Who's Sorry Now? (2 page)

So how come he had made such a dog's dinner of relations with his wife's mother?

The very question Marvin Kreitman put to Hazel Kreitman (then Hazel Nossiter) at the time of their engagement, more than twenty years before. ‘So what's wrong with your mother?'

What could Hazel Nossiter say? ‘She doesn't like you.'

‘I know she doesn't like me.
Why
doesn't she like me?'

And what could Hazel Nossiter say to that? She doesn't like you because your father sells purses on a street market in Balham? She doesn't like you because you're sulky and never look at her? Instead she said, and this was also true, ‘She doesn't like you because you've never let her like you.'

Kreitman's mother-in-law kept a photograph on her dressing table of her daughter with her arms around a man. The man was not Kreitman. The man was a soldier in the Israeli Defence Forces. Yossi. A grinner with more teeth visible than Kreitman had in the whole of his mouth. Hazel had met Yossi on holiday the year before she met Kreitman. She had been travelling with a student
Christian group to the Holy Places. She wasn't Christian in the Christian sense, but it was something to do. Hazel was like that: people asked her to go somewhere with them, so she went. As witness Yossi. He had stopped the bus Hazel was travelling on, ordered her off at rifle-point, walked her into the Negev and strip-searched her.

It was love at first sight. As soon as Kreitman's mother-in-law saw Yossi's photograph she fell in love with him.

That Yossi was no more than an outdoor version of Kreitman, Kreitman without his shirt on, only made it worse for Kreitman and for Hazel. ‘If you're so hot for Yossi, how come you aren't hot at all for Marvin?' Hazel asked.

‘Because Yossi smiles,' her mother explained. ‘And because he doesn't have a pleading expression in his eyes. And because he doesn't look as though he thinks he's done something wrong. And because his father doesn't sell purses on a street market in Balham. Are those enough reasons for you, darling?'

This was why Kreitman had never let his mother-in-law like him enough for him to fall in love with her. She was already in love with another man. And Kreitman only fell in love with women who were already a bit in love with him. Which shows, as Mrs Nossiter had shrewdly noticed, how little confidence in himself he had.

Despite which, or more likely because of which, he was head over heels in love with five women and not insusceptible to a sixth. For once you start falling in love with women it is impossible to stop.

And once you start counting …

But Kreitman had to count something. No one can get through life indifferent to numbers. Money, blessings, lovers – we are too ethereal to do without the material world, and too indeterminate to tell ourselves apart without measuring how much material we've commandeered. Call it ballast, call it markings. So many tons, so many stripes. The God-fearing
count their beads, and even the most self-denying anchorite tots up what he's relinquished at the end of every day.

Making a distinction between those he didn't think about and those he thought about all the time, between those who were so conjunctive to his life and soul he didn't need to think about them and those who renewed him with the novelty of their affections, Kreitman counted to five. When his life made no sense to him he would try counting backwards, to include every woman he had ever loved, and every woman who had ever loved him, but there was something pathetic about that. He'd save retrospective accumulation for when he was an old man. For the time being, five (plus four) would do. Not too few. Not too many.

Though of course any number can be too many for some people. Take his friend, Charlie Merriweather …

‘I get nightmares after talking to you,' Charlie told him over their weekly pretend-pauper dim sum lunch in Lisle Street. ‘I dream about waking up in bed with someone whose name I can't remember.'

Excluding his daughter, whom he could never not think of as his little girl – for ever the wriggly Kitty-Litter Farnsbarns – Charlie loved just the one woman. And her name he had no difficulty at all remembering in bed, seeing as it was the same as his. Charlotte Jane – the other half of C. C. Merriweather, the composite writer of children's stories – known as Charlie since before she could remember. A tomboy name. And a tomboy she had looked, protruding like a sheaf of wheat from her wedding dress, unconfined and boisterous, even as she and Charlie exchanged their marriage vows. ‘Charlie Juniper, do you take Charlie Merriweather? Charlie Merriweather, do you take Charlie Juniper?' Both unprotected, lacking eyelashes, big-boned and trundling, with the air of having been left out in all seasons, like the Cerne Abbas giant and his wife. Did the Charlies take? Of course the Charlies took. ‘I now pronounce you … You may kiss …' And they'd been kissing each other,
to the exclusion of all others, ever since. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. Just fancy, Marvin Kreitman thought, wondering if it was like kissing yourself.

‘I'm interested to hear,' were his actual words, ‘that when you go to bed what you dream about is going to bed.'

‘Only after seeing you.'

‘I wouldn't think that one through, Charlie.'

Charlie Merriweather laid down his chopsticks and sighed one of his big sad cheery sighs. ‘Not the homo routine, Marvin.'

‘I can't help it. I'm homophobic.'

‘You
affect
to be homophobic.'

‘Only because I'm a latent homosexual.'

‘You're not a latent homosexual. And anyway, no homosexual would have you.'

‘That's why I'm homophobic.'

‘All this,' Charlie said, trying to change the mood, ‘to disguise the fact that you think
I'm
the bent one.'

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 business …' 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 …