The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘Who with, then, Dad?’ I asked him.

  But he wasn’t going to answer that. He made a gesture with his hands, meaning them, out there, in the cory-crowded oceans, in the shikse-sheltering streets.

  So what did he think I was going to do with Sabine Weinberger once he’d cleared the house for us? Not pop my dick in her mouth, that’s for sure. And not demand that I be allowed to insert two fingers in her cunt either.

  Neither of which things, as a matter of incidental fact, I did. But I made it clear to her how sore I felt.

  ‘I’ve been talking to Sheeny Waxman,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘You must have known Sheeny would tell me,’ I said.

  ‘Tell you what?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘I didn’t think it would make any difference,’ she said.

  ‘Who to?’ I said.

  ‘To you,’ she said.

  ‘What about to Sheeny?’

  ‘I don’t care about Sheeny. I don’t care if I never see Sheeny Waxman again in my life.’

  ‘Is that why you sucked his dick?’

  ‘I sucked his dick because he asked me to.’

  ‘What if I’d have asked you to suck my dick?’

  ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘No. But what if I had?’

  ‘I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Ah!’ I said.

  ‘I want to see you again.’

  ‘Ah!’ I said.

  ‘I respect you,’ she said.

  ‘So I don’t get my dick sucked?’

  ‘Not yet. Not right away.’

  ‘Because you respect me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But if you didn’t respect me you would?’

  ‘Yes, because afterwards it wouldn’t matter if you didn’t respect me.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said — and I saw the beginnings of another misogynistic essay for my English teacher here — ‘so this is all actually about whether I respect you, not whether you respect me.’

  ‘If I didn’t respect you I wouldn’t care whether you respected me.’

  ‘Why do you think I wouldn’t respect you if you sucked my dick?’

  ‘Because they never do.’

  What I wanted to say was in that case stop sucking dicks, but I saw that that might not be the best way to serve my cause.

  ‘There’s always a first time,’ I said instead.

  She fell quiet. Then she said, ‘I’d like to …’

  I detected the but. ‘But?’

  She shrugged. She’d said it all. ‘Later,’ she said. Meaning, when we’d settled the question of mutual respect. In other words, when it was too late to matter.

  But if she thought we’d sorted things out, I didn’t. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘So that’s the dick. Now what about the cunt?’

  I now see that as it related to sexual relations between ourselves — the Tiskers and the Taskers — Sabine Weinberger’s ethical position differed not a jot from my father’s. Do unto others what you wouldn’t do unto your own. There was a time when I abominated such a system and took it to be monstrous abuse of those who were not us. ‘What are they, these shikses and shaygetsim, these yoks and yekeltehs?’ I remember shouting at my father, ‘scrap paper to practise on?’ In fact my indignation could not have been more misplaced. What we were practising was nothing less than charity, which is supposed to begin at home. We were giving the best of ourselves to the gentiles — here, have, swallow — and saving nothing but the left-overs, the lees, the bitter lees, for ourselves.

  And now I’m sounding like my children, Baruch and Channa, except that they would never use the language I use.

  Regarding the matter of whether Sabine Weinberger was or wasn’t going to suck my dick, all speculation came to an end about a week later in her bedroom when I knelt on her shoulders and pushed it in. Here, have, swallow. I didn’t like the me whose reflection I saw in her glass eye. I didn’t look gentlemanly. I didn’t look a mensch. But you have to do what you have to do. Her fault, for doing what she didn’t have to do with Sheeny. I couldn’t be expected to go through life getting nothing from women because they wanted to see me again. I was prepared to take my chance. I’d settle for them not liking me and just sucking my dick instead. My loss.

  As for respecting Sabine Weinberger after she’d sucked my dick, of course I didn’t.

  TWO

  A wonderfully interesting field is open to the young girl entering into serious table tennis. If she is keen, there is no lack of teachers. Whereas a man may have to travel far to find good practice partners, a girl can always find a stronger man player to practise with.

  Modern Table Tennis, Jack Carrington

  AND NOW LORNA Peachley?

