Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  Kreitman laughed. People liked getting Kreitman to laugh because his laughter always seemed to take him by surprise, as though it was a sound he didn’t know he had it in him to make.

  ‘Charlie, not for one moment have I ever thought of you as bent. To be candid with you, and I’d like this not to go any further than these four walls, I don’t believe anyone is bent. Not really. Not in their hearts. My theory is that they’re all pretending. But you … Why are you shaking your head?’

  ‘Because you aren’t being candid with me. Why won’t you admit you’re not able to come up with any other satisfactory explanation.’

  ‘For what? The mincing way you pick at your food? You don’t have to be gay to burn your fingers on pork-and-chive dumplings.’

  Charlie Merriweather inspected his fingers, velvety and padded like a dog’s paws. He appeared to be thinking about licking them clean. ‘Now that’s homophobic,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘You think I’m peculiar, Marvin, because I don’t have affairs.’

  ‘Charlie, it’s not my business whether you have affairs or not. Besides, for all I know you have hundreds. I’ve seen you at book signings.’

  ‘You’ve seen us both at book signings. And the people we sign for are all under twelve.’

  ‘Twelve going on seventy. They’re getting older, your readers, I’ve noticed that.’

  ‘Your usual point is that they’re getting younger.’

  ‘The old are getting younger – I think that’s my usual point.’

  ‘You’ll also have noticed, since you notice so much, that I haven’t had an affair since I met Charlie.’

  ‘When I first knew you you were complaining you hadn’t had an affair before you met Charlie.’

  ‘Oh, Lord, was I? Then that just proves it. I’m not an affair person. That’s why you’re starting to wonder about me.’

  ‘People who wonder whether people are wondering about them are usually wondering about themselves. But I’d leave being gay out of it. Doesn’t the received wisdom have it that gays tend more to promiscuity than the other thing?’

  ‘Not the happily married ones, Marvin.’

  ‘Ah!’

  Kreitman finally let the hovering Chinese waitress take away his bowl. She’d been eyeing it from the minute Kreitman started eating. But that’s the way of it in Lisle Street, where the restaurants tend to be tiny and the clearing-away matters more than the cooking. What Kreitman and Merriweather both liked about this restaurant was having to step over the yellow plastic slop buckets at the entrance. It gave them the feeling of being in Shanghai.

  ‘Ah what?’ Merriweather wanted to know.

  ‘Just Ah,’ Kreitman said. He wiped his mouth with his napkin and closed his face down. Not another word until the quarters of orange arrived. And the hot barbers’ towels, exploding out of their hygienic wrappers. Bang! Bang! Untouched by human hand. (There was a joke, in the backstreets of Shanghai, WI – fastidiousness!) Only after he’d exploded his towel did Kreitman explain himself. ‘Are you on an errand from Hazel via Charlie? Is that what this is all about? Are we raising questions of sexual irregularity so that you can steer the conversation round to mine?’

  ‘Charlie and I don’t discuss your marriage, Marvin. Much, no doubt, as you would like us to. You’ve been trying to wring disapproval out of me for twenty years. Sorry – no can do. I have no attitude to the way you live.’

  ‘The way I live?’ Unbidden, the face of Shelley, his mother’s second husband’s nurse, invaded Kreitman’s thoughts. They had been to the theatre the night before where Kreitman had been struck by the prettiness of her concentration. He had told her so, whereupon, without changing her expression, she had called him a patronising bastard. He was remembering how prettily she said that.

  ‘I have no attitude to you and women other than maybe some sneaking envy. I think you’re a lucky devil …’

  ‘Luck doesn’t come in to it, Charlie.’ Unbidden, the long unshaven legs of Ooshi.

  ‘I don’t mean I think you’re lucky because of what you get. I mean you’re lucky to have the temperament you have. Lucky to be able to do it. I couldn’t. Can’t. Don’t want to, either, in the end. I think I’ve become used to nice sex …’

  ‘Run that by me again.’

  ‘Nice sex …’

  ‘You mean tired sex.’

  ‘I mean nice sex. Same person, same place, same time – I like that. But that doesn’t mean I disapprove of your way. It’s not for me. I just don’t have the balls.’

  ‘Fairy!’

  Followed by the bill.

  Two old friends, one steadfastly in love with the same woman all his married life, one not, meeting regularly to decide who is the unhappier. And then losing their nerve.

