Conversations with Friends(64)

Should we go back upstairs? she said.

The inside of my body hummed like a piece of machinery. I searched Bobbi’s face for some acknowledgement of what had just happened but there was none. Was she just confirming that she felt nothing for me any more, that kissing me was like kissing a wall? Was it some kind of experiment? Upstairs we got our coats and then walked home together talking about college, about Melissa’s new book, about things that didn’t really concern us.





26




The next evening, Nick and I went to see an Iranian film about a vampire. On the way to the cinema I told him about Bobbi kissing me and he thought about it for a few seconds and then said: Melissa kisses me sometimes. Not knowing what I felt, I started to make jokes. You kiss other women behind my back! We were nearly at the cinema anyway. I do want to make her happy, he said. Maybe you’d prefer not to talk about it. I stood at the door of the cinema with my hands in my coat pockets. Talk about what? I said. About you kissing your wife?

We’re getting along better now, he said. Than we were before all this. But I mean, maybe you don’t want to know about that.

I’m glad you’re getting along.

I feel like I should thank you for making me a tolerable person to live with.

Our breath hung between us like fog. The door of the cinema swung open with a rush of warmth and the smell of popcorn grease.

We’re going to be late for the film now, I said.

I’ll stop talking.

Afterwards we went to get falafel on Dame Street. We sat in the booth, and I told him my mother was coming to Dublin the next day to visit her sister and that she was taking me home in the car after that for my ultrasound. Nick asked me what day the appointment was and I told him the afternoon of November third. He nodded, he wasn’t forthcoming on these kinds of topics. I changed the subject by saying: my mother is suspicious of you, you know.

Is that bad? said Nick.

Then the woman brought us our food and I stopped talking to eat. Nick was saying something about his parents, something about not seeing them much ‘after everything last year’.

Last year seems to come up a lot, I said.

Does it?

In fragments. I’m picking up that it was a bad time.

He shrugged. He went on eating. He probably didn’t know that I knew he had been in hospital. I sipped on my glass of Coke and said nothing. Then he wiped his mouth on a napkin and started to talk. I hadn’t really expected him to start, but he did. There was nobody in either of the booths near us, nobody listening in, and he talked in a sincere, self-effacing way, not trying either to make me laugh or to make me feel bad.

Nick told me that last summer he had been working in California. He said the schedule was gruelling and he was run-down and smoking too much, and then one of his lungs collapsed. He couldn’t finish filming, he said he ended up in some awful hospital in the States with no one he knew anywhere nearby. At the time Melissa was travelling around Europe for an essay about immigrant communities and they weren’t in touch very much.

By the time they were both back in Dublin, he told me, he was exhausted. He didn’t want to go out anywhere with Melissa, and if she had friends over he would mostly stay upstairs trying to sleep. They were bad-tempered with one another and argued frequently. Nick told me that when they first married they had both wanted to have children, but increasingly when he brought it up Melissa would refuse to talk about it. She was thirty-six by then. One night in October she told him she had decided she didn’t want children after all. They fought. He told me that he’d said some unreasonable things. We both did, he said. But I regret what I said to her.

Eventually he moved into the spare room. He slept a lot during the day, he lost a lot of weight. At first, he said, Melissa was angry, she thought he was punishing her, or trying to force her into something she didn’t want. But then she realised he was really sick. She tried to help, she made appointments with doctors and counsellors, but Nick never went. I can’t really explain it now, he said. I look back on how I behaved and I don’t understand it myself.

Finally in December he was admitted to a psychiatric unit. He stayed there for six weeks, and during that time Melissa started seeing someone else, a mutual friend of theirs. He realised it was going on because she sent him a text that was intended for the other person. It probably wasn’t great for my self-esteem, he said. But I don’t want to exaggerate. I don’t know if at that point I had any self-esteem left anyway. When he came out, Melissa said she wanted a divorce, and he said okay. He thanked her for everything she had done to try and help him and suddenly she started crying. She told him how scared she had been, how guilty she felt just for leaving the house in the morning. I thought you were going to die, she said. They talked for a long time, they apologised to one another. In the end they agreed to keep living together until they could find some other arrangement.

Nick started working again in the spring. He was exercising more, he took a small part in an Arthur Miller play one of his friends was directing. Melissa fell out with Chris, the man she was seeing, and Nick said their lives just sort of continued. They tried to negotiate what he described as a ‘quasi-marriage’. They saw one another’s friends, they ate together in the evenings. Nick renewed his gym membership, took the dog down to the beach in the afternoons, started reading novels again. He drank protein shakes, he put the weight back on. Life was okay.