by Sally Rooney
Oh yeah, I meant to ask, he said. How are things with you and Bobbi? That wasn’t the best way for her to find out about us I guess.
Yeah, it’s been awkward. It’s kind of bothering me.
This is the first relationship you’ve been in since you two were together, isn’t it?
I guess so, I said. Do you think that’s why it’s weird?
Well, you didn’t really seem to separate that much after you broke up. In the sense that you still spend all your time together.
She was the one who broke up with me.
Nick paused, and when he spoke he sounded like he was smiling curiously. Yes, I know that, he said. Is it relevant?
I rolled my eyes, but I was enjoying him. I put down the cup of tea on the table. Oh I see, I said. I see why you’re calling me, okay.
What?
You want us to have phone sex.
He started laughing. This was the intended effect and I basked in it. He laughed a lot. I know, he said. Classic me. I wanted to tell him about the hospital then, because he was in such a nice mood with me, and he might say consoling things, but I knew it would make the conversation serious. I didn’t like cornering him into having serious conversations. By the way, he said, I saw a girl on the beach today who looked like you.
People are always saying someone looks like me, I said. And then when I see the person it’s always someone plain-looking and I have to pretend not to mind.
Oh, not this woman. This woman was very attractive.
You’re telling me about an attractive stranger you saw, how sweet.
She looked like you! he said. She was probably less hostile, though. Maybe I should have an affair with her instead.
I took a mouthful of tea and swallowed. I felt silly for not replying to his email for so long and grateful that he didn’t dwell on it or act hurt. I asked what he had been doing that day and he told me he was avoiding his parents’ calls and feeling guilty about it.
Is your dad as handsome as you are? I said.
Why, are you thinking about going there? He’s very right-wing. I would point out he’s also still married, but when has that stopped you before?
Oh, that’s nice. Now who’s hostile?
I’m sorry, he said. You’re so right, you should seduce my dad.
Do you think I’m his type?
Oh yeah. In the sense that you greatly resemble my mother, anyway.
I started to laugh. It was a sincere laugh but I still wanted to make sure he would hear it.
That’s a joke, said Nick. Are you laughing there, or weeping? You don’t resemble my mother.
Is your dad actually right-wing or was that a joke too?
Oh no, he’s a real wealth creator. Hates women. Absolutely detests the poor. So you can imagine he loves me, his camp actor son.
I was really laughing then. You’re not camp, I said. You’re aggressively heterosexual. You even have a twenty-one-year-old mistress.
That I think my father would actually approve of. Happily he’ll never know.
I looked around the empty kitchen and said: I cleaned my room today in advance of you getting back from France.
Did you really? I love that. I think this actually counts as phone sex now.
Will you visit me?
After a pause he said: of course. I didn’t feel I had lost him exactly, but I knew he was thinking about something else. Then he said: you sounded really out of it on the phone the other night, were you drunk?
Let’s forget about it.
You’re just not a big person for phone calls usually. You weren’t upset or anything, were you?
I heard something in the background on Nick’s end of the line, and then a little crackling noise. Hello? he called out. A door opened and then I heard Melissa’s voice say: oh, you’re on the phone. Nick said: yeah, give me one second. The door closed again. I said nothing.
I’ll visit you, he said quietly. I have to go, all right?
Sure.
Sorry.
Go ahead, I said. Live your life.
He hung up.
*
The next day, our friend Marianne came back from Brooklyn and told us about all the celebrities she had met. She showed us photographs on her phone over coffee: Brooklyn Bridge, Coney Island, Marianne herself smiling with a blurry man who I privately did not believe was actually Bradley Cooper. Wow, Philip said. Cool, I agreed. Bobbi licked the back of her teaspoon and said nothing.
I was happy to see Marianne again, happy to listen to her problems as if my own life was going exactly how it always went. I asked about her boyfriend Andrew, how he liked his new job, whatever happened with his ex messaging him on Facebook. I boasted to her about Philip’s internship in the agency, how he was going to become a predatory literary agent and make millions, and I could see I was pleasing him. It’s better than the arms trade, he said. Bobbi snorted. Jesus, Philip, is that your gold standard? she said. At least I’m not selling arms?
At this point the conversation slipped away from me. Before I could direct another question toward Marianne, Philip started to ask us about Étables. Nick and Melissa were still over there, they weren’t coming back for another two weeks. Bobbi told him we’d had ‘fun’.
Any luck with Nick yet? he asked me.
I stared at him. To Marianne he added: Frances is having an affair with a married man.
No I’m not, I said.
Philip is joking, said Bobbi.
Famous Nick? Marianne said. I want to hear about him.
We’re friends, I said.
But he definitely has a crush, said Philip.
Frances, you temptress, said Marianne. Isn’t he married?
Blissfully, I said.
To change the subject, Bobbi mentioned something about wanting to move out and find an apartment closer to town. Marianne said there was an accommodation crisis, she said she’d heard about it on the news.
And they won’t take students, Marianne said. I’m serious, look at the listings.
You’re moving out? said Philip.
