by Sally Rooney
After a few seconds I was conscious that Bobbi had stopped talking, and when I turned to see her she was looking over at Nick too, with her bottom lip pushed out a little, like: oh, now I see who you’re staring at. I wanted a glass to hold against my face.
Well, at least he can dress himself, she said.
I didn’t pretend to be confused. He was wearing a white T-shirt and he had suede shoes on, the kind everyone wore then, desert boots. Even I wore desert boots. He only looked handsome because he was handsome, though Bobbi wasn’t sensitive to the effects of beauty like I was.
Or maybe Melissa dresses him, said Bobbi.
She was smiling to herself as if concealing a mystery, though her behaviour wasn’t in the least mysterious. I ran my hand through my hair and looked away. A white square of sunlight lay on the carpet like snow.
They don’t even sleep together, I said.
Our eyes met then and Bobbi lifted her chin just barely.
I know, she said.
During the reading we didn’t whisper in each other’s ears like we usually did. It was a book of short stories by a female writer. I glanced at Bobbi but she kept looking forward, so I knew I was being punished for something.
We saw Nick and Melissa after the reading was over. Bobbi went to meet them and I followed her, cooling my face against the back of my hand. They were standing near the refreshments table and Melissa reached over to get us both a glass of wine. White or red? she said.
White, I said. Always white.
Bobbi said: when she drinks red her mouth goes like, and she gestured to her own mouth in a little circle. Melissa handed me a glass and said: oh I get that. It’s not so bad, I think. There’s something appealingly evil about it. Bobbi agreed with her. Like you’ve been drinking blood, she said. And Melissa laughed and said: yes, sacrificing virgins.
I looked into the wine, which was clear and almost greenish-yellow, the colour of cut grass. When I glanced back at Nick he was looking at me. The light from the window felt hot on the back of my neck. I was wondering if you’d be here, he said. It’s nice to see you. And he slipped his hand into his pocket as if he was afraid of what else he might do with it. Melissa and Bobbi were talking still. No one was paying us any attention. Yeah, I said. You too.
9
Melissa was working in London the following week. It was the hottest week of the year, and Bobbi and I sat in the empty college campus together eating ice cream and trying to get a tan. One afternoon I emailed Nick asking him if I could come over so we could talk. He said sure. I didn’t tell Bobbi. I brought my toothbrush in my bag.
When I arrived at the house all the windows and doors were open. I rang the doorbell anyway and heard him saying come in from the kitchen, he didn’t even check who it was. I closed the door behind me anyway. When I got inside he was drying his hands on a tea towel, like he’d just finished washing up. He smiled and told me he’d been feeling nervous about seeing me again. The dog was lying on the sofa. I hadn’t seen her on the sofa before and wondered if maybe Melissa wouldn’t let her sleep there. I asked Nick why he was nervous and he laughed and made a little shrugging gesture, though one that seemed more relaxed than anxious. I leaned my back against the countertop while he folded the towel away.
So, you’re married, I said.
Yeah, it looks like it. Do you want a drink?
I accepted a small bottle of beer, though only because I wanted something to hold in my hand. I felt restless, the way you feel when you’ve already done the wrong thing and you’re anxious about what the outcome is going to be. I told him I didn’t want to be a homewrecker or whatever. He laughed at that.
That’s funny, he said. What does that mean?
I mean, you’ve never had an affair before. I don’t want to wreck your marriage.
Oh, well, the marriage has actually survived several affairs, I just haven’t been involved in any of them.
He said this amusingly, and it made me laugh, though it also had the effect, which I guess was intended, of making me relax about the morality side of things. I hadn’t really wanted to feel sympathetic to Melissa, and now I felt her moving outside my frame of sympathy entirely, as if she belonged to a different story with different characters.
When we went upstairs I told Nick I had never had sex with a man before. He asked if that was a big deal and I said I didn’t think it was, but it might be weird if he only found out later. While we undressed I tried to seem casual by keeping my limbs still and not trembling violently. I was afraid of undressing in front of him, but I didn’t know how to shield my body in a way that wouldn’t look awkward and unattractive. He had a very imposing upper body, like a piece of statuary. I missed the distance between us when he’d watched me being applauded, which now seemed protective, even necessary. But when he asked me if I was sure I wanted to do all this, I heard myself say: I didn’t really come over just to talk, you know.
In bed he asked me what felt good a lot. I said everything felt good. I felt very flushed and I could hear myself making a lot of noise, but only syllables, no real words. I closed my eyes. The inside of my body was hot like oil. I was possessed by an overwhelming and intense energy which seemed to threaten me. Please, I was saying. Please, please. Eventually Nick sat up to take a box of condoms from his bedside locker and I thought: I might never be able to speak again after this. But I surrendered without struggle. Nick murmured the word ‘sorry’, as if the several seconds I had been lying there waiting constituted a minor wrong on his part.
When it was over I lay on my back shivering. I had been so terribly noisy and theatrical all the way through that it was impossible now to act indifferent like I did in the emails.
That felt kind of okay, I said.
Did it?
I think I liked it more than you did.
Nick laughed and lifted his arm to place a hand behind his head.
