J: A Novel by Howard Jacobson

Author:Howard Jacobson [Jacobson, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780553419573
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2014-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

THREE

The Women’s Illness

Monday 25th

Not normally a diary day, but there are things I have to get down before they escape me.

Bloody Gutkind!

Looking on the bright side, as it is my nature to do, the decline of Gutkind’s fortunes, following his most recent act of lumbering zealotry, must herald an improvement in mine. Funny how fate—the divine juggler—balances the fortunes of men with such precision, so that with each rise or fall we vacate space, not just for any old rival, but for someone we have a particular reason for hating. It was to yours truly, anyway, that the powers that be turned to minimize the damage Gutkind was causing. First of all the clown needed to be called off Kevern Cohen, and who better than me, given that I’d taught him briefly (Gutkind, that is) as a mature student, impossible as it is to believe that so unimaginative a man could ever have flirted with the idea of a second career in the Benign Visual Arts, though the Benign Visual Arts, I have to say, did not flirt back—who better, I repeat, than someone with my authority to remind him of the limits of his? Nothing too heavy-handed, just a quiet, entre nous suggestion—implicating no one higher up—that he back off. Why break a butterfly on a wheel and all that. Since you’re acquainted with him, Professor, you can intimate our disfavor, was the flavor (the flavor of their disfavor is nice, don’t you think?) of their communication to me. My knowing Kevern as well, of course, gave me extra ammunition. “I’ve been watching Cohen for some time,” I could get away with saying to Detective Inspector Gutkind, “and nothing I have seen suggests he would harm a hair of a woman’s head, let alone do what was done to poor Lowenna Morgenstern, so please don’t bother your own pretty little head about him any further. Kevern Cohen? Mr. Lovespoon himself! Are you joking? A policeman of all people should know there are some men who are incapable of committing a murder because they know they’d never get the blood off their hands. Can you imagine our friend Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen scrubbing underneath his fingernails? He’d be there, crouched over himself, washing until Doomsday. Don’t make me laugh, Detective Inspector. The country’s crawling with ruffians. Go bag yourself one of those.”

How it was that Gutkind became first an acquaintance and subsequently a student of mine is a story in itself. We met through our wives, is the short of it. They had become friends in the course of attending Credibility Fatigue classes together. And that, too, is a story in itself. It’s always the women who go a little wobbly in the matter of WHAT HAPPENED—probably as a consequence of giving or anticipating giving birth, unless it’s a more generally diffused hormonal agitation—whereupon some stiffening of their resolve is called for. I can’t speak for Mrs. Gutkind, who has since left her husband—for which, I have to say, no sane

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