Shylock Is My Name

by Howard Jacobson

  “My wife wants me,” he said, rising. He had intended the subject of his ailing wife to go largely unspoken between them. Sympathy was not what he was looking for. And Shylock, anyway, did not strike him as the man to give it. “I’ll be back presently,” he said, making everything sound as ordinary as possible.

  But his heart was thumping. Could Kay have compounded all that was not ordinary about the day by actually calling for him by name?

  The answer to that was no. The carer was worried about Kay, that was all. She had heard noises in the house and seemed more than usually distressed. But by the time Strulovitch got to her she was asleep in her chair, her head lolling to one side, no word for Strulovitch on her nerveless lips. He straightened her up, kissed her brow, and went downstairs again. He wondered whether Shylock would still be there. Or whether he had ever been there at all.

  “So where were we?” he asked, finding him as he’d left him, folded tight in his chair, all light excluded from his face.

  Shylock shrugged.

  Did that mean he was tiring? Strulovitch would have sat with him, swirling liquid in his glass, enjoying the dark quiet, but the longer he didn’t speak the more he thought about Kay.

  “And now?” he asked, after as prolonged a silence as he could bear.

  “And now what do the Gentiles think? I’d be surprised if they’re not thinking what they’ve always thought. Certainly their minds are no cleaner.”

  “No, I meant what now for you?”

  “Me personally?”

  Strulovitch decided to risk the other’s wrath. He had invited Shylock into his stricken home. Now Shylock had to invite Strulovitch into his.

  “Yes, you personally.”

  Shylock rubbed his face with his hands. Would it still be there when he took his hands away? His fingers, Strulovitch noted, were coated with a dark fur. Is he closer to the apes than I am, he wondered.

  “For me personally,” Shylock said, charging the word with all its long history of insolence and obloquy, “there is no now. I live when I lived. I have told you: where the story stopped, I stop. But sometimes, for the hellish pleasure of it, I roll the exit line of another dupe of fools around my tongue. I hanker, as you will easily imagine, for a resounding exit line.”

  Strulovitch made as though to rack his brain for the exit line in question. But it was late for tests.

  “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you,” Shylock said impatiently. How long did Strulovitch need? “I have always had a soft spot for Puritans,” he explained. “Which I suppose is not surprising since they have a soft spot for us. We return each other’s compliments. I like the idea that I, a heartless Jew, should be fortified in my unforgivingness by a Puritan.”

  “I’m surprised,” Strulovitch said, displeased to have been found wanting, “that you take hellish pleasure in those words. They sound feeble to me, like an old man wagging his finger at small children.”

  “That’s because you know they can’t be acted upon. Malvolio, too, stops where the story stopped. He won’t ever enjoy that revenge. But the intention echoes onwards through time. He has finally tasted blood. Until now he has only played at being a moralist, his Puritanism the stuff of pantomime. We are all the stuff of pantomime until we run up against reality. Now he knows whereof the little jesting world of men and women is really made.”

  For a man who reined in his agitation, Shylock had grown excited. Deep grooves appeared, like brackets—bracketing all that had not been and never would be said—about his sunken eyes.

  Strulovitch looked at him warily. “You aren’t, I hope, intending violence.”

  “That would depend…”

  “On what?”

  “Your definition of violence.”

  SEVEN

  Plurabelle—who wanted to be loved for herself, that’s to say for what she was rather than what she had, but who was as hard to distinguish from what she had as people generally are, and she more so than most because it was what she had that gave her the confidence and the leisure to be who she was—thus vexed and double-vexed, Plurabelle could not stop asking Barney to reaffirm his valuation of her. Once you have presented yourself as a prize wrapped up in an enigma it is difficult not to want to go on being guessed at and bid for. On her television show blindfolded contestants sipped dainty bits from a saucer, like cats, and hoped to prefer what she’d prepared. That way they’d win her company for the evening, and who could say what else? Back in the real-time world of the Golden Triangle, Barney had to second-guess which dress she liked herself in most that day, which earrings were the best accompaniment to what she had chosen to wear, which hotel in which country she wanted to be taken to on her birthday, whether she wanted her lobster cracked or in the shell, thermidor or Newburg, whether she wanted sex straightforward or perverse, with the lights on or off, with the windows open or closed.

