The Finkler Question

by Howard Jacobson

  She took him back to her hotel in the Haymarket. Her suggestion. She was lewd in the taxi, sliding her hand up into his hero shirt and down into his tight Mr Darcy breeches. Calling him Billy, which it occurred to her, as they swung past Eros, rhymed with willy. Strange how impure Americans could be, Treslove thought, for a people puritanical to their souls. Prim and pornographic all at once.

  But he was in no position to be judgemental.

  Gratitude and a sense of relief overwhelmed him. He was still in the game; he was still a player. In fact, he’d never been a player but he knew what he meant.

  He slid his tongue behind her dazzling panorama of teeth, trying without success to distinguish one tooth from another. He had the same trouble with her breasts. They didn’t divide. They constituted a bosom, singular.

  She was so perfect she needed only one of everything.

  She was a television producer, over in London for a few days to discuss a joint venture with Channel 4. He was relieved it wasn’t the BBC. He wasn’t sure he could sleep with anyone with BBC connections. Not if he was to manage a decent erection for any length of time.

  In the event he didn’t manage a decent erection for any length of time because she bounced up and down on him in a flurry of nipple and curl which embarrassed him into prematurity.

  ‘Wow!’ she said.

  ‘It’s the dress,’ he told her. ‘I shouldn’t have asked you to keep the dress on. Too many hot associations.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park.’

  ‘I can take it off.’

  ‘No. Keep it on and give me twenty minutes.’

  They talked about their favourite Jane Austen characters. Kimberley – of course she was called Kimberley – liked Emma. That was who she was being. Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, rich, ‘And with her tits out,’ she laughed, putting them back in. Or, rather, Treslove thought, putting it back in.

  Taking it back out again, he said he found some of Jane Austen’s heroines a touch effervescent for his taste – not Emma, of course not Emma – preferring Anne Elliot, no, loving, really loving Anne Elliot. Why? Not sure, but he thought something to do with her running out of time to be happy.

  ‘Drinking in the last-chance saloon,’ Kimberley said, showing she understood the nuances of Georgian England.

  ‘Yes, yes, something like that. It’s the idea of her faded beauty I love. Fading as you read.’

  ‘You love faded beauty!’

  ‘No, God no, not as a rule. I don’t mean in life.’

  ‘I should hope not.’

  ‘God no.’

  ‘I’m relieved to hear that.’

  ‘It’s the fairy-story quality,’ he said, pausing to graze purposefully on her breast. ‘Jane Austen waves her wand and conjures a happy ending at the eleventh hour, but in life it would have been a tragedy.’

  She nodded, not listening. ‘And now time for you to wave your wand,’ she said, looking at her watch. She had given him exactly twenty minutes. She no more did approximations than she did tragedy.

  ‘Wow!’ she said again five minutes later.

  It was the jolliest night of sex Treslove had ever had. A surprise to him because he didn’t do jolly. When he left her in the morning she handed him her card – in case he was ever in LA, but be careful to give her warning, her husband wouldn’t be that enthusiastic about finding Billy Crystal on the doorstep in his Regency breeches. She slapped his behind as he left.

  Treslove felt like a prostitute.

  So what about that prematurity? Treslove, in his street clothes, stopped for coffee in Piccadilly to think it through. Bounce had never done the business for Treslove. Bounce, if anything, had always been detrimental to business. So what, on this occasion, had? The dress undoubtedly had had something to do with it – Anne Elliot straddling him and shaking her head from side to side like a Swedish porn star. But the dress alone could not explain the alacrity of his appreciation, nor his repeating it at twenty-minute intervals, not for the entire night but for more of it than was gentlemanly to brag about. Which left only the mugging. He would not have sworn to this in a court of law but he had a feeling he’d been half thinking about the woman who had attacked him while Kimberley rose and swelled and wowed! above him. They were a similar build, he fancied. So was he thinking about her or seeing her? He couldn’t have sworn which of those either.

