Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  The one exception to this blanket distaste, ironically enough, was trade fairs. Kreitman had only to say he was off to a trade fair and Charlie Merriweather’s face lit up. ‘Full of carbuncled rogues and louche auctioneers, will it be?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s not that sort of a fair,’ Kreitman told him. ‘Forget Smollett and Surtees. It’s not a horse fair. It’s not a carnival of the picturesque trades. It’s just a thousand stalls with hard shell suitcases on them and a bunch of dead farts taking orders.’

  ‘Clerkly types? I love those. Brown overalls and pencils behind their ears?’

  ‘Those are cheesemongers, Charlie.’

  ‘Lots of roistering?’

  Kreitman sighed. ‘The major manufacturers usually offer you a small drink and a crisp. And the people at the glamour end, if they’re there, as like as not have a dozen fridgeloads of champagne on their stalls, though I wouldn’t call what they do roistering – more falling asleep.’

  ‘What about at night? Do you all stay at the same hotel?’

  ‘Usually at the same nine or ten hotels. You do the rounds.’

  ‘And what happens?’

  ‘There’s a great dealing of eating, much adding up of order forms, usually under the table, and some modest wife-stealing, but not enough to get excited about.’

  ‘Sounds riveting,’ Charlie enthused. ‘I do wish you’d take me with you.’

  But because he didn’t appreciate being the Merriweathers’ day at the races, the channel through which the raw sewage of human vitality flowed into the Merriweathers’ cautious lives, Kreitman never did take Charlie along. Now here he was, taking Charlie’s wife.

  Was life strange or was life strange?

  ‘What you’ll find,’ he told Chas, ‘is that the wider the gap between the actual value of the object and what it fetches, the nicer to be with those who sell it. If you ask me who I really look forward to seeing up here it’s the boys who sell sunglasses. How much do sunglasses cost to manufacture? Not a brass razoo. What do they sell them for? A king’s ransom. And like it or not, the size of that discrepancy lifts a burden from the personalities of people in sunglasses. No bitterness, you see. Potters and woodcarvers on the other hand, whose margin is their labour, are the least amicable souls here. Shouldn’t be so but is. It goes against everything I’ve been taught. And against everything I believe in. But there you are. Nothing smooths the path of social intercourse like easily won prosperity.’

  ‘Is that your motto?’

  ‘No. My motto is life is cruel. But we’re here to enjoy ourselves.’

  ‘I thought we were here for you to buy bags.’

  ‘Same thing. Follow me.’

  They were in a grand floral hall, of the sort Chas remembered skipping through as a girl, holding her mother’s hand, and, once in a blue moon her father’s, wondering what made one onion arrangement win first prize and another identical onion arrangement win no prize at all. She had tasted cheese in a room just like this, and pulled a face after sipping elderflower wine. And later, in similar halls in Frankfurt and other cities of the children’s book, she and Charlie had been trailed round foreign publishers, made a fuss of and quizzed greedily on future projects. (Ah, Charlie!) But for those memories, she could take such a space or leave it. It was a big room, that was all. Kreitman, on the other hand, was enchanted by it. ‘Stuff as far as the eye can see,’ he marvelled. ‘Don’t you love it? Heaven will be piled high like this. Maybe with handbags and purses, maybe not, maybe leather goods are kept in hell, but lobbied and full of light just like here, high-domed with metal girders and glass roofs, with lots of little tables to have sandwiches at, and all the inexhaustible plenty of paradise laid out on stalls in numbered avenues.’ She felt she was with a small, hungry boy. ‘Were you denied presents as a child?’ she wanted to ask him. ‘Were you forced to go without?’ But she didn’t dare. And in the end didn’t want to. Why break the spell? This was a side of him she hadn’t expected to find. Marvin Kreitman, verdant! Sometimes, she was sure without his even knowing he was doing it, he squeezed her arm. Look, Chas! Look! Look at what? Quantity, that was all. Sheer volume. She was astonished by him. Who’d have thought it? Marvin Kreitman, as fired up by simple abundance as a kid in Santa’s grotto!

  And he was the same when he was buying, too. No shrewd reserve. No horse-trading or circumspection. Simply – ‘Love those, love those, not so keen on those, love those, how soon can you deliver?’ – and that was that. On to the next treat.

  Was he doing it for her? To show her he wasn’t Flash Harry? To show he had a heart? No, he was doing it for him. She had never seen him so happily engaged in anything. Normally, if there was a normally now that she and Charlie weren’t Mr and Mrs Merriweather, but normally in the sense of previously, Kreitman would burst upon them in Richmond like a change in the weather, looking for some social fix, itching for trouble, vexed and vexatious. She would never have guessed he had it in him to enjoy something so lacking in disputatiousness as placing an order for wallets. Since he enjoyed it so much, and enjoyed the intercourse that went with it – stockist to supplier, leatherman to leatherman – she was at a loss to understand why he was always looking elsewhere for his satisfactions, why he wasn’t content to do the thing he did, instead of semi-professionally upsetting women. But then Chas didn’t know the father of whom Kreitman was the son.