It shouldn’t be legal to say No Students, Marianne said. It’s discrimination.
Where are you looking? I asked. You know we’ll be letting the second bedroom in my place.
Bobbi looked at me and then let out a little laugh.
We could be flatmates, she said. How much?
I’ll talk to my dad, I said.
I hadn’t spoken to my father since I’d visited his house. When I called him after coffee that evening, he answered, sounding relatively sober. I tried to repress the image of the mayonnaise jar, the noise of bluebottles hammering themselves against glass. I wanted to be speaking to someone who lived in a clean house, or someone who was only a voice, whose life I didn’t have to know about. On the phone we talked about the apartment’s second bedroom. He told me his brother had some viewings arranged and I explained that Bobbi was looking for a place.
Who’s this? he said. Who’s Bobbi?
You know Bobbi. We were in school together.
Your friend, is it? Which friend now?
Well, I really only had one friend, I said.
I thought you’d want another girl living with you.
Bobbi is a girl.
Oh, the Lynch girl, is it? he said.
Bobbi’s surname was actually Connolly, but her mother’s name was Lynch, so I let that one go. He said his brother could give her the room for six fifty a month, a price Bobbi’s father was willing to pay. He wants me to have somewhere quiet to study, she said. Little does he know.
The next day her father drove her over in his jeep with all her belongings. She had brought some bedlinen and a yellow anglepoise, and also three boxes of books. When we unloaded the car, her father drove off again and I helped Bobbi to dress the bed. She started sticking some postcards and photographs onto the wall while I put the pillows into cases. She put up a photograph of the two of us in our school uniforms, sitting on the basketball court. We had long tartan skirts on a
nd ugly, dimpled shoes, but we were laughing. We looked at it together, our two little faces peering back at us like ancestors, or perhaps our own children.
*
Term didn’t start up for another week, and in the meantime Bobbi bought a red ukulele and took to lying on the couch playing ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ while I cooked dinner. She made herself at home by moving items of furniture around while I was out for the day and sticking magazine cut-outs on the mirrors. She took a great interest in getting to know the neighbourhood. We stopped into the butcher’s one day for mince and Bobbi asked the guy behind the counter how his hand was. I had no idea what she was talking about, I didn’t even know she’d been in the place before, but I did notice the guy was wearing a blue cast on his wrist. Stop, he said. Needs surgery now and everything. He was shovelling red meat into a plastic bag. Oh no, said Bobbi. When will that be? He told her Christmas. Fucked if I’m getting a day off either, the guy said. You’d have to be across in Massey’s before you get a day off in this place. He handed her the bag of meat and added: in your coffin.
The profile was published just before classes started up again. I went to Easons the morning it came out and flicked through the magazine looking for my name. I stopped at a full-page photograph of Bobbi and me, taken in the garden in Étables. I had no recollection of Melissa taking such a photograph. It depicted us sitting at the breakfast table together, me leaning over as if to whisper something in Bobbi’s ear, and Bobbi was laughing. It was an arresting image, the light was beautiful, and it conveyed spontaneity and warmth in a way the earlier posed photographs hadn’t. I wondered what Bobbi would say about it. The article that followed was a short, admiring account of our spoken word performances and of the spoken word scene in Dublin generally. Our friends read it and said the photograph was flattering, and Sunny sent me a nice email about it. For a while, Philip liked to carry a copy of the magazine around and read from it in a phony accent, but that joke exhausted itself eventually. Pieces like this were published in small magazines all the time, and anyway Bobbi and I hadn’t performed together in months.
Once term started, I had academic work to keep me busy again. Philip and I walked to seminars together having minor disagreements about various nineteenth-century novelists, which always ended with him saying things like: look, you’re probably right. One evening Bobbi and I called Melissa to thank her for the article. We put her on speakerphone so we could sit at the table to talk. Melissa told us all about what we’d missed in Étables, the thunderstorms, and the day they went to visit the castle, things I had already heard about. We told her we had moved in together and she sounded pleased. Bobbi said: we must have you over some time. And Melissa said that would be lovely. She told us they were coming home the next day. I pulled my sleeve over my hand and rubbed absent-mindedly at a little stain on the tabletop.
I continued to read through my log of conversations with Bobbi, entering search terms which seemed wilfully calculated to annoy me. Searching for the word ‘feelings’ unearthed this conversation, from our second year of college:
Bobbi: well you don’t really talk about your feelings
me: you’re committed to this view of me
me: as having some kind of undisclosed emotional life
me: I’m just not very emotional
me: I don’t talk about it because there’s nothing to talk about
Bobbi: i don’t think ‘unemotional’ is a quality someone can have
Bobbi: that’s like claiming not to have thoughts
me: you live an emotionally intense life so you think everyone else does
me: and if they’re not talking about it then they’re hiding something
Bobbi: well, ok
Bobbi: we differ on that
Not all the exchanges were like this. The ‘feelings’ search also brought up the following conversation, from January:
me: I mean I always had negative feelings about authority figures
me: but really only when I met you did I formulate the feelings into beliefs
me: you know what I mean
Bobbi: you would have gotten there on your own though
Bobbi: you have a communist intuition
me: well no, I probably only hated authority because I resent being told what to do
me: if not for you I could have become a cult leader
me: or an ayn rand fan
Bobbi: hey, i resent being told what to do!!
