by Sally Rooney
12.
Alice, do you think the problem of the contemporary novel is simply the problem of contemporary life? I agree it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilisation is facing collapse. But at the same time, that is what I do every day. We can wait, if you like, to ascend to some higher plane of being, at which point we’ll start directing all our mental and material resources toward existential questions and thinking nothing of our own families, friends, lovers, and so on. But we’ll be waiting, in my opinion, a long time, and in fact we’ll die first. After all, when people are lying on their deathbeds, don’t they always start talking about their spouses and children? And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person? So in that sense, there is nothing bigger than what you so derisively call ‘breaking up or staying together’ (!), because at the end of our lives, when there’s nothing left in front of us, it’s still the only thing we want to talk about. Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive—because we are so stupid about each other.
As to this last point, I speak from personal experience. On the way home from a birthday thing last night, I kind of randomly got off the bus at Grove Park and walked over to Simon’s house. I suppose I was a little bit drunk and feeling bad about myself, and maybe I thought I could rely on him to rub my shoulders and give me compliments. Or maybe I wanted him not to be there. Or to be there with this girl he’s been seeing, so I could feel even worse about myself. I don’t know. I don’t know what I wanted, or what I thought would happen. Anyway, when I got upstairs it was obvious the buzzer had woken him up, and he’d had to get out of bed to let me in. It wasn’t really late, only around midnight. He was standing in the doorway looking tired and old. I don’t mean that in a bad way. But when I see him usually, I suppose I’m used to seeing the same beautiful blonde teenager I’ve always seen, since I was a little girl. And when he was standing in the doorway last night I realised, he’s not that boy anymore. What do I really know about his life? When I developed my first teenage crush on Simon, I didn’t understand sexual feelings very well, and I came up with the phrase ‘the special touch’ to describe to myself how I felt when he touched me. Which, by the way, he only ever did either by accident or in the most chaste ways imaginable. Isn’t that a really funny phrase, ‘the special touch’? Thinking about it now, it makes me want to laugh. But then last night in bed, he put his arms around me and immediately those words rushed back into my mind, like the last fifteen years were nothing, and the feeling was the same.
We ended up going to Mass together this morning. The church on his street has a very glamorous stone portico at the entrance and the extraordinarily Catholic name ‘Church of Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners’. He didn’t ask me to come with him, by the way, I wanted to go, though I’m not sure now why I wanted to. It’s possible I was getting such a nice feeling from his company that I just didn’t want to be physically parted from him for an hour. But it’s also possible, and I’m not sure how to put this, that I didn’t want him to go without me because I felt jealous. Now that I’ve said it, I don’t really know what I mean by that. Do I resent him for liking the concept of God better than he likes me? The idea seems plainly absurd. But then what? Having put myself back on intimate terms with Simon, albeit for a brief interlude, was I afraid that he was going to Mass to cleanse himself of me? Or maybe in a way I didn’t really believe he was going to go through with it, and that if I offered to go with him, he would have to come out and admit he had not been totally serious about the religion thing after all. In the end of course we filed into the church together uneventfully. Inside, it was all white and blue, with painted statues, and dark panelled confession boxes with luxurious velvet curtains. Most of the other attendees were little elderly women wearing pastel-coloured jackets. When the service began, Simon didn’t suddenly start acting very intense and spiritual, or crying about the majesty of God the Father or anything like that, he was just his usual self. Mostly he sat there listening and doing nothing. At the beginning, when everyone kept repeating ‘Christ have mercy’ and all of that, I think a part of me wanted him to start laughing and tell me it was all a joke. In a way I felt afraid of the way he was behaving, saying things like ‘I have greatly sinned’—actually saying such things out loud in his ordinary voice, the same way I might say ‘it’s raining’, if I had a sincere belief that it was raining and nothing about this belief struck me as ridiculous. I looked over at him a lot, feeling I suppose alarmed by his seriousness, and he just glanced back at me in a friendly way, as if to say: Yes, this is Mass, what did you expect? Then there was a reading about a woman pouring oil on the feet of Jesus and, I think, drying his feet with her hair? Unless I misunderstood. Simon sat there listening to this patently bizarre and freakish story and looking, as ever, completely calm and ordinary. I know I keep saying how ordinary he was, but it was precisely the seeming absence of any change in his personhood, precisely the fact that he went on being fully and recognisably the same man as always, that was so mystifying to me.
