Conversations with Friends(10)

I arrived in time for the wild applause, he said. So I can only assume good things. I’ve read your work actually, is that a terrible thing to say? Melissa forwarded it on to me, she thinks I like literature.

At this point I felt a weird lack of self-recognition, and I realised that I couldn’t visualise my own face or body at all. It was like someone had lifted the end of an invisible pencil and just gently erased my entire appearance. This was curious and actually not unpleasant, though I was also aware that I was cold and might have been shivering.

She didn’t tell me she was going to forward it to people, I said.

Not people, just me. I’ll send you an email about it. If I compliment you now you’ll think I’m just saying it, but the email will be very flattering.

Oh, that’s nice. I like getting compliments where I don’t have to make eye contact with the person.

He laughed at that, which gratified me. It had started raining harder and Philip had come back from the bathroom to shelter under the ledge with us again. My arm was touching Nick’s and I felt a pleasant sense of illicit physical closeness.

It’s weird knowing someone just casually, he said, and then later finding out they’re observing things all the time. It’s like, God, what has this person noticed about me?

We looked at one another. Nick’s face was handsome in the most generic way: clear skin, pronounced bone structure, the mouth a little soft-looking. But his expressions seemed to pass over it with a certain subtlety and intelligence, which gave his eye contact a charismatic quality. When he looked at me, I felt vulnerable to him, but I also felt strongly that he was letting himself be observed, that he had noticed how interested I was in forming an impression of him, and he was curious about what it might be.

Yeah, I said. All kinds of bad things.

And you’re what, like, twenty-four?

I’m twenty-one.

For a second he looked at me like he thought I was kidding, eyes widened, eyebrows raised, and then he shook his head. Actors learn to communicate things without feeling them, I thought. He already knew I was twenty-one. Maybe what he really wanted to communicate was an exaggerated awareness of our age difference, or a mild disapproval or disappointment about it. I knew from the internet that he was thirty-two.

But don’t let that get in the way of our natural rapport, I said.

He looked at me for a moment and then he smiled, an ambivalent smile, which I liked so much that I became very conscious of my own mouth. It was open slightly.

No, I couldn’t possibly, he said.

Philip told us he was going to get the last bus, and Melissa said she had a meeting the next morning and she was planning to head off too. Quickly after that the whole group dispersed. Bobbi got the DART back to Sandymount, and I walked back along the quays. The Liffey was swollen up and looked irritated. A school of taxis and cars swam past and a drunk man walking on the other side of the street yelled that he loved me.

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.