No, he said, you really didn’t.
You were very nice to me.
Was I?
Seriously, I really do appreciate how nice you were, I said.
Wait. Hey. Are you all right?
Little tears had started slipping out of my eyes and down onto the pillow. I wasn’t sad, I didn’t know why I was crying. I’d had this problem before, with Bobbi, who believed it was an expression of my repressed feelings. I couldn’t stop the tears so I just laughed self-effacingly instead, to show that I wasn’t invested in the crying. I knew I was embarrassing myself badly, but there was nothing I could do about it.
This happens, I said. It wasn’t anything you did.
Nick touched his hand to my body then, just under my breast. I felt soothed like I was an animal, and I cried harder.
Are you sure? he said.
Yeah. You can ask Bobbi. I mean, don’t.
He smiled and said: yeah, I won’t. He was stroking me with the tips of his fingers, like the way he petted his dog. I wiped at my face roughly.
You’re really handsome, you know, I said.
He laughed then.
Is that all I get? he said. I thought you liked my personality.
Do you have one?
He turned over on his back, looking up at the ceiling with a bemused expression. I can’t believe we did this, he said. I knew then that the crying was over. I felt good about everything I could think of. I touched the inside of his wrist and said: yes, you can.
I woke up late the next morning. Nick made French toast for breakfast and I got the bus back into town. I sat at the back, near a window, where the sun bore down on my face like a drill and the cloth of the seat felt sensationally tactile against my bare skin.
*
That evening Bobbi said she needed somewhere to stay to get away from the ‘domestic situation’. Apparently Eleanor had thrown away some of Jerry’s possessions over the weekend, and at the height of the ensuing argument Lydia had locked herself in the bathroom and screamed that she wanted to die.
Deeply uncool, Bobbi said.
I told he
r she could stay with me. I didn’t know what else to say. She knew I had an empty apartment. That evening she played around with my electric piano using my laptop for sheet music and I checked my email on my phone. No one had been in touch. I picked up a book but didn’t feel like reading. I hadn’t done any writing that morning, or the morning before. I had started reading long interviews with famous writers and noticing how unlike them I was.
You’ve got a notification on your instant message thing, said Bobbi.
Don’t read it. Let me see it.
Why are you saying don’t read it?
I don’t want you to read it, I said. Give me the laptop.
She handed me the laptop, but I could see she wasn’t going back to the piano. The message was from Nick.
Nick: i know, i’m a bad person
Nick: do you want to come over again some time this week?
Who’s it from? Bobbi said.
Can you relax about it?
Why did you go ‘don’t read it’?
Because I didn’t want you to read it, I said.
She bit on her thumbnail coquettishly and then got onto the bed beside me. I shut my laptop screen, which made her laugh.
I didn’t open it, she said. But I did see who it was from.
Okay, good for you.
You really like him, don’t you?
I don’t know what you’re talking about, I said.
Melissa’s husband. You have a serious thing for him.
I rolled my eyes. Bobbi lay back on the bed and grinned. I hated her then and even wanted to harm her.
Why, are you jealous? I said.
She smiled, but absently, as if she was thinking of something else. I didn’t know what else to say to her. She went back to the piano for a while and then she wanted to go to bed. When I woke up the next morning she was already gone.
*
I stayed with Nick most nights that week. He wasn’t working, so he went to the gym for a couple of hours in the morning and I went into the agency or just wandered around the shops. Then in the evening he made dinner and I played with the spaniel. I told Nick I didn’t think I’d eaten so much food in my life, which was true. At home my parents had never cooked with chorizo or aubergine. I had also never tasted fresh avocado before, though I didn’t tell Nick about that.
One night I asked him if he was afraid of Melissa finding out about us and he said he didn’t think she would find out.
But you found out, I said. When she had affairs.
No, she told me.
What, really? Out of the blue?
The first time, yeah, he said. It was very surreal. She was away at one of these book festivals, and she called me at like five in the morning and said she had something to tell me, that was it.
Fuck.
But it was just a one-off thing, they didn’t keep seeing each other after that. The other time was a lot more involved. I probably shouldn’t be telling you all these secrets, should I? I’m not trying to make her look bad. Or at least I don’t think I am, I don’t know.
Over dinner we exchanged some of the details about our lives. I explained that I wanted to destroy capitalism and that I considered masculinity personally oppressive. Nick told me he was ‘basically’ a Marxist, and he didn’t want me to judge him for owning a house. It’s this or paying rent forever, he said. But I acknowledge it’s troubling. It sounded to me like his family was very wealthy, but I was wary of probing the issue, since I already felt self-conscious about never paying for anything. His parents were still married and he had two siblings.
During these discussions, Nick laughed at all my jokes. I told him I was easily seduced by people who laughed at my jokes and he said he was easily seduced by people who were smarter than he was.
I guess you just don’t meet them very often, I said.
See, isn’t it nice to flatter each other?
The sex was so good that I often cried while it was happening. Nick liked me to go on top, so he could sit back against the headboard, and we could talk quietly. I could tell that he liked it when I talked to him about how good it felt. It was very easy to make him come if I talked about that too much. Sometimes I liked to do that just to feel powerful over him, and afterwards he would say: God, I’m sorry, that’s so embarrassing. I liked him saying that even more than I liked the sex itself.