  Some days, so engrossed were they in not getting round to having the conversation they would like to have had, they couldn’t part. They would idle about Soho, back through Chinatown, across Shaftesbury Avenue and into the wicked warren of Berwick and Brewer and Broadwick, where every window was suggestive of deviance, even those with only cream cakes or rolls of calico on display. Then they would cut back through the street market, past the fish and veggie men playing furtive stand-up poker with the barber outside the King of Corsica, past the fruiterers offering ‘A pound a scoo’ ‘ere!’ – three tomatoes, five lemons, seven onions, take your pick, pre-weighed in stainless-steel bowls, scoops, like winnings at a fairground – then out via suppurating Peter Street, where the pimps pick their teeth with match ends, into Wardour, dog-legging through Old Compton, getting gayer, into Dean and Frith, scenes of some jittery escapades in the skin trade when they were students, or at least when Kreitman was, but sorted out and hardened now, pedestrianised, masculinised, production company’d, cappuccino’d. What they were waiting for was a decent interval to elapse between lunch and afternoon tea. They needed to go on sitting opposite each other, eating and drinking, skirting the issues of their lives, almost saying what they wanted to say. Space allowing, they would crush into Patisserie Valerie where it was too public to break down and weep, failing that one of the new coffee houses, though preferably not one that was too exclusively or too hostilely butch.

  Genuinely bothered by gays, were they? No. Yes. No. Yes. No, not bothered exactly. More destabilised. How could they be otherwise? The public hand-holding was so new and so challenging. And intended to be destabilising, was it not, in the way that a protest march is intended to shake the convictions of those happy with the status quo. Of the two, Kreitman was more agitated by gayness than Charlie, for whom the hetero life was baffling enough. The beauty of monogamy is that nothing outside its magic circle impinges on it; it has its own worries to attend to. Kreitman, though, was in a sort of competition with gayness. He felt seriously undermined by it. Challenged on the very ground where he had planted his colours. He meant it when he said he wasn’t sure he believed anyone really wanted to mess around in his own sex. Other, other – that had been his driving force since he could remember. As much other as you could muster. They had even called it other, he and his friends. ‘Cop any other, last night?’ Other when life was ribald, other when it grew more serious. The nobleness of life is to do thus … He being Antony, the other being Cleopatra (blazing black eyes, gold hooped earrings and dirty fingertips). But apparently not. Not necessarily so. What about the nobleness of life is to do thus – he being Antony, the other being … well, you tell me? Was that the great love story of our time – Antony and Antony? In which case where did that leave him, toiling at an activity no longer prized? Carrying home the cups and pennants no one else wanted or could be bothered to compete for?

  Only recently, while sitting at a bar in an exhibition hall in Hamburg – off buying purses – he had fallen into conversation with a couple of Biedermeier gays from Berlin. He had liked them, found them handsome, found their neatness transfixing, enjoyed the musky smell of them, got drunk and allowed his tongue to run away with him. ‘This gay bus
iness …’ He was speaking as a man’s man himself, he hoped they understood. Which they did, perfectly. The only thing they didn’t understand was why a man’s man chose to spend so much time – so much quality time, they laughed – in the company of women. ‘What?’ He was surprised by his own surprise. As were they. Had he really never stopped to ask himself before today what it said about his masculinity that it shied so nervously – they were only taking him at his own word here – from masculinity in others. They didn’t put it to him like this, of course, they were altogether far too urbane, but if anyone were to be called a sissy …

  Was the cyclist who shouted ‘Honk, honk, urgent delivery’ and deliberately all but ran Kreitman down on the corner of Broadwick and Poland Street gay? He rode as though dozing in an armchair, not remotely urgent, his head thrown back, his hands insolently off his handlebars, wearing green bulging lunch-pack shorts, a thunder and lightning sleeveless vest, a pink and purple nylon baseball cap reversed, with a matching pink and purple nylon backpack scarcely big enough to hold an eyeliner pencil and a couple of tightly rolled condoms – what did that say?

  ‘My fucking right of way!’ Kreitman yelled after him. ‘Try that again, you moron, and I’ll have you in the fucking gutter!’

  Almost out of sight by now, for Kreitman delivered long sentences, the cyclist put one of his free hands behind his back and showed Kreitman his finger. Was it painted?

