by Sally Rooney
Oh, you are drunk, she said.
I know, yeah. I said that in the messages.
He tried to open her dressing gown again and she folded her arms tightly to prevent him.
Here, what’s the problem? he said. Are you on your period or something? I don’t care if you are, I’m a grown-up.
Alice retied her dressing gown grimly and said: You’re trying to embarrass me.
No, no. I’m just wondering what’s the matter. I’m not trying anything, I’m happy to be here. The taxi driver was very impressed I had a girlfriend who lived in such a big house.
Alice looked up at him and finally said: Are you on drugs?
God yeah, he said. Wouldn’t be much of a night out if I wasn’t.
She stood there with her arms folded. I don’t know, she said. Would other people let you behave like this? Other girlfriends or boyfriends you’ve had. Is this normal? You go out with your friends and get hammered and then show up in the middle of the night looking for sex?
He seemed to consider this, leaning his arm against the wall beside her head. I would often give it a go, yeah, he said. Not everyone would be up for it, obviously.
Right. You must think I’m a complete fucking idiot.
No, I think you’re highly intelligent. It’s not lucky for you, in a lot of ways. If you were a little bit stupider you might have an easier life.
He stood up straight and put his hands on her hips, in a way that seemed to convey fondness and even contrition.
The taxi driver told me you were going to fuck me out of it, Felix said. He told me, no way is she going to let you call around at this hour of the night looking like that. What I look like, I don’t actually know, I haven’t seen myself. But I can imagine not good.
You just look drunk.
Ah, do I? I don’t know, I suppose I shouldn’t have texted you. The stupid thing is, I was actually having a good night. I mean, okay, I went a bit overboard getting sick, but I was having a good time other than that. And you were probably having a fine time as well, lying in bed or whatever. So I shouldn’t have texted you really.
Right, but you felt like having sex, she said.
Well, I’m only human. Nah, but if that’s all I was after I could have gone elsewhere, couldn’t I? No need to bother you just for that.
She shut her eyes and said in a quiet, inexpressive voice: I’m sure that’s true.
Alice, don’t be looking so serious, he said. I haven’t been off with anyone else. Obviously I could if I wanted to, but so could you. Look, I’m sorry if I’ve annoyed you, alright?
For a moment she said nothing.
And you probably don’t like being around drunk people anyway, he said.
No, I don’t.
No, why would you? I’d say you had enough of that growing up.
She stared up at him and he kept his hands on her hips, holding her against the wall.
Yes, I did, she said.
If you want me to go home, just say.
She shook her head. He kissed her again. They went upstairs together, Alice holding Felix’s hand and following behind him. In her room he took off her dressing gown and lifted her nightdress off over her head. She lay back on the bed and he went down on her. Her body looked compact, androgynous. She pressed her hand flat over her mouth. He broke off then to undress himself and take his watch off. Looking down at her where she lay stretched out naked on the mattress, he said with a smile: Do you know what you look like? One of those girl statues we saw in Rome.
She laughed and covered her face.
Is that not nice? he said. It was meant nicely.
She said it was. He lay down beside her, his head propped up on the pillows, his hand toying idly with her small soft breast.
I was thinking about you at work today, he said. I find it makes me feel a bit better for a while but then I actually feel worse, because you’re lying around here all day and I’m stuck in a warehouse packing boxes. Not that I’m put out with you about it. I’m not going to be able to explain this the right way, but the difference between what we’re doing right now and what I do all day, I actually can’t describe. It’s hard to believe I have to use the same body for both things, I’ll say it like that. And it doesn’t feel like the same. These hands touching you now, I use them to pack boxes? I don’t know. At work my hands are fucking freezing all the time. And like, basically numb. Even if you wear gloves they go numb eventually, everyone says that. Sometimes I’ll get a little cut or a scrape or something and I won’t even notice until I see it’s bleeding. And these are the same hands touching you? I don’t know, you probably think I’m off my head talking like that. But you’re very, very soft and nice to touch, that’s all. And warm. When you let me come inside you, I feel so good, I can’t even describe. I was thinking about that at work today and I wanted it so much I started getting annoyed. Like, annoyed, yeah, pissed off. That’s the other thing I will say about work, your feelings get really messed up in there. You start feeling things that make no sense. I should have been looking forward to seeing you, but I actually felt pissed off. And then I didn’t even want to see you anymore. There’s no point trying to explain it because it doesn’t make any sense, I’m just saying what I felt. I’m sorry.
She told him it was okay. For a little while he kissed her and said nothing. Then he asked if she would go on top because he was tired, and she said yes. Once he was inside her she was still for a few seconds, breathing hard. Okay? he said. She nodded. He looked content to wait. You have such a perfect cunt, he said. A shudder dropped over her, from her head down to her pelvic bone. She put a hand on his shoulder. They fucked slowly for a couple of minutes while he touched her. In a high uneven voice she said: Oh God, I’m in love with you, I really am. He looked up at her then. Are you, yeah? he said. That’s good. Say it again. Trembling, out of breath, she bent her head low, and said: I love you, I love you. He put his hands around her waist, his fingers pressing into the flesh of her back, and pulled her down hard onto him, again and again quickly, and she was wincing almost as if in pain.