  Listen and you can hear her body parts moving. Shh, listen. Oof plock, oof plock.

  That’s her bat you’re hearing. She took the sponge route. The women’s game needed a bit of speed and a fat wedge of naked foam upped the tempo prettily. Her chopping was always suspect too, so now she could just stick her bat out and half-volley. Oooof! Even the balls sighed when Lorna Peachley hit them.

  Lorna Peachley came into my life — I mean properly came into my life — at a time when I was in danger of becoming a winner. Gone, the red face; gone, the existential bashfulness; gone, the boy with the rubbery little in-between. I habituated the KD now. I sat on girls’ faces. I played table tennis with the game’s equivalent of the Stern Gang. My own grandmother wouldn’t have recognized me.

  And Cambridge? A year or two away yet, but in the bag. I already knew which college I was going to. The misogynistic one.

  Everything conspired to make me impressive, even the new bats. I’d gone for sandwich in the end, as Sabine Weinberger, who knew nothing about the game except from a retailing point of view, suggested that I should. Though it was Lorna Peachley I listened to. ‘If you’re ever going to beat me it’s not going to be with pimples,’ she told me. But who wanted to beat her? Why would any normal man ever want to do anything but lose to Lorna Peachley? I went along with the pretence that I was experimenting with ways to overcome her, but in truth I only plumped for sandwich in order to lose to her more comprehensively.

  That it improved my results against absolutely everybody else was merely a side benefit.

  And it didn’t even do that right away. To begin with I had to sacrifice half my game to the fucking thing. The first shot to go was my forehand chop. With sandwich you either have to chop the ball so late your opponent has in all probability gone home, or you make no allowances at all and hope to blind him. The backhand lingered longer, but soon I discovered it was more economical and certainly more effective to block. The word tells you all you need to know about the stroke. As for example that it isn’t a stroke at all, but an afterthought, a stab, at its most athletic, a lunge. Except when Lorna Peachley executed it. Then it was as though everything soft in nature had mustered in a fairy ring. And the sound she made when she struck was like the air going out of a thousand luxury Rexine pouffes. Ooooooof.

  Bit by bit there disappeared from my game — and indeed from the game in general — everything I’d originally loved about it. No more retrieving from the back of the room. No more coddling the ball and making it yours. No more giving it so much dig you could hear it changing its mind in mid-air. Thanks to science, in a few short years the game had gone forwards only to go backwards. Now we were all stabbing and zetzing as gracelessly as beginners. Except, of course, for you know who.

  Yet out of this evil sprang forth good. The sandwich bat released the backhand flick that had been locked up inside me. Barna had flicked like no one else in the history of the game, using ordinary rubber with modest brown nipples. So far I had played exclusively (excepting my Collins Classic) with a bat that bore his name, but I had never truly been able to let my wrist go. Something inhibited me. I could drive with it. I could get plenty of topspin, and by changing the weight from my right foot to my left and swivelling my hips, I could di
sguise its direction and pull off a backhand winner where one was least expected. But that final wristy coup de grâce always eluded me. Now, liberated by the spring in the sandwich and the sensation, which may or may not have been an illusion, of enjoying an extra picosecond between feeling the ball on my bat and releasing it, I found a flexibility of wrist that made even Phil Radic stop and look.

  In the end it was probably the sound that made the difference. We could no longer with any onomatopoeic justification say that we played ping-pong. Just as everything else in the world was growing noisier, our game had fallen quiet. In fact the new bats were not dead silent. What they did was cushion sound. They put a distance, at once uncanny and unsatisfying, between a stroke and its reverberation. I say unsatisfying because it robbed you of a due consciousness of drama to let fly at a ball with all your strength, only to hear a suffocated squelch, like a ripe grape falling on your neighbour’s lawn, the least division of a second later. On the other hand, whatever my loyalty to it, the plock of a ping-pong ball on a ping-pong bat had never struck me as subtle or heroic. I winced inwardly at the moment of contact — plock ouch! — and since no stroke is ever finished at the moment of contact, my follow-through was never the smooth ongoing trajectory it should have been. Now that there was no demeaning plock, I felt free to make a ballet of my follow-through.