me: yes but out of spiritual purity
me: not a will to power
Bobbi: you are in many ways, the very worst psychologist
I remembered having this conversation; I remembered how effortful it felt, the sense that Bobbi was misunderstanding me, or even intentionally averting her gaze from what I was trying to say. I’d been sitting in the upstairs bedroom in my mother’s house, under the quilt, and my hands were cold. Having spent Christmas in Ballina away from Bobbi, I wanted to tell her that I missed her. That was what I had started to say, or thought about saying.
*
Nick came over to the apartment a few days after they got back, an afternoon when Bobbi was busy with lectures. When I let him in we looked at one another for a couple of seconds and it felt like drinking cold water. He was tanned, his hair was fairer than before. Oh, fuck, you look so good, I said. That made him laugh. His teeth were gorgeously white. He glanced around at the hall and said: yeah, nice apartment. It’s pretty central, what’s the rent like? I said my dad’s brother owned it and he looked at me and said: oh, you little trust fund baby. You didn’t tell me your family had property in the Liberties. The whole building or just the apartment? I punched his arm lightly and said: just the apartment. He touched my hand and then we were kissing again, and under my breath I was saying: yes, yes.
21
The following week, Bobbi and I went to the launch of a book in which one of Melissa’s essays appeared. The event was in Temple Bar, and I knew that Melissa and Nick would be there together. I selected a blouse that Nick particularly liked, and left it partly unbuttoned so my collarbone was visible. I spent several minutes carefully disguising the small blemishes on my face with make-up and powder. When Bobbi was ready to go she knocked on the bathroom door and said: come on. She didn’t comment on my appearance. She was wearing a grey turtleneck and looked much better than I did anyway.
Nick and I had seen each other a couple of times during the week, always while Bobbi was at lectures. He brought me little gifts when he visited. One day he brought ice cream, and on Wednesday a box of doughnuts from the booth on O’Connell Street. The doughnuts were still hot when he arrived and we ate them with coffee and talked. He asked me if I had been in touch with my father lately, and I wiped a crust of sugar from my lips and said: I don’t think he’s doing too well. I told Nick about the house. Jesus, he said. That sounds traumatic. I swallowed a mouthful of coffee. Yeah, I said. It was upsetting.
After this conversation I asked myself why it was that I could talk to Nick about my father, even though I’d never been able to broach the subject with Bobbi. It was true that Nick was an intelligent listener, and I often felt better after we spoke, but those things were true of Bobbi too. It was more that Nick’s sympathy seemed unconditional, like he rooted for me regardless of how I acted, whereas Bobbi had strong principles that she applied to everyone, me included. I didn’t fear Nick’s bad judgement like I did Bobbi’s. He was happy to listen to me even when my thoughts were inconclusive, even when I told stories about my own behaviour that showed me in an unflattering light.
Nick wore nice clothes when he visited the apartment, like he always did, clothes I suspected were expensive. Instead of leaving them on the floor when he undressed, he folded them over the back of my bedroom chair. He liked to wear pale-coloured shirts, sometimes linen ones that looked vaguely rumpled, sometimes Oxford shirts with button-downs, always worn with the sleeves rolled back over his forearms. He had a canvas golf jacket he seemed to like a lot, but on cold days he
wore a grey cashmere coat with blue silk lining. I loved this coat, I loved how it smelled. It had only a shallow lip of collar and a single row of buttons.
On Wednesday I tried the coat on while Nick was in the bathroom. I got out of bed and slipped my naked arms through the sleeves, feeling the cool silk run over my skin. The pockets were heavy with personal items: his phone and wallet, his keys. I weighed them in my hands like they were mine. I gazed at myself in the mirror. Inside Nick’s coat my body looked very slim and pale, a white wax candle. He came back into the room and laughed at me in a good-natured way. He always dressed to go to the bathroom in case Bobbi came home unexpectedly. Our eyes met in the mirror.
You’re not keeping it, he said.
I like it.
Unfortunately, I like it too.
Was it expensive? I said.
We were still looking at each other in the mirror. He stood behind me and lifted the coat open with his fingers. I watched him looking at me.
It was, uh … he said. I don’t remember how much it was.
A thousand euro?
What? No. Two or three hundred maybe.
I wish I had money, I said.
He slipped his hand inside the coat then and touched my breast. The sexual way you talk about money is kind of interesting, he said. Though also disturbing, obviously. You don’t want me to give you money, do you?
In a way I do, I said. But I wouldn’t necessarily trust that impulse.
Yeah, it’s weird. I have money that I don’t urgently need, and I would rather you had it. But the transaction of giving it to you would bother me.
You don’t like to feel too powerful. Or you don’t like to be reminded how powerful you like to feel.