by Sally Rooney
Do you typically pretend for long? I said.
You tell me, Nick said in his normal voice.
I think I figured it out pretty quickly. But I was concerned I was just deluding myself.
Oh, I felt the same way about you.
He had picked up the bottle and was refilling our glasses.
So is this just sex, I said, or do you actually like me?
Frances, you’re drunk.
You can tell me, I won’t be offended.
No, I know you won’t, he said. I think you want me to say it’s just sex.
I laughed. I was happy he said that, because it was what I wanted him to think, and because I thought he really knew that and was just kidding around.
Don’t feel bad, I said. It’s terribly enjoyable. I may have mentioned that before.
Only a couple of times. But I’d like it in writing if possible. Just something permanent that I can look at on my deathbed.
He slipped his hand between my knees then. I was wearing a striped dress and my legs were bare; the moment he touched me I felt hot and passive as if I were asleep. Any strength I had seemed to leave me completely and when I tried to speak I stammered.
What happens when your wife gets home? I said.
Yeah. We’ll work something out.
10
I hadn’t spoken to Bobbi since the night she’d stayed over in the apartment. Because I was staying with Nick and not thinking about anything else, I hadn’t tried to get in touch with her or put much thought into the question of why she hadn’t called. Then after Melissa came back to Dublin, I got an email from Bobbi with the subject heading ‘jealous???’
look, i don’t care if you have a crush on nick, and i wasn’t trying to embarrass you or whatever. sorry if it came across that way. (and i’m not going to be moralistic about him being married either, i’m pretty sure melissa has affairs anyway). BUT it was really fucked up of you to accuse me of being jealous of him. it is just so stereotypically homophobic to accuse a gay woman of being secretly jealous of men, which i know you know. but even more than that it’s really devaluing to our friendship to make out like i’m competing with a man for your attention. what does that say about how you see me? do you really rank our relationship below your passing sexual interest in some middle aged married guy? it hurt my fucking feelings actually.
I was in work when I received the email, but none of the other people who worked there were around. I read the message several times. For some reason I deleted it briefly, and then went into my trash folder to retrieve it almost straight away. Then I marked it as unread and opened it to read it again as if for the first time. Of course Bobbi was right. I had called her jealous to try and hurt her. I just hadn’t known that it had actually worked, or that it was even possible to hurt her no matter how hard I tried. Realising not only that hurting Bobbi’s feelings was within my power but that I had done it practically offhandedly and without noticing, made me uncomfortable. I wandered around the office and poured some water from the cooler into a plastic cup though I wasn’t thirsty. Then eventually I sat back down.
It took me several drafts to finish writing my reply.
Hey, you’re right, it was a weird and wrong thing to say and I shouldn’t have said it. I felt defensive and I just wanted to make you angry. I feel guilty for hurting your feelings over something so stupid. I’m sorry.
I sent it and then logged out of my email for a while to get some work done.
Philip came in around eleven and we talked a little. I told him I hadn’t written anything in a week and he raised his eyebrows.
I thought you were all about discipline, he said.
I was.
Are you having a weird month? You seem like you are.
On my lunch break I logged back into my email. Bobbi had replied.
ok i forgive you. but really, nick? is that your thing now? i just feel like he probably unironically reads articles called ‘one weird trick for perfect abs’
if it absolutely had to be a man i assumed it would be someone wussy and effeminate like philip, this is so unexpected.
I didn’t reply to that. Bobbi and I had always shared a contempt for the cultish pursuit of male physical dominance. Even very recently we had been asked to leave Tesco for reading aloud inane passages from men’s magazines on the shop floor. But Bobbi was wrong about Nick. That wasn’t what he was like. Really he was the kind of person who would laugh at Bobbi’s cruel impression of him and not try to correct her. But I couldn’t explain that to her. I certainly couldn’t tell her what I found most endearing about him, which was that he was attracted to plain and emotionally cold women like me.
By the time I finished work I was tired and I had a headache, a bad one. I walked home and decided to lie in bed for a while. It was five o’clock. I didn’t wake up until midnight.
*
I didn’t see Nick again before he left for Scotland. Because he was on set from early in the morning, the only way we could talk was online, late at night. He was usually tired by then and seemed withdrawn, and I started writing only terse responses to his messages, or not responding at all. Online he talked about trivial things, like how much he hated his co-workers. He never said that he missed me, or thought about me at all. When I made any reference to the time we’d spent in his house together he tended to skip over it and talk about something else. In response I felt myself becoming cold and sarcastic.
Nick: the only reasonable person on set is stephanie
me: why don’t you have an affair with her then.
Nick: well i think that could only harm our working relationship
me: is that a hint
Nick: also she is at least 60
me: and you’re what like.. 63?
