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His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one.
People who see what’s coming have faulty chronology, that is all.
There was something exquisite to Treslove in the presentiment of a woman he loved expiring in his arms. On occasions he died in hers, but her dying in his was better.
She didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know. Someone, something, was in store for him.
It is terrible to lose a woman you have loved, but it is no less a loss to have no woman to take into your arms and cradle before tragedy strikes . . .
But then life was a disaster movie in which lovely women died,
His shins ached with the imagined collision.
soi,
Archaeology, Concrete Poetry, Media and Communications, Festival and Theatre Administration, Comparative Religion, Stage Set and Design, the Russian Short Story, Politics and Gender. On finishing his studies – and it was never entirely clear when and whether he had finished his studies, on account of no one at the university being certain how many modules made a totality – Treslove found himself with a degree so unspecific that all he could do with it was accept a graduate traineeship at the BBC.
He felt himself to be a stunted shrub in a rainforest of towering trees. All around him other trainees rose to startling eminence within weeks of their arriving. They shot up, because there was no other direction you could go but up, unless you were Treslove who stayed where he was because no one knew he was there.
‘Why say exhilarating when you can say sexy?’ she asked him. ‘Because an arts festival isn’t sexy.’ ‘And you want to know why that is? Because you insist on using words like exhilarating.’ ‘What’s wrong with it?’ ‘It’s indirect language.’ ‘There’s nothing indirect about exhilaration.’ ‘There is the way you say it.’ ‘Could we try for a compromise with exuberance?’ he asked, without any. ‘Could we try for a compromise with you getting another job?’
He only realised he loved her when she sacked him.
Thereafter he gave up on a career in the arts and filled a succession of unsuitable vacancies and equally unsuitable women, falling in love whenever he took up a new job, and falling out of love – or more correctly being fallen out of love with – every time he moved on.
She had red hair and angry skin. She heated up so quickly Treslove had always been frightened to get too near to her. ‘I am a rock,’ he insisted, from a distance. ‘I will be with you to the end.’ ‘Well, you’re right about that at least,’ she told him. ‘This is the end. I’m leaving you.’ ‘Just because I’m in demand?’ ‘Because you’re not in demand with me.’ ‘Please don’t leave. If I wasn’t a rock before, I’ll be a rock from now on.’ ‘You won’t. It isn’t in your nature.’ ‘Don’t I look after you when you’re ill?’ ‘You do. You’re marvellous to me when I’m ill. It’s when I’m well that you’re no
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An excerpt from 'The Finkler Question', one of my recent reads. What a wit in mundane dialogue!
She had red hair and angry skin. She heated up so quickly Treslove had always been frightened to get too near to her. ‘I am a rock,’ he insisted, from a distance. ‘I will be with you to the end.’ ‘Well, you’re right about that at least,’ she told him. ‘This is the end. I’m leaving you.’ ‘Just because I’m in demand?’ ‘Because you’re not in demand with me.’ ‘Please don’t leave. If I wasn’t a rock before, I’ll be a rock from now on.’ ‘You won’t. It isn’t in your nature.’ ‘Don’t I look after you when you’re ill?’ ‘You do. You’re marvellous to me when I’m ill. It’s when I’m well that you’re no
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Here is one more. This one from The Booker Prize winner, my melancholic favorite, Howard Jacobson.
No one they loved had left them because they had loved no one yet. Loss was a thing of the future.
A phrase such as ‘the idea derived from evolution that ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis’ for example, not impossibly intricate in itself but somehow resistant to effort, as though it triggered something obdurate and even delinquent in his mind. Or the promise to look at an argument from three points of view, each of which had five salient features, the first of which had four distinguishable aspects. It was like discovering that a supposedly sane person with whom one had been enjoying a perfect normal conversation was in fact quite mad. Or, if not mad, sadistic.
Poised for Top Booker Prize, the second time over.
After a fortnight of intense consolation, she asked him, ‘Why do you keep telling me it’ll be all right? There isn’t anything wrong.’ He shook his head. ‘I saw you lighting a candle. Come here.’ ‘I like candles. They’re pretty.’ He ran his hands through her hair. ‘You like their flicker. You like their transience. I understand.’ ‘There’s something you should know about me,’ she said. ‘I’m a bit of an arsonist. Not serious. I wasn’t going to burn down the church. But I am turned on by flame.’ He laughed and kissed her face. ‘Hush,’ he said. ‘Hush, my love.’ In the morning he woke to twin
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Here is another clip from the same book. Sheer joy of reading.
After a fortnight of intense consolation, she asked him, ‘Why do you keep telling me it’ll be all right? There isn’t anything wrong.’ He shook his head. ‘I saw you lighting a candle. Come here.’ ‘I like candles. They’re pretty.’ He ran his hands through her hair. ‘You like their flicker. You like their transience. I understand.’ ‘There’s something you should know about me,’ she said. ‘I’m a bit of an arsonist. Not serious. I wasn’t going to burn down the church. But I am turned on by flame.’ He laughed and kissed her face. ‘Hush,’ he said. ‘Hush, my love.’ In the morning he woke to twin
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In love with a pyromaniac.
So he fell limp and allowed himself to be flung into the window and emptied. Allowed? The word dignified his own role in this. It was all over too quickly for him to have a say in the matter. He was grabbed, thrown, eviscerated. By a woman.
