Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘Charlie, enough.’

  ‘Come on, play the game. Which one … ?’

  And so out at last, brandied, into the roaring Soho night, remorseless with clubbers, boys bald as missiles, girls gashed red across the face as though with razors, and Kreitman exclaiming, ‘Christ, these kids!’ and Charlie swaying off the pavement, agreeing, ‘Yes, beautiful, aren’t they, so much more sure of themselves than I ever was, splendid really, so come on, Marvin, who’s it going to be?’ and then the cyclist – that cyclist! – with his hands off the bars, pink and purple luminous under the street lights, crying, ‘Honk, honk, urgent delivery,’ and Kreitman’s chance, come sooner than expected, to unseat the cocksucker before he mowed down his jabbering friend, and the next thing flat out under the vomiting moon with tyre marks across his chest.

  Not liking anything about the world when he came to in it, with a fright more nauseating than birth, back as though from hell with all its devils, only to find more of them waiting to pitchfork his soul, and Charlie not sobered, still with his big white jaw hanging open, wanting an answer to his crazy question – ‘Which one, Marvin? Who are you going to give me?’ – Kreitman went to sleep again on the street.

  When he came to a second time it was already another day and he was lying on a castored metal trolley in a corridor off Emergency.

  ‘Is this where they are laid who tangle with a faggot?’ he enquired.

  Whereupon someone smoothed his hair and said ‘Shhh!’ And strike him dead – strike him dead again – if that someone wasn’t Charlie, not Charlie his old chum but Charlie his old chum’s wife. Charlie otherwise known as Chas.

  That Charlie!

  Chapter Three

  So where was Hazel?

  More to the point, who was Hazel?

  ‘I might not be anybody,’ she warned Kreitman on their first date. ‘I have never had a father. And girls who have never had a father never really learn how to turn themselves into a resistant force.’

  ‘Then don’t resist me,’ Kreitman said. Though even he knew she wasn’t talking about that.

  They were sitting in a curry restaurant near his digs in Camden. They had noticed each other in lectures for months but their paths hadn’t otherwise crossed until they’d met in a picture queue for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Neither was alone, but neither exactly looked tied up either. Kreitman decided to ignore the feelings of their respective dates and gave her his card. No other student at the university had his own card. Hazel laughed when she read it –

  Marvin Kreitman

  B.A. Pending

  – and the squishy-hearted Kreitman immediately fell in love with her because her laughter had such sadness in it. ‘Ring me,’ he said in a dark voice, and she did. That was partly what she meant by having no resistant force. When somebody asked her to do something she did it. And now here she was letting him choose what she ate, how many poppadoms, which sorts of pickle, not because she couldn’t resist, but because she couldn’t see any logical reason why she should resist.

  She tried. For weeks after this first date she refused to see Kreitman, actually washing her hair every night for a month and once even sleeping with another man she hardly knew in order that she shouldn’t have to lie to Kreitman when she made the usual excuses and said she was seriously seeing someone else. She was terrified of her own quiescent nature. The year before, holidaying in Israel at a friend’s suggestion, she had let a soldier take her off the bus and strip-search her in the Negev. Yossi. She even told her mother about him. ‘Handsome devil,’ her mother said, ‘I can see why.’

  She lacked moral guidance. Her mother had worked in the House of Commons library in the fifties (the last good-naturedly fancy-free decade of the English twentieth century), where she dressed in pencil skirts which showed off her calf muscles and satin blouses which made her breasts float like pillows, and where she became intimate with any number of Cabinet ministers, all of them Tories (the only ones she liked: a social confidence, sense of humour thing), one of whom – though if anybody knew which, nobody was saying – had fathered Hazel. Given Hazel’s mother’s predilection for men who looked like Hazel’s Israeli soldier – tiers of teeth, no-smoke-without-fire eyes, shoulders bristling with wool, moustaches like a sea lion’s and a bazooka in his belt – it oughtn’t to have been too difficult to whittle down the number of Tory ministers in contention; but Hazel never felt she’d got close (Harold Macmillan, no; Selwyn Lloyd, no; Anthony Eden, hardly) and maybe her mother was never dead sure herself. Whoever he was – or at least whoever he was told he was, and that did not preclude his being a cartel comprising every suspect on the list – he left the women well provided for, with a flat giving out on to a Juliet balcony overlooking the British Museum, a blue-grey Austin A40, an inexhaustibly stocked drinks cabinet and a sufficient allowance to make Hazel’s mother think twice before selling her story or asking for more. Which outcome, viewed all round, hardly disposed her to bring her daughter up a bundle of maidenly compunctions. She put Hazel on the pill at thirteen and advised her to let impulse be her judge. The only trouble with that being that Hazel could never decide which her impulse was or what it was telling her.

