After a few minutes, she came back into the bathroom holding her phone outstretched toward me.
It’s Nick, she said.
What?
Nick’s on the phone for you.
My hands were wet. I lifted one of them out of the water and reached to dry it clumsily on a bathtowel before accepting the phone from her hand. She left the room again.
Hey, are you okay? said Nick’s voice.
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.
I’m feeling all right now, I said. Thank you.
Bobbi told me what happened. It must have been really frightening.
For a few seconds neither of us said anything, and then we both started speaking.
You first, I said.
He told me he would like to come and see me. I said he was welcome to. He asked if I needed anything and I said no.
Okay, he said. I’ll get in the car. What were you going to say?
I’ll tell you when I see you.
I hung up and carefully placed the phone on the dry part of the bathmat. Then I closed my eyes again and let the warmth of the water into my body, the synthetic fruit scent of shampoo, the hard plastic of the tub, the fog of steam that wet my face. I was meditating. I was counting my breaths.
After what seemed like a long time, fifteen minutes or half an hour, Bobbi came back in. I opened my eyes and the room was very bright, radiantly bright, and strangely beautiful. All okay? Bobbi said. I told her Nick was coming over and she said: good. She sat on the side of the bath and I watched her take a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from her cardigan.
What she said to me after she lit the cigarette was: are you going to write a book? I realised then that she hadn’t answered Philip’s questions about our performances because on some level she knew that something had changed, that I was working on something new. The fact that she had noticed this gave me a kind of confidence but also served to demonstrate that nothing about me was impenetrable to Bobbi. When it came to sordid or mundane things, she might be slow to notice, but real changes that occurred inside me were never hidden from her.
I don’t know, I said. Are you?
She screwed one eye shut like it was bothering her and then opened it again.
Why would I write a book? she said. I’m not a writer.
What are you going to do? After we graduate.
I don’t know. Work in a university if I can.
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.
What do you mean ‘if’？ I said.
This was too obvious, and for a while Bobbi said nothing and picked a loose hair off the sleeve of her cardigan instead.
I thought you were planning to bring down global capitalism, I said.
Well, not on my own. Someone has to do the small jobs.
I just don’t see you as a small-jobs person.
That’s what I am, she said.
I didn’t really know what I’d meant by a ‘small-jobs person’。 I believed in small jobs, like raising children, picking fruit, cleaning. They were the jobs I considered the most valuable, the jobs that struck me as deserving the most respect of all. It confused me that suddenly I was telling Bobbi that a job in a university wasn’t good enough for her, but it also confused me to imagine Bobbi doing something so sedate and ordinary. My skin was the same temperature as the water, and I moved one knee outside, into the cold air, before dipping it back down again.
Well, you’ll be a world-famous professor, I said. You’ll lecture at the Sorbonne.
No.
She seemed irritable, almost about to express something, but then her eyes became calm and remote.
You think everyone you like is special, she said.
I tried to sit up and the bathtub was hard on my bones.
I’m just a normal person, she said. When you get to like someone, you make them feel like they’re different from everyone else. You’re doing it with Nick, you did it with me once.
No.
She looked up at me, without any cruelty or anger at all, and said: I’m not trying to upset you.