Nick: funny
Nick: i’ll run it by her if you want
me: oh please do
At home I watched YouTube clips of his film and TV appearances. He had once played the young father of a kidnap victim in an episode of a long-running crime drama, and in one scene he broke down and cried in the police station. That was the clip I watched most often. He cried exactly the way I imagined he would in real life: hating himself for crying, but hating himself so much that it only made him cry harder. I found that if I watched this clip before we spoke at night, I tended to be more sympathetic toward him. He had a very basic HTML fansite online that hadn’t been updated since 2011, which I looked at sometimes while we were talking.
I was sick at the time, I had cystitis. For a while the persistent discomfort and mild fever felt psychologically appropriate and I did nothing about them, but eventually I went to see the college doctor and she gave me antibiotics and a painkiller that made me drowsy. I spent the evenings looking at my own hands or trying to focus on a laptop screen. I felt disgusting, like my body was full of evil bacteria. I knew that Nick was suffering no similar after-effects. There was nothing equivalent about us. He had screwed me up in his hand like paper and tossed me away.
I tried to start writing again, but everything I produced was full of a bitterness that made me ashamed. Some of it I deleted, some I hid in folders I never looked inside. I was taking things too seriously again. I fixated on perceived wrongs Nick had done to me, callous things he had said or implied, so that I could hate him and therefore justify the intensity of my feelings for him as pure hatred. But I recognised that the only thing he had done to hurt me was to withdraw his affection, which he had every right to do. In every other way he had been courteous and thoughtful. At times I thought this was the worst misery I had experienced in my life, but it was also a very shallow misery, which at any time could have been relieved completely by a word from him and transformed into idiotic happiness.
One night online I asked him if he had sadistic tendencies.
Nick: not that i know of
Nick: why do you ask?
me: you seem like someone who does
Nick: hm
Nick: that’s worrying
Some time passed. I
stared at the screen but didn’t type anything. I was one day away from finishing my antibiotics.
Nick: is there an example you’re thinking of?
me: no
Nick: ok
Nick: i think when i hurt people it tends to be through selfishness
Nick: rather than being an end in itself
Nick: have i done something to hurt you?
me: no
Nick: are you sure?
I let more time go by. With the pad of my finger I covered his name on my laptop screen.
Nick: are you still there?
me: yeah
Nick: oh
Nick: i guess you don’t feel like talking then
Nick: that’s ok, i should go to bed anyway
The next morning he sent me an email that read:
i can see you don’t really feel like keeping in touch at the moment, so i’m going to stop sending you messages, ok? i’ll see you when i’m back.
I considered writing a spiteful email in response but instead I didn’t reply at all.
The following night Bobbi suggested we watch one of Nick’s films.
That would be weird, I said.
He’s our friend, why would it be weird?
She was on my laptop, searching Netflix. I had made a pot of peppermint tea and we were waiting for it to brew.
It’s on here, she said. I saw it on here. It’s the one about the bridesmaid marrying her boss.
Why are you even looking for his films?
It’s a pretty minor part but he does take his shirt off at one point. You’re into that, right?
Genuinely, please stop, I said.
She stopped. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor and she reached to pour herself a splash of tea to see if it was ready.
Do you like him as a person? she said. Or is it just like, he’s good-looking and married to someone interesting?
I could tell she was still hurt by the jealousy remark, but I had apologised already. I didn’t want to indulge her hostility toward Nick, especially since I wasn’t talking to him then. It was obvious to me that Bobbi’s feelings were not sincerely hurt anymore, if they ever had been, and that she just liked to make fun of me whenever I experienced romantic feelings. I looked at her like she was something very far away from me, a friend I used to have, or someone whose name I didn’t remember.
Melissa’s not that interesting, I said.
When Bobbi went home I looked up the film she was talking about. It had been released six years previously, when I was fifteen. Nick appeared in it as a character with whom the protagonist has a regrettable one-night stand. I found a video link and skipped ahead to the scene where he was getting out of her shower the next morning. He looked younger, and his face was different, although even in this video he was older than me. I watched the scene twice. After he left, the protagonist called her friend and they laughed hysterically about what a jerk Nick’s character was, which was a bonding moment for their friendship.
I sent him an email after I watched it. I wrote:
Sure, if that’s what you want. I hope the filming is going okay.
He replied at about 1 a.m.
i should have told you before, but i’m going to be in the north of france for most of august with melissa and various other people. it’s a huge villa type place in a village called etables. people are always coming and going, so you’re welcome to come and stay for a while if you want, though i can see why that might not appeal.
I was sitting cross-legged in bed trying to work on a spoken word thing when the email notification came through. I replied:
So are we still having an affair or is that over now?
He didn’t reply for a while. I guessed he had gone to bed, but the possibility that he hadn’t yet made me not want to work any more. I made myself a cup of instant coffee and watched some YouTube videos of other spoken word performers.
Eventually a notification came through on instant messenger.
