by Sally Rooney
4
Bobbi was going out to dinner with her father on Thursday, so we offered Philip the spare ticket to the play. Philip kept asking if we were going to have to talk to Nick afterwards, and I didn’t know. I doubted if he would come out especially to talk to us, so I said I was sure we could just leave as usual. Philip had never met Nick but had seen him on TV and considered his looks ‘intimidating’. He asked me a lot of questions about what Nick was like in real life, none of which I felt qualified to answer. When we bought the programme, Philip leafed straight to the actor bios and showed me Nick’s photograph. In the dim light it was really just an outline of a face.
Look at his jaw, he said.
Yeah, I see it.
The lights came up onstage, and the actress playing Maggie came on and started yelling in a Southern accent. It wasn’t a bad accent, but it still felt like an actor’s accent. She got out of her dress and stood there in a white slip, like Elizabeth Taylor’s white slip in the film, though this actress looked both less artificial and also somehow less convincing. I could see a care label bunched inside the seam of the slip she was wearing, which destroyed the effect of reality for me, although the slip and its care label were undoubtedly themselves real. I concluded that some kinds of reality have an unrealistic effect, which made me think of the theorist Jean Baudrillard, though I had never read his books and these were probably not the issues his writing addressed.
Finally Nick appeared, out of a door on stage left, buttoning up a shirt. I felt a sting of self-consciousness, as if the audience had all turned at this moment to observe my reaction. He looked very different onstage, and spoke in an unrecognisably different voice. His manner was cool and detached in a way that suggested sexual brutality. I breathed in and out through my mouth several times, and wet my lips repeatedly with my tongue. The production in general was not very good. The other actors had off-key accents and everything onstage looked like a prop waiting to be handled. In a way this just emphasised how spectacularly beautiful Nick was, and made his misery seem more authentic.
When we came out of the theatre it was raining again. I felt pure and tiny like a newborn baby. Philip put up his umbrella and we walked toward his bus stop while I sort of grinned manically at nothing and touched my own hair a lot.
That was interesting, Philip said.
I thought Nick was probably a lot better than the other actors.
Yeah, it was stressful, wasn’t it? But he was pretty good.
I laughed much too loudly at this remark and then stopped when I realised nothing about it was funny. A light, cool rain feathered the umbrella and I tried to think of something interesting to say about the weather.
He is handsome, I heard myself saying.
To an almost off-putting extent.
We reached Philip’s bus stop and had a short discussion about which of us should take the umbrella. In the end I took it. It was raining heavily and getting dark. I wanted to talk more about the play but I could see Philip’s bus was about to pull in. I knew he wouldn’t want to talk much more about the play anyway, but I still felt disappointed. He started counting out his fare and said he’d see me tomorrow. I walked back to my apartment on my own.
When I got inside I left the umbrella by the courtyard door and opened up my laptop to look at Nick’s email address. I felt I should send him a short thank-you message for the tickets, but I kept getting distracted by items in the room, like a Toulouse-Lautrec poster I had hanging above the fireplace and a particular smudge on the patio window. I got up and walked around for a while to think about it. I cleaned the smudge with a damp cloth and then made a cup of tea. I considered calling Bobbi to talk about whether it would be normal to send an email or not, but I remembered she was with her father. I wrote a sample message, and then deleted the draft in case I might accidentally hit send. Then I wrote the same thing over again.
I sat staring at my laptop screen until it went black. Things matter to me more than they do to normal people, I thought. I need to relax and let things go. I should experiment with drugs. These thoughts were not unusual for me. I put Astral Weeks on the stereo in the living room and slumped right onto the floor to listen. Though I was trying not to dwell on the play, I found myself thinking about Nick onstage yelling: I don’t want to lean on your shoulder, I want my crutch. I wondered if Philip was similarly preoccupied, or was this more private. I need to be fun and likeable, I thought. A fun person would send a thank-you email.
I got up and typed a brief message congratulating Nick on his performance and expressing gratitude for the tickets. I moved the sentences here and there, and then seemingly at random I hit the send button. Afterwards I shut my laptop and went back to sitting on the floor.
I was expecting to hear from Bobbi about her dinner with Jerry and eventually, after the album was finished, she did call. I was still sitting slumped against the wall when I answered the phone. Bobbi’s father was a high-ranking civil servant in the Department of Health. She did not apply her otherwise rigorous anti-establishment principles to her relationship with Jerry, or at least not with any consistency. He’d taken her to a very expensive restaurant for dinner and they’d had three courses with wine.
He’s just trying to emphasise that I’m an adult member of the family now, Bobbi said. And he takes me seriously, blah blah blah.
How’s your mother holding up?
Oh, it’s migraine season again. We’re all tiptoeing around like fucking Trappist monks. How was the play?
Nick was really good, actually, I said.
Oh, that’s a relief. I felt like it might be terrible.
No, it was. Sorry, I remember your question now. The play was bad.
Bobbi hummed a kind of tuneless piece of music to herself and offered no further remark.
Remember last time we visited their house, and afterwards you said you thought they were like, unhappily married? I said. What made you say that?
I just thought Melissa seemed depressed.