Afterwards they were still for a while, resting against one another. Then she climbed off him, sat on the side of the mattress and took a drink from the water bottle on her bedside table. He lay down with his head nestled among the pillows, watching her. Pass me that when you’re finished, he said. She gave him the bottle and he drank without lifting his head.
Handing the bottle back, he said: Here, I want to know something. You know you’re always saying that you’re rich. What do you mean, are you a millionaire or what?
She screwed the cap back onto the bottle. About that, she said.
He watched her in silence. A million, really, he said. That’s a lot of money.
Yes it is.
All that just from books?
She nodded.
And just sitting in your bank account, or it’s all tied into things? he said.
Rubbing her eyes, she said it was mostly just sitting in her bank account. He was still watching her, his eyes moving quickly and discreetly over her face, her arms, her shoulders. After a time, he said: Come here and tell me you love me again. I could get to like it. With heavy, tired movements she lay back down beside him.
I love you, she said.
And when did you realise this? Love at first sight kind of thing, was it?
No, I don’t think so.
A bit later on, then, he said. In Rome?
She turned to him and he draped his arm over her body. Her eyes were half-closed. His face was thoughtful, alert.
I suppose so, she said.
That’s pretty quick to be falling in love with someone. What was it, maybe three weeks?
Letting her eyes close, she said: About that.
Would that be usual for you?
I don’t know. I don’t fall in love very often.
He lay watching her for a second or two. And vice versa, I assume, he said.
She smiled faintly and said: People don’t fall
in love with me very often, you mean? No, indeed they don’t.
And you don’t seem to have many friends either, he said.
She stopped smiling then. She turned to look at Felix in silence for several seconds while all expression emptied from her features. Then she said simply: No, I suppose not.
No, yeah. Because since you moved in here, I don’t think anyone’s been to see you, have they? Your family haven’t. And your friend Eileen, you talk about her a lot, but she hasn’t bothered. I think I’m the only person who’s been in the house since you arrived, would that be right? And you’re here at least a few months.
Alice stared at him and said nothing. He seemed to take this as permission to continue, and tucked his arm up under his pillow thoughtfully.
I was thinking about it over in Italy, he said. Watching you do your reading and your autographs and all that. I wouldn’t go so far as to say you work hard, because your job’s a laugh compared to mine. But you have a lot of people wanting things off you. And I just think, for all the fuss they make over you, none of them actually care about you one bit. I don’t know if anyone does.
They looked at one another for several long seconds. As Felix watched her, his initial self-assurance, even sadistic triumph, changed gradually into something else, as if recognising too late his own misapprehension.
You must really hate me, she said coolly.
No, I don’t, he replied. But I don’t love you either.
Of course not. Why should you? I wasn’t deluded about that.
She turned over then, quite calmly, and switched off the lamp on the bedside locker. The darkness dissolved their faces and only the outlines of their bodies were visible under the sheets. Neither of them moved at all and every line, every shadow in the room was still.
You can leave if you’d like, she said. But you’re welcome to stay. You might flatter yourself you’ve hurt me very badly, but I can promise you I’ve been through worse.
He lay there in silence, not responding.
And when I said I loved you I was telling the truth, she added.
He made a noise that sounded like a strangled laugh, and then said: Ah, I like your style. I’ll give you that. You’re not easy to get the upper hand on, are you? Obviously I’m not going to manage it. It’s funny, because you carry on like you’d let me walk all over you, answering my texts at two in the morning, and then telling me you’re in love with me, blah blah blah. But that’s all your way of saying, just try and catch me, because you won’t. And I can see I won’t. You’re not going to let me have it for a minute. Nine times out of ten you’d have someone fooled with the way you go on. They’d be delighted with themselves, thinking they were really the boss of you. Yeah, yeah, but I’m not an idiot. You’re only letting me act badly because it puts you above me, and that’s where you like to be. Above, above. And I don’t take it personally, by the way, I don’t think you’d let anyone near you. Actually, I respect it. You’re looking out for yourself, and I’m sure you have your reasons. I’m sorry I was so harsh on you with what I said, because you were right, I was just trying to hurt you. And I probably did hurt you, big deal. Anyone can hurt anyone if they go out of their way. But then instead of getting mad with me, you go saying I’m welcome to stay over and you still love me and all this. Because you have to be perfect, don’t you? No, you really have a way about you, I must say. And I’m sorry, alright? I won’t be trying to take a jab at you again. Lesson learned. But from now on you don’t need to act like you’re under my thumb, when we both know I’m nowhere near you. Alright?
Another long silence fell. Their faces were invisible in darkness. Eventually, in a high and strained voice, straining perhaps for an evenness or lightness it did not attain, she replied: Alright.
If I ever do get a hold of you, you won’t need to tell me, he said. I’ll know. But I’m not going to chase too much. I’ll just stay where I am and see if you come to me.
Yes, that’s what hunters do with deer, she said. Before they kill them.
22.
