Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  She laughed. ‘You are one strange poet, Marvin,’ she said.

  He didn’t laugh. ‘I am one lonely poet,’ he said. ‘I miss you.’

  ‘If I’ve hurt you,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry. But I doubt that I’ve hurt you for long, if at all. This was always a game for you.’

  ‘It never was, Chas. It was never a game. I take responsibility for my actions. I see them through. You’re the one, as you’ve told me countless times, and as I can now avouch with my own eyes, who accidentally falls into situations and accidentally falls out of them again.’

  ‘I hardly accidentally fell into you, Marvin.’

  ‘No, you didn’t. But you’ll think you did. At the last you’ll explain me to yourself and then forget me, as an obstacle you tripped over.’

  ‘Whereas for you it was all purpose and meaning?’

  ‘To my shame, yes. I envy you your light touch.’

  She took it. He could hear her riding with the punch. ‘Well, you have your view of me,’ she said. ‘As for my view of what you’ve been doing, I’ll flatter myself that the game may have got out of hand. But it began as a game. Why deny it? Charlie’s told me of your dare.’

  ‘My dare?’

  ‘I marvel you could be so easily entertained, Marvin. It could hardly have been much of a challenge. You knew the state Charlie was in. It must have been like taking candy from a baby.’

  ‘Charlie told you that I challenged him? Challenged him to do what?’

  ‘Join you in one of your games. What larks, Charlie. You have a crack at the short chubby one, and I’ll see what I can make happen with the long bony one.’

  ‘He said I said that?’

  ‘Or words to that effect. You’ll forgive me if I’m not able to replicate the exact locution.’

  ‘Did he give you any inkling as to why I might have issued this challenge, as you call it?’

  ‘Idleness, Marvin. You had a wife, he had a wife – why not?’

  ‘I had nothing better to do that night?’

  ‘Ah, so you do remember the night.’

  ‘I have a wife, you have a wife, let’s play swaps – after all these months we’ve spent together my morality still strikes you as no more subtle than that?’

  ‘You know what you did, Marvin. You’re a man who prides himself on knowing his own nature. A wife has never been a sacred commodity to you. Not yours nor anyone else’s. No doubt you’ll be having a laugh at my expense with the next one.’

  ‘The next one?’

  ‘The next however many …’

  On the spot Kreitman made a decision. He would not tell Chas what had really happened. He would not disabuse her of her regained wifely trust. Let her think of Charlie as an easily led lost lamb, if that served the marriage. That would be his second wedding present to them both. And some sort of goodbye gift to her.

  Not that she would have believed him, whatever he’d told her.

  The saddest part of all, for Kreitman, that. That she would never believe him.

  Chapter Five

  And Hazel?

  It offended Kreitman aesthetically to be thinking about Hazel now that the Charlies were back thinking about each other. There was a moral ugliness in symmetry. Kreitman believed he owed it to himself, let alone to Hazel, let alone to Chas – to everyone, in fact, except Charlie – not to be so obvious. Yet he had been dreaming about her – hadn’t he? – prior to Chas giving him the heave-ho. He had been missing her well before missing her was the obvious thing to be doing; at a time, to be brutal about it, when missing her was anything but symmetrical.

  He had always been a man who moved seamlessly from one woman to the next. Seamlessly but not heartlessly. If anything the seamlessness proved how much heart he had. Only another woman could put him together again, that was how hard he fell. Whether going back to a previous woman, if that’s any way to talk about your wife, was proof of the same emotional logic, he wasn’t sure; maybe it proved that this time he had fallen harder than ever.

  He wasn’t going anywhere else, that he was sure about. There was no savour in the thought of Ooshi or Bernadette. And he was too low – low in spirits, but more importantly, too ethically low in his own estimation – to have any zest for making new ground. He couldn’t imagine himself polished up and ready to go. He had no shine. He had no caps in his pistol. Back was the place for him. Back made sense.