  ‘Make me Mayor of London for just five minutes, Charlie,’ Kreitman fumed, ‘invest me with the power and I’ll have every sanctimonious fucking faggot cyclist in the capital in clink.’

  ‘Only the faggot ones?’

  ‘What gets me is they think they’ve got some God-given dispensation, the lot of them, just because they’re not punching holes in the ozone layer. I’ve seen the future, Charlie – we fetishise these arseholes and they run us down! Serves us right.’

  What amazed Charlie was how furious Kreitman had become, how quickly and seamlessly furious, given the smallness of the offence and the number of reasons (five plus four) Kreitman had to be happy.

  This didn’t happen every time the two men lunched late in town. Mostly they would plunge back peaceably into twilit Soho, enjoying the nightly handover, the silver cans of film spilling stardust as they skipped between production houses, the workers leaking home and the theatregoers nosing out, the shops shuttering, the rubbish piling, the bars starting to fill, the daytime beggars leaving with their sleeping bags over their shoulders, ceding to the night shift, and the mobs of inflamed teenage boys from penurious countries, bound in a sort of helix of indecision, drifting apart but always attached to one another, like the arms of a kindergarten mobile. In their different ways, both Marvin Kreitman and Charlie Merriweather felt at home here; nothing to do with the film and television industry, or the wholesale jewellery trade, or the silk merchants, or the Lithuanian lowlifes; what they enjoyed was the peculiarly English early-evening melancholy, the sensible damped-down expectancy, the scruffiness taking from the excitement, unless scruffiness happened to be what excited you …

  ‘What I can’t decide,’ Kreitman said, ‘is whether it’s like peeling off an expensive whore and finding cheap cotton underwear, or undressing a scrubber and finding La Perla.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Merriweather, setting his big chin. ‘I wouldn’t know either way.’

  Whereupon they would decrease their pace, ring their wives on their mobiles, and decide on somewhere to have dinner.

  Tonight, and it was to be a night different from all other nights for both of them, they chose a big noisy Italian which Kreitman’s window dresser had told him about and where, therefore, he couldn’t take her mother – one of the new steel-cool New York Italians, sans napery and sans space between the tables, in which, supposing they let you in, you were laughed at if you asked for fegato or tiramisu and waitresses as touchy as grenades took you through pastas named after eminent Mafiosi.

  ‘Christ, Charlie, what’s cavatappi?’

  ‘Ask the waitress.’

  ‘I’m frightened to. But it comes with a sauce of smoked turkey, seared leeks and brandied shallots. Nice and light. I’ll have that. You?’

  ‘Elicoidali with five cheeses.’

  ‘What’s elicoidali?’

  ‘What it sounds like. Italian for coronary.’

  ‘Then don’t have it.’

  ‘Too late to start worrying about that.’

  He rubbed his great dog’s-paw hands together, daring death. Charlie the high-risk voluptuary. Around food he was still the prep-school glutton, smacking his chops and popping his cheeks to cram in one more lolly. Be the same around the you-know-what, Kreitman thought, deliberately courting ugliness, not himself yet, not recovered from the affront of being almost knocked down by a cocksucker. And lectured to by his best friend – was it a lecture? – about nice sex.

  ‘And a bottle of Brunello di Montecello,’ he told the waitress. It was time to start that.

  Had they not eaten Chinese for lunch they might well have gone for Indian tonight. Not the poncy stuff. Not cuisine vindaloo, served on big white plates – two dry lamb chops presented with their legs in the air, like Soho pole-dancers, in a baby-powdering of fenugreek. By Indian, the two friends still meant stainless-steel bowls of blistering brown slop, suddenly called balti. They had lived in Indian restaurants in their student days, shovelling down old-fashioned bhunas and madrases in Camden High Street before and after going to see Jack Nicholson movies. Kreitman’s choice; Charlie Merriweather didn’t care for movies and only went to have somewhere quiet to sleep off one curry and dream of the next. Kreitman (who could have passed for an Indian anywhere but in India – Sabu, they had called him at school) even got around to learning to cook festive Indian dishes, sitting cross-legged in the kitchen of his too expensive digs, crumbling saffron and separating sheets of vark, the edible silver leaf of which angels’ tongues are made, with a view to transforming the humble pilau into an offering to the gods. And Charlie? He rubbed his hands and watched. Sometimes he rubbed his stomach and salivated. ‘Knives and forks, Charlie!’ Kreitman would shout. ‘Bowls! Pickles! Spoons!’