I became infatuated with the house he lived in: how immaculate everything was, and the coolness of the floorboards in the morning. They had an electric coffee grinder in the kitchen and Nick bought whole-bean coffee and then put small portions in the grinder before breakfast. I wasn’t sure if this was pretentious or not, though the coffee tasted incredibly good. I told him it was pretentious anyway and he said, what do you drink? Fucking Nescafé? You’re a student, don’t act like you’ve got taste. Of course I secretly liked all the expensive utensils they had in their kitchen, the same way I liked to watch Nick press the coffee so slowly that a film of dark cream formed on its surface.
He talked to Melissa pretty much every day during the week. Usually she would call in the evenings, and he’d take the phone into another room while I lay on the couch watching TV or went outside to smoke. These conversations often took twenty minutes or more. Once I watched an entire episode of Arrested Development before he came back in the room, it was the one where they burn down the banana stand. I never heard anything Nick said on the phone. I asked once: she’s not suspicious or anything, is she? And he just shook his head and said, no, it’s okay. Nick wasn’t physically affectionate toward me outside of his room. We watched TV together the way we would have done if we were just waiting for Melissa to get home from work. He let me kiss him if I wanted to, but I always had to initiate it.
It was hard to figure out how Nick really felt. In bed he never put any pressure on me to do anything, and he was always very sensitive to what I wanted. Still, there was something blank and withholding about him. He never said anything nice about my appearance. He never touched or kissed me spontaneously. I still felt nervous whenever we undressed, and the first time I gave him head he was so quiet that I stopped to ask if I was hurting him. He said no, but when I started again, he stayed completely silent. He didn’t touch me, I didn’t even know if he was looking at me. When it was finished I felt awful, like I had made him endure something neither of us enjoyed.
After I left the agency on Thursday that week, I walked past him in town. I was with Philip, going from work to get coffee, and we saw Nick with a tall woman who was directing a pushchair with one hand and talking on the phone with the other. Nick was holding an infant. The infant was wearing a red hat. Nick waved hello as they walked by us, we even looked at one another quickly, but they didn’t stop and talk. That morning he had watched me get dressed, lying with his hands behind his head.
That’s not his baby, is it? Philip said.
I felt like I was playing a video game without knowing any of the controls. I just shrugged and said, I don’t think he has children, does he? I got a text from Nick shortly afterwards saying: my sister Laura and her daughter. Sorry for walking on, they were kind of in a rush. I texted back: cute baby. Can I come over tonight?
That night at dinner he asked me, so did you really think the baby was cute? I told him I didn’t get a good look at her, but from a distance she seemed like a cute one. Oh, she’s the best, Nick said. Rachel. I don’t love many things in life, but I really love that baby. The first time I saw her I just started crying, she was so small. This was by far the most emotion I’d ever heard Nick express, and I was jealous. I thought about making a joke of how jealous I was, but it felt creepy to be jealous of a baby, and I doubted Nick would appreciate it. That’s sweet, I said. He seemed to sense my lack of enthusiasm and said awkwardly: you’re probably too young to care about babies anyway. I felt hurt and raked my fork over the dish of risotto silently. Then I said, no, I really thought you were being sweet. Uncharacteristically.
What, like I’m usually gruff and aggressive? he s
aid.
I shrugged. We went on eating. I knew I was starting to make him nervous, I could see him watching me across the table. He wasn’t in the least gruff or aggressive, and I saved the question in my mind for later, feeling that he had unintentionally revealed some private fear.
When we undressed that night his bedsheets felt icy against my skin, and I mentioned how cold it was. The house? he said. Do you find it cold at night?
No, I mean just now, I said.
I went to kiss him and he allowed me to, but absently, and without real feeling. Then he pulled away and said: because if you’re cold at night, I can put the heating on.
I’m not, I said. The sheets felt cold just now, that’s all.
Right.
We had sex, it was nice, and afterwards we lay there looking up at the ceiling. Air hauled itself into my lungs, I felt peaceful. Nick touched my hand and said: are you warm now? I’m warm, I said. Your concern for my temperature is quite touching. Oh well, he said. It would look bad for me if you froze to death. But he was stroking my hand when he said it. The police might have some questions, I said. He laughed. Yeah, he said. Like, what’s this beautiful corpse doing in bed with you, Nick? It was just a joke, he would never really call me beautiful. But I liked the joke anyway.
On Friday night, before Melissa came home from London, we watched North by Northwest and shared a bottle of wine. Nick was leaving the country the following week to film something in Edinburgh, so I wouldn’t see him again for a short time. I can’t remember most of what we said that night. I remember the scene on the train where Cary Grant’s character is flirting with the blonde woman, and that for some reason I repeated one of her lines out loud in a clipped American accent. I said: and I don’t particularly like the book I’ve started. This made Nick laugh a lot, for no real reason, or maybe because my accent was so bad.
Now you do Cary Grant, I said.
In a mid-Atlantic cinema voice Nick said: the moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her.