"Conversations with Friends"

[fiefoe]

After the torturous "Madam Bovary", it's nice to be reminded that novels about having affairs can still be a breeze to read. The protagonists are self-aware and likable/flawed in about the right amount, and act their age. The final conversations -- Frances's phone call with Melissa, her letter to Bobbie and her call with Nick at the very end -- pay off handsomely. They manage to both clear the air and open up for more possibilities. No wonder Sally Rooney is considered a wunderkind.
#adultery_as_self-actualization

• Next to the door was a low table where someone had left a stack of change, a hairbrush and an open tube of lipstick. There was a Modigliani print hanging over the staircase, a nude woman reclining. I thought: this is a whole house. A family could live here.
• He’s very tall, Bobbi said.
  Melissa smiled as if ‘tall’ was a euphemism for something, but not necessarily something flattering.
• I remember that we talked about the poet Patricia Lockwood, who we admired, and also about what Bobbi disparagingly called ‘pay gap feminism’.
• She was radiantly attractive, which meant everyone had to work hard not to pay her any attention.
• Bobbi gave me some more of her vodka and asked me if I liked girls. It was very easy to act unfazed around her. I just said: sure. <> I wasn’t betraying anyone’s loyalties by being Bobbi’s girlfriend.
• Sometimes when I was doing something dull, like walking home from work or hanging up laundry, I liked to imagine that I looked like Bobbi. She had better posture than I did, and a memorably beautiful face. The pretence was so real to me that when I accidentally caught sight of my reflection and saw my own appearance, I felt a strange, depersonalising shock.
• Although I couldn’t specify why exactly, I felt certain that Melissa was less interested in our writing process now that she knew I wrote the material alone. I knew the subtlety of this change would be enough for Bobbi to deny it later, which irritated me as if it had already happened.
• He hardly opened his mouth.
  Yeah, he had a humorous silence about him.
• I enjoyed playing this kind of character, the smiling girl who remembered things. Bobbi told me she thought I didn’t have a ‘real personality’, but she said she meant it as a compliment. Mostly I agreed with her assessment. At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterwards think: oh, so that’s the kind of person I am.
• but I was glad the poems were only ever performed and never published. They floated away ethereally to the sound of applause. Real writers, and also painters, had to keep on looking at the ugly things they had done for good.
• 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.
• 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.
• My face was plain, but I was so extremely thin as to look interesting, and I chose my clothing to emphasise this effect.
• so perfect that I was glad he had missed the performance. Maybe having him witness how much others approved of me, without taking any of the risks necessary to earn Nick’s personal approval, made me feel capable of speaking to him again, as if I also was an important person with lots of admirers like he was, as if there was nothing inferior about me. But the acclaim also felt like part of the performance itself, the best part, and the most pure expression of what I was trying to do, which was to make myself into this kind of person: someone worthy of praise, worthy of love.
• I was very aware of Nick standing at my elbow, though I couldn’t see his expression. I knew how badly I wanted to remain in control of the conversation.
  Yeah, men love telling me I’m cool, I said. They just want me to act like I’ve never heard it before.
• During his periods of contrition he tried to make conversation with me about school and I had to choose between humouring and ignoring him. Humouring him made me feel dishonest and weak, a soft target. Ignoring him made my heart beat very hard and afterwards I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. Also it made my mother cry.
• When we saw one another at events Melissa and I increasingly avoided making eye contact. She and Bobbi whispered in each other’s ears and laughed, like they were in school. I didn’t have the courage to really dislike her, but I knew I wanted to.
• We followed her into the kitchen, which was dim and full of music and people wearing long necklaces. Everything looked clean and spacious.
• I wanted Nick to come back into the room, so I could look at him across the countertop. Instead I looked at Melissa and thought: I hate you. This idea just came from nowhere, like a joke or an exclamation. I didn’t even know if I really hated her, but the words felt and sounded right, like the lyrics to a song I had just remembered.
• Then I read his email again several times. I was relieved he had put the whole thing in lower case like he always did. It would have been dramatic to introduce capitalisation at such a moment of tension.
• After that I went back and forth on the question of whether to tell Bobbi that I had kissed Nick. I had, regardless of my ultimate decision, meticulously rehearsed the way I would tell her about it, which details I would emphasise and which I would leave out.
