Conversations with Friends(23)

Hey, I’m just at Frances’s place now, she said. Do you mind if I put you on speakerphone?

Bobbi closed the door and followed me into the living room, where she dropped her phone unceremoniously onto the table, with the speakerphone enabled.

Hi Frances, said Melissa’s voice.

I said hello, though what I meant was: I hope you haven’t found out about me sleeping with your husband.

So whose is the house exactly? Bobbi said.

It belongs to a friend of mine called Valerie, said Melissa. I mean, I say friend, she’s in her sixties. More like a mentor. She was very helpful with getting the book published, and all that. Anyway, old old money. And she likes to have people staying in her various properties when she’s not around.

I said that she sounded interesting.

You’d like her, Melissa said. You might get to meet her, she does spend a day or two in the house sometimes. She lives in Paris usually.

Wealthy people sicken me, said Bobbi. But yeah, I’m sure she’s great.

How have you been keeping, Frances? Melissa said. It feels like an age since I’ve seen you.

I paused, and then said: I’ve been well, thank you. And you? Melissa also paused and then replied: good.

How was London? I asked. You were over there last month, were you?

Was that last month? she said. Time is so funny.

She said she had better be getting back to dinner and hung up. I didn’t think there was anything remotely funny about time, certainly not ‘so funny’.

After Bobbi left that night I wrote for an hour and a half, poetry in which I figured my own body as an item of garbage, an empty wrapper or a half-eaten and discarded piece of fruit. Putting my self-loathing to work in this way didn’t make me feel better as such, but it tired me out. Afterwards I lay on my side with A Critique of Postcolonial Reason propped half-open on the pillow beside me. Occasionally I lifted a finger to turn the page and allowed the heavy and confusing syntax to drift down through my eyes and into my brain like fluid. I’m bettering myself, I thought. I’m going to become so smart that no one will understand me.

Before we left the country, I sent Nick an email telling him we were coming to stay. I said: I’m sure Melissa told you already, I just want to assure you I’m not planning on making a scene. He replied saying: cool, it’ll be nice to see you. I stared at that message repeatedly, often reopening it to stare at it again. It was so devoid of tone or meaning that it infuriated me. It was as if, our relationship having come to an end, he had demoted me right back to my previous status as an acquaintance. The affair might be over, I thought, but something being over is not the same as something never having happened. In my anger I even began searching my emails and texts for ‘evidence’ of our affair, which consisted of a few boring logistical messages about when he would be back in the house and what time I might arrive. There were no passionate declarations of love or sexually graphic text messages. This made sense, because the affair was conducted in real life and not online, but I felt robbed of something anyway.

On the plane I shared my headphones with Bobbi, who had forgotten hers. We had to turn the volume way up to be able to hear anything over the engines. Bobbi was a nervous flyer, or she said she was, but I thought she played it up to an extent just for fun. When we flew together she made me hold hands. I wished I could ask her what she thought I should do, but I was sure if she knew what had happened she’d be appalled at the idea of me even going to étables. In a way I was appalled too, but also fascinated. Before that summer I’d had no idea I was the kind of person who would accept an invitation like this from a woman whose husband I’d repeatedly slept with. This information was morbidly interesting to me.

Bobbi fell asleep for most of the flight and only woke up when we landed. She squeezed my hand while the other passengers got up to get their luggage, and said: flying with you is so relaxing. You have a very stoic disposition. The airport smelled of artificial air freshener, and Bobbi bought us two black coffees while I figured out which bus we had to catch. Bobbi had studied German in school and spoke no French, but wherever we went she managed to communicate effectively with her hands and face. I saw the man behind the coffee counter smiling at her like a beloved cousin, while I desperately repeated the names of towns and bus services to the woman at the ticket desk.

Bobbi had a way of belonging everywhere. Though she said she hated the rich, her family was rich, and other wealthy people recognised her as one of their own. They took her radical politics as a kind of bourgeois self-deprecation, nothing very serious, and talked to her about restaurants or where to stay in Rome. I felt out of place in these situations, ignorant and bitter, but also fearful of being discovered as a moderately poor person and a communist. Equally, I struggled to make conversation with people of my own parents’ background, afraid that my vowels sounded pretentious or my large flea-market coat made me look rich. Philip also suffered from looking rich, though in his case because he really was. We two often fell silent while Bobbi chatted effortlessly with taxi drivers about current affairs.

It was six in the morning by the time we boarded the bus to étables. I was exhausted, and a headache had settled behind my eyes so I had to squint at the tickets to read them. The bus took us through verdant countryside, which a white mist had settled over, shot through with sunlight. On the bus radio, voices chatted lightly in French, laughing sometimes, and then there was music. We passed farmland on either side, vineyards with hand-painted signs and immaculate drive-through bakeries advertised in neat sans-serif lettering. Very few cars were on the roads, it was early.