Nick: are you awake
me: yes
Nick: so yeah look
Nick: i don’t know what you want
Nick: obviously we can’t see each other very often
Nick: and having an affair is reasonably stressful
me: haha
me: are you breaking up with me
Nick: if we never actually see one another
Nick: then the affair just consists of like
Nick: worrying about the affair
Nick: do you see what i mean
me: I can’t believe you’re breaking up with me over instant messenger
me: I thought you were going to leave your wife so we could run away together
Nick: you don’t need to be defensive
me: how do you know what I need
me: maybe I’m actually really upset
Nick: are you
Nick: i never have any idea what you feel about anything
me: well it doesn’t really matter now, does it
He had to be back on set early that morning so he went to bed. I kept thinking about the time I gave him head and he just lay there quietly letting me do it. I had never done that before, I wanted to explain. You could have told me what was so bad about it instead of just letting me carry on. It wasn’t kind. I felt so foolish. But I knew he had done nothing wrong really. I considered calling Bobbi and telling her everything, in the hope that she would tell Melissa and then Nick’s life would be ruined. But I decided it would be too humiliating a story to relate.
11
I missed work the next day because I slept in. I sent Sunny a grovelling email and she responded: we survived. It was noon by the time I showered. I put on a black T-shirt dress and went out for a walk, though it was too hot to enjoy walking. The air felt helpless and trapped on the streets. Shop windows reflected blinding flares of sunlight and my skin was damp. I sat on the campus cricket pitch on my own and smoked two cigarettes, one after another. I had a headache, I hadn’t eaten. My body felt used up and worthless to me. I didn’t want to put food or medicine into it any more.
That afternoon when I got back, I had a new email from Nick.
so i feel like our conversation last night was kind of awkward. it’s obviously hard for me to tell what you actually want and i don’t really know if you were joking about being hurt. you’re a very stressful person to talk to online. i hope you’re not upset or anything.
I wrote back:
Forget about it. See you in September, I hope the weather is good in France.
He didn’t email me again after that.
Three days later, Melissa invited Bobbi and me to come stay in the villa in Étables for a few days in August. Bobbi kept sending me links to the Ryanair website and saying we should go for just a week, or even just five days. I could afford the flights and Sunny didn’t mind me taking time off.
Eventually I said: fine. Let’s go.
*
Bobbi and I had been on several foreign trips together before. We always took the cheapest flights, early in the morning or late at night, and as a consequence we usually spent the first day of the trip feeling irritable and trying to find free WiFi. The only day I had ever spent in Budapest we’d sat in a coffee shop with our luggage while Bobbi drank espressos and engaged in a heated online argument about drone strikes, which she relayed to me aloud. When I told her I wasn’t particularly interested in hearing the discussion, she said: children are dying, Frances. We didn’t speak for several hours after that.
In the days preceding our trip, Bobbi sent me frequent text messages about items I should remember to pack. It was in my nature to remember what I needed, and very much in Bobbi’s nature not to. One evening she called around to the apartment with a list, and when I answered the door she was holding her phone between her shoulder and ear.
Hey, I’m just at Frances’s place now, she said. Do you mind if I put you on speakerphone?
Bobbi closed the door and followed me into the living room, where she dropp
ed her phone unceremoniously onto the table, with the speakerphone enabled.
Hi Frances, said Melissa’s voice.
I said hello, though what I meant was: I hope you haven’t found out about me sleeping with your husband.
So whose is the house exactly? Bobbi said.
It belongs to a friend of mine called Valerie, said Melissa. I mean, I say friend, she’s in her sixties. More like a mentor. She was very helpful with getting the book published, and all that. Anyway, old old money. And she likes to have people staying in her various properties when she’s not around.
I said that she sounded interesting.
You’d like her, Melissa said. You might get to meet her, she does spend a day or two in the house sometimes. She lives in Paris usually.
Wealthy people sicken me, said Bobbi. But yeah, I’m sure she’s great.
How have you been keeping, Frances? Melissa said. It feels like an age since I’ve seen you.
I paused, and then said: I’ve been well, thank you. And you? Melissa also paused and then replied: good.
How was London? I asked. You were over there last month, were you?
Was that last month? she said. Time is so funny.
She said she had better be getting back to dinner and hung up. I didn’t think there was anything remotely funny about time, certainly not ‘so funny’.
After Bobbi left that night I wrote for an hour and a half, poetry in which I figured my own body as an item of garbage, an empty wrapper or a half-eaten and discarded piece of fruit. Putting my self-loathing to work in this way didn’t make me feel better as such, but it tired me out. Afterwards I lay on my side with A Critique of Postcolonial Reason propped half-open on the pillow beside me. Occasionally I lifted a finger to turn the page and allowed the heavy and confusing syntax to drift down through my eyes and into my brain like fluid. I’m bettering myself, I thought. I’m going to become so smart that no one will understand me.