Conversations with Friends(11)

It was easy to write to Nick, but also competitive and thrilling, like a game of table tennis. We were always being flippant with each other. When he found out my parents lived in Mayo, he wrote:

we used to have a holiday home in Achill (like every other wealthy South Dublin family I’m sure).



I replied:

I’m glad my ancestral homeland could help nourish your class identity. P.S. It should be illegal to have a holiday home anywhere.



He was the first person I had met since Bobbi who made me enjoy conversation, in the same irrational and sensuous way I enjoyed coffee or loud music. He made me laugh. Once, he mentioned that he and Melissa slept in separate rooms. I didn’t tell Bobbi about that, but I thought about it a lot. I wondered if they still ‘loved’ one another, although it was hard to imagine Nick being that unironic about anything.

He never seemed to go to bed until the early morning, and we increasingly emailed one another late at night. He told me he had studied English and French at Trinity, so we had even had some of the same lecturers. He’d majored in English and had written his final-year dissertation on Caryl Churchill. Sometimes while we talked I typed his name into Google and looked at photographs of him, to remind me what he looked like. I read everything about him on the internet and often emailed him quotes from his own interviews, even after he asked me to stop. He said he found it ‘super embarrassing’. I said: stop emailing me at 3.34 a.m. then (don’t actually). He replied: me email a 21 year old in the middle of the night? i don’t know what you’re talking about. i would never do that.

One night at the launch of a new poetry anthology, Melissa and I were left alone in a conversation with a male novelist whose books I had never read. The others had gone to get drinks. We were in a bar somewhere off Dame Street and my feet hurt because I was wearing shoes that I knew were too small. The novelist asked me who I liked to read and I shrugged. I wondered if I could just remain silent until he left me alone, or if this would be a mistake, since I didn’t know how acclaimed his books were.

You have a real coolness about you, he said to me. Doesn’t she?

Melissa nodded but not enthusiastically. My coolness, if I had any, had never moved her.

Thanks, I said.

And you can take a compliment, that’s good, he said. A lot of people will try to run themselves down, you’ve got the right attitude.

Yes, I’m quite the compliment-taker, I said.

At this point I could see him try to exchange a look with Melissa, who remained disinterested. He seemed almost on the point of winking at her but he didn’t. Then he turned back to me with a smirking expression.

Well, don’t get cocky, he said.

Nick and Bobbi rejoined us then. The novelist said something to Nick, and Nick replied with the word ‘man’, like: oh, sorry about that, man. I would later make fun of this affectation in an email. Bobbi leaned her head on Melissa’s shoulder.

When the novelist left the conversation, Melissa drained her wine glass and grinned at me.

You really charmed him, she said.

Is that sarcastic? I asked.

He was trying to flirt with you. He said you were cool.

I was very aware of Nick standing at my elbow, though I couldn’t see his expression. I knew how badly I wanted to remain in control of the conversation.

Yeah, men love telling me I’m cool, I said. They just want me to act like I’ve never heard it before.

Melissa really did laugh then. I was surprised I could make her laugh like that. I felt for a moment that I’d misjudged her and, in particular, her attitude toward me. Then I realised Nick was laughing also, and I lost interest in what Melissa felt.

Cruel, he said.

Don’t think you’re exempt, said Bobbi.

Oh, I’m definitely a bad guy, Nick said. That’s not why I’m laughing.

*



At the end of June I went to Ballina for a couple of days to visit my parents. My mother didn’t enforce these visits, but lately when we spoke on the phone she’d started saying things like: oh you’re alive, are you? Am I going to recognise you next time you come home, or will you have to put a flower in your lapel? Eventually I booked a train ticket. I sent her a text telling her when to expect me and signed off: in the spirit of filial duty, your loyal daughter.

Bobbi and my mother got along famously. Bobbi studied History and Politics, subjects my mother considered serious. Real subjects, she would say, with an eyebrow lifted at me. My mother was a kind of social democrat, and at this time I believe Bobbi identified herself as a communitarian anarchist. When my mother visited Dublin, they took mutual enjoyment in having minor arguments about the Spanish Civil War. Sometimes Bobbi would turn to me and say: Frances, you’re a communist, back me up. And my mother would laugh and say: that one! You may as well ask the teapot. She had never taken much interest in my social or personal life, an arrangement which suited us both, but when I broke up with Bobbi she described it as ‘a real shame’.

After she picked me up from the train on Saturday, we spent the afternoon in the garden. The grass had been cut and gave off a warm, allergenic smell. The sky was soft like cloth and birds ran over it in long threads. My mother was weeding and I was pretending to weed but actually just talking. I discovered an unforeseen enthusiasm for talking about all the editors and writers I had met in Dublin. I took my gloves off to wipe my forehead at one point and didn’t put them back on. I asked my mother if she wanted tea and she ignored me. Then I sat under the fuchsia bush plucking little fuchsias off the branches and talking about famous people again. The words just flew out of my mouth deliciously. I had no idea I had so much to say, or that I would enjoy saying it so much.