  Flourish — that’s what distinguishes the flick. Over goes the wrist, and up and away in impertinent disregard for decorum — like Fonteyn in the arms of Nureyev, like a shooting star, only more dazzling, more bewildering to the naked eye — goes the racket. Prosaic physiology alone applies the brakes. The socket of the arm says no, otherwise the spiritual momentum of the flick would carry you off for ever into the starry immensity. Yes, take me there, yes.

  Forget the world in a grain of sand; if you would hold eternity, buy yourself a sandwich bat, study Victor Barna, and do as I did.

  Impossible to describe the sensation of abandon which accompanies a perfectly executed backhand flick. Or the liberation. Or the relief.

  It was like running away from home.

  It was like having your in-between pulled.

  It was like running away from home with Lorna Peachley.

  It was like having your in-between pulled by Lorna Peachley …

  Enough. None of those things happened.

  I’d become a devil-may-care flicker, let’s leave it at that. And I flicked myself into title after title, into the Hagganah averages, into the newspapers, into the national rankings, everywhere except into Lorna Peachley’s pants.

  This is the all-time loser’s great inborn gift — he knows how to ensure that there remains one avenue of opportunity always closed to him, or to be more positive about it, one lane of disappointment forever open.

  Let’s get a few things clear. Had I wanted Lorna Peachley I could have had her. That’s not arrogance, just simple teenage fact. For our age and for the times I was in possession of the necessaries. Girls respected me because there was still a whiff of the shell-shrinker about me, a becoming withdrawal, a delicacy of feeling but without (any longer) the accompanying disfigurements of bashfulness. And thanks to Sabine Weinberger, I now knew that too much respect got you nowhere, that the time always came when you had to squat on their shoulders and insist on your way.

  So I was covered for either eventuality.

  I don’t think it would be too far-fetched, either, to say that I actually did have my way with Lorna Peachley, given that what I wanted more than anything was not to have her. My desire for Lorna Peachley took the form of a yearning to belong to her, to be hers to do with as she chose, to lose and lose and lose and lose to her. And I did.

  It was some time before I ran into her again after that first meeting in Burnley on Twink’s last afternoon as a civilian. Her family had settled for a while in Timperley and had they been happy there it’s unlikely I’d have seen as much of her as I subsequently did. She’d have starred for Cheshire, I’d have starred for Lancashire, we might have played against each other in a mixed doubles a couple of times a year, and that would have been that. Indeed we did play against each other for our respective counties once, in a deciding mixed doubles rubber in a church hall in Macclesfield, and that was when I acquired the taste for losing to her. I can still remember the shot that did it, a disguised angled half-volley that left me with my feet in a tangle, fending at air. It was on a crucial point. She raised her hands in a salute to her partner, sending a vibration through all her moving body parts. Her breasts shuddered, her belly quivered, and I don’t think I can bear to describe — even now — what her vulva did. Was it the way she wore her shorts or was she just built differently from other girls? Transfixing, whatever the reason. The deep creviced V for victory of her mons Veneris never not visible, never not distinct, never not grand, never not moving.

  Vulvas come and go in ping-pong as in everything else. See one, some would say, and you’ve seen them all. But no vulva moved — actually moved and spoke to you — as Lorna Peachley’s did.

  Who can disentangle what from what in such a matrix of consequences? Which of Lorna Peachley’s moving body parts, if any, was decisive in fixing me for ever in servitude to her? I can still see how her pony-tail pranced too, and how the light caught the lovesick purple of the ribbons she wore. Heart-breaking for me, ribbons in a lovely girl’s hair. Was I touched, rather than stirred, into submission? And what if I’d won that point, what if you’d netted that half-volley and punched the air in frustration not triumph, sending a vibration of defeat not V for victory through your breasts, your belly, your pudendum (though where was your shame, Lorna Peachley)? Would everything have turned out differently in that case? Would I have loved you conventionally? Married you instead of Sabine Weinberger? Outraged my father who wanted me to practise on shikselehs, not marry them, however beautiful and touching and all-moving? Sired a couple of sweet half-Peachley gentile children, Sally and Nigel, instead of the rabid Channa and Baruch? And maybe stayed in touch with where I hailed from, at the intersection of the Irwell and the Bug, joined the Whitefield golf club with you, played bridge with you in Bury, instead of getting out, going as far away as possible, running running running from the tsatskes and the losing?