  And how otherwise had Chas imagined the afternoon going? What had she pictured – Kreitman counting notes out of his briefcase and tormenting unpractised artisans with the smell of city money? ‘Never mind what’s on the price list, how much to me, sunshine?’ Something more businessy, was that what she’d been expecting? Something that smacked a little more of the cold mercantilism of Saudi Arabia, say? – though that hardly made any sense, did it, since Saudi Arabia was hot. What then? She knew what she’d expected and wouldn’t name it. Shame on me, she thought.

  That she could paint herself the villain helped her face the night. He wasn’t the evil one, she was. In which case, if one of them had the right to second thoughts, it was him. Nothing had been said about – she made mental quotation marks – ‘the night’. They had dropped their bags off at the hotel without registering, then walked straight over, through the gardens, to the exhibition rooms. She had thought the hurry was to postpone embarrassment. Or even to bamboozle her. Night, what night? Now she knew it was simply because Kreitman couldn’t wait to get over there and breathe in Elysium. But did that mean he was not calculating on any embarrassment, that it was all dusted down and sorted, he and she a couple – Mr and Mrs Marvin Kreitman! – sharing the one room, the one toothbrush mug, the one bed? Had they had that conversation? If so, she hadn’t been listening. Anxiety about the arrangements had been plucking at her peace of mind – ha! her what? – ever since she’d met him on the station platform that morning, looked him over in his over-lapelled Italian suit, stared into his too avid eyes and wondered what the hell she was embarking on. By mid-afternoon her understanding of who was arranging to do what to whom – an understanding that had stopped at fluttering heroines and bad-faced villains – had undergone a quiet revolution. Let’s look at it this way, she thought: it was she who had first invited him to meet her at the gym; it was she who had accepted, with what was beginning to look like unseemly alacrity, an offer to accompany him on a buying trip to Harrogate which really was a buying trip to Harrogate; and it was she who was wandering round the fair a picture of world-weariness and cynicism, while the heart of the scoundrel bent on seducing her was pounding like a ten-year-old’s. If anyone should be wondering whether this excursion, or whatever you were meant to call it, was the right thing, shouldn’t it be him?

  Well, he’s big enough to tell me to push off, she decided. But by God it helped her, when Kreitman had seen and bought enough, and the hour for sorting out ‘the arrangements’ – the hour she’d been dreading – struck, to think of him as the innocent and herself, if not exactly as the abductress, at least as a force, and maybe
even the instrumental force, in whatever happened next. It only needed the receptionist to hand her a key to her own room, a room not immediately adjoining Kreitman’s at that, not in the same corridor, not on the same floor – briefly, she expected to hear, not even in the same hotel – for her to wonder whether she wasn’t the blackguard in this relationship, and furthermore to wonder whether the very word relationship wasn’t itself an imposition of impurity on the snow-white blamelessness of Kreitman’s intentions.

  ‘I’d have expected you to be hairier than you are,’ she told him, making absent circles with her fingers on his chest, trying to remember girlish ways.

  She was in his arms, not easy for her as a non-collapsible woman, but she had found a way of folding down her shoulders and introverting her elbows, which was more comfortable than it ought to have been.

  He looked down at himself. ‘I seem hairy enough,’ he said, in a voice so gentle he barely recognised it.

  ‘That’s my hair you’re looking at, you fool,’ she laughed. Her voice had come down off the high wire and was warm and deep again, like turned earth. ‘And I’m not talking about the amount of hair you’ve got, anyway. I mean I expected it to be more like you, spikier and more aggressive. Your skin, too, is softer than I imagined.’

  ‘Remembered,’ he corrected her.

  She knew which word she wanted to use. ‘Imagined,’ she insisted, warning him off.

  But Kreitman knew which word he wanted to use. ‘Remembered,’ he repeated. ‘Except that it would appear you haven’t.’

  ‘Haven’t what, Marvin?’

  ‘Haven’t remembered the feel of me.’

  She made a movement to sit up, but he held her to him. ‘You’re the one who hasn’t remembered,’ she said. ‘I haven’t ever touched you. Not touch touch. I grabbed you. That was all. Once upon a time, before I was a respectably married woman, I made a grab at you in anger, but of course a man never minds that. I sometimes think you could grab a man’s cock off in rage and he’d take it as a sexual compliment.’

  ‘Try me, Charlie.’

  ‘I don’t feel any rage right now.’

  He knew what he could do to change that. He could ask her to describe to him the spirit in which, on the very same spot, and after she was a respectably married woman, she had made a grab at Nyman. But why go looking for trouble? Don’t spoil it, he told himself. Don’t rub at an old itch. Isn’t this lovely enough for you?

  It even crossed his mind that if this wasn’t lovely enough for him, he was as good as done for, a dead man.

