The Very Model Of A Man by Howard Jacobson

Author:Howard Jacobson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Publisher: Studio 28
Published: 2015-03-26T06:00:00+00:00

VII

It is late when he gets back to his room. Already he can smell the morning on the night. He pushes open his door and resolves not to light a candle. There is nothing he needs to see. He slips out of his clothes, hanging them carefully, sleeves always out, pockets always emptied, and gropes towards the bed. His hands touch hair and flesh. He flinches from the contact, fearing that a stray dog may have crept under his blanket, or a stray prophet, or a stray relative from Eden. But what he touches next tells him that this is neither a scryer nor a satirist lying on its back on his bed, with its lips parted and its breath held and its small breast heaving.

‘Zilpah?’

The lean, abrasive arms reach up to clasp him. Once again his first thought is that she is too thin.

Girls without flesh are a delicacy in Babel. Like quail, they are valued because they can be consumed in a single mouthful. But Cain lacks the epicurean’s lightness of temperament. He is grave and seeks gravity. A slight woman confirms all his worst fears about existence. A slight woman proves the nugatoriness of things. A slight woman proves there is no hereafter. When you penetrate her you enter nothing.

She hangs from his neck, as weightless as a locket. With her mouth she seeks the lines and furrows of his suffering. She must taste every crime he has committed and every punishment that’s been visited on him. Of her own free will she must drink of the waters of bitterness. His bitterness.

He unlocks her fingers from behind his head.

‘What do you need?’ she asks him. She has a little voice, such as a mouse might have, to match her little body. But in a low register, as though the mouse behind the draughty wainscot has caught a little cold.

He shakes his head, vainly, in the dark. What does he need? Would she know what he meant if he said he needed scraping?

There is silence in the bed for a while. Nothing moves. He wonders if she has crept out without his hearing, nibbled through the mattress and escaped under the space beneath his door. Then suddenly the blanket is thrown off and she is up on all fours, whimpering like the stray dog he had at first taken her for.

‘This is what you need…’ the cur within her cries.

She presents her narrow, shadowed hindquarters to him, spreading herself open so that he may have complete and unobstructed access to the little puckered flower that grows in the very eye of her rump –

– What he needs.

The odour of her offering, her floral tribute, is rich and sour, suggestive of what is arable; its recipient at the mercy of just such impulses as must have riven his father in the days prior to Eve, when only a field of bullocks stood between all he knew of frustration and all he imagined of felicity.

He sighs, his father’s son. Old Adam’s boy.

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