Conversations with Friends(44)

A few days after the hospital I called Bobbi to ask if we were still friends. I could feel my voice getting stupid when I asked her, though I was trying to make it sound like a joke. I thought you were going to call me the other night, she said. I was in hospital, I told her. My tongue felt huge and traitorous in my mouth.

What do you mean? she said.

I explained what had happened.

They thought you were miscarrying a pregnancy, she said. That’s kind of intense, isn’t it?

Is it? I don’t know, I didn’t know what to feel about it.

She sighed audibly into the receiver. I wanted to explain that I didn’t know how much I was allowed to feel about it, or how much of what I felt at the time I was still allowed to feel in retrospect. I panicked, I wanted to tell her. I started thinking about the heat death of the universe again. I called Nick and then hung up on him. But these were all things I did because I thought something was happening to me which turned out not to happen. The idea of the baby, with all its huge emotional gravity and its potential for lasting grief, had disappeared into nothing. I had never been pregnant. It was impossible, maybe even offensive, to grieve a pregnancy that had never happened, even though the emotions I’d felt had still been real at the time that I felt them. In the past Bobbi had been receptive to my analyses of my own misery, but this time I couldn’t trust myself to deliver the argument without weeping into the phone.

I’m sorry that you feel like I lied to you about Nick, I said.

You’re sorry that I feel that way, okay.

It was just complicated.

Yeah, Bobbi said. I guess extramarital relationships can be.

Are you still my friend?

Yes. So when are you getting this ultrasound thing?

I told her November. I also told her about the doctor asking about unprotected sex, which made her snort. I was sitting on my bed, with my feet under the coverlet. In the mirror on the other wall I could see my left hand, my free hand, moving nervously up and down the seam of a pillowcase. I dropped it and watched it lie dead on the quilt.

Still, I can’t believe Nick would try to get away with not using a condom, Bobbi said. That’s fucked up.

I mumbled something defensive like: oh, we didn’t … you know, it wasn’t really …

I’m not blaming you, she said. I’m surprised at him, that’s all.

I tried to think of something to say. None of the idiotic things we did felt like they were Nick’s fault because he always just followed along with what I suggested.

It was probably my idea, I said.

You sound brainwashed when you talk like that.

No, but he’s actually very passive.

Right, but he could have said no, Bobbi said. Maybe he just likes to act passive so he doesn’t have to take the blame for anything.

In the mirror I noticed that my hand had started doing the thing again. This wasn’t the conversation I was trying to have.

You’re making him sound very calculating, I said.

I didn’t mean he was doing it consciously. Have you told him you were in hospital?

I said no. I felt my mouth opening again to explain about the phone call when he accused me of being drunk, then I decided against telling her, instead pronouncing the phrase: yeah, no.

But you’re close with him, she said. You tell him things.

I don’t know. I don’t know really how close we are.

Well, you tell him more than you tell me.

No, I said. Less than you. He probably thinks I never tell him anything.

That night I decided to start reading over my old instant message conversations with Bobbi. I’d taken on a similar project once before, shortly after our break-up, and now I had whole additional years of messages to read. It comforted me to know that my friendship with Bobbi wasn’t confined to memory alone, and that textual evidence of her past fondness for me would survive her actual fondness if necessary. This had been foremost in my mind at the time of the break-up also, for obvious reasons. It was important to me that Bobbi would never be able to deny that at one point she had liked me very much.

This time I downloaded our exchanges as one huge text file with time stamps. I told myself it was too large to read from start to finish, and it also didn’t take a coherent narrative shape, so I decided to read it by searching for particular words or phrases and reading around them. The first one I tried was ‘love’, which brought up the following exchange, from six months previously:

Bobbi: if you look at love as something other than an interpersonal phenomenon Bobbi: and try to understand it as a social value system Bobbi: it’s both antithetical to capitalism, in that it challenges the axiom of selfishness Bobbi: which dictates the whole logic of inequality

Bobbi: and yet also it’s subservient and facilitatory

Bobbi: i.e. mothers selflessly raising children without any profit motive Bobbi: which seems to contradict the demands of the market at one level Bobbi: and yet actually just functions to provide workers for free me: yes

me: capitalism harnesses ‘love’ for profit

me: love is the discursive practice and unpaid labour is the effect me: but I mean, I get that, I’m anti love as such

Bobbi: that’s vapid frances

Bobbi: you have to do more than say you’re anti things



I got out of bed after I read that exchange and stripped my clothes off to look in the mirror. Periodically I found myself doing this out of a kind of compulsion, though nothing about me ever seemed to change. My hip bones still jutted out unattractively on either side of my pelvis, and my abdomen was still hard and round to the touch. I looked like something that had dropped off a spoon too quickly, before it had time to set. My shoulders were freckled with broken, violet-coloured capillaries. For a while I stood there just looking at myself and feeling my repulsion get deeper and deeper, as if I was experimenting to see how much I could feel. Eventually I heard a ringing noise in my bag and went to try and find it.