  “You just don’t know me,” she’d say when he mispicked. “I don’t know what we’re doing together.”

  On occasions she even cried over their incompatibility of whim.

  His impulse was to go and do some work under the chassis of her Volkswagen Beetle but he knew he couldn’t go on hitching his wagon to that lone star—she’d think it was the only trick he had.

  He spoke to D’Anton who was, in a manner of speaking, responsible for the daily pickle in which he found himself. Without quite saying “You got me into this” he did say get me out of it. Not out of the relationship, which in other ways had so far proved as beneficial as he’d dared hope, but out of forever being tried for indiscrimination and forever being found guilty.

  Although D’Anton would never have dreamed of coming between Plurabelle and Barney, he liked it when his friend, still bedwarmed, so to speak, still with the perfumes of Plurabelle on him, appealed to him for help. He didn’t care to see himself as a go-between—such a role diminished his ongoing influence—more a sort of gentleman of the bedchamber, a confidant at the highest pitch of intimacy, a priest of the nuptial mysteries, no matter that Plurabelle and Barnaby were not yet man and wife.

  “What you need to do,” he said, “is man up to this aesthetically and critically.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?” Barney asked.

  “It means daring to trust your own judgement. Stop doing what she wants you to do.”

  “I don’t know what she wants me to do.”

  “Stop trying to figure it out. Follow your own impulses. Go out and buy her something decisively surprising that proves the confident refinement of your taste.”

  “I’m not sure I could afford that.”

  “I’m not talking expensive or meretricious. I mean an object of value in itself and in the fact that you have chosen it. Not something you guess she might like but something you do. Whatever she thinks of the gift, she will love you for being definite in your selection of it.”

  Barney put his hand to his cheek like a fallen cherub in the presence of the Creator. “I suppose I daren’t risk a banger?”

  “No you dare not. You don’t want to undo your good work with cars.”

  “What then? Jewellery?”

  “Too obviously expensive.”

  “I wasn’t thinking sapphires.”

  “Then too obviously cheap.”

  “Perfume? Lingerie?”

  Few words disgusted D’Anton more than “lingerie.” “More obvious still,” he said.

  Out of ideas, Barney decided to second-guess D’Anton. “Are you thinking a work of art?”

  “It’s not for me to think anything, Barnaby. But art is good, yes.”

  “Do you have something she might like?”

  “You are not entering into the spirit of this. This is about you, not me. Besides, Plury knows what I find and what I like. She would recognise my hand in it if you came to me.”

  “So what am I to do? I have no eye.”

  “You must have seen something beautiful that you like.”

  “The Mona Lisa.”

  “A ste
p down from that.”

  “The Singing Butler.”

  “A step up.”

  Barney looked hurt. Being able to look hurt was a gift that had always served him well. Like the best lyric poets he knew how to convey his hurt into every heart.

  “I simply mean,” D’Anton said, remorsefully, “that I don’t think Plury will go for that.”

  “You’ve just told me not to consider what she’d go for.”

  “Yes, but we don’t want actively to offend her.”

  Barney threw up his hands. If, as D’Anton’s expression implied, between the Mona Lisa and The Singing Butler a wide chasm of the beautiful yawned, he was damned if he knew how to cross it.

  Unable to bear seeing his friend continuing at a loss, D’Anton reached out for him and put a protective hand, like an upturned cup, over his. Beneath D’Anton’s fatherly fingers Barney’s fingers quivered. D’Anton did not dare look at him. He suggested that they go together to Capes Dunn Fine Art Auction Galleries in Charles Street, Manchester. There was a sale coming up the following week. Never having been to a fine-art auction, Barney was worried he would not know what to do. “All that’s required of you is to see something that takes your fancy in the catalogue,” D’Anton assured him, “and I’ll bid for you.”

  The very thought of the outing—just the two of them in pursuit of beautiful things—delighted D’Anton.

