I read the email several times. It seemed like an affectation on Melissa’s part not to include paragraph breaks, as if she was saying: look at the tide of emotion that has swept over me. I also believed she had edited the email carefully for effect, the effect being: always remember who is the writer, Frances. It is me, and not you. These were the thoughts I sprang to, unkind thoughts. She didn’t call me a bad person, she didn’t say any of the horrible things about me that the situation would excuse. Maybe a tide of emotion really did sweep over her. The part of the email about my youth affected me, and I realised it didn’t matter whether it was calculated or not. I was young and she was older. That was enough to make me feel bad, like I had put extra coins into the vending machine. On the second reading I let my eyes skip over that section.
The only part of the email I really wanted to know about was the information relating to Nick. He had been in psychiatric hospital, which was news to me. I wasn’t repelled as such; I had read books, I was familiar with the idea that capitalism was the really crazy thing. But I had thought people who were hospitalised for psychiatric problems were different from the people I knew. I could see I had entered a new social setting now, where severe mental illness no longer had unfashionable connotations. I was going through a second upbringing: learning a new set of assumptions, and feigning a greater level of understanding than I really possessed. By this logic Nick and Melissa were like my parents bringing me into the world, probably hating and loving me even more than my original parents did. This also meant I was Bobbi’s evil twin, which didn’t seem at the time like taking the metaphor too far.
I followed this pattern of thought superficially, like letting my eyes follow the trajectory of a passing car. My body was twisted up in the library chair like a coiled spring and my legs were crossed twice over, the arch of my left foot pressed tightly into the base of the chair. I felt guilty that Nick had been so ill, and that I knew about it now even though he had chosen not to tell me. I didn’t know how to handle the information. In the email Melissa had been callous about it, like Nick’s illness was a dark comic backdrop to her affair, and I wondered if she felt that way or if that was a way of disguising what she really felt. I thought of Evelyn in the bookshop telling him again and again how well he looked.
After an hour, the email I wrote in response was as follows:
Lots to think about. Dinner sounds good.
25
It was the middle of October by then. I put some cash together from whatever I could find in my room, as well as some birthday and Christmas money I’d forgotten to lodge in the bank. Altogether this came to forty-three euro, four fifty of which I spent in a German supermarket buying bread, pasta and tinned tomatoes. In the mornings I asked Bobbi for the use of her milk and she waved me away like: use whatever you want. Jerry gave her an allowance every week, and I also noticed she had started wearing a new black wool coat with tortoiseshell buttons. I didn’t want to tell her what had happened with my account, so I just described myself as ‘broke’ in a tone of voice I calculated to be flippant. Every morning and evening I called my father, and every morning and evening he didn’t pick up. We did go to Melissa and Nick’s house to have dinner.
We went more than once. Increasingly I noticed that Bobbi had started to enjoy Nick’s company, even to enjoy it more than the company of Melissa or myself. When the four of us spent time together, she and Nick often engaged in pretend arguments or other competitive activities from which Melissa and I were excluded. They played video games after dinner, or magnetic travel chess, while Melissa and I talked about impressionism. Once when they were drunk they even raced each other around the back garden. Nick won but he was tired afterwards, and Bobbi called him ‘elderly’ and threw dead leaves on him. She asked Melissa: who’s prettier, Nick or me? Melissa looked at me and in an arch tone she replied: I love all my children equally. Bobbi’s relationship with Nick affected me in a curious way. Seeing them together, each giving the other all of their attention, gave me a weird aesthetic thrill. Physically they were perfect, like twins. At times I caught myself wishing they would move closer or even touch one another, as if I was trying to complete something which in my mind remained unfinished.
We often had political discussions, in which we all shared similar positions but expressed ourselves differently. Bobbi, for example, was an insurrectionist, while Melissa, from a grim pessimism, tended to favour the rule of law. Nick and I fell somewhere between the two of them, more comfortable with critique than endorsement. We talked one night about the endemic racism of criminal justice in the US, the videos of police brutality that we had all seen without ever seeking them out, and what it meant for us as white people to say they were ‘difficult to watch’, which we all agreed they were although we couldn’t fix on one exact meaning for this difficulty. There was one particular video of a black teenage girl in a bathing suit crying for her mother while a white police officer knelt on her back, which Nick said made him feel so physically ill he couldn’t finish watching it.
I realise that’s indulgent, he said. But I also thought, what good even comes of me finishing it? Which is depressing in itself.
We also discussed whether these videos in some way contributed to a sense of European superiority, as if police forces in Europe were not endemically racist.
Which they are, Bobbi said.
Yeah, I don’t think the expression is ‘American cops are bastards,’ said Nick.
Melissa said she didn’t doubt that we were all a part of the problem, but it was difficult to see how exactly, and seemingly impossible to do anything about it without first comprehending that. I said I sometimes felt drawn to disclaiming my ethnicity, as if, though I was obviously white, I wasn’t ‘really’ white, like other white people.
No offence, Bobbi said, but that’s honestly very unhelpful.
I’m not offended, I said. I agree.