  But there was a big black buzzing fly of a question in this ointment – had Charlie, out of the same mix of oafishness and unscrupulousness, told Hazel what he’d told Chas? Never trust a man who sees himself as a good husband: if Kreitman didn’t know that before, he knew it now. Even Charlie, though, must have seen that telling the one was not the same as telling the other. It was one thing Charlie ingratiating himself back into the favours of his wife at Kreitman’s expense. All’s fair in love and war. And any insult to Chas implicit in the revelation of Kreitman’s manipulative role was nicely offset by Charlie’s being able to show that his defection was never really of his own doing. He pushed me, Chassyboots. You lose one, you win one back; and the one Chas won back was the one she wanted anyway. But for Charlie to have left Hazel feeling she’d been bartered, dangled as a bit of bait by her husband and snatched at by Charlie in a fit of drunken not to say desperate bravado – and for Charlie then to have left her! – that surely was something else. That surely was an unthinkable callousness.

  But did Charlie know that? Buzz, buzz, sang the big black fly. Kreitman put nothing past a good husband.

  Kreitman listened to the silence coming from Kennington, interpreting it now this way, now that. You can tell when a silence is going to break, what Kreitman couldn’t tell was how. At last, he found a message from Hazel on his answering machine. He played it back several times with his heart in his mouth. Well? Had he or hadn’t he? Hazel’s voice was dark and cold, as remote as ever, and punitive – there was something he needed to come round and see with his own eyes straight away, meaning there was some misfortune he was going to have to bear the blame for. But as far as he could make out there was no reference to any new or specific misdemeanour on his part, just all the old ones.

  ‘Go upstairs,’ she told him, when he arrived. ‘Go upstairs and see your handiwork.’

  He had put his arms out to her, more like an old friend than an old husband. ‘Good to see you,’ he had said. And it was. He meant it. Having seen nothing of her in her brief frilly period under Charlie, he was not aware of the part her suit played in this latest dialogue of anger. To him she looked angry in all the former, familiar ways. Darted at the bust, scimitar’d in at the waist, creases like blades in her trousers – Hazel as she lived and breathed, and as he knew and had once loved her.

  Of course, it hurt his head to see her too. Of those instantaneous comparisons which a man cannot help but make – measuring this one’s figure against that one’s mind, that one’s freedom of spirit against this one’s stately equilibrium in high heels – none made him feel good. He was still too warmed through with Chas to want to catch himself denigrating her. On the other hand he did not want to be standing looking at Hazel and wishing she were someone else. Multiply the women, Kreitman believed, and you multiply the mortifications. This was where Burns had it wrong. The illicit rove, as the poet quaintly called what Chas had equally quaintly called going from woman to woman, does not petrify the feelings; quite the opposite – it excruciates them.

  Pierced in a hundred places, love-lost St Sebastian Kreitman surveyed the ruins of his wife, once his lover, and put his arms out to her.

  But she’d refused them, ordering him upstairs to see his handiwork. What did that mean? He was frightened. What did she want him to see? What did she have up there? Charlie’s head? Had she enticed Charlie back and sliced him up? Chas? Could Hazel have hatched a double revenge and harmed Chas? This was Kreitman’s oldest fear as an illicit rover, that he would be the death of them, fuck them and find them dead. Freudian or what?

  ‘Go where upstairs
?’ he asked.

  ‘Juliet’s room. And go quietly.’

  A stranger in his own house, he felt gingerly for the steps. Would he remember Juliet’s room? He’d better. But why there? Was Juliet home? Juliet ill? Pregnant? Big with child? Big with Charlie’s child? Was that what was waiting for him, not Charlie’s head but Charlie’s foetus?

  Juliet’s room. Ah, yes. He remembered. Bedtime stories. Herodotus. The Autobiography of lliM trautS nhoj, that inspiring anti-children’s story of growing up different from all other kids, and of course every Thursday, Friday, Saturday night, come wind, come rain, small squishy-hearted Marvin Kreitman … No T-shirts, no posters of footballers and hang the consequences. Once upon a time, Juliet, there was this Benthamite … He pushed open the door. The curtains were closed. Someone was in the bed. Too big to be Charlie’s baby or Charlie’s head. Too small to be Chas. And breathing too loudly, if with too much difficulty, to be dead.

  ‘Daddy?’ a voice said.

  ‘Juliet?’

  He went over to her. ‘Don’t kiss me,’ she said.