  Considering their upbringings – Charlie left to fend for himself at an unheated minor public school near Lewes, Kreitman encouraged to run riot at a progressive in Farnborough and never once to make a bed or rinse a toothbrush if he wasn’t minded – you would have put your money on Charlie turning out the housemaker. But Charlie had been awed by university and fell helpless the moment he got there. His bulk embarrassed him. When he went to lectures, he felt his head was too big and annoyed the people behind. He tried slumping, but that only drew sarcasm from the lecturer who told him that if he was as tired as he looked perhaps he ought not to have got up. He was ashamed of his voice which was too public school for the crowd he had half fallen in with, and too loud as well. ‘Don’t boom at me,’ a girl from Newcasde had told him on what couldn’t quite pass for a date, and that had made him more ashamed and somehow, as though to compensate, more booming still. By the end of his first term he was racked with confusion, a person who was too noisy and too shy, who was too much there and yet not there at all. He drooped disconsolately, like a puppy who had grown too big for its owner and been thrown on to the streets. ‘I’m just waiting for someone to take pity on me,’ he told Kreitman. ‘I’ve taken pity on you,’ Kreitman reminded him. ‘No,’ Charlie said, ‘I mean a woman.’ Someone to take pity on him, adore him, cook him breakfast and give him a good home.

  Whereas Kreitman was putting mileage, fast, between himself and the idea of a man instanced by his father, the Purse King. Sullen at work, sullen back from work, whisky from the cut-glass decanters on the solid-silver tray on the walnut sideboard, scoff without a thank-you, empty apron, count, curse, packet of Rennies, five spoons of Gaviscon, half a gallon of Andrews Liver Salts, gallstones, ulcer, cancer, heart attack, swear, snore, stroke. Maybe at first the decanters weren’t cut glass, or the tray solid silver, or the w
hisky single malt, but Rome wasn’t built in a day; by the time the purse empire had extended to two markets, then to three, then to the first of the shops in Streatham High Street – KREITMAN THE RIGHTMAN FOR SMALL LEATHER – nothing conducive to Bruno Kreitman’s well-being, not that he ever enjoyed any well-being, wasn’t of the best. Why did Kreitman hate his father so intensely on account of those whisky decanters? Because they bottled up curiosity. Because they denied the random mess of life. His father could have come home from the markets with funny stories, anecdotes of the pedlar’s life, traveller’s tales. Guess what happened to me today … ? Who do you think I ran into … ? Listen, you’ll enjoy this … But he didn’t see himself as a pedlar and therefore wasn’t able to avail himself of any of the pedlar’s consolations. The fact that it was small leather he was peddling only made it worse. You can’t distance yourself from the public when you’re flogging them small leather. Purses and wallets infect mankind with a distraction close to madness. But he could have made a virtue of that, couldn’t he? Could have come home expert in the rich insanity of his trade – ‘You should see them at my stall, like perverts loosed into a playground. Fingering, poking, probing. Sniffing the leather. Rubbing the suede against their cheeks. You’re the clever dick, Marvin, you explain to me why every woman over fifty, whether she intends to buy a new purse or not, feels she has to show you the contents of her old one.’ Marvin Kreitman, growing into a speculative boy, would have enjoyed putting his mind to that. ‘Could it be love they crave, Dad? Could purse-buying be like exhibitionism, a cry of sexual loneliness?’ Bad luck, in that case, if you happened on Kreitman Senior. Nothing doing there. He rebuffed all cries for help and told the punters not to finger his goods if they weren’t buying. Swore at them, too, if they persisted or grew tetchy or had the effrontery to haggle. Take it or fucking leave it. Sambo! Yes, Sambo as well, under his poisoned breath. Anybody call Bruno Kreitman a kike and he’d have had the Haganah in and instigated another Nuremberg. But Sambo awakened no consciousness of equivalence in him. He would still be swearing when he got home, reliving the mortifications of his day: the bleeders – curses aimed at his own chest, blows to his own heart – the bleeders! Turning Kreitman’s soul to ash. It amazed the boy that with manners as gruff as his, his father ever managed to sell anything. But there’s the mystery of the purse. In the end it will sell itself.