Conversations with Friends(43)

We finished the meal in silence. I went upstairs afterwards and looked at my arm in the mirror, where I’d pinched it. It was red and a little swollen and when I touched it, it stung.

*



I stayed at home for the next few days, lying around and reading. I had a lot of academic reading I could have been doing in advance of the college term, but instead what I started reading was the gospels. For some reason my mother had left a small leather-bound copy of the New Testament on the bookshelf in my room, sandwiched between Emma and an anthology of early American writing. I read online that you were supposed to start with Mark and then read the other gospels in this order: Matthew, then John, then Luke. I got through Mark pretty quickly. It was divided up into very small parts which made it easy to read, and I noted down interesting passages in a red notebook. Jesus didn’t talk very much during Mark’s gospel, which made me more interested in reading the others.

I’d hated religion as a child. My mother had taken me to Mass every Sunday until I was fourteen, but she didn’t believe in God and treated Mass as a social ritual in advance of which she made me wash my hair. Still, I came at the Bible from the perspective that Jesus was probably philosophically sound. As it turned out I found a lot of what he said cryptic and even disagreeable. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him, I didn’t like that, though I also wasn’t sure I fully understood it. In Matthew there was a passage where the Pharisees were asking Jesus about marriage, which I was reading at eight or nine in the evening, while my mother was looking at the papers. Jesus said that in marriage, man and wife are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate. I felt pretty low when I read that. I put away the Bible, but it didn’t help.

The day after the hospital I’d received an email from Nick.

hey. sorry about how i acted on the phone last night. i was just afraid someone had seen your name come up on the screen and it would become a thing. anyway no one saw and i told them it was my mother calling (let’s not get too psychological about that). i did notice you sounded weird though. is everything ok?



ps everyone tells me that i’ve been in a bad mood since you left. also evelyn thinks i’m ‘pining’ for you, which is awkward.



I read it many times but didn’t reply. The next morning the letter from the hospital arrived, scheduling the ultrasound for some time in November. I thought it seemed like a long time to wait, but my mother said that was public health care for you. But they don’t know what’s wrong with me, I said. She told me that if it was anything serious they never would have discharged me. I didn’t know about that. Anyway I filled out my prescription for the pill and started taking it.

I called my father a couple of times, but he didn’t pick up the phone or return my calls. My mother suggested I could ‘drop by’ his house, on the other side of town. I said I was still feeling ill and that I didn’t want to walk over for nothing, since he wasn’t answering his phone. In response she just said: he’s your father. It was like some kind of mantric prayer with her. I let the issue go. He wasn’t in touch.

My mother hated the way I talked about my father, like he was just another normal person rather than my distinguished personal benefactor, or a minor celebrity. This irritation was directed toward me, but it was also a symptom of her disappointment that my father had failed to earn the respect she wanted me to give him. I knew she’d had to sleep with her purse tucked inside her pillowcase when they were married. I’d found her crying the time he fell asleep on the stairs in his underwear. I saw him lying there, gigantic and pink, his head cradled in one of his arms. He was snoring like it was the best sleep of his life. She couldn’t understand that I didn’t love him. You must love him, she told me when I was sixteen. He’s your father.

Who says I have to love him? I said.

Well, I want to believe you’re the kind of person who loves her own parents.

Believe what you want.

I believe I raised you to be kind to others, she said. That’s what I believe.

Was I kind to others? It was hard to nail down an answer. I worried that if I did turn out to have a personality, it would be one of the unkind ones. Did I only worry about this question because as a woman I felt required to put the needs of others before my own? Was ‘kindness’ just another term for submission in the face of conflict? These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right not to love anyone.

I found a video of the documentary that Bobbi had mentioned in France, a 1992 TV production called Kid Genius! Nick wasn’t the primary kid genius on the programme, there were six featured children, each with different areas of interest. I skipped until I found some footage of Nick looking at books, while a voiceover explained that at the age of only ten, ‘Nicholas’ had read several significant works of ancient philosophy and written essays on metaphysics. As a child Nick was very thin like a stick insect. The first shot showed a gigantic family home in Dalkey, with two imposing cars parked outside. Later in the show Nick appeared with a blue backdrop behind him and a female interviewer asked him questions about Platonic idealism, which he answered competently, without seeming haughty. At one point the interviewer asked: What makes you love the ancient world so much? And Nick cast his eyes around nervously like he was looking for his parents. Well, I don’t love it, he said. I just study it. You don’t see yourself as a budding philosopher king? the interviewer said humorously. No, Nick said very seriously. He tugged on the sleeve of his blazer. He was still looking around like he expected someone to appear and help him. That would be my worst nightmare, he said. The interviewer laughed, and Nick relaxed visibly. Women laughing always relaxed him, I thought.