  And in the gloom he saw that her face was smashed. He thought his legs were going to go from under him. Kreitman’s invariable way of signalling sympathy for those he loved: the buckling of his limbs. He had fainted when Juliet was born. Now he had to hold on to something not to faint again. There were plasters across Juliet’s nose. The veins in her cheeks were broken. Her eyes were black and swollen. At least one of them was closed altogether. Yet it was she who had to say, ‘Daddy, are you all right?’

  ‘Jesus, Juliet,’ he said, ‘what’s happened to you?’

  ‘Collision with a bike,’ she said. ‘It seems to run in the family.’

  He trusted himself to let go of the bedhead and knelt by her, kissing her hand. ‘You don’t have to be brave and make jokes,’ he said. ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘I just told you. A bike happened to me.’

  ‘What bike – ?’

  But now Hazel was in the room. ‘She wanted to see you,’ she said. ‘But she didn’t want to be cross-examined. If you can’t sit with her quietly, I think you should leave.’

  ‘I’ll sit with her quietly,’ Kreitman said. And he did, stroking her arms, tracing the length of her fingers with the tips of his, making little circles of solace round her knuckles, and saying ‘Shhh.’ Why Shhh? She wasn’t saying anything. It discomforted him, having daughters. It always had. He couldn’t blame them for anything. And he felt there was always something they were asking for, something they had a perfect right to, which he couldn’t quite give them, just as he couldn’t quite give it to his cat. He’d been happiest, in their early years, when they were asleep. He had loved the sound of their breathing. Asleep, he could care for them, and sometimes, with a fervency and a sort of hopelessness that baffled him, adore them. Asleep, they laid claim on him by virtue of their separateness. At last Juliet went under, lulled by his stroking fingers. He put his ear to her chest, the way he remembered doing when she was young, making sure of the regularity of her breathing. That was his idea of being a father. Waiting for them to go to sleep, then worrying in case they were dead. Not all that different from his idea of being a lover.

  ‘Satisfied?’ Hazel asked, when he finally crept down the stairs. She was waiting for him by the door, meaning that he wasn’t invited to sit down, have tea, or otherwise make himself at home. Your house, but you chose for it not to be – that was what she was reminding him.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean “satisfied”,’ he said. He felt cornered, so he fought. ‘I don’t know why you invited me to see my “handiwork”. What’s your point, Hazel. What’s happened?’

  ‘My point is that you have brought us to this. Me a bitter hag, yourself a fool and your daughter lying upstairs like a broken doll. That’s my point, Marvin!’

  A terrible weariness descended on him. How old was he? A hundred? Five hundred? ‘Most of this we’ve had out before, Hazel,’ he said, measuring his words as though he had only a few dozen of them left in him. ‘You’re right. Right about what I’ve done to you. Right about what I’ve done to myself. But I’m fucked if I can see what I have done to Juliet.’

  ‘You’ve just seen her, Marvin.’

  ‘I didn’t do that, Hazel.’

  ‘You did it. You caused it, just as surely as if you’d raised your own fist.’

  ‘I thought she was knocked down by a bicycle.’

  ‘For God’s sake.’ For a fraction of a second Kreitman wondered whether she was going to raise her fist to him herself. ‘You’ve just seen her. A bicycle doesn’t do that. You know what a bicycle does. It makes you crazier than you are already, but it doesn’t do that. She’s been hit, Marvin. She’s been beaten up. And now you need a chair! Look at you!’

  He did need a chair. His second totter in one evening. What a pity his mother wasn’t here to see it. Before his legs could go from under him, he sank on to the stairs.

  ‘Who hit her?’

  ‘Why, what are you going to do? Hit him back? When was the last time you hit anyone not a woman?’

  He put his head in his hands. Was it all a madhouse now? Was Hazel right about what a bicycle does when you walk it into it, had it made him crazy? Had he woken up on the hospital trolley into an asylum for the insane? ‘You know perfectly well, Hazel,’ he said with vehemence, because a man demands justice even in an asylum for the insane, ‘that I am not a hitter of women.’

  ‘There are other ways of doing damage, Marvin.’

  ‘Yes, there are. But we aren’t talking about those. You’ve just told me Juliet was hit. Who hit her?’

  ‘You hit her.’

