[...] smiling and remembering details about their work. I enjoyed playing this kind of character, the smiling girl who remembered things. Bobbi told me she thought I didn't have a "real personality", but she said she meant it as a compliment. Mostly I agreed with her assessment. At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterward think: oh, so that's the kind of person I am.

[...] 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 fantasized 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 [...]

Is your dad as handsome as you are? I said

Why, are you thinking about going there? He's very right-wing. I would point out that he's also still married, but when has that stopped you before?

Oh, that's nice. Now who's hostile?

I'm sorry, he said. You're so right, you should seduce my dad.

Do you think I'm his type?

Oh yeah. In the sense that you greatly resemble my mother, anyway.

I started to laugh. It was a sincere laugh but I still wanted to make sure he would hear it.

That's a joke, said Nick. Are you laughing there, or weeping? You don't resemble my mother.

Is your dad actually right-wing or is that a joke too?

Oh no, he's a real wealth creator. Hates women. Absolutely detests the poor. So you can imagine he loves me, his camp actor son.

I was really laughing then. You're not camp, I said. You're aggressively heterosexual. You even have a twenty-one-year-old mistress.

That I think my father would actually approve of. Happily he'll never know.

Bobbi: well you don't really talk about your feelings
me: you're committed to this view of me
me: as having some kind of undisclosed emotional life
me: I'm just not very emotional
me: I don't talk about it because there's nothing to talk about
Bobbi: i don't think "unemotional" is a quality someone can have
Bobbi: that's like claiming not to have thoughts
me: you live an emotionally intense life so you think everyone else does
me: and if they're not talking about it then they're hiding something
Bobbi: well, ok
Bobbi: we differ on that

I looked down at my own hands. Carefully, like I was daring myself, I said: if I lash out at you it's just because you don't seem very vulnerable to it.

He looked at me then. He didn't even laugh, it was just a kind of frowning look, like he thought I was mocking him. Okay, he said. Well. I don't think anyone likes being lashed out at.

But I mean you don't have a vulnerable personality. Like, I find it hard to imagine you trying on clothes. You don't seem to have that relationship with yourself where you look at your reflection wondering if you look good in something. You seem like someone who would find that embarrassing.

Right, he said. I mean, I'm a human being, I try clothes on before I buy them. But I think I understand what you're saying. People do tend to find me kind of cold and like, not very fun.

I was excited that we shared an experience I found so personal, and quickly I said: people find me cold and lacking in fun.

Really? he said. You always seemed charming to me.

I was gripped by a sudden and overwhelming urge to say: I love you, Nick. It wasn't a bad feeling, specifically; it was slightly amusing and crazy, like when you stand up from your chair and suddenly realize how drunk you are. But it was true. I was in love with him.

Throughout Melissa's reading, Nick watched her face very attentively and laughed in the right places. My discover that I was in love with Nick, not just infatuated but deeply personally attached to him in a way that would have lasting consequences for my happiness, had prompted me to feel a new kind of jealously toward Melissa. I couldn't believe that he went home to her every evening, or that they ate dinner together and sometimes watched films on their TV. What did they talk about? Did they amuse each other? Did they discuss their emotional lives, did they confide in one another? Did he respect Melissa more than me? Did he like her more? If we were both going to die in a burning building and he could only save one of us, wouldn't he certainly save Melissa and not me? It seemed practically evil to have so much sex with someone who you would alter allow to burn to death.

I've never worked hard at anything, I said.

That must be why you study English.

Then he said that he was just joking, and actually he had won his school's gold medal for composition. I love poetry, he said. I love Yeats.

Yeah, I said. If there's one thing you can say for fascism, it had some good poets.

He didn't have anything else to say about poetry after that. [...]

When I got home, I went to my room and took a single plastic-wrapped bandage from the drawer. I am normal, I thought. I have a body like anyone else. Then I scratched my arm open until it bled, just a faint spot of blood, widening into a droplet. I counted to three and afterward opened the bandage, placed it carefully over my arm, and disposed of the plastic wrap.

[...] I knew what I was going to tell him, the most desperate thing I could possibly tell him, as if even in the depths of indignity I craved something worse.

The problem isn't that you're married, I said. The problem is that I love you and you obviously don't love me.

He took a deep breath in and said: you're being unbelievably dramatic, Frances.

Fuck you, I said.

I slammed his bedroom door hard on my way out. He shouted something at me on my way down the stairs but I didn't hear what it was. I walked to the bus stop, knowing that my humiliation was now complete. Even though I had known Nick didn't love me, I had continued to let him have sex with me whenever he wanted, out of desperation and a naive hope that he didn't understand what he was inflicting on me. Now even that hope was gone. He knew that I loved him, that he was exploiting my tender feelings for him, and he didn't care. On the bus home I chewed the inside of my cheek and stared out the black window until I tasted blood.

She seemed irritable, almost about to express something, but then her eyes became calm and remote.

You think everyone you like is special, she said.

I tried to sit up and the bathtub was hard on my bones.

I'm just a normal person, she said. When you get to like someone, you make them feel like they're different from everyone else. You're doing it with Nick, you did it with me once.

No.

She looked up at me , without any cruelty or anger at all, and said: I'm not trying to upset you.

But you are upsetting me, I said.

Well, I'm sorry.