  I could tell that I was using the Bobbi character mainly to reassure myself that Nick was interested in me, and I knew in real life Bobbi wouldn’t react that way at all, so I stopped.
• Often I found myself believing that if I looked like Bobbi, nothing bad would happen to me. It wouldn’t be like waking up with a new, strange face: it would be like waking up with a face I already knew, the face I already imagined was mine, and so it would feel natural.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
  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.
• but really, nick? is that your thing now? i just feel like he probably unironically reads articles called ‘one weird trick for perfect abs’
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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
• 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’.
• In my anger I even began searching my emails and texts for ‘evidence’ of our affair, which consisted of a few boring logistical messages about when he would be back in the house and what time I might arrive. There were no passionate declarations of love or sexually graphic text messages. This made sense, because the affair was conducted in real life and not online, but I felt robbed of something anyway.
• In a way I was appalled too, but also fascinated. Before that summer I’d had no idea I was the kind of person who would accept an invitation like this from a woman whose husband I’d repeatedly slept with. This information was morbidly interesting to me.
• Equally, I struggled to make conversation with people of my own parents’ background, afraid that my vowels sounded pretentious or my large flea-market coat made me look rich.
• In terms of verbal declarations, ‘I didn’t dream about her at night’ was the first thing I could remember him saying that implied I had any special status to him at all.
• Evelyn kept saying: some of these people have degrees, these are doctors and professors we’re talking about. I had noticed before this tendency of people to emphasise the qualifications of refugees.
• An adult woman, okay, said Bobbi. And do you think you’d find her attractive in a swimsuit?
  Nick looked at Bobbi for an excruciatingly long second, and then put the piece of paper down.
  Bobbi already knows who it is, said Nick.
  We all know who it is, Melissa said quietly.
• It’s not like him, she said. But I guess you’re his type.
  I looked down at our feet, I felt dizzy.
  Or am I flattering myself? she said.
  I met her eye then, and I realised she was trying to make me laugh. I did laugh, out of gratitude for her kindness and her apparent trust.
• The roses had huge, sensuous petals and tight, unrevealing centres, like some kind of sexual nightmare.
• I gripped her wrist when she pulled away, trying to stare at her, but it was too dark. She slipped out of my grasp like a thought.
• Outside the kitchen window the leaves dripped rain like squares of watered silk.
• I had never seen anything like this before and it scared me so badly that the only comforting idea I could think of was: maybe it’s not happening. I kept returning to this thought every time I felt myself starting to panic, as if going insane and hallucinating an alternate reality was less frightening than what was really going on.


• Then I looked at him and said: I mean he didn’t come inside me, am I not being clear? He looked back down at his clipboard then. We hated each other energetically, I could see that.
• A searing anxiety developed inside me at this thought, in the same form it always took no matter what external stimulus triggered it: first the realisation that I would die, then that everyone else would die, and then that the universe itself would eventually experience heat death, a kind of thought sequence that expanded outward endlessly in forms too huge to be contained inside my body. I trembled, my hands were clammy, and I felt sure I would be sick again. I punched my leg meaninglessly as if that would prevent the death of the universe.
• The non-existent baby entered a new category of non-existence, that is, things which had not stopped existing but in fact had never existed.
• I worried that if I did turn out to have a personality, it would be one of the unkind ones. Did I only worry about this question because as a woman I felt required to put the needs of others before my own? Was ‘kindness’ just another term for submission in the face of conflict? These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right not to love anyone.
• I wanted to explain that I didn’t know how much I was allowed to feel about it, or how much of what I felt at the time I was still allowed to feel in retrospect. I panicked, I wanted to tell her. I started thinking about the heat death of the universe again. I called Nick and then hung up on him. But these were all things I did because I thought something was happening to me which turned out not to happen. The idea of the baby, with all its huge emotional gravity and its potential for lasting grief, had disappeared into nothing.
• I loved when he was available to me like this, when our relationship was like a Word document which we were writing and editing together, or a long private joke which nobody else could understand. I liked to feel that he was my collaborator.
