Chapter 24

In my room Nick sat on the bed while I dressed in clean pyjamas and towelled my hair. We could hear Bobbi strumming her ukulele in the other room. Peace seemed to radiate outwards from the inside of my body. I was tired and very weak, but these were also peaceful feelings in their own way. Eventually I came to sit beside Nick and he put his arm around me. I could smell cigarette smoke on the collar of his shirt. He asked about my health, and I told him I’d been to hospital in August and that I was waiting for an ultrasound. He touched my hair and said he was very sorry I hadn’t told him about it before. I said I didn’t want him to pity me and for a while he was quiet.

I’m really sorry about the other night, he said. I felt like you were trying to hurt my feelings and I overreacted, I’m sorry.

For some reason all I could say was: it’s all right, don’t worry.

Those were the only words that would come, so I said them as soothingly as I could.

All right, he said. Well, can I tell you something?

I nodded.

I spoke to Melissa, he said. I told her we’ve been seeing each other. Is that okay?

I closed my eyes. What happened? I said quietly.

We talked for a while. I think she’s all right. I told her that I wanted to keep seeing you and she understands that, so.

You didn’t have to do that.

I should have done it at the beginning, he said. There was no need to put you through any of this, I was just being cowardly.

We were silent for a few seconds. I felt blissfully tired, like each cell in my body was winding down into a deep private sleep of its own.

I know I’m not a great guy, he said. But I do love you, you know.

Of course I do. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, but I didn’t know if you wanted to hear it. I’m sorry.

I was smiling. My eyes were closed still. It felt good to be wrong about everything. Since when have you loved me? I said.

Since I met you, I would think. If I wanted to be very philosophical about it, I’d say I loved you before then.

Oh, you’re making me very happy.

Am I? he said. That’s good. I want to make you very happy.

I love you too.

He kissed my forehead. When he spoke, his words were light but in his voice I heard a concealed emotion, which moved me. All right, he said. Well, you’ve suffered enough. Let’s just be very happy from now on.

*

The next day, I received an email from Melissa. I was sitting in the library, typing up a page of notes, when her email arrived. I decided that before reading it I would take a walk around the library desks. Slowly I arose from my seat and began my walk.

Inside, everything was very brown. Out of the windows I could see a rattle of wind making its way through the trees. On the cricket green a woman in shorts was running with her elbows working up and down like small pistons. I cast a glance back at my own library desk to ensure my laptop was still there. It sat glowing ominously into the nothingness. I walked halfway around the room before looping back to my own seat, as if this circuit around the library desks was actually a physical endurance test of some kind. Then I opened the email.

Hi Frances. I’m not angry at you, I want you to know that. I’m just getting in touch with you because I think it’s important that we’re on the same page with this. Nick doesn’t want to leave me & I don’t want to leave him. We are going to keep living together & being married. I’m putting this in an email because I don’t trust Nick to be straight with you about it. He has a weak personality & compulsively tel s people what they want to hear. In short if you’re sleeping with my husband because you secretly believe that one day he wil be your husband, then you’re making a serious mistake. He’s not

going to divorce me & if he did he would never marry you. Equal y if you’re sleeping with him because you believe his affection proves you to be a good person, or even a smart or attractive person, you should know that Nick is not primarily attracted to good-looking or moral y worthy people. He likes partners who take complete responsibility for al his decisions, that’s al . You wil not be able to draw a sustainable sense of self-respect from this relationship you’re in. I’m sure you find his total acquiescence charming now, but over the course of a marriage it actual y becomes exhausting. Fighting with him is impossible because he’s pathological y submissive, & you can’t scream at him without hating yourself. I know because today I screamed at him for a long time. Because I myself have ‘made mistakes’ in the past, it’s hard to feel truly cathartical y wronged by the fact that he’s been having sex with a 21-year-old behind my back, & I hate that. I feel like any other person would feel in this situation. I’ve cried copiously, not only in fits & starts but also for sustained periods of over an hour each. But just because I once slept with another woman at a literary festival & then several years later while Nick was in psychiatric hospital began an affair with his best friend which continued even after I knew Nick had found out about it, my feelings don’t count. I know I’m a monster & he probably tel s you bad things about me. Sometimes I find myself thinking: if I’m so awful, why doesn’t he leave me? And I know what kind of person has those thoughts about their own spouse. The kind of person who later murders their spouse, probably. I wouldn’t murder Nick but it’s important for you to know that if I tried, he would absolutely go with it. Even if he figured out that I was planning his murder he wouldn’t bring it up in case it upset me. I’ve become so used to seeing him as pathetic & even contemptible that I forgot anybody else could love him. Other women have always lost interest once they got to know him.

But not you. You love him, don’t you? He tel s me your father is an alcoholic, so was mine. I wonder if we gravitate toward Nick because he gives us a sense of control that was lacking in childhood. I actual y believed him when he told me nothing had happened between you & it was just a crush. I felt relieved, isn’t that terrible? I thought oh wel , he only met you during the summer, he stil wasn’t real y himself then, he’s been so much better since.