  Doubt it. Seriously doubt it. A gorgeous prospect, but not for me. I had to lose to someone softer than myself. Lorna Peachley was ideal. Made for it. And there would always have been another winning point to set me off, had she not found just the shot to do it that afternoon in Macclesfield. She had more than half-volleys in her armoury.

  Unhappy in Timperley, her family moved to Whitefield Heights. That was decisive. Now she could play for Lancashire. Now we could train together. Now I could be invited over to her house, where she had her own table, partly to practise, partly to give her parents, the doctors Peachley, a closer squizz at a Jewish person. They hadn’t realized, when they’d shifted to Whitefield, that they were going to be the sole sandy Anglos in a concentration of ex-beetroot farmers from the banks of the River Dniester, recently made good. What they’d constructed their all-moving blue-black olives-in-garlic daughter out of, these lizard-still, cream-coloured Home Counties homoeopaths, I have no idea. It must have been a mystery to them too. And I guess that was another reason they had me round so often: they wanted to understand the manner of beast that had somehow snuck in between great-granny’s sheets calling cuckoo! however many full moons ago.

  Brian and Mary. Sweet people. I’d catch them staring at me intently when they thought I wasn’t looking, trying to fathom my workings. How could an organism so hot still function? How did I see where I was going with all that hair hanging over my eyes? How come I didn’t fall over, with such top-heavy brick shithouse shoulders? I should have introduced them to my father. He’d have tested their understanding of the human sciences.

  Of course the other thing they were looking to see was what I might be doing to their daughter. The years were advancing, but we still hadn’t reached that nadir of moral decline whe
n parents invited you in to cohabit freely with their children. We were of the age of consent, but only just. Wisdom dictated that we shouldn’t be given too much free scope. But they would never have had an inkling of what we were really up to. What I was really up to. Not Brian and Mary. Morbidities of the sort I favoured were not dreamt of in their philosophy. Else they’d have insisted we get on with regulation shtupping between games, like ordinary well-adjusted kids our age.

  I was making their lovely daughter ill.

  She wrote to me, asking me not to call on her for a while. She was confused. Upset. Suffering headaches. Feeling — she didn’t know what — peculiar.

  Welcome to the club. I’d upped the ante recently, having lost to her in a charity cup match, in full public view. A humiliation. A male player of my standing was not expected to go out to a woman, however good. And not so comprehensively. I felt the loss in what the Bible calls the bowels. It went straight there, like a low blow. A sort of nausea, but also a lightness, as if I hadn’t eaten for a month. Dizzy, too. I could barely stay upright. Or together. I felt I was coming apart in strips. Disintegration of the moral fibre. You could have blown me over and shredded me. Or she could. But then she had. Losing to her on her home table in Whitefield with only Brian and Mary peeping was one thing, but out in the world, with all the world watching — oh, the horrid sickly beauty of it, like the sweet disgusting death smell of a bat cave. Too high. Too warm. Too naked. Too many. No god.

  Think jealousy, if you’re not familiar with the vertiginous sensation I’m describing. Think watching the woman you love submitting to another man’s embraces where everyone can see. Go on, get into it! Think two fingers up the cunt. Think three if it’ll help. Think everything Othello thought when he saw Sheeny Waxman wiping his dick on Desdemona’s handkerchief. And now remove the third party. Keep it just between you and her. Except that there is no you. You’re shredded. Blown apart. Not just disregarded but dismembered. Skinned until your bones squeak. And now sit back and enjoy.