Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

GET OUT! JUST get out! Do it for yourself if you wont do it for me. Take a holiday. Go away for a month. Go away for a year. Youve had the best of my life. Cant you find it in your heart to leave me to enjoy what littles left of it?

But what man can believe in his heart that a woman will enjoy her life without him?

Mel

Get out! Get the fuck out!

He feels he is being attacked from the air. Buzzards are after him. Lean, ill-balanced, scraggy throated scavengers with torn wings and bleeding eyes.

Serves him right. Teach him to have loved the bird in the woman.

He sits in his study, his head on his desk, protecting his eyesight, amid the machinery indispensable to the smooth running of his life. The phones, the fax machine, the computers, the screens, the printer, the scanner, the photocopier, the batteries on charge, the tape recorder, the radio, the CD player, the strip-screen television, the laptop television, the VCRs, the manual typewriter in case of a power failure, the dictaphone in case of a manual failure. Only twelve months ago he had an electrician in to give him more sockets. Enough to get me through to year fifteen of the new millennium. By which time civilisation will have discovered an alternative to electricity? No. By which time he will be dead. Say two doubles on each wall? Say three. Making eighteen in all, one wall being nothing but books. But already he needs more. Today every socket is in use, three with adaptors. Twenty-one plugs all warm and whirring at the same time.

Shut the fuck up or get the fuck out!

The noise his room makes is part of the problem. He has the volume down on everything. The phones ringers are off. His laser printer is the quietest money can buy. He oils his office chair. He has rugs on his carpets. Nothing bleeps. If he is in his room when a fax is arriving and when isnt he in his room? he throws a cushion over the machine to stifle the sound of the paper-cutter. He watches television all day. He cant not watch television. Watching television is his job. Wear fucking headphones, then! And he does. He sits in a creakless chair watching television all day, wearing fucking headphones, the gaps between his ears and the pads stuffed with tissues so that not a sound, not a squeak or a throb, can leak out and distract her from whats left of her fucking life. If he could fit his halogen reading light with a silencer he would, God knows he would.

But the problem still isnt solved. He fears that the problem cant be solved. When she says he makes too much noise she means it ideologically. She cant think with him in the house. She cant think with him in her life. Lets face it, he says to her, you cant think with me in the fucking universe.

Just try shutting your door, she tells him.

Ha! He laughs. As if one little door could fix it.

Everything is stopping her from concentrating. He is just part of the wider problem. Its not personal. He can see that. Every adult female of her acquaintance feels as she feels. They can none of them think above the ceaseless racket of a masculinist universe: the humming of the spheres; the sizzle of static; the mad bleepings of car alarms the assertion of mens rights over mens things.

But why cant he just try shutting his door?

Ask him that and hell tell you that hes keeping it open for her. So that she shouldnt feel rejected by him. The truth is, though, that hes the one who fears exclusion. He keeps his door open so that he can hear her moving about, hear her thinking, sighing. This isnt jealousy. He isnt straining his ears to catch her sighing for someone else. Its devotion. Love. Hes fixated on her. He hears her breathe and he knows hes alive. Close the door and hes dead.

So thats something else thats preventing her from concentrating the sound of him listening.

Stop that! she calls to him from her study.

Stop what?

Stop listening to me!

His point is that she couldnt hear him listening if she werent so finely attuned herself. And by she he doesnt just mean her, Mel, he means her sex.

Youve turned yourselves into acoustic freaks, he tells her. Youve all got micro-hearing. You can hear yourselves fucking bleed

Bleed? Shows the age of the company you keep when youre not at home. Women of my years dont bleed.

Doesnt stop you listening.

Frank, Id leave the subject of blood if I were you.

Shes starting to use his name. Thats how serious this is becoming.

Mel, youre all out there tuning into the silent fucking spring. You can hear the grass grow. If I wasnt here youd be screaming at the fucking spiders for swallowing so loud.

You go, Ill deal with the spiders. I can tread on a spider.

Go? Go where? Everything indispensable to the smooth running of his life is here.

She doesnt use machines. Doesnt hold with them. She writes her feministical-erotic novels long hand. When shes interviewed about a book, which is rarely since she finishes a book rarely she says that slowness is of the essence. As with love-making so with prose-making. You can tell when a novels been written by mechanical means, she says. It lacks the pace of real life. The rhythms all wrong.

Like him. His rhythms all wrong. In fact, she tells him, you have no rhythm.

You mean I dont share yours.

You dont share anybodys. When we first made love I used to wonder where you were. You seemed to be out there on your own, entirely solitary, going about your own private business.

And later?

What later?

He doesnt say that her feministical-erotic heroines are all out there on their own, going about their private business, getting multiple orgasms as by right, without reference to whoever it is theyre getting them with. Or through. Or by. Or on. He doesnt say that thats the only thing that distinguishes them from pre-feministical-erotic heroines, who squandered their sexuality (whatever that fucking word means) fretting about what men wanted. That and the amount of inter-orgasmic intellectualising they do these Serenas and Cybeles with cunts they can call their own and the conversation of Wittgenstein. It isnt safe to talk about her work.

Just as it isnt safe to talk about his.

What are you watching that crap all day for?

He would like to say that it isnt crap. That he doesnt hold with snobbery about popular entertainment. But it is crap. And getting crappier. And he does hold with snobbery about popular entertainment. Thats the other reason for not looking beyond the year fifteen of the new millennium there will be nothing left worth staying alive for.

He would also like to remind her that its his job. That he is the best television critic in the country. Or one of. That watching that crap all day is what pays the bills. That without his watching that crap all day she couldnt afford the luxury of writing a hundred words a month. But that would take them back to talking about her work. Which isnt safe. If he wasnt sitting there with his door open watching that crap all day and listening to her listening to him listening to her, her output would be more like the hundred pages a month she was capable of before she knew he existed.

Not safe to talk about the time before she knew he existed.

Nothings safe. Now they are fighting over towels.

They have towel rings in their bathroom, one above the other, to save space. On these they hang the identical chaste white dimpled French table napkins she insists on calling bath-towels. What do you think it means, she asks him, that in the twenty years I have known you I have always hung my bath-towel below yours?

It is, of course, an ideological question. One that he knows better than even to attempt to answer.