After the readings, the priest started blessing the bread and wine, and then he asked the congregation to lift up their hearts. All at the same time, in a soft collective whisper, everyone in the church replied: ‘We lift them up to the Lord.’ Is it really possible I witnessed such a scene, right in the middle of Dublin, only a few hours ago? Is it possible such things literally go on, in the real world you and I both live in? The priest said ‘Lift up your hearts’, and everyone, including Simon, replied without any hesitation or irony: ‘We lift them up to the Lord.’ Did they believe they were telling the truth, and that their hearts in that moment really were lifted up to the Lord, whatever that even means? If I’d asked myself that question yesterday, I would have said, of course not. Mass is just a social ritual, religious people don’t actually spend time thinking about God, and they certainly never try to lift their hearts up toward him or to conceptualise what it would mean to do such a thing. But today I feel differently. I feel that at least some of the people in that church sincerely believed that they were lifting their hearts up to the Lord. And I think Simon believed it. I think he knew what he was saying, and had thought about it, and believed it was true. After that, the priest asked us to give each other the sign of peace, and Simon shook hands with all the silvery little elderly women, and then he shook my hand and said ‘Peace be with you’, and by then I wanted him to mean it. I didn’t feel anymore that I wanted him to be joking, and in fact I felt that I wanted him to be as serious as he seemed, and more serious, and to mean every word.
Can it be that during the service I actually came to admire the sincerity of Simon’s faith? But how is it possible for me to admire someone for believing something I don’t believe, and don’t want to believe, and which I think is manifestly incorrect and absurd? If Simon started to worship a turtle as the son of God, for example, would I admire his sincerity? From a strictly rationalist perspective, it makes as much sense to worship a turtle as it does to worship a first-century Judaean preacher. Considering that God doesn’t exist, the whole thing is random anyway, and it may as well be Jesus, or a plastic bucket, or William Shakespeare, it doesn’t matter. And yet I feel I couldn’t admire Simon’s sincerity if he went down the road of turtle worship. Am I just admiring the ritual, then? Admiring his ability to blandly and uncritically accept received wisdom? Or do I secretly believe there
is something special about Jesus, and that to worship him as God, while not quite reasonable, is somehow permissible? I don’t know. Maybe it was just the calm, gentle way that Simon conducted himself in the church, the way he recited the prayers so quietly and sedately, just the same as the little old ladies did, and not trying to be any different from them, not trying to show that he believed any more or less ardently than they did, or any more critically or intellectually than they did, but just the same. And he didn’t even seem embarrassed that I was there watching him—I mean he wasn’t embarrassed for me, at how out of place I was, but he also wasn’t embarrassed for himself, to be caught in the act of worshipping a supreme being I didn’t believe in.
Afterwards on the street, he thanked me for coming with him. For a second then I was afraid he would make a joke of it after all, just out of awkwardness or nerves, and the idea horrified me. But he didn’t. I should have known he wouldn’t, because it wouldn’t have been like him. He just thanked me and we went our separate ways. If I say the Mass was strangely romantic I hope you’ll know what I mean. Maybe it made me feel there was something deep and serious in Simon, which I hadn’t seen for a long time, or maybe it was his gentleness when we were shaking hands. Or, as I’m sure an evolutionary psychologist would suggest, maybe I’m just a frail little female, and after sleeping in a man’s bed I come over all weak and tender about him. I make no great claims for myself, it could well be true. And writing this email I do feel a little weak and tender about Simon, and even a little protective, who knows why. If I had gone straight home this morning instead of going with him to the church, I’m not sure I would feel the same way now—but at the same time, if we had just gone to Mass this morning and we hadn’t slept together last night, I don’t think I’d feel like this now either. It was the seemingly ill-suited combination of sleeping together and then going to Mass afterwards that I think has given me this feeling—the feeling of entering into his life, even just briefly, and seeing something about him that I had never seen before, and knowing him differently as a result.
Speaking of friendship and romance: how is Rome? How is Felix? How are you? The parts of your email about sexuality were very funny. Do you think you’re the only person who has ever felt sexual desire?? In case the answer is yes, I am attaching a PDF of Audre Lorde’s essay ‘Uses of the Erotic’, which I know for a fact you will greatly enjoy. Finally—yes of course you should invite Simon to stay! I know he wants to see you, and I can’t think of anything better in the world than having the two of you to myself for a week by the seaside. Love always, E.
13.