  Enter Kreitman, spouting determined views. Later on, they both decided, he must have smelt fatherlessness on her, given how wide he opened his paternal arms – Come to Marvin! – and also given how much space he tried to take up in her company, filling all her needs; but at the time of his first wooing her she made him think more of the forest than the orphanage. There was some quality of feral shyness about her that fascinated him; she seemed to peer at him from behind trees, startled, wanting to snuffle him before she would come out. Even her face was snouty, pointed like a deer’s, with piercing grey forestial eyes, suggesting indolence no less than timidity, and maybe not timidity at all so much as cruel reserve. In her dressing she chose to give the impression of floaty impermanence, tying her cascading lion’s mane in ribbons too insubstantial to contain it, and favouring flighty dresses in filmy colours over the wintry denims most girls wore for lectures.

  One warm spring day she turned up for lunch in the union twirling a damson-coloured parasol. And matching damson-coloured ribbons in her hair. When Marvin saw that he thought his chest would burst with love. A parasol!

  ‘You remind me,’ he told her on their third curry date, ‘of a tropical butterfly.’

  ‘Oh, please!’ she said.

  ‘I’m not spinning you a line. I feel that as long as I keep my palm open and absolutely still you will stay on it’ – he demonstrated his meaning with a hand as steady as he could manage – ‘but as soon as I try to close around you’ – snap! – ‘you will fly away.’

  Maybe that was the moment, she told herself much later, when I should have fucked him off. She tried a second time. She wrote to him after their first essay at lovemaking, suggesting that they leave it, that they weren’t suited, that whatever he may have thought he was making with her, it wasn’t love.

  ‘What was it, then?’ he phoned to ask.

  She took her time. ‘Moan,’ she said, at last. ‘You made moan.’

  He took his time too. He was upset. And genuinely bewildered. In the end the best he could come up with was, ‘I thought you were meant to moan.’

  ‘Not like that. Not like a soul in torment. Where was the joy?’

  Joy! He didn’t ask what the fuck joy had to do with it. But he did say that for his part he thought it had gone rather well.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘Like a social occasion. Like a difficulty negotiated. You laboured over me, Marvin. You sorted me out.’

  ‘Nerves. Just give me another chance. I know where everything is now. Next time I won’t moan or labour. Next time you can labour over me.’

  Too much trouble to resist. She accepted his invitation to visit his mother when his father was away selling purses at a two-day bank-holiday fair. There was an upright piano at the Kreitmans’, dark and heavy and over-ornamental, like all their furniture.
Kreitman’s father hated music but believed any house he lived in should have a piano. Mona Kreitman was able to play a few tunes on it, all of them of a sort to arouse confused longings in her son. ‘Jealousy’, ‘I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now’, ‘You Always Hurt the One You Love’, ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ – songs like those. At first she waved away the suggestion when he asked her to play for his new girlfriend. She couldn’t. She had no aptitude. Whatever noise she made on the piano was not meant to be heard outside the family. Finally she played and sang ‘I’ll Never Smile Again’ in an arrangement by the Ink Spots, then closed the piano lid and went to boil the kettle.

  Hazel felt unliked and tried to make a better impression by sitting at the piano herself.

  ‘Oh, you play, do you?’ Mona Kreitman enquired, rattling the cups.

  ‘Not really,’ Hazel said. She essayed the first movement of a late Beethoven sonata, taking care not to essay it too well, then sang ‘Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes’ in a voice more thrillingly purple than Kreitman had any idea she possessed.

  Had Kreitman not been in love with her before, he would certainly have lost his reason over her now. A woman with a tawny mass of startled hair, who twirled a damson-coloured parasol and sang Ben Jonson! He saw his life extending through its middle years and into old age, serene and comfortable, the French windows open to a fragrant garden blessed by butterflies, wine the colour of Hazel’s hair on a silver tray beside him, and Hazel herself, his wife, untouched by time, playing the piano for him, Schubert, Chopin, Debussy.