  But there was a problem with this. The attack had certainly not stimulated him sexually at the time. Why would it have? He was not that kind of a man. A fractured nose was bloody painful, end of, as his sons said. Nor had it remotely stimulated him in the days following. And it wasn’t doing anything for him sitting thinking of it now. But something was. Recollection of the night before, naturally. It had been a night to be pleased with and proud of. It hadn’t only broken a long drought, it had been a one-night stand to rival the best of them and Treslove was not by nature a one-night-stand man. Yet still some further consciousness of excitation or erotic disturbance nagged away at him.

  Then he got it. Billy Crystal. Kimberley had taken him for Brad Pitt initially, but when she’d looked more closely into his face she had seen someone else. Dustin Hoffman . . . Adam Sandler . . . Billy Crystal. He had stopped her there, but had she continued the list would in all likelihood, given where it was heading, have included David Schwimmer, Jerry Seinfeld, Jerry Springer, Ben Stiller, David Duchovny, Kevin Kline, Jeff Goldblum, Woody Allen, Groucho Fucking Marx . . . did he have to go on?

  Finklers.

  Fucking Finklers every one.

  He had read somewhere that every actor in Hollywood was a Finkler by birth, whether or not they kept their Finkler names. And Kimberley – Kimberley for God’s sake; what was her name originally: Esther? – Kimberley had mistaken him for all of them.

  By mistaken he didn’t mean – he couldn’t have meant; she couldn’t have meant – mistaken in appearance. Even to Kimberley’s blurred vision he could not have physically resembled Jerry Seinfeld or Jeff Goldblum. He was the wrong size. He was the wrong temperature. He was the wrong speed. The resemblance he bore to these men must, in that case, have been of another order. It must have been a matter of spirit and essence. Essentially he was like them. Spiritually he was like them.

  He couldn’t have said whether taking him for a Finkler in essence pressed Kimberley’s button – no reason it should have done, if they were all Finklers where she came from – but what if it pressed his?

  Two such misidentifications in two weeks. Never mind what Finkler himself thought. Finkler was possessive of his Finklerishness. ‘Ours is not a club you can just join,’ he had explained to Treslove in the days when he insisted on being called Samuel.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of joining,’ Treslove had told him then.

  ‘No,’ Finkler had replied, already losing interest. ‘I never said you were.’

  So Finkler was not what could be called an uninterested party.

  Whereas two women without an axe to grind – two weeks, two women, two identical misidentifications!

  Treslove bit his knuckles, ordered more coffee and allowed his life – his lying life, was it? – to pass before him.

  2

  Finkler had asked for it.

  That was Tyler Finkler’s view at the time and it was Julian Treslove’s too. Sam had it coming.

  Tyler Finkler had the better case. Her husband was fucking other women. Or if he wasn’t fucking other women he might as well have been fucking other women for the amount of attention he was showing her.

  Treslove’s case was simply that Finkler had it coming because he was Finkler. But he also saw that a woman as beautiful as Tyler shouldn’t have to suffer.

  Tyler Finkler. The late Tyler Finkler. Remembering her over a second coffee, Treslove sighed a deep sigh.

  ‘Sam’s on an all-consuming project,’ he had said at the time. ‘He’s an ambitious man. He was an ambitious boy.’

  ‘My husband was a boy!’ />
  Treslove had smiled weakly. Finkler had not in fact been much of a boy but it didn’t feel right saying so to Finkler’s angry wife.

  They were lying on Treslove’s bed in that suburb he insisted on calling Hampstead. They should not have been lying on Treslove’s bed in any suburb. They both knew that. But Finkler had asked for it.

  Tyler had rung Treslove originally to enquire whether it was all right to come over and watch the first programme of her husband’s new series on Treslove’s television. ‘Of course,’ he had said, ‘but won’t you be watching it with Sam?’

  ‘Samuel is watching it with the crew, otherwise known as his mistress.’

  Tyler was the only person who still called Sam Samuel. It gave her power over him, the power of someone who knew an important person before he became important. Sometimes she went further and called him Shmuelly to remind him of his origins when he appeared to be in danger of forgetting them.

  ‘Oh,’ Treslove said.