But why, because of their marriage?
Well, don’t you find Nick sort of hostile toward her? said Bobbi.
No. Do you?
The first time we went over there, remember he went around scowling at us and then he yelled at her about feeding the dog? And we could hear them arguing when we went to bed?
Now that she said that, I did remember perceiving a certain animosity between them on that occasion, though I didn’t accept that he had yelled.
Was she there? Bobbi said. At the play?
No. Well, I don’t know, we didn’t see her.
She doesn’t like Tennessee Williams anyway. She finds him mannered.
I could hear that Bobbi said this with an ironic smile, because she was aware that she was showing off. I was jealous, but I also felt that because I had seen the play I was party to something Bobbi didn’t know about. She still saw Nick as a background figure, with no significance other than as Melissa’s husband. If I told her that I had just sent him an email thanking him for the tickets, she wouldn’t understand that I was showing off too, because to her Nick was just a function of Melissa’s unhappiness, and uninteresting in his own right. It seemed unlikely she would see the play now, and I couldn’t think of any other way to impress her with Nick’s personal significance. When I mentioned that he was planning to come and see us perform sometime soon, she just asked if that meant Melissa would come too.
Nick replied to my email the next afternoon in all lower case, thanking me for coming to the play and asking when Bobbi and I were next performing. He said they were running a show in the Royal every night and matinees at weekends so he would almost certainly miss our set unless it started sometime after half ten. I told him I would see what I could do, but not to worry if he couldn’t make it. He replied saying: oh well, it wouldn’t be very reciprocal then, would it?
5
Over the summer I missed the periods of intense academic concentration which helped to relax me during term time. I liked to sit in
the library to write essays, allowing my sense of time and personal identity to dissolve as the light dimmed outside the windows. I would open fifteen tabs on my web browser while producing phrases like ‘epistemic rearticulation’ and ‘operant discursive practices’. I mostly forgot to eat on days like this and emerged in the evening with a fine, shrill headache. Physical sensations reintroduced themselves to me with a feeling of genuine novelty: breeze felt new, and the sound of birds outside the Long Room. Food tasted impossibly good, as did soft drinks. Afterwards I’d print the essay out without even looking over it. When I went to get my feedback, the notes in the margins always said things like ‘well argued’ and sometimes ‘brilliant’. Whenever I got a ‘brilliant’ I took a little photograph of it on my phone and sent it to Bobbi. She would send back: congrats, your ego is staggering.
My ego had always been an issue. I knew that intellectual attainment was morally neutral at best, but when bad things happened to me I made myself feel better by thinking about how smart I was. When I couldn’t make friends as a child, I fantasised that I was smarter than all my teachers, smarter than any other student who had been in the school before, a genius hidden among normal people. It made me feel like a spy. As a teenager I started using internet messageboards and developed a friendship with a twenty-six-year-old American grad student. He had very white teeth in his photographs and told me he thought I had the brain of a physicist. I sent him messages late at night confessing that I was lonely in school, that the other girls didn’t seem to understand me. I wish I had a boyfriend, I wrote. One night he sent me a picture of his genitals. It was a flash photograph, zoomed right in on the erect penis, as if for medical examination. For days afterwards I felt guilty and terrified, like I had committed a sick internet crime which other people could discover at any moment. I deleted my account and abandoned the associated email address. I told no one, I had no one to tell.
*
On Saturday I talked to the venue organiser and got our set pushed back until half ten. I didn’t mention to Bobbi that I had done that, or why. We had smuggled in a bottle of white wine which we shared from plastic cups in the downstairs bathrooms. We liked to have one or two glasses of wine before performing, but no more than that. We sat on the sinks refilling our cups and talking about the new stuff we were going to perform.
I didn’t want to tell Bobbi I was nervous, but I was. Even looking in the mirror made me nervous. I didn’t think I looked awful. My face was plain, but I was so extremely thin as to look interesting, and I chose my clothing to emphasise this effect. I wore a lot of dark colours and severe necklines. That night I was wearing a reddish-brown lipstick and in the weird bathroom light I looked sick and faint. Eventually the features of my face seemed to come apart from one another or at least lose their ordinary relationships to each other, like a word you read so many times it makes no sense any more. I wondered if I was having an anxiety attack. Then Bobbi told me to stop staring at myself and I stopped.
When we went upstairs we could see Melissa sitting alone with a glass of wine and her camera. The seat beside her was empty. I cast around but it was clear to me, from something about the shape or the noise of the room, that Nick was not there. I thought this would calm me down, but it didn’t. I licked my teeth several times and waited for the man to say our names into the microphone.
Onstage, Bobbi was always precise. All I had to do was try and tune in to her particular rhythm and as long as I could do that, I would be fine too. Sometimes I was good, sometimes I was just okay. But Bobbi was exact. That night she made everyone laugh and got a lot of applause. For a few moments we stood there in the light, being applauded and gesturing to each other, like: it’s all her. It was at this point I saw Nick enter from the door at the back. He looked slightly breathless, like he had taken the stairs too quickly. Instantly I looked away and pretended I hadn’t noticed him. I could see that he was trying to catch my eye and that if I returned his gaze he would give me a kind of apologetic expression. I found this idea too intense to think about, like the glare of a bare lightbulb. The audience continued to applaud and I could feel Nick watching us as we left the stage.