  Mona Kreitman, a psychic in the matter of her son’s heart, closed hers to Hazel. ‘You should hear Marvin sing,’ she said. ‘He has a lovely voice.’

  That was the moment, Hazel told herself much later, when she should have fucked Kreitman’s mother off too. With me you will hide your light under a bushel, Mona Kreitman had as good as told her. And Hazel, the fool she was, agreed. Whatever you wish, Mrs Kreitman. Whatever will make you and Marvin happy. And so she had hidden and shrunk herself. And did it make Mrs Kreitman happy? Not on the surface, it didn’t. On the surface Mona Kreitman gave the impression of a mother who couldn’t understand what her son saw in a woman who had so little to offer, who shrank from conversation and seemed to wilt in company. ‘She’s such a mouse of a thing,’ she told her friends. But then being able to say that is a species of happiness for a mother, isn’t it?

  As for whether it made Marvin happy – of course it didn’t. But then what did make Marvin happy?

  In the end she got the hang of his way of doing it. Labour, sorrow, pain, talk – ‘Tell me, tell me’ – excruciation, vehemence, violence even – each of them out there spinning in a separate universe, striving, at best, for collision. Not uninteresting once you gave away the girlish dream of reciprocated romance. And she was programmed not to hang on too tenaciously to anything if it got in the way, even though in this specific instance her programmer advised her otherwise, not liking Kreitman’s bolshiness or his antecedents, and of course considering Yossi, who still occasionally sent postcards of the Negev, the dishier option.

  So no, not uninteresting, sometimes very interesting indeed, for she too had a place of pain for Kreitman to labour to locate – who doesn’t? – a loneliness to graze, buttons of uncertainty and dread to press; and besides, it was all atoned for, Hazel thought, by Kreitman’s lovingness away from the lovemaking that wasn’t. He showered her with his time, she who had grown up without male company; he went shopping with her, took her to the pictures, cooked for her, expatiated in her ear, discoursed on the evils of money, showed her how dirty money made you, and when they had to be separated, let it be only for a weekend, only for a day, he wept over her. She had never seen a man weep so copiously. She had never seen a man weep full stop, but even had she, she was certain he would not have wept as Marvin wept. Off to the country to see an old school friend one Friday at the end of their second month together, she kissed him on the platform at Paddington and was shocked by how desperately he clung to her, how sorrowful he looked, how haggard and hollowed suddenly, a shadow of his usual brash self, hiding his grief-deformed face from her, unable to speak, his heart spilling from his throat. He didn’t run after the train, as she’d seen some men do, but waved her off with a hopeless hand, like a little boy’s, and blew her gentle kisses, and stood as though he meant to remain in that very place until her train pulled in again on Sunday night.

  If that wasn’t what you called being in love, what was? Away from the brutalised bed, he loved her for herself, loved her to distraction, bought her presents – mainly lingerie, high heels and sex toys, but still presents – made exorbitant declarations, couldn’t bear to be without her, and surprised her again and again by the delicacy of his feelings for her, whatever the sex toys seemed to say to the contrary. Once, when he came upon her laughing with a bunch of male students at the union bar, exchanging embarrassing lavatory experiences, fart jokes, turd jokes, overflowing-cistern jokes, then clapping a monologue, her hands full of rings he’d given her, the monologue a droll explanation of why dogs lick one another’s arseholes (because originally they’d gone to a dogs’ convention and left their own arseholes outside on hangers – so it’s Platonic, you see, each dog forever searching for his own lost self), he pulled her away by her hair then dissolved into tears. He couldn’t bear to see her defiled like this, ensnared in coarseness, compromised by smut. And laughing at what wasn’t laughable. ‘Dogs’ arseholes aren’t funny, Hazel!’ Promise him, promise him, never again. He loved her to distraction, and her gratitude for all those unexpected proofs of his distraction felt very much like distracted love in return.

  ‘Don’t tell me this isn’t the real thing,’ she told her mother, ‘because it’s the nearest I’m ever going to get.’

  ‘Not true, darling,’ her mother said. ‘Remember the Negev.’

  ‘Oh, Mother, that was just the hots,’ Hazel said.