  ‘And the worst thing is that she isn’t even the fucking director. She’s just the production assistant.’

  ‘Ah,’ Treslove said, wondering if Tyler would have been watching it with Sam had Sam, more conventionally, been fucking the director. You never knew quite where you were with Finklers – men or women – when it came to matters that bore on humiliation and prestige. Non-Finklers judged all infidelities equally, but in his experience Finklers were prepared to make allowances if the third party happened to be someone important. Prince Philip, Bill Clinton, the Pope even. He hoped he wasn’t stereotyping them, thinking that.

  ‘Will you be bringing the children?’ Treslove asked.

  ‘The children? The children are away at school. They’ll soon be at university. At least pretend to take an interest, Julian.’

  ‘I don’t do children,’ he explained. ‘I don’t even do my own.’

  ‘Well, you don’t have to worry. We won’t be doing any children ourselves. My body’s past all that.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Treslove.

  This was the first inkling he had that he and his friend’s wife would not be watching much television that evening. ‘Ha,’ he said to himself, showering, as though he were the victim of whatever was going to happen, rather than an active partner in it. But there was never the remotest possibility that he would be able to resist Tyler, no matter that she was using him only to get her own back on her husband.

  Though she wasn’t the sort of woman he normally fell for, he had fallen for her anyway the first time Sam had introduced her as his wife. He had not seen his friend for a while and did not know he was going out with anyone in particular, let alone that there had been a marriage. But that was Finkler’s way. He would lift the hem of his life infinitesimally, just enough to make Treslove feel intrigued and excluded, before lowering it again.

  The newly married Mrs Finkler was not in fact beautiful, but she was as good as beautiful, dark and angular, with features on which a careless man could cut himself, and pitiless sarcastic eyes. Though there was little meat on her bones she was somehow able to suggest sumptuous occasions. Whenever Treslove met her she was dressed as for a state banquet, where she would eat little, talk with assurance, dance gracefully with whoever she had to, and win admiring glances from the whole room. She was the sort of woman a successful man needs. Competent, worldly, coolly elegant – so long as the man doesn’t forget her in his success. The word humid came to Treslove’s mind when he thought about Tyler Finkler. Which was surprising given that she was on the surface arid. But Treslove was imagining what she would be like below the surface, when he entered her dark womanly mysteriousness. She was somewhere he had never been and probably ought not to think of going. She was the eternal Finkler woman. Hence there never being the remotest possibility of his refusing her when she offered. He had to discover what it would be like to penetrate the moist dark womanly mysteriousness of a Finkleress.

  They put the television on but didn’t watch a frame of Sam’s programme. ‘He’s such a liar,’ she said, stepping out of a dress she could have worn to see her husband get a knighthood. ‘Where’s his philosophy when I don’t have his dinner ready on time? Where’s his philosophy when he should be keeping his dick in his pants?’

  Treslove said nothing. It was odd having his friend’s face on his television at the same time as he had his friend’s wife in his arms. Not that Tyler was ever actually in his arms. She liked to be made love to from a distance as though it wasn’t really happening. Much of the time she lay facing away from Treslove, working on his penis with her hand behind her back, as though fastening a complicated brassiere, or struggling with a jar that wouldn’t open, while she traduced her husband in running commentary. She preferred the light on and saw no sensual virtue in silence. Only when he entered her – briefly, because she told him she did not welcome extended intercourse – did Treslove find the warm dark Finkleress humidity he had anticipated. And it exceeded all his imaginings.

  He lay on his back and felt the tears well in his eyes. He told her he loved her.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘You don’t even know me. That was Sam you were doing it to.’

  He sat up. ‘It most certainly was not.’

  ‘I don’t mind. It suits me. We might even do it again. And if it turns you on to be doing your friend – doing him or doing him over, let’s not finesse here – it’s fine by me.’

  Treslove propped himself up on his elbow to look at her but she was turned away from him again. He reached out to stroke her hair.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ she said.

  ‘What you don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is that this is the first time for me.’

  ‘The first time you’ve had sex?’ She didn’t actually sound all that surprised.