And now I realise that you’re actual y a function of the betterness, or it’s a function of you. Are you making my husband better, Frances? What gives you the right to do that? He’s awake during the day now, I’ve noticed. He’s started replying to emails & answering the phone again. When I’m at work he sometimes sends me interesting articles about leftists in Greece. Does he send you the same ones or are they personalised? I admit I’m threatened by your extreme youth. It’s very shocking thinking about your own husband being into younger women. I never noticed it before with him. 21 is young, right? But what if you were 19, would he stil have done it then? Is he the kind of morbid guy in his 30s who secretly finds 15-year-old girls attractive?

Has he ever used the search term ‘teen’? These are things I didn’t have to think about before you came into our lives. Now I wonder if he hates me. I didn’t hate him when it was me seeing someone else; in fact I think I liked him more, but if he tried to tel me that I’d want to spit at him. I think most of al I’m shocked that he doesn’t want to do the easy thing & leave you. That’s how I know I’ve been replaced. He says he stil loves me, but if he doesn’t do what I say any more, then how can I believe him? Of course he never overreacted like this in my case, & I always thought I was so lucky that he didn’t. Now I wonder if he ever loved me at al . It’s hard to imagine marrying someone you don’t love, but actual y it’s just the kind of thing Nick would do, out of loyalty & a craving for punishment. Do you know him that way too, or am I the only one? Part of me wishes I could be friends with you. I used to find you very cold & unkind, and at first I thought it was because of Bobbi, which I resented. Now that I know it was just jealousy & fear, I feel differently about you. But you don’t need to be jealous, Frances. For Nick you’re probably indistinguishable from happiness. I don’t doubt that he considers you the great love of his adult life. He & I never had a tempestuous affair behind anyone’s back. I know I can’t ask him to stop seeing you, although I want to. I could ask you to stop seeing him, but why should I? Things are better now, even I can see that. I used to come home in the evening & he’d be in bed already. Or else sitting in front of the TV having not changed the channel since he woke up. Once I came home & saw him watching some kind of softcore pornographic film where two cheerleaders were kissing each other, & when he saw me he shrugged & said ‘I’m not watching this, I just didn’t know where the remote was.’ At the time I actual y pretended not to believe him, because I thought it would be less upsetting if he were real y watching the cheerleader film rather than just sitting there reluctantly al owing the film to keep playing because he was too depressed to find the remote. Now I keep thinking about al the evenings I’ve come home this month & he’s been cooking & listening to something on the radio. And he’s always clean-shaven & asking me how my day was & his gym clothes are always in the washing machine. I see him looking in the mirror sometimes with quite an appraising expression. Of course, how could I not have known? But I always said I wanted him to be happy, & now I know it was true al along. I do want that. Even when it looks like this I stil want it. So.

Anyway. Maybe we could al have dinner together some time. (I’l invite Bobbi too.)

I read the email several times. It seemed like an affectation on Melissa’s part not to include paragraph breaks, as if she was saying: look at the tide of emotion that has swept over me. I also believed she had edited the email carefully for effect, the effect

being: always remember who is the writer, Frances. It is me, and not you. These were the thoughts I sprang to, unkind thoughts.

She didn’t call me a bad person, she didn’t say any of the horrible things about me that the situation would excuse. Maybe a tide of emotion really did sweep over her. The part of the email about my youth affected me, and I realised it didn’t matter whether it was calculated or not. I was young and she was older. That was enough to make me feel bad, like I had put extra coins into the vending machine. On the second reading I let my eyes skip over that section.

The only part of the email I really wanted to know about was the information relating to Nick. He had been in psychiatric hospital, which was news to me. I wasn’t repelled as such; I had read books, I was familiar with the idea that capitalism was the really crazy thing. But I had thought people who were hospitalised for psychiatric problems were different from the people I knew. I could see I had entered a new social setting now, where severe mental illness no longer had unfashionable connotations. I was going through a second upbringing: learning a new set of assumptions, and feigning a greater level of understanding than I really possessed. By this logic Nick and Melissa were like my parents bringing me into the world, probably hating and loving me even more than my original parents did. This also meant I was Bobbi’s evil twin, which didn’t seem at the time like taking the metaphor too far.

I followed this pattern of thought superficially, like letting my eyes follow the trajectory of a passing car. My body was twisted up in the library chair like a coiled spring and my legs were crossed twice over, the arch of my left foot pressed tightly into the base of the chair. I felt guilty that Nick had been so ill, and that I knew about it now even though he had chosen not to tell me. I didn’t know how to handle the information. In the email Melissa had been callous about it, like Nick’s illness was a dark comic backdrop to her affair, and I wondered if she felt that way or if that was a way of disguising what she really felt. I thought of Evelyn in the bookshop telling him again and again how well he looked.

After an hour, the email I wrote in response was as follows:

Lots to think about. Dinner sounds good.