Eileen, I’m sorry if my last email alarmed you. I did cancel all my public engagements for several months, as you know, but I was always planning to go back to work eventually. Surely you understand that this is my job? No one finds that fact more tiresome and degrading than I do, but I never meant you to think that I had actually retired from public life altogether. You have never been off work sick for more than four days at a time, so I should think my taking four months off would strike you as a pretty protracted break. And yes, I did fly out of Dublin, and back into Dublin again, at seven in the morning and one in the morning respectively. Since you also have a job, at which I understand you keep regular hours, I didn’t think waking you up in the middle of the night for a quick cup of tea and a chat would have been particularly polite. You can’t possibly think I don’t want to see you, since I have been asking you repeatedly for months on end to come and visit me, and I only live three hours away. As for the unanswered text message from Roisin, I’m confused—are you writing to me personally, or in your capacity as friendship ambassador for the greater Dublin region? You’re right, I didn’t reply to her text, because I’ve been busy. With all due love and affection, I don’t intend to file a report with you every time I fall behind on my correspondence.
As for the rest of your message: what exactly do you mean when you say ‘beauty’? You wrote that to confuse personal vanity with aesthetic experience is a grave mistake. But is it another mistake, and maybe a related one, to take aesthetic experience seriously in the first place? No doubt it is possible to be moved in a personally disinterested way by artistic beauty or by the beauty of the natural world. I even think it’s possible to enjoy the good looks of other people, their faces and bodies, in a way that’s ‘purely’ aesthetic, i.e. without the element of desire. Personally I often find people beautiful to look at without feeling any inclination to draw them into a particular relationship with myself—in fact I don’t find beauty much of an inducement to desire anyway. In other words I exercise no volition in perceiving beauty and I experience no conscious will as a result. This I suppose is what the Enlightenment philosophers meant by aesthetic judgement, and it corresponds rightly enough to the kind of experience I’ve had with certain works of visual art, passages of music, scenic vistas, and so on. I find them beautiful, and their beauty moves me and gives me a pleasurable feeling. I agree that the spectacle of mass consumerism marketed to us as ‘beauty’ is in reality hideous and gives me none of the aesthetic pleasure I get from, e.g., sunlight falling through leaves, or the ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’, or ‘Kind of Blue’. But I’m inclined to ask: so what? Even if we suppose that the beauty of ‘Kind of Blue’ is in some sense objectively superior to the beauty of a Chanel handbag, which philosophically speaking is a lot of ground to give, why does it matter? You seem to think that aesthetic experience is, rather than merely pleasurable, somehow important. And what I want to know is: important in what way?
I’m not a painter or a musician, for good reason, but I am a novelist, and I do try to take the novel seriously—partly because I’m conscious of the extraordinary privilege of being allowed to make a living from something as definitionally useless as art. But if I tried to describe my experience of reading the great novels, it would not be remotely like the aesthetic experience I’ve described above, in which no volition is involved and no personal desires are stirred. Personally I have to exercise a lot of agency in reading, and understanding what I read, and bearing it all in mind for long enough to make sense of the book as I go along. In no sense does it feel like a passive process by which beauty is transmitted to me without my involvement; it feels like an active effort, of which an experience of beauty is the constructed result. But, I think more importantly, great novels engage my sympathies and make me desire things. When I look at the ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’, I don’t ‘want’ anything from it. The pleasure is in seeing it as it is. But when I read books, I do experience desire: I want Isab
el Archer to be happy, I want things to work out for Anna and Vronsky, I even want Jesus to be pardoned instead of Barabbas. Again it might be that I am a narrow-minded and rather vapid reader, sentimentally wishing the best for everyone (except Barabbas); but if I wished the opposite, that Isabel should make a bad marriage, that Anna should throw herself under the train, it would just be a variation on the same experience. The point is that my sympathies are engaged, I’m no longer disinterested.
Have you talked to Simon about any of this? I think you could rely on him to present a more coherent view of the thing than I can, because his worldview has a consistency mine lacks. In Catholic doctrine, as far as my understanding goes, beauty, truth and goodness are properties of being which are one with God. God kind of literally ‘is’ beauty (and also truth, which maybe is what Keats meant, I’m not sure). Humankind strives to possess and understand these properties as a way of turning toward God and understanding his nature; therefore whatever is beautiful leads us toward contemplation of the divine. As critics we may quibble about what is and isn’t beautiful, because we are only human and God’s will isn’t perfectly accessible to us, but we can all agree on the surpassing importance of beauty itself. It’s all very nice and self-contained, isn’t it? I could riff on it a little to explain my sympathetic engagement with the great novels. For example, God made us the way we are, as complex human beings with desires and impulses, and compassionate attachment to purely fictional people—from whom we obviously can’t expect to derive any material satisfaction or advantage—is a way of understanding the deep complexities of the human condition, and thus the complexities of God’s love for us. I can even go further: in his life and death, Jesus emphasised the necessity of loving others without regard to our own self-interest. In a way, when we love fictional characters, knowing that they can never love us in return, is that not a method of practising in miniature the kind of personally disinterested love to which Jesus calls us? I mean that sympathetic engagement is a form of desire with an object but without a subject, a way of wanting without wanting; desiring for others not what I want for myself but the way I want for myself.
