Frances.
At some point the chocolate cake was gone. I looked into the box and saw crumbs and icing smeared around the paper rim which I had neglected to remove. I got up from the table, put the kettle on, and emptied two spoonfuls of coffee into the French press. I took some painkillers, I drank the coffee, I watched a murder mystery on Netflix. A certain peace had come to me and I wondered if it was God’s doing after all. Not that God existed in any material way but as a shared cultural practice so widespread that it came to seem materially real, like language or gender.
At ten past eleven that night I heard her keys in the door. I went to the hall and she was unzipping her raincoat, the one she had brought to France that summer, and streams of water were trickling down her sleeves and dripping with a light percussive sound onto the floorboards. Our eyes met.
That was a weird email, Bobbi said. But I love you too.
30
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. Bobbi told me I had made her miserable. We were sitting on my bed, Bobbi against the headboard with the pillows propped behind her, me at the foot of the mattress sitting with crossed legs. She said that I’d laughed at her during arguments, like she was a moron. I told her what Melissa said, that I wasn’t a very nice person. Bobbi laughed herself then. Melissa would know, she said. When has she ever been nice to anyone?
Maybe niceness is the wrong metric, I said.
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. I mean this is an issue in public discourse. We end up asking like, is Israel ‘nicer’ than Palestine. You know what I’m saying.
I do.
Jerry is certainly ‘nicer’ than Eleanor.
Yes, I said.
I had made Bobbi a cup of tea, and she was holding it on her lap, between her thighs. She warmed her hands on either side of it while we were talking.
I don’t resent you writing about me for profit, by the way, said Bobbi. I find it funny as long as I’m actually in on the joke.
I know. I could have told you and I didn’t. But at some level I still see you as the person who broke my heart and left me unfit for normal relationships.
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.
I shrugged. I could think of nothing to say. She lifted the tea and sipped it, then settled the cup back between her thighs.
You could go to counselling, she said.
Do you think I should?
You’re not above it. It might be good for you. It’s not necessarily normal to go around collapsing in churches.
I didn’t try to explain that the fainting wasn’t psychological. Anyway, what did I know? If you think so, I said.
I think it would kill you, said Bobbi. To admit that you needed help from some touchy-feely psychology graduate. Probably a Labour voter. But maybe it would kill you in a good way.
Truly I say to you, unless one is born again.
Yeah. I came not to send peace, but a sword.
After that night, Bobbi started to walk with me from college to the sandwich shop in the evenings. She learned Linda’s name and made small talk with her while I put my apron on. Linda’s son was in the Irish army, Bobbi learned that. When I came home in the evening we ate dinner together. She moved some of her clothing into my room, some T-shirts and clean underwear. In bed we folded around each other like origami. It’s possible to feel so grateful that you can’t get to sleep at night.
Marianne saw us holding hands in college one day and said: you’re back together! We shrugged. It was a relationship, and also not a relationship. Each of our gestures felt spontaneous, and if from the outside we resembled a couple, that was an interesting coincidence for us. We developed a joke about it, which was meaningless to everyone including ourselves: what is a friend? we would say humorously. What is a conversation?
In the mornings Bobbi liked to get out of bed before me, so she could use up all the hot water in the shower like she used to when she was staying in the other room. Then she would drink an entire pot of coffee with her hair dripping wet at the kitchen table. Sometimes I carried a towel from the hot press and draped it onto her head, but she’d just continue to ignore me and read about social housing online. She peeled oranges and left the soft, sweet-smelling peel wherever she dropped it, to turn dry and crinkly on the tabletop or an arm of the sofa. In the evenings we walked through Phoenix Park under an umbrella, linking arms and smoking at the foot of the Wellington monument.