While I let myself into the apartment I thought about Nick entering the room while everybody applauded. This now felt perfect to me, 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.
6
After that we saw Melissa sporadically and she sent us occasional email updates about the profile piece. We didn’t visit her at home again, but we ran into her now and then at literary events. I usually speculated in advance about whether she or Nick might attend a particular thing, because I liked them, and I liked having other people observe their warmth toward me. They introduced me to editors and agents who acted very charmed to meet me and who asked interested questions about my work. Nick was always friendly, and even praised me to other people sometimes, but he never seemed particularly eager to engage me in conversation again, and I got used to meeting his eye without feeling startled.
Bobbi and I went along to these events together, but for Bobbi it was really only Melissa’s attention that mattered. At a book launch on Dawson Street she told Nick she had ‘nothing against actors’， and he was like, oh thanks Bobbi, that’s so generous of you. When he attended on his own once, Bobbi said: just you? Where’s your beautiful wife?
Do I get the sense you don’t like me? said Nick.
It’s nothing personal, I said. She hates men.
If it makes you feel better, I do also personally dislike you, said Bobbi.
Nick and I had started to exchange emails after the night he missed our performance. In the message he’d promised to send about my work, he described a particular image as ‘beautiful’。 It was probably true to say that I had found Nick’s performance in the play ‘beautiful’， though I wouldn’t have written that in an email. Then again his performance was related to the physicality of his existence in a way that a poem, typed in a standard font and forwarded on by someone else, was not. At a certain level of abstraction, anyone could have written the poem, but that didn’t feel true either. It seemed as though what he was really saying was: there’s something beautiful about the way you think and feel, or the way that you experience the world is beautiful in some way. This remark returned to me repeatedly for days after the email arrived. I smiled involuntarily when I thought of it, like I was remembering a private joke.
It was easy to write to Nick, but also competitive and thrilling, like a game of table tennis. We were always being flippant with each other. When he found out my parents lived in Mayo, he wrote:
we used to have a holiday home in Achill （like every other wealthy South Dublin family I’m sure）。
I replied:
I’m glad my ancestral homeland could help nourish your class identity. P.S. It should be illegal to have a holiday home anywhere.
He was the first person I had met since Bobbi who made me enjoy conversation, in the same irrational and sensuous way I enjoyed coffee or loud music. He made me laugh. Once, he mentioned that he and Melissa slept in separate rooms. I didn’t tell Bobbi about that, but I thought about it a lot. I wondered if they still ‘loved’ one another, although it was hard to imagine Nick being that unironic about anything.
He never seemed to go to bed until the early morning, and we increasingly emailed one another late at night. He told me he had studied English and French at Trinity, so we had even had some of the same lecturers. He’d majored in English and had written his final-year dissertation on Caryl Churchill. Sometimes while we talked I typed his name into Google and looked at photographs of him, to remind me what he looked like. I read everything about him on the internet and often emailed him quotes from his own interviews, even after he asked me to stop. He said he found it ‘super embarrassing’。 I said: stop emailing me at 3.34 a.m. then （don’t actually）。 He replied: me email a 21 year old in the middle of the night? i don’t know what you’re talking about. i would never do that.
One night at the launch of a new poetry anthology, Melissa and I were left alone in a conversation with a male novelist whose books I had never read. The others had gone to get drinks. We were in a bar somewhere off Dame Street and my feet hurt because I was wearing shoes that I knew were too small. The novelist asked me who I liked to read and I shrugged. I wondered if I could just remain silent until he left me alone, or if this would be a mistake, since I didn’t know how acclaimed his books were.