That same Sunday morning in Rome, Alice couldn’t get the shower in the bathroom to switch off. Once she had dried herself and put on a dressing gown, she asked Felix to look at it. He came in and turned the shower head into the wall and examined the unit, clicking the power button on and off to no avail, as she stood behind him with her hair dripping onto her shoulders. Removing the exterior plastic casing of the shower, he squinted at a label inside. With his left hand he took his phone from his pocket and held it out behind him for Alice to accept. Once she had taken it, he read aloud the make and model number and asked her to put it into Google, while he pressed the power button again and watched the interior mechanism move. She tapped the browser icon on the screen of his phone, and it opened on a popular porn website. The page displayed a list of search results for the query ‘rough anal’. In the top thumbnail a woman was shown kneeling on a chair, with a man behind her holding her by the throat. Underneath that, another thumbnail showed a woman crying, with smeared lipstick, and mascara running in exaggerated trails from her eyes. Without touching the screen or interacting with the page in any way, Alice handed the phone back to Felix and said: You might want to close out of that. He took the phone back, glanced at it, and instantly flushed all over his face and throat. The plastic covering of the shower unit fell forward again and he had to catch and rebalance it with his other hand. Uh, he said. Sorry. Jesus, that’s awkward, sorry about that. She nodded, put her hands in her dressing gown pockets, removed them again, and then went to her room.
A few minutes later, Felix found a solution for the issue with the shower unit. He left the apartment then and went for a walk. Several hours passed, Alice in her bedroom working, Felix walking around the city alone. He wandered down the Corso listening to his headphones, glancing in shop windows and occasionally checking his phone. Back in the apartment Alice came out to the kitchen, ate a banana, some bread and half a bar of chocolate, and then returned to her room.
When Felix got back, he knocked on Alice’s bedroom door and, without opening it, asked if she’d like to get something to eat.
I’ve eaten already, she said from inside. Thank you.
He nodded to himself, pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers, walked away from her door, and then walked back again. He shook his head and knocked on the door again.
Can I come in? he asked.
Sure.
He opened the door and found her sitting up against the headboard with her laptop on her lap. The window was open. He stood in the doorway, not entering, one hand on the doorframe. She tilted her head to one side enquiringly.
I fixed the shower, he said.
I noticed that. Thank you.
She returned her attention to whatever she had been doing on her laptop. He continued standing there, looking unsatisfied.
Are you mad with me? he asked.
No, I’m not mad.
I feel bad about what happened earlier.
Don’t worry about it, she said.
He rubbed the doorframe under his hand, still watching her.
Do you really not want me to worry about it, or are you just saying that? he asked.
What do you mean?
You’re acting a bit off with me.
She shrugged. He waited for her to say something and she didn’t.
See, like that, he said. You’re not really talking.
I don’t know what you want me to say. It’s your business what kind of porn you like to watch. But it is unfortunate you left the page open because I found it disturbing.
He frowned and said: I wouldn’t really say it was disturbing.
No, I’m sure you wouldn’t.
What does that mean?
Looking up at him now with a rather fierce expression, she said: What do you want to hear, Felix? You like to watch videos of horrible things happening to vulnerable women, and you want me to say what? That’s fine? I’m sure it is fine. You’re not going to go to prison for it.
And you think I should, do you?
What I think is really none of your business, is it?
He laughed. He had his hands in his pockets, shaking his head. Lightly he tapped his shoe on the doorframe. I suppose there’s nothing embarrassing in your search history, he said.
Nothing like that, no.
Well, you’re very superior, then.
She was typing something, no longer looking up at him. He watched her.
I don’t think you really care about those women, he said eventually. I think you’re just annoyed that I like something you don’t.
Maybe.
Or maybe you’re jealous of them.
They looked at one another for a moment. Calmly, she said: I think it’s a shame you would speak to me like that. But no, I’m not jealous of anyone who has to degrade themselves for money. I consider myself lucky I don’t have to.
Your money hasn’t gotten you very far with me, though, has it?
Without flinching she replied: On the contrary, I’ve had the pleasure of your company for the last three days. What more could I ask?
He glanced behind him, into the living room, and then rubbed his hands down over his face in a gesture of total mental or physical exhaustion. She watched him neutrally.
Is that what you were after, the pleasure of my company? he said.
Yes.
And you’ve enjoyed it, have you?
Very much, she said.
He looked around, shaking his head slowly. Finally he walked into the room and sat on the empty side of the bed, with his back turned to her.
Can I lie down for a second? he said.
Sure.
He lay down on his back. Next to him she continued typing. She seemed to be writing an email.
You’re making me feel incredibly guilty over something I don’t think was that bad, he said.