  ‘Exactly!’ her mother told her.

  And she did have the hots for Kreitman, or at least would have had the hots for Kreitman had her hots not called out his hots – oh, God, those, his dreaded inflexible stage-managing, his iron-grip ritualising, this way not that way, say this but not that, beg for me, deny me, open yourself, close yourself, cheap whore it, expensive mistress it, hurt me, hurt me more, ensnaring her in coarseness, defiling her with smut, before away they went again, labouring and moaning, spinning centrifugally, lost in their separate immensities. After which, as predictable as dance steps, her dark forebodings – ‘He’s wanking into me,’ she thought, ‘he’s doing something on his own, I might as well be a bucket’ – followed by his breezy day-to-day devotion, prodigality with his company, anguish at the merest mention of an absence, followed by her line-of-least-resistance conviction that if that wasn’t proof of love then nothing was.

  She liked him, liked the idea of herself with him, high-principled woman on the arm of high-principled young man, loved it when he called her ‘his girl’, his romping girl, came alive in the role of a companion-wife if not in the role of a harlot-wife, came to think that she was cut out, after all, to do socialising and give dinners – though not in the presence of her mother-in-law – to remember birthdays and have babies, but still she should have fucked him off when she had the chance. Now, a score or more years on, she could not remember when she first discovered that his desolation on the platform of every railway station in London did not stop him sleeping with another woman as soon as he could find one, ‘as soon as’ meaning within the hour sometimes, within the half, should another train luckily disgorge someone of the same mind. He was as broken-hearted as a man could be for fifteen minutes, then he wasn’t. It was as subtle, morally, as that. As subtle as one dog sniffing after another. Was he looking for succour, for consolation, a replacement only while she was away, because she was away? Frankly, she didn’t give a damn. He had tried to flatter her with that one, when first caught out: No, no, no, not what it looked, nothing like what it looked, in truth he was
merely dipping into the general pool of her sex made fragrant by her dear self, and therefore – didn’t she see? – only gazing after temporary reflections of her. Loving her made him alive to all women. The only men who didn’t love all women were those who were not lucky enough to love one. She flooded him with vitality, energised him, replenished what she took, made him feel as powerful as a god. Should it be any surprise, then, that he acted like a god? Looked down out of his lordly superfluity and plucked whatever took his fancy? As for what it meant: nothing. Passing fancy, that was all. There was only her … she must believe him, her alone, and her reflections …

  ‘Whatever,’ she said, instituting separate beds.

  ‘Whatever’ – was she the first person, she wondered now, to have coined the new nihilistic usage of that word? Watching daytime television, sick to her soul, watching the victims of failed love affairs and marriages, the betrayers and the betrayed, the liars and the lied-to, agree for the sake of ten minutes of telly notoriety to turn their unhappiness into a free-for-all freak show of the emotions, Hazel noted the increasing frequency, month by month, year by year, of ‘Whatever’. Tired of listening, tired of reasoning, tired of lies, that’s all there was to say – ‘Whatever.’ The rest was silence. ‘You murdered my feelings, you stole from me and cheated me, you trashed my home, you corrupted my children, you turned my friends against me, you made me loathe myself…’

  ‘Whatever.’

  But she’d said it first and, she believed, she still said it best.

  She blamed herself at the time. No will power. Of course he took advantage. Anyone would take advantage. She’d have taken advantage of herself if she’d known how. No point then, in her middle twenties, with one child had and one child coming, making empty gestures. She didn’t want the gift-wrapped life her poor mother lived, unaccompanied in a silent flat overlooking the British Museum, waiting to be strip-searched by the Israeli army. And she wasn’t up for starting the whole shebang again: ‘Hello, I might not be anybody’, followed by another seeming-softie weeping buckets on the platform at Paddington. And at least now she could be free of Kreitman fucking with her head. Drop the ‘with’ – actually fucking her head was what he’d done. ‘My lower parts were never the problem,’ she told her friends, ‘though of course he talked cunt until the cows came home. But it was head he really wanted. And I don’t mean what you think I mean. What my husband liked to do with head was fuck it. Show me what’s in yours and I’ll pretend to show you what’s in mine. He fucked my brain, girls, but now at last, I am pleased to tell you, I am able to think for myself again.’