At the bar afterwards Philip bought us a round of drinks and said the new poem was his favourite. I had forgotten to bring his umbrella.
See, and people say I hate men, Bobbi said. But I actually really like you, Philip.
I swallowed half my glass of gin and tonic in two mouthfuls. I was thinking about leaving without saying hello to anyone. I could leave, I thought, and it felt good to think about it, as if I was in control of my own life again.
Let’s go find Melissa, Bobbi said. We can introduce you.
By then Nick was sitting beside Melissa and already drinking from a bottle of beer. I felt very awkward about approaching them. The last time I had seen him he’d had a fake accent and different clothes, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear his real accent again. But Melissa had spotted us already anyway. She asked us to sit down.
Bobbi introduced Melissa and Nick to Philip, and Philip shook their hands. Melissa said she remembered them meeting before, which delighted him. Nick said something about being sorry he’d missed our performance, though I still wasn’t looking at him. I drained the rest of my gin and tonic and then knocked the ice from side to side in the glass. Philip congratulated Nick on the play and they talked about Tennessee Williams. Melissa called him ‘mannered’ again and I pretended not to know she had made the observation before.
After we bought a new round of drinks, Melissa suggested we go out for a cigarette. The smoking area was a little walled garden downstairs and it wasn’t particularly full, since it was raining. I hadn’t seen Nick smoking before, and I took a cigarette too although I didn’t want one. Bobbi was doing an impression of one of the men who had performed before us at the reading. It was a very funny though also cruel impression. We all laughed. It was starting to rain harder then, so we gathered underneath the shallow ledge projecting from the window. We talked for a while, Bobbi mostly.
It’s cool you’re playing a gay character, Bobbi was saying to Nick.
Is Brick gay? he said. I think maybe he’s just bisexual.
Don’t say ‘just bisexual’, she said. Frances is bisexual, you know.
I didn’t know that, Melissa said.
I chose to drag on my cigarette for a long time before saying anything. I knew that everyone was waiting for me to speak.
Well, I said. Yeah, I’m kind of an omnivore.
Melissa laughed at that. Nick looked at me and gave an amused smile, which I looked away from quickly and pretended to take an interest in my glass.
Me too, Melissa said.
I could tell Bobbi was enthralled by this remark. She asked Melissa something I didn’t listen to. Philip said he was going to the bathroom and left his drink on the windowsill. I stroked the chain of my necklace, feeling the alcohol warm inside my stomach.
Sorry I was late, Nick said.
He was speaking to me. In fact it seemed that he had waited for Philip to leave us alone so he could address this sentence to me. I told him I didn’t mind. He held the cigarette between his index and middle fingers, where it looked miniature compared to the breadth of his hand. I was aware of the fact that he could pretend to be anyone he wanted to be, and I wondered if he also lacked a ‘real personality’ the same way I did.
I arrived in time for the wild applause, he said. So I can only assume good things. I’ve read your work actually, is that a terrible thing to say? Melissa forwarded it on to me, she thinks I like literature.
At this point I felt a weird lack of self-recognition, and I realised that I couldn’t visualise my own face or body at all. It was like someone had lifted the end of an invisible pencil and just gently erased my entire appearance. This was curious and actually not unpleasant, though I was also aware that I was cold and might have been shivering.
She didn’t tell me she was going to forward it to people, I said.
Not p
eople, just me. I’ll send you an email about it. If I compliment you now you’ll think I’m just saying it, but the email will be very flattering.
Oh, that’s nice. I like getting compliments where I don’t have to make eye contact with the person.
He laughed at that, which gratified me. It had started raining harder and Philip had come back from the bathroom to shelter under the ledge with us again. My arm was touching Nick’s and I felt a pleasant sense of illicit physical closeness.
It’s weird knowing someone just casually, he said, and then later finding out they’re observing things all the time. It’s like, God, what has this person noticed about me?
We looked at one another. Nick’s face was handsome in the most generic way: clear skin, pronounced bone structure, the mouth a little soft-looking. But his expressions seemed to pass over it with a certain subtlety and intelligence, which gave his eye contact a charismatic quality. When he looked at me, I felt vulnerable to him, but I also felt strongly that he was letting himself be observed, that he had noticed how interested I was in forming an impression of him, and he was curious about what it might be.
Yeah, I said. All kinds of bad things.
And you’re what, like, twenty-four?
I’m twenty-one.
For a second he looked at me like he thought I was kidding, eyes widened, eyebrows raised, and then he shook his head. Actors learn to communicate things without feeling them, I thought. He already knew I was twenty-one. Maybe what he really wanted to communicate was an exaggerated awareness of our age difference, or a mild disapproval or disappointment about it. I knew from the internet that he was thirty-two.
But don’t let that get in the way of our natural rapport, I said.
He looked at me for a moment and then he smiled, an ambivalent smile, which I liked so much that I became very conscious of my own mouth. It was open slightly.