• Bobbi: i don’t think ‘unemotional’ is a quality someone can have
  Bobbi: that’s like claiming not to have thoughts
• I think you would miss it too.
  Being dominated? Of course I would. That’s like foreplay for us. You say cryptic things I don’t understand, I give inadequate responses, you laugh at me, and then we have sex.
• But I mean you don’t have a vulnerable personality. Like, I find it hard to imagine you trying on clothes.
• I was gripped by a sudden and overwhelming urge to say: I love you, Nick. It wasn’t a bad feeling, specifically; it was slightly amusing and crazy, like when you stand up from your chair and suddenly realise how drunk you are. But it was true.
• He’s fucking married, said Philip.
  Don’t be a moralist, Bobbi said. That’s all we need.
  I just continued folding my mouth up smaller and smaller and didn’t look at anyone.
  Is he going to leave his wife? said Philip.
  Bobbi scrubbed at her eye with a fist. Quietly and with a tiny mouth I said: no.
• I closed my eyes. He had a gentle tone in his voice and I wanted to climb into it, like it was something hollow I could be suspended inside.
• This phrase, ‘if I can’, made it clear that Bobbi was trying to tell me something serious, something that couldn’t be communicated in words but instead through a shift in the way we related to each other. Not only was it nonsense for Bobbi to say ‘if I can’ at the end of her sentence, because she came from a wealthy family, read diligently and had good grades, but it didn’t make sense in the context of our relationship either. Bobbi didn’t relate to me in the ‘if I can’ sense. She related to me as a person, maybe the only person, who understood her ferocious and frightening power over circumstances and people. What she wanted, she could have, I knew that.
• There’s that beautiful coat, I said. He was wearing it. He smiled, he rubbed at one of his eyes. I was worried about you, he said. I’m glad you’re feeling well enough to fetishise commodities as usual.
• We were silent for a few seconds. I felt blissfully tired, like each cell in my body was winding down into a deep private sleep of its own.
• Equally if you’re sleeping with him because you believe his affection proves you to be a good person, or even a smart or attractive person, you should know that Nick is not primarily attracted to good-looking or morally worthy people. He likes partners who take complete responsibility for all his decisions, that’s all. You will not be able to draw a sustainable sense of self-respect from this relationship you’re in.
• Has he ever used the search term ‘teen’? These are things I didn’t have to think about before you came into our lives. Now I wonder if he hates me. I didn’t hate him when it was me seeing someone else; in fact I think I liked him more, but if he tried to tell me that I’d want to spit at him.
• Now that I know it was just jealousy & fear, I feel differently about you. But you don’t need to be jealous, Frances. For Nick you’re probably indistinguishable from happiness. I don’t doubt that he considers you the great love of his adult life. He & I never had a tempestuous affair behind anyone’s back. I know I can’t ask him to stop seeing you, although I want to. I could ask you to stop seeing him, but why should I?
• But I always said I wanted him to be happy, & now I know it was true all along. I do want that. Even when it looks like this I still want it.
• It seemed like an affectation on Melissa’s part not to include paragraph breaks, as if she was saying: look at the tide of emotion that has swept over me. I also believed she had edited the email carefully for effect, the effect being: always remember who is the writer, Frances. It is me, and not you.
• I could see I had entered a new social setting now, where severe mental illness no longer had unfashionable connotations. I was going through a second upbringing: learning a new set of assumptions, and feigning a greater level of understanding than I really possessed. By this logic Nick and Melissa were like my parents bringing me into the world, probably hating and loving me even more than my original parents did.
• She asked Melissa: who’s prettier, Nick or me? Melissa looked at me and in an arch tone she replied: I love all my children equally. Bobbi’s relationship with Nick affected me in a curious way. Seeing them together, each giving the other all of their attention, gave me a weird aesthetic thrill. Physically they were perfect, like twins.
• Bobbi thought the fetishisation of ‘untouched nature’ was intrinsically patriarchal and nationalistic. I like houses better than fields, I observed. They’re more poetic, because they have people in them.
• I told him that Melissa thought he was ‘pathologically submissive’ and he said it would be a mistake to assume that meant he was powerless in relationships with women. He told me he thought helplessness was often a way of exercising power.