  ‘The first time’ – it sounded tasteless now he had to put it into words – ‘the first time . . . you know . . .’

  ‘The first time you’ve done the dirty on Samuel? I shouldn’t worry about that. He wouldn’t hesitate to do it to you. Probably already has. He sees it as a droit de philosophe. Being a thinker he thinks he has a right to fuck whoever takes his fancy.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I meant that you’re my first . . .’

  He could hear his hesitancy irritating her. The bed chilled around her. ‘First what? Spit it out. Married woman? Mother? Wife of a television presenter? Woman without a degree?’

  ‘Don’t you have a degree?’

  ‘First what, Julian?’

  He swallowed the word a couple of times but needed to hear himself say it. Saying it was almost as sweet in its unholiness as doing it. ‘Jew,’ he finally got out. But that wasn’t quite the word he was after either. ‘Jewess,’ he said, taking a long time to finish it, letting the heated hiss of all those ssss linger on his lips.

  She turned round as though for the first time she needed to see what he looked like, her eyes dancing with mockery. ‘Jewess? You think I’m actually a Jewess?’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘That’s the nicest question you could have asked me. But where did you get the idea from that I’m the real deal?’

  Treslove couldn’t think of what to say, there was so much. ‘Everything,’ was all he could come up with in the end. He remembered attending one of the Finkler boys’ bar mitzvahs but as he wasn’t sure which he remained silent on the subject.

  ‘Well, your everything is a nothing,’ she said.

  He was bitterly upset. Not a Jewess, Tyler? Then what was that dark humidity he had entered?

  She hung her bottom lip at him. (And that, wasn’t that Jewish?) ‘Do you honestly think,’ she went on, ‘that Samuel would have married someone Jewish?’

  ‘Well, I hadn’t thought he wouldn’t.’

  ‘Then how little you know him. It’s the Gentiles he’s out to conquer. Always has been. You must know that. He’s done Jewish. He was born Jewish. They can’t reject him. So why waste time on them? He’d have married me in a church had I asked him. He was the
tiniest bit furious with me when I didn’t.’

  ‘So why didn’t you?’

  She laughed. A dry rattle from a parched throat. ‘I’m another version of him, that’s why. We were each out to conquer the other’s universe. He wanted the goyim to love him. I wanted the Jews to love me. And I liked the idea of having Jewish children. I thought they’d do better at school. And boy, have they done better!’

  (Her pride in them – wasn’t that Jewish as well?)

  Treslove was perplexed. ‘Can you have Jewish children if you’re not Jewish yourself?’

  ‘Not in the eyes of the Orthodox. Not easily, anyway. But we had a liberal wedding. And I had to convert even for that. Two years I put in, learning how to run a Jewish home, how to be a Jewish mother. Ask me anything you need to know about Judaism and I can tell you. How to kosher a chicken, how to light the Shabbes candles, what to do in a mikva. Do you want me to tell you how a good Jewish woman knows her period is over? I am possessed of more Jewishkeit than all the echt Jewish women in Hampstead rolled together.’

  Treslove absented himself, mentally rolling together all the echt Jewish women in Hampstead. But what he asked was, ‘What’s a mikva?’

  ‘A ritual bath. You go there to cleanse yourself for your Jewish husband who will die if he encounters a drop of your blood.’

  ‘Sam wanted you to do that?’

  ‘Not Samuel, me. Samuel couldn’t have given a monkey’s. He thought it was barbaric, worrying about menstrual blood which in point of fact he quite likes, the sicko. I went to the mikva for me. I found it calming. I’m the Jew of the two of us even if I was born a Catholic. I’m the Jewish princess you read about in the fairy stories, only I’m not Jewish. The irony being –’

  ‘That he’s out fucking shiksas?’

  ‘Too obvious. I’m still the shiksa to him. If he wants the forbidden he can get it at home. The irony is that he’s out fucking Jews. That lump of lard Ronit Kravitz, his production assistant. I wouldn’t put it past him to be converting her.’

  ‘I thought you said she’s already Jewish.’

  ‘Converting her to Christianity, you fool.’