The Act of Love by Howard Jacobson

way you have a hand in your own destiny. And sink or swim, it may prove exhilarating.
    A great endeavour lures me on – the words are not mine but those of another deviant on a moralising mission. Pervert Pervert, as I recall a sneeringly buttoned-up English teacher calling him when I mentioned I’d been reading Lolita in the vacation. Takes one to know one, was what I should have said, but I didn’t want to lead him on. In my school you only had to look at a teacher to have him leaving you love letters in your satchel. His – Pervert Pervert’s – great endeavour bore on girls even further below the age of consent than Marius would have been prepared to entertain, though with Marius it was more a case of being horrified by old flesh than revelling in young. My endeavour, which is strictly legal, is less threatening to society. It is to make the case for cuckolds, though I have to say I hate the comicality of the word. And when I say ‘make the case ’ I don’t mean win publicity for our cause. I’m not looking to form an association. What lures me on is an altogether more pastoral ambition – to extend the great arm of brotherhood around the millions upon millions of husbands who would invite their wives to wrong them if they could only find the courage for it. Cuckolds of the World Unite! You have everything to lose but your chains.
    By someone else – the someone else whose arms we imagine wound around our wives – I mean another man. The fancy which some husbands entertain of seeing their wives carnally embracing another woman is something else entirely. I’m not such a puritan as to deny titillation its place in the erotic life, or to pretend that the sight of two women kissing isn’t sometimes pretty – my father more than once announced he had a taste for it – but titillation is not what I’m about. Hell doesn’t wait on the soft-focusexperimentalism of an age that will try anything once and in the process let all danger (other than disease) drain clean away from sex. The nymphs climb off the bed, bow gracefully to their audience, get dressed, and normal life resumes, unless they discover they like too much where they’ve just been, but that too is another story.
    No, the love of which I speak, love desperate and bloody, the only love that deserves to speak its name – the last erotic adventure left to us as we await extinction – requires another man. A rival. Not a companion in enjoyment of your spouse’s favours, not a Jim to your Jules or a Jules to your Jim. Not a vacation from you or a variation of you, or even the Heathcliffif-all-else-perishes rocky-eternity beneath you, but the dread, day and night and in all weathers alternative to you. You as it hasn’t fallen to you to be. You who might efface you and make you as though you had never been.
    But such imaginings come and go, sometimes acted upon, more often not, until the imagination cools and finds other errands for itself outside obsession. For the lucky (or the daring) few, fancy is transfigured into fact. You unlatch your nature. You welcome Pandemonium into your heart. You do not have to wonder, you know. You do not have to beg, as Othello begs, ophthalmic proof. You have the proof. And now the love you bear the woman who betrays you – except that it is no betrayal, for a consummation cannot be called betrayal – flowers into adoration.
    No man has ever adored a woman who does not know her to be lying in the arms of someone else.
    No man ever adored his wife as I, Felix Quinn, adored Marisa Quinn, already the lover of other men, but soon – soon, soon, if desires have wings – to be the mistress of Marius.

    The surprising thing is that I was the other man – the rival, the dread alternative to the man she had – before I became her husband. The best cuckolds are always those who have cuckolded first. They know from the inside the enormity of that betrayal which is no betrayal, though inour case it was a betrayal since the