  ‘Who hit her, Hazel?’

  ‘Who do you think hit her?’

  ‘It wasn’t Charlie, surely to God?’

  ‘Charlie! I think, Marvin, that you and I ought not to be talking about Charlie. Before there’s any more hitting, let’s leave Charlie out of it. Your other friend hit her.’

  ‘I don’t have another friend.’

  ‘Nyman hit her, you fool!’

  ‘Nyman?’

  ‘Nyman. What do you say to that? Faggot is what you normally say. Try it out for size. “Nyman the faggot? Nyman the cocksucker hit my daughter?” First things first, eh? First he’s a faggot, then he hits your daughter. Let no one say you don’t have your priorities sorted.’

  Are my ears ringing, Kreitman wondered, or is this what the world is going to sound like from now on? He put the flats of his hands beside him on the stairs. He was only two steps up but he needed all the support he could get.

  ‘Under what circumstances,’ he asked, ‘did Nyman beat up Juliet?’

  ‘The usual. Boy meets girl. Girl dances with boy. Boy beats up girl’

  ‘Juliet’s been seeing Nyman?’

  ‘That’s quick of you. Yes, Juliet’s been seeing Nyman. Satisfied?’

  ‘What is this, Hazel? What do you mean “satisfied”? Why would I be satisfied? He knocked me down. I hate the fucker. If either of us should be satisfied, shouldn’t it be you?’

  ‘You wish! You and your dirty little mind. What can I manoeuvre Hazel into this time? I know – how about the faggot I wrestled off his bicycle.’

  Charlie. Kreitman heard Charlie. What really happened on that night of nights, a fairy tale for children by Charlie – one half of the C. C. – Merriweather. So what else had Charlie told her? As though it mattered! As though he cared!

  He pointed his finger at her, wagged it like the moralist in all matters of sex he held himself to be. ‘It was you who wanted to fuck him, Hazel. It was you who shed tears because he was showing rather more interest in other women’ – he decided against saying Chas – ‘than in you.’

  ‘You found him for me, Marvin. You plucked him off his bicycle and gave him to me on a plate. And if I thought of saying yes please for a drunken minute, whose fault was that? Who reduced me to it? Who took every grain of dignity and self-worth from me, years ago … years ago?’

&nbs
p; ‘So this is about you, not Juliet?’

  ‘Don’t dare me, Marvin.’

  ‘I’ll dare you. I’ll dare you to tell me how I made Nyman hit Juliet.’

  ‘You brought him into our lives.’

  ‘I didn’t …’

  ‘You brought him into our lives after you’d made our lives shit.’

  ‘What was wrong with Juliet’s life?’

  ‘She’s your daughter, Marvin, that’s what’s wrong with it. You taught her to be sarcastic. You taught her to mistrust people and then to make a fool of them. You set her a cold example.’

  ‘She’s her mother’s daughter.’

  ‘And if she learned coldness from me, whose fault’s that? I wasn’t born cold. I didn’t come to you cold.’

  Kreitman shook his ringing head. ‘What has this got to do with anything?’

  ‘What do you think? She thought she could tease Nyman the way she was brought up to tease people who can look after themselves. She needled him. She riled him. She admits she did. Her idea of love talk, just like yours. And she thought he was up to it because he was a friend of her dad’s.’

  ‘She knew he was no friend of mine. I warned her to keep away from him. I warned her he was a faggot and that faggots get emotional. Let alone give you fucking Aids. Have they slept together as well?’

  ‘What do you know, Marvin, about anything? You wound the boy up mercilessly and thought he wasn’t aware of it. You ragged him and ragged him and at the same time used him to get yourself hot. Do you think he hadn’t noticed? You made a foe of him, Marvin. Is that a surprise? Did you suppose he’d love you for it? You made him your enemy. You gave him a purpose. And when Juliet treated him exactly as you’d treated him he put his purpose into action. She asked for it, she admits that. She was defending Daddy in language of which Daddy would heartily have approved. In so far as Daddy has ever heartily approved of anything, except his dick. But she didn’t ask for a beating. No one in their right mind asks for a beating. You made that happen. You and your rage and your unhappiness and your greed. And that’s why I ask you are you satisfied.’