her what it was that Jessica had stolen.

  It was an agony to him—keener than any knife-wound— to be keeping secrets from his wife, whatever the damp was doing to her flesh. It felt like a betrayal of the heart.

  And still she doesn’t know.

  A mercy, Shylock believes. A mercy she got away when she did.

  —

  Simon Strulovitch’s daughter had not got away. Not yet. Unless you call college getting away. Otherwise, he was similarly situated. He too fretted about the value placed on her as an exotic, feared the strength of the avidity she inspired, and the effect of the flattery on her. Added to this was his reputation as a wealthy connoisseur, a donor to elitist institutions and, for no reason other than that he’d visited Israel and given artworks to some of its universities, a Zionist—all in all a reputation he was vain enough to see as an inducement beyond Beatrice’s charms. It wasn’t theft he feared—Beatrice did not have the key to his vaults—it was the view of him as a bogeyman on all counts that she was bound to encounter at college, and the added value which that view of him lent her as a prize. She was worth turning, that was what it came to. The histories of terrorism and brigandage, of revolution and sedition, bulged with the apostate daughters of rich men with unacceptable convictions. A girl who would sleep with her father’s enemies was of a succulence beyond description, plunder that exceeded in value even Simon Strulovitch’s rubies and turquoises.