You’re sorry that I feel that way, okay.
It was just complicated.
Yeah, Bobbi said. I guess extramarital relationships can be.
Are you still my friend?
Yes. So when are you getting this ultrasound thing?
I told her November. I also told her about the doctor asking about unprotected sex, which made her snort. I was sitting on my bed, with my feet under the coverlet. In the mirror on the other wall I could see my left hand, my free hand, moving nervously up and down the seam of a pillowcase. I dropped it and watched it lie dead on the quilt.
Still, I can’t believe Nick would try to get away with not using a condom, Bobbi said. That’s fucked up.
I mumbled something defensive like: oh, we didn’t … you know, it wasn’t really …
I’m not blaming you, she said. I’m surprised at him, that’s all.
I tried to think of something to say. None of the idiotic things we did felt like they were Nick’s fault because he always just followed along with what I suggested.
It was probably my idea, I said.
You sound brainwashed when you talk like that.
No, but he’s actually very passive.
Right, but he could have said no, Bobbi said. Maybe he just likes to act passive so he doesn’t have to take the blame for anything.
In the mirror I noticed that my hand had started doing the thing again. This wasn’t the conversation I was trying to have.
You’re making him sound very calculating, I said.
I didn’t mean he was doing it consciously. Have you told him you were in hospital?
I said no. I felt my mouth opening again to explain about the phone call when he accused me of being drunk, then I decided against telling her, instead pronouncing the phrase: yeah, no.
But you’re close with him, she said. You tell him things.
I don’t know. I don’t know really how close we are.
Well, you tell him more than you tell me.
No, I said. Less than you. He probably thinks I never tell him anything.
That night I decided to start reading over my old instant message conversations with Bobbi. I’d taken on a similar project once before, shortly after our break-up, and now I had whole additional years of messages to read. It comforted me to know that my friendship with Bobbi wasn’t confined to memory alone, and that textual evidence of her past fondness for me would survive her actual fondness if necessary. This had been foremost in my mind at the time of the break-up also, for obvious reasons. It was important to me that Bobbi would never be able to deny that at one point she had liked me very much.
This time I downloaded our exchanges as one huge text file with time stamps. I told myself it was too large to read from start to finish, and it also didn’t take a coherent narrative shape, so I decided to read it by searching for particular words or phrases and reading around them. The first one I tried was ‘love’， which brought up the following exchange, from six months previously:
Bobbi: if you look at love as something other than an interpersonal phenomenon Bobbi: and try to understand it as a social value system Bobbi: it’s both antithetical to capitalism, in that it challenges the axiom of selfishness Bobbi: which dictates the whole logic of inequality
Bobbi: and yet also it’s subservient and facilitatory
Bobbi: i.e. mothers selflessly raising children without any profit motive Bobbi: which seems to contradict the demands of the market at one level Bobbi: and yet actually just functions to provide workers for free me: yes
me: capitalism harnesses ‘love’ for profit
me: love is the discursive practice and unpaid labour is the effect me: but I mean, I get that, I’m anti love as such
Bobbi: that’s vapid frances
Bobbi: you have to do more than say you’re anti things
I got out of bed after I read that exchange and stripped my clothes off to look in the mirror. Periodically I found myself doing this out of a kind of compulsion, though nothing about me ever seemed to change. My hip bones still jutted out unattractively on either side of my pelvis, and my abdomen was still hard and round to the touch. I looked like something that had dropped off a spoon too quickly, before it had time to set. My shoulders were freckled with broken, violet-coloured capillaries. For a while I stood there just looking at myself and feeling my repulsion get deeper and deeper, as if I was experimenting to see how much I could feel. Eventually I heard a ringing noise in my bag and went to try and find it.
When I retrieved my phone it said I’d missed a call from my father. I tried calling back but he didn’t answer. By then I was getting cold so I put all my clothes back on and went downstairs to tell my mother I was going to drop by my father’s house. She was sitting at the table reading the paper; she didn’t look up. Good woman, she said. Tell him I was asking after him.