But why, because of their marriage?
Well, don’t you find Nick sort of hostile toward her? said Bobbi.
No. Do you?
The first time we went over there, remember he went around scowling at us and then he yelled at her about feeding the dog? And we could hear them arguing when we went to bed?
Now that she said that, I did remember perceiving a certain animosity between them on that occasion, though I didn’t accept that he had yelled.
Was she there? Bobbi said. At the play?
No. Well, I don’t know, we didn’t see her.
She doesn’t like Tennessee Williams anyway. She finds him mannered.
I could hear that Bobbi said this with an ironic smile, because she was aware that she was showing off. I was jealous, but I also felt that because I had seen the play I was party to something Bobbi didn’t know about. She still saw Nick as a background figure, with no significance other than as Melissa’s husband. If I told her that I had just sent him an email thanking him for the tickets, she wouldn’t understand that I was showing off too, because to her Nick was just a function of Melissa’s unhappiness, and uninteresting in his own right. It seemed unlikely she would see the play now, and I couldn’t think of any other way to impress her with Nick’s personal significance. When I mentioned that he was planning to come and see us perform sometime soon, she just asked if that meant Melissa would come too.
Nick replied to my email the next afternoon in all lower case, thanking me for coming to the play and asking when Bobbi and I were next performing. He said they were running a show in the Royal every night and matinees at weekends so he would almost certainly miss our set unless it started sometime after half ten. I told him I would see what I could do, but not to worry if he couldn’t make it. He replied saying: oh well, it wouldn’t be very reciprocal then, would it?
5
Over the summer I missed the periods of intense academic concentration which helped to relax me during term time. I liked to sit in the library to write essays, allowing my sense of time and personal identity to dissolve as the light dimmed outside the windows. I would open fifteen tabs on my web browser while producing phrases like ‘epistemic rearticulation’ and ‘operant discursive practices’. I mostly forgot to eat on days like this and emerged in the evening with a fine, shrill headache. Physical sensations reintroduced themselves to me with a feeling of genuine novelty: breeze felt new, and the sound of birds outside the Long Room. Food tasted impossibly good, as did soft drinks. Afterwards I’d print the essay out without even looking over it. When I went to get my feedback, the notes in the margins always said things like ‘well argued’ and sometimes ‘brilliant’. Whenever I got a ‘brilliant’ I took a little photograph of it on my phone and sent it to Bobbi. She would send back: congrats, your ego is staggering.
My ego had always been an issue. I knew that intellectual attainment was morally neutral at best, but when bad things happened to me I made myself feel better by thinking about how smart I was. When I couldn’t make friends as a child, I fantasised that I was smarter than all my teachers, smarter than any other student who had been in the school before, a genius hidden among normal people. It made me feel like a spy. As a teenager I started using internet messageboards and developed a friendship with a twenty-six-year-old American grad student. He had very white teeth in his photographs and told me he thought I had the brain of a physicist. I sent him messages late at night confessing that I was lonely in school, that the other girls didn’t seem to understand me. I wish I had a boyfriend, I wrote. One night he sent me a picture of his genitals. It was a flash photograph, zoomed right in on the erect penis, as if for medical examination. For days afterwards I felt guilty and terrified, like I had committed a sick internet crime which other people could discover at any moment. I deleted my account and abandoned the associated email address. I told no one, I had no one to tell.
*
On Saturday I talked to the venue organiser and got our set pushed back until half ten. I didn’t mention to Bobbi that I had done that, or why. We had smuggled in a bottle of white wine which we shared from plastic cups in the downstairs bathrooms. We liked to have one or two glasses of wine before performing, but no more than that. We sat on the sinks refilling our cups and talking about the new stuff we were going to perform.
I didn’t want to tell Bobbi I was nervous, but I was. Even looking in the mirror made me nervous. I didn’t think I looked awful. My face was plain, but I was so extremely thin as to look interesting, and I chose my clothing to emphasise this effect. I wore a lot of dark colours and severe necklines. That night I was wearing a reddish-brown lipstick and in the weird bathroom light I looked sick and faint. Eventually the features of my face seemed to come apart from one another or at least lose their ordinary relationships to each other, like a word you read so many times it makes no sense any more. I wondered if I was having an anxiety attack. Then Bobbi told me to stop staring at myself and I stopped.
When we went upstairs we could see Melissa sitting alone with a glass of wine and her camera. The seat beside her was empty. I cast around but it was clear to me, from something about the shape or the noise of the room, that Nick was not there. I thought this would calm me down, but it didn’t. I licked my teeth several times and waited for the man to say our names into the microphone.
Onstage, Bobbi was always precise. All I had to do was try and tune in to her particular rhythm and as long as I could do that, I would be fine too. Sometimes I was good, sometimes I was just okay. But Bobbi was exact. That night she made everyone laugh and got a lot of applause. For a few moments we stood there in the light, being applauded and gesturing to each other, like: it’s all her. It was at this point I saw Nick enter from the door at the back. He looked slightly breathless, like he had taken the stairs too quickly. Instantly I looked away and pretended I hadn’t noticed him. I could see that he was trying to catch my eye and that if I returned his gaze he would give me a kind of apologetic expression. I found this idea too intense to think about, like the glare of a bare lightbulb. The audience continued to applaud and I could feel Nick watching us as we left the stage.
At the bar afterwards Philip bought us a round of drinks and said the new poem was his favourite. I had forgotten to bring his umbrella.
See, and people say I hate men, Bobbi said. But I actually really like you, Philip.
I swallowed half my glass of gin and tonic in two mouthfuls. I was thinking about leaving without saying hello to anyone. I could leave, I thought, and it felt good to think about it, as if I was in control of my own life again.