‘What bands do you like?’ she asked him, after a longer dumpling-filled silence than she could bear. Libor pondered the question. The girl laughed, as at her own absurdity. She twirled a lifeless lock of hair around a finger that had an Elastoplast on it. ‘What bands did you used to like,’ she corrected herself, then blushed as though she knew the second question was more absurd than the first. Libor turned his ear to her and nodded. ‘I’m not in principle keen on banning anything,’ he said. She stared at him.
bet the girl had a ball with you,’ Treslove said. ‘Trust me, she didn’t. I have sent her flowers to apologise.’ ‘Libor, that will just make her think you want to go on.’ ‘Ech, you English! You see a flower and you think you’ve been proposed to. Trust me, she won’t. I enclosed a handwritten note.’ ‘You weren’t rude to her.’ ‘Of course not. I just wanted her to see how shaky my handwriting was.’ ‘She may have taken that as proof she excited you.’ ‘She won’t have. I told her I was impotent.’ ‘Did you have to be so personal?’ ‘That was to stop it being personal. I didn’t say she had made me
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‘I’m a philosopher, I’m not sure about anything.
Finkler did not know which was the more estimable, if sadness can be esteemed – feeling cheated of more of the happiness you’d enjoyed, or never having had it in the first place.
Treslove remembered it only to forget it.
trilby
Doctors read the genes the way fortune-tellers read the tea leaves; they believe in rational coincidence.
‘I still think nothing’s broken. Take some paracetamol. What did you do?’ ‘Walked into a tree.’ ‘You’d be surprised how many of my patients walk into trees.’ ‘I’m not in the slightest bit surprised. Hampstead’s full of trees.’ ‘This isn’t Hampstead.’ ‘And we’re all preoccupied these days. We don’t have the mental space to notice where we’re going.’ ‘What’s preoccupying you?’ ‘Everything. Life. Loss. Happiness.’ ‘Do you want to see someone about it?’ ‘I’m seeing you.’ ‘Happiness isn’t my field. You depressed?’
‘And did the tree also make those marks on your neck?’ the doctor asked him. ‘OK, a woman scratched me.’ ‘Those don’t look like scratches.’ ‘OK, a woman manhandled me.’ ‘A woman manhandled you! What did you do to her?’ ‘You mean did I manhandle her back? Of course not.’ ‘No, what did you do to make her manhandle you?’ Culpability.
both hands clawing at his hair, so inconsolable his father’s grief, so loud the sorrow, that Treslove thought his brain would combust.
‘So she didn’t feel you up?’ ‘Sam, she mugged me. She emptied my pockets.’ ‘Was she armed?’ ‘Not that I know of.’ ‘Know of or knew of?’ ‘What’s the difference?’ ‘You could know now that she wasn’t though you thought then that she was.’ ‘I don’t think that I thought then that she was. But I might have.’ ‘You let an unarmed woman empty your pockets?’ ‘I had no choice. I was afraid.’ ‘Of a woman?’ ‘Of the dark. Of the suddenness –’ ‘Of a woman.’ ‘OK, of a woman. But I didn’t know she was a woman at first.’
Her speciality was the absence of something in male artists, an absence which she was gentler on than was the fashion at the time. Treslove felt an erotic sorrow for her well up inside him the minute she walked shivering into his studio and put headphones on.
‘If you think I’m going to let you fuck me on our first date,’ she said, letting him fuck her on their first date, ‘you’ve got another think coming.’ Her explanation for that later was that what they’d been on wasn’t a date. So he asked her out on a date. She turned up wearing long Edwardian opera gloves which she’d bought at a jumble sale, and wouldn’t let him fuck her. ‘Then let’s go out not on a date,’ he said. She told him you couldn’t plan not being on a date, because then it was a date. ‘Let’s neither go on a date nor not go on a date,’ he suggested. ‘Let’s just fuck.’ She slapped his
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They stopped seeing each other after that, which meant he was free to fuck her. ‘Give
‘You’re not a bad man exactly,’ she told him once. ‘I don’t mean you’re not bad-looking or not bad in bed, I mean you’re not malevolent.
‘Oh God, I know what you mean. Do you think he was capable of being with a living woman?’
Treslove settled down into the plush discomfort of Libor’s Biedermeier sofa.
‘I know – your conscience made you. A convenient entity your conscience. There when you need it, not when you don’t.
Praise from his peers affected him almost as deeply as the prayers he had never said for his grandfather.
I don’t recall your ever saying to me that though they were shit as comedians you thought them profound as thinkers.
She closed her eyes. She could read his mind without having to keep them open.
You have publicly proclaimed yourself disgusted by Jews because they throw their weight around and then tell you they believe in a compassionate God.
Treslove would have said Come and die at my place but he knew he couldn’t. A woman must die in her own home and in her own husband’s arms, no matter that her lover would mop her brow with more consideration than the husband ever could.
Yes, she came round to his house, slid with angular infidelity into his bed and fucked him, but without ever truly noticing he was there.
Poor Tyler, fucking two unfuckable men. No wonder she looked ill.
Tyler, fresh from Treslove, turning to her husband smiling, facing him as she had never once faced Treslove, holding his penis in front of her like a bridal bouquet, not a problem to be solved behind her back like Treslove’s. Looking at it even, perhaps giving it name, confronting it head-on, admiring it, as she had never once confronted and admired his.
They cut out their tongues in solidarity with a young woman who was raped and mutilated. Something of a self-defeating action, since they couldn’t thereafter effectively voice their anger.
‘A Jew. You’ve got to be a Jew to get why you’re ashamed of being a Jew.’
‘This is your first one, then,’ she said. Treslove was astonished. How could she have known she was his first healthy woman? She saw his confusion. ‘Your first Passover,’ she said.
But what is true in the individual instance has to be true in the general.