  But Barney had a further concern. Money spent on Plurabelle was never, of course, wasted. “Give and ye shall receive” was one of the many Christian truisms about sensible investment his Christian mother had taught him, and to date he had surely taken from Plurabelle a sizeable interest on what he had put in. But there were limits to the store he could go on putting in from.

  “We will worry about that,” D’Anton said, with gentle understanding, “when the time comes.”

  One of the reasons D’Anton’s friends loved him as they did was the comforting sense he gave them of an inexhaustible store of assistance, should such be needed.

  The mistake Barnaby made, when the time did come, was to allow himself to be delayed by Plurabelle asking him to choose her a book to suit her mood from a Tolkien, a Murakami and a Jackie Collins. “I couldn’t say no to her, could I?” he explained to D’Anton who was sitting waiting in a taxi, looking at his watch. D’Anton was so far irritated with his friend—believing he had forgotten an outing which in prospect meant so much to him—that he didn’t even express curiosity as to which book Barnaby had chosen. And he continued to stare out of the taxi window as Barnaby, sparing no small literary or domestic detail, set about telling him. The Murakami, apparently. Because Barnaby knew Plury loved Japanese food. As though D’Anton gave a damn. The long and the short of it was that they arrived at the auction house just too late to stop an early study by Solomon Joseph Solomon for his painting Love’s First Lesson from being sold to Simon Strulovitch. Barney had seen enough of this work in the sale catalogue to know that here was something he truly loved on his own behalf while feeling confident it would be loved every bit as well by Plurabelle, so like her was the naked Venus with her glowing cheeks and tiny nipples, and so like him was the naked Cupid in her lap, looking up at her with undisguised if slightly insolent devotion.

  Particularly he liked the little bow and arrow.

  “Can’t we offer to outbid him?” he wondered.

  “Too late, I’m afraid,” D’Anton said. “What’s sold is sold. Did nothing else take your fancy?”

  Alas, nothing else did.

  For the second time in a week D’Anton was lanced in the heart by the look of bewildered dejection on his friend’s handsome face.

  “Leave it with me,” he said, with a sigh that would in turn have lanced Barnaby’s heart had he possessed one.

  EIGHT

  Untrue what Strulovitch said about not exactly tailing his daughter.

  It had been going on a long time. She was thirteen when it started. Thirteen in fact, twenty-three in appearance. Luscious. A Levantine princess. A pomegranate. She was luscious to herself, too. He had caught her looking at her reflection in the mirror once, pouting her lips and laughing at her own fullness, smoothing her thighs, pushing out her breasts, amused by the too-muchness but overwhelmed by it at the same time. As though it imposed a responsibility on her. Was this really her? Was this really hers to do with as she chose? He could understand it only too well. When he was thirteen and untouched he felt he had already gone to waste. A great prince in prison lies, he would say as he went alone to bed night after night. And he was no pomegranate. Of course she had to deploy herself. Of course she had to feel her beauty had a purpose beyond her own gaze and, yes—because she knew he tailed her, knew he followed her into her own bedroom even—beyond his.

  He got it. He got it all. But he couldn’t allow it. It was the waste he couldn’t bear. The other kind of waste. The waste of his and Kay’s ambitions for her. The waste of their love. The waste of that excitement he’d felt when he saw her for the very first time. The betrayal of the covenant. The waste of her, not as a pomegranate but a promise.

  She was throwing that promise away. On boys who were beneath her. On crazes that demeaned her. On drinks and drugs she didn’t need. On music that didn’t merit a second of her attention. She had grown up in a house that was filled with Mozart and Schubert from morning to night. How could she not tell the difference? The first time he tailed her was to a party in a stinking house in Moss Side where a disc jockey scratched records with his dirty fingernails and shouted “Make some noise!” It was that injunction—make some noise—that brute invitation to the inchoate, that enraged him even more than the sight of her sitting cross-legged on the floor, smoking weed and stroking the matted hair of a half-conscious troglodyte lying with his head in her lap. “Make some noise,” Strulovitch hissed into her ear as he dragged her down the stairs, “have I brought you up to value noise as an entity—just noise for the sake of it, Beatrice—while some chthonic arsehole fondles your breasts!”