  Fortunately, it was lovely enough for him. The pair of them drifting about like ghosts lost in an unknown room, coming in and out of sleep, cautious of each other, watchful of the abrasions which a sudden movement or a false note could cause – abrasions to the body, wounds to the soul. It was what she had dreaded, the whole performance of getting to know another person intimately again, making sure your spirits didn’t clash, that your knees didn’t bang, that you didn’t speak over each other’s words, what’s your star sign, what’s your favourite colour, if there’s a God how do you explain Auschwitz, oh sorry, have I already asked you that. That was the reason everybody their age always gave for not embarking on an affair even when an affair beckoned – who could face the getting-to-be-acquainted ritual one more time. It was what baffled people about Kreitman, how he could go on and on doing that. Without doubt it helped in this case that they already knew each other, but knowing as a friend, more specifically knowing as a friend of your husband, was not the same as knowing as a … well, knowing as a lover, was it? Yet here she was, here they were, encased in darkness, feeling their way around each other’s hearts, daring to risk questions, only half noticing the answers, making gifts of revelations so tenuous they floated off into the night, finding a whole hidden history of the self here and now in the cradling of foreign arms – in short, doing everything the no-longer young said they never wanted to do again, except that it seemed they did, else why did it feel so heaven-sent.

  ‘Is this what’s always in it for you?’ she asked.

  He didn’t stir. ‘I don’t get any part of that question,’ he said. They had left the bathroom door ajar and by the faint yellow light coming in from the street he could just make out their distorted reflections in the chromeware, some of him in the taps, some of her in the towel rail, come together more astonishingly, if that could be, than even in their actual conjoined flesh.

  She took her time. Infinity was all around them. ‘Is this the reason you go from woman to woman?’

  This? Well, he couldn’t pretend he didn’t know what this meant. ‘This, Chas, is the reason I’m going nowhere.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It isn’t necessary to palm me off. I’d actually prefer to hear it from you that you go from woman to woman in order to keep on feeling this. I can see how it could become compulsive. Looking to be reinvented, again and again, remade in another person’s appreciation of you. I can forgive that sooner than some heartless, accumulative thing.’

  ‘I’m not heartless, I’m humourless. I can’t do casualness.’

  ‘I thought casualness was exactly what you did do.’

  ‘I know that’s what you thought. You were wrong. I do solemnity. I make a wake out of everything. That’s to say I did.’

  ‘But I’m not talking about the spirit in which you do numbers, I’m just asking why you do numbers at all.’

  ‘I don’t. Just because they accumulate doesn’t mean I’m an accumulator. They accumulate in the course of my trying to pin them down.’

  ‘But why do you want to pin women down, Marvin? Listen to your own language. Why must they be down, and why must you bring them down?’

  She was disappointed in herself. She had meant to be subtler. He had not acted – so far, so far – as she had expected him to act, yet here was she asking precisely the questions which he must have known she’d ask.

  Listening to her, Kreitman felt a fraud, and not a little sorry for them both. If he’d ever had a day as a doer-down of women, a libertine or whatever the word used to be, that day was over. There were no more libertines. The very idea was an anachronism. Only in the heart of Charlie – herself an anachronism – did the fear of libertinage still exist. Only in this bed, next to this woman, was he still a dangerous man. He thought it behoved him to tell her that.

  ‘Listen, Charlie,’ he said, ‘you’re fighting an enemy that’s packed up and gone home. The great seducers of the past were first and foremost blasphemers and revolutionaries. They got at God and the established order through women. There’s no mileage in that any more. Now the worst crime we can charge them with is misogyny. Which is not just feeble psychology – the idea that you would go through women because you hate them – it’s also milk-and-water theology. What a downgrading of sin! To reduce evil to such a piddling ambition – the sexual downfall of a gullible woman.’

  ‘It’s not so piddling if you’re the woman.’

  ‘Of course it’s not … assuming she exists any more, the poor but honest wictim.’

  ‘It’s still a question why you seek it, Marvin, even if you would rather be fighting God.’

  ‘I don’t seek the downfall of women. I just need them to stay still while I work out what I do seek. Which is more likely to be my own downfall.’

  She could hardly stay still herself after that. ‘No fear,’ she laughed. She tried to break from his arms, but he kept them close around her, his hands locked in the fuzzy hollow of her back, a smaller space than he’d imagined, a velvety declivity like something unexpected in nature, a mouse hole on a golf course, or a tiny crater from a meteorite. In clothes she seemed all bones, a woman made of calcium and chalk, out of them she was an undulation of smooth surfaces. How this could be, Kreitman had no idea. But then she was all surprises to him.

  He could have said that that was one reason why he went, in her quaint phrase, from woman to woman – why he had once gone from woman to woman – because you never knew what you
were going to find. The ever unfolding amazement. But he was no longer in the grip of unlocated curiosity; what moved him now was the miracle of Chas: why her skin refuted chaos theory; why his own skin seemed to come off under her fingers, so unexpectedly possessive was her touch; why his body received hers as though her imprint had been on him since birth.

  He kissed all around her eyes. Two perfect circles. ‘I can’t make it sound any good,’ he told her, ‘and I ask you not to ask me to name it – but here, now, with you, I have found what I want.’

  She blinked something salty into his mouth. ‘Will it do me any good to believe that?’ she asked.