• Listening to Bobbi theorise in this way was exciting. She spoke in clear, brilliant sentences, like she was making shapes in the air out of glass or water.
• It feels strange, he said, hearing myself talk about it like I was the main character. It almost feels like I’m lying, although I think everything I said was true. But Melissa would tell it differently.
• All sick people were good for in the Bible was to be healed by people who were well.
• I had the sense that something in my life had ended, my image of myself as a whole or normal person maybe. I realised my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn’t make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn’t make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful. Nothing would.
• The grey notebook even helped me to feel out the contours of words like ‘moderate’ and ‘severe’, which no longer felt ambiguous but definitive and categorical. I paid so much attention to myself that everything I experienced came to seem like a symptom.
• He hung up. I closed my eyes and felt all the furniture in my room begin to disappear, like a backwards game of Tetris, lifting up toward the top of the screen and then vanishing, and the next thing that would vanish would be me.
• I started to feel better then, as if my privacy extended all around me like a barrier protecting my body. I was a very autonomous and independent person with an inner life that nobody else had ever touched or perceived.
• Me, all the clothing I wear, all the language I know. Who put me here in this church, thinking these thoughts? Other people, some I know very well and others I have never met. Am I myself, or am I them? Is this me, Frances? No, it is not me. It is the others. Do I sometimes hurt and harm myself, do I abuse the unearned cultural privilege of whiteness, do I take the labour of others for granted, have I sometimes exploited a reductive iteration of gender theory to avoid serious moral engagement, do I have a troubled relationship with my body, yes. Do I want to be free of pain and therefore demand that others also live free of pain, the pain which is mine and therefore also theirs, yes, yes.
• Hello? said Melissa.
  Can we talk for a second? Or is it a bad time?
  She laughed, or at least I think that’s the noise she was making.
  You mean generally or right now? she said. Generally it’s a bad time, but right now is fine.
• Suddenly I’m looking around my own fucking house, thinking: is this sofa ugly? Is it kitsch to drink wine? And things I felt good about before started to make me feel pathetic. Having a husband instead of just fucking someone else’s husband. Having a book deal instead of writing nasty short stories about people I know and selling them to prestigious magazines.
• Okay. I didn’t like you either. But you weren’t a very nice person.
  We both paused then, like we had just raced each other up a set of stairs and we were out of breath and thinking about how foolish it was.
  I regret that, I said. I regret not being nicer. I should have tried harder to be your friend.
• I’m sorry my story hurt your feelings. I think the reason it hurt is because it showed I could be honest with someone else even when I wasn’t honest with you. I hope that’s the reason. I called Melissa on the phone tonight asking her why she sent the story to you. It took me some time to realise that what I was really asking was: why did I write the story?
• When you broke up with me I felt you beat me at a game we were playing together, and I wanted to come back and beat you. Now I think I just want to sleep with you, without metaphors. That doesn’t mean I don’t have other desires... To love someone under capitalism you have to love everyone. Is that theory or just theology?
• We talked about our break-up for the first time that night. It felt like opening a door that’s been inside your own house all along, a door that you walk past every day and try never to think about.
• Of course it’s really about power, Bobbi agreed. But it’s harder to work out who has the power, so instead we rely on ‘niceness’ as a kind of stand-in.
• You underestimate your own power so you don’t have to blame yourself for treating other people badly. You tell yourself stories about it. Oh well, Bobbi’s rich, Nick’s a man, I can’t hurt these people. If anything they’re out to hurt me and I’m defending myself.
• Too sincere, he said. Needy. I’m thinking, how do you flatter your ex-girlfriend, but in a kind of aloof way?
• I think you should tell her. You can’t control what she thinks of you anyway. You know, sick or healthy, you’re never going to be able to do that. What you’re doing now is deceiving her just for the illusion of control, which probably isn’t worth it.
• Well, but what does it mean for a relationship to ‘work out’? he said. It was never going to be something conventional.
• You know I went up to my room and waited for you, right? I mean for hours. And at first I really thought you would come. It was probably the most wretched I ever felt in my life, this kind of ecstatic wretchedness that in a way I was practically enjoying.
• I closed my eyes. Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn’t know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position. <> Come and get me, I said.