The next day Nick called me on the phone when I was still in bed. I’d fallen asleep at around ten in the morning and it was past noon by then. The window blinds were casting an ugly grey shadow on the ceiling. When I answered, he asked if he’d woken me up and I said: it’s okay. I didn’t sleep well. He asked if he could come over. I reached a hand to pull the blinds open and said all right, sure.
I waited in bed while he got in the car. I didn’t even get up to shower. I put on a black T-shirt to buzz him into the building and he came through looking very freshly shaven and smelling like cigarettes. I gripped my throat when I saw him and said something like, oh, it didn’t take you long to get into town. We went into my room together and he said yeah, the roads were pretty clear.
For a few seconds we stood there looking at each other and then he kissed me, on the mouth. He said: is this okay? I nodded and murmured something stupid. He said: sorry again about last night. I’ve been thinking about you a lot. I’ve missed you. It sounded like he’d prepared these statements in advance so that I couldn’t later accuse him of not saying them. My throat hurt like I was going to cry. I felt him touch me underneath my T-shirt and then I did start crying, which was confusing. He said: oh no, what’s wrong? Hey. And I shrugged and made weird meaningless hand gestures. I was crying very hard. He just stood there looking awkward. He was wearing a pale blue shirt that day, a button-down shirt, with white buttons.
Can we talk about it? he said.
I said there was nothing to talk about, and then we had sex. I was on my knees and he was behind me. He used a condom this time, we didn’t discuss that. When he spoke to me I mostly pretended I couldn’t hear him. I was crying pretty badly still. Certain things made me cry harder, like when he touched my breasts, and when he asked me if it felt okay. Then he said he wanted to stop, so we stopped. I pulled the bedsheets over my body and pressed my hand down on my eyes so I didn’t have to look at him.
Was it not good? I said.
Can we talk?
You used to like it, didn’t you?
Can I ask you something? he said. Do you want me to leave her?
I looked at him then. He looked tired, and I could see that he hated everything I was doing to him. My body felt completely disposable, like a placeholder for something more valuable. I fantasised about taking it apart and lining my limbs up side by side to compare them.
No, I said. I don’t want that.
I don’t know what to do. I’ve been feeling fucking awful about it. You seem so upset with me and I don’t know how I can make you happy.
Well, maybe we shouldn’t see each other any more.
Yeah, he said. Okay. I guess you’re probably right.
I stopped crying then. I didn’t look at him. I pulled my hair back from my face and took an elastic tie off my wrist to wrap around it. My hands were trembling and I was starting to see faint lights in my eyeline where there were no real lights. He said he was sorry, and that he loved me. He said something else also, like he didn’t deserve me or something like that. I thought: if only I hadn’t picked up the phone this morning, Nick would still be my boyfriend, and everything would be normal. I coughed to clear my throat.
After he left the apartment I took a small nail scissors and cut a hole on the inside of my left thigh. I felt that I had to do something dramatic to stop thinking about how bad I felt, but the cut didn’t make me feel any better. Actually it bled a lot and I felt worse. I sat on the floor of my room bleeding into a rolled-up piece of tissue paper and thinking about my own death. I was like an empty cup, which Nick had emptied out, and now I had to look at what had spilled out of me: all my delusional beliefs about my own value and my pretensions to being a kind of person I wasn’t. While I was full of these things I couldn’t see them. Now that I was nothing, only an empty glass, I could see everything about myself.
I got cleaned up and found a plaster to put over the cut. Then I pulled the blinds and opened my copy of Middlemarch. Ultimately it didn’t matter that Nick had taken the first opportunity to leave me as soon as Melissa wanted him again, or that my face and body were so ugly they made him sick, or that he hated having sex with me so much that he had to ask me to stop halfway through. That wasn’t what my biographers would care about later. I thought about all the things I had never told Nick about myself, and I started to feel better then, as if my privacy extended all around me like a barrier protecting my body. I was a very autonomous and independent person with an inner life that nobody else had ever touched or perceived.
The cut kept on throbbing badly even after it stopped bleeding. By that time I was a little frightened that I had done something so stupid, although I knew I never had to tell anyone about it and it would never happen again. After Bobbi had broken up with me I hadn’t cut any holes into my skin, although I did stand in the shower and let the hot water run out and then keep standing there until my fingers went blue. I privately termed these behaviours ‘acting out’. Scratching my arm open was ‘acting out’, and so was giving myself hypothermia by accident and having to explain it to a paramedic on the phone.
That evening I thought about my father’s phone call from the night before, and how I had wanted to tell Nick about it, and for a moment I really thought: I will call Nick and he will come back. Things like this can be undone. But I knew that he would never come back again, not really. He wasn’t only mine any more, that part was over. Melissa knew things that I didn’t know. After everything that had happened between them they still desired one another. I thought about her email, and about how I was sick and probably infertile anyway, and how I could give Nick nothing that would mean anything to him.
For the next few days I stared at my phone for hours on end and accomplished nothing. The time moved past visibly on the illuminated onscreen clock and yet I still felt as though I didn’t notice it passing. Nick didn’t call me that evening, or that night. He didn’t call me the next day, or the day after that. Nobody did. Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen. I applied for jobs and turned up for seminars. Things went on.
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