  She fought him on the stairs and fought him as he dragged her into the Mercedes while the chauffeur looked on, saying nothing. “That’s what this is really about, isn’t it,” she said. “It’s not the music, it’s got nothing to do with music, it’s the fondling. Well no one was fondling me as it so happens. I was fondling him. The only fondling of me that was going on was in your head.”

  He slapped her face. You don’t accuse your father of having sexual fantasies about you. She got out of the car. He ran after her. A stranger shouted “Hey!” when he saw them struggling. “Fuck you!” Strulovitch said, “I’m her father.” “Then try behaving like it,” the stranger said. It was a line Beatrice was to borrow. “If you want me to behave like your daughter, try behaving like my father.”

  A couple of days later she walked into his study laughing like a witch. “I’ve just remembered your description of the boy fondling me,” she said. “A chthonic arsehole. Congratulations. You make me proud to be your daughter. No other girl has a dad who could come up with a phrase like that.”

  Strulovitch felt a twinge of pride. It wasn’t a bad phrase for the spur of the moment. And it had the merit of being deadly accurate. “I’m grateful for your appreciation, Beatrice,” he said. “I’m sorry I hit you.”

  “You’re sick,” she said. “Chthonic arsehole. What you really mean is a goy boy. You wouldn’t have minded if he’d been a Jew.”

  “Not true.”

  “True!”

  “All right, I might have minded less. Not on religious grounds, but because a Jew isn’t interested in the idea of making noise.”

  She laughed again. “Shows what you know,” she said.

  Was she right? Was chthonic arsehole just a euphemism for a non-Jew?

  He didn’t think so. When he saw a Christian he didn’t see a creature of the prehistoric dark. That, surely, was more what Christians saw when they saw him. Why, it was sometimes what he saw when he saw himself.

  The fact remained that a C
hristian husband was not what he wanted for his daughter, any more than his father had wanted a Christian wife for him. Yet it was with him exactly as it had been with his father. They both took non-Jews as they found them, enjoyed cordial relations with them, respected them, loved them—his father’s trustiest pal was a chalk-white Methodist from Todmorden; his partner, a man he cherished like a wife, an ultramontanist from Wells—and they both, father and son, reserved their highest admiration for Gentile geniuses—Mozart and Beethoven, Rembrandt and Goya (Goya!), Wordsworth and Shakespeare (whether he was a Shapiro or he wasn’t). With what the Gentiles were in themselves Strulovitch had no quarrel. Only when it came to who his daughter would marry (and maybe sleep with) did he have reservations. Only when he thought of the covenant did a Christian become a troglodyte.

  So in the name of that covenant, how many more times did he bundle her into the Mercedes?

  He was lucky she never ran away with any of the freaks—he felt he needed another word—who fondled her breasts, even for one night. When he hated her he said that was because she knew which side her bread was buttered, when he loved her he said it was because beneath it all she was a young woman of profound good sense. Either way, he went on tailing her until she grew so accustomed to his presence in the shadows of a car park or at a table in the far corner of a bar wearing dark glasses and reading the Financial Times that she would turn and ask him for a ride home when she felt she’d been out long enough, or a loan when she ran out of cash.

  One bank holiday Monday he followed her to the Notting Hill Carnival. She’d said she was going to stay with cousins in Hendon—he’d even put her on the train—but he got wind of her plans. He knew it wasn’t going to be easy finding her in the crowds but went, despite his loathing of street parties, public nudity, jungle music—jungle music? yes, jungle music—drunkenness, and masquerades, fearing the worst. The worst being? A Rasta junked-up to his eyeballs, swathed in a kafia and making noise on a steel drum. In the event it was Beatrice who found him. His anxiety must have lit him like a beacon. Boldly—and ironically because she knew his fears—she introduced him to a white man in a suit, pretty much his age, who shook his hand and said, “An honour to meet you Mr. Strulovitch.”