by
Sally Rooney
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Peter appears to think about this, and answers: Not if you were good at it. No. It’s easy to do things you’re already good at, that’s not courageous. Trying to do something you might not be capable of doing— He breaks off here, apparently thinking again, chewing a crust of bread. We’re being hard on ourselves in a way, he remarks, because both our lives involve some voluntary exposure to what other people might call defeat. Which I think requires a certain degree of courage. Even if just psychologically.
Ivan listens, letting the wine get warm in his mouth before swallowing. You mean like when I lose at chess, he says.
A lot of people probably wouldn’t be able to cope with it the way you can.
I don’t know. I don’t think I cope with it all too well. It bothers me a lot to lose.
It bothers me a lot too, says Peter.
Ivan looks at him across the table. Yeah? he says. I wouldn’t have thought that either. Like when you lose at a court case, it bothers you?
Peter nods his head, looking down at his plate, moving his cutlery around. Absolutely, he says. I find it very aggravating.
No way. It’s funny. I don’t remember you getting too annoyed when you would lose at debating.
He glances up with a kindly smile. I didn’t lose very often, he says.
Yeah, true. At the time it made me feel like debating must be kind of fake, compared to chess. How you would win all the time and never lose.
Well, there just wasn’t anyone good enough to beat us.
Ivan considers this, and then answers: I wanted my life to be like that.
Me too, says Peter.
On the way back, they stop at an old country hotel in Knocknagarry. Margaret doesn’t think anyone will see them, it’s too unlikely, there’s no use being paranoid. And indeed, when they enter, the dining room is almost empty: a young family near the entrance, an elderly couple by the closed piano. Margaret and Ivan are shown to a small table, set with white linen, heavy silverware, a lighted wax candle. In her exhausted satisfaction after swimming, she smiles at him without speaking, and he smiles back. They order, the waitress brings their food, and they eat. When Margaret rests her arm on the tabletop, Ivan reaches over and touches the back of her hand lightly with his fingertips. No one else takes any notice, the staff, the elderly couple, the young family with their noisy children, and why should they. Margaret is reminded of the way she felt when she first met Ivan: as if life had slipped free of its netting. As if the netting itself had all along been an illusion, nothing real. An idea, which could not contain or describe the borderless all-enveloping reality of life. Now, in her satisfied exhaustion, with her hand resting on the white linen tablecloth, the touch of Ivan’s fingertips, the candle dripping a slow thread of wax down its side, the glossy closed lid of the piano, Margaret feels that she can perceive the miraculous beauty of life itself, lived only once and then gone forever, the bloom of a perfect and impermanent flower, never to be retrieved. This is life, the experience, this is all there has ever been. To force this moment into contact with her ordinary existence only seems to reveal how constricting, how misshapen her ideas of life have been before. When the waitress returns to ask if they are enjoying the meal, Margaret does not move her hand, and neither does Ivan. Politely they both answer that the meal is very nice, while on the table the tips of his fingers brush her thumb. After they finish eating, they pay together and leave through the lobby, Margaret taking her keys from her bag to unlock the car.
im like damn girl nobody cares dont be paranoid [but ofc it's easier to say than to believe lol]
[...] Sometimes wonders how much of his capacity for pleasure is just vanity. Please, I need it. Oh God, it feels so good. He loves that. Happy woman. Compliment deeper and more intense, to make her. Tightening kind of throbbing feeling inside him just thinking about it. Are you happy, Naomi, he said. And looking up at him she answered yes. Didn’t even laugh about it afterwards: too weird maybe. Is that what you’re into, Peter, you like the girl to pretend she’s happy? Instead she lay with her head on his shoulder, talking about which of his friends she liked the most. Felt so in love with her then he could hardly speak. Pain in his throat like crying. Am I annoying you, she asked. He moved his hand over her hair, swallowing. Not at all, he said. Go on. Light touch with the cash in the morning, don’t worry about it. Watching him get dressed for work the other day she said from bed: Honestly, very dilf-coded. Alright, he replied, I changed my mind, I’m taking you back to jail. She, the calculating liar, the exploited innocent, yes. Whole thing getting a bit fucking Marcel Proust. Waits until she’s out of the house to vacuum the carpet, wipe down the bathroom surfaces. Haul the laundry up and down from the basement. Not wanting her to see: and why. Awkward to make her thank him maybe. Or trying to maintain the fiction of his own dominance, when in truth she has become effortlessly the mistress of his household, he at times something more like a live-in servant, washing on the delicate cycle her favourite underwear.
[...] I’ll tell you what I think, she says. I think you’ve had your feelings involved with someone else all along. So every now and then, you just act cold with me for no reason. Or randomly stop speaking to me. To make sure I don’t get too attached. Eyes closed, he swallows. Right, he says. Or to make sure I don’t. Half expecting in the silence that follows to hear her again laughing. Glitter of her teeth. To make him come crawling at last, as she has wanted, as she has always planned. Instead she murmurs: Can we go to bed now. Catch in his throat trying to swallow. Mm, he says. You want that? And her head is nodding. Yeah, a lot, she says. Like, a lot, a lot. Rich fragrance of her unwashed hair. And will it make you happy? he asks. Again her head nodding, sweetly, her hand holding his, small firm pressure of her fingers. Yes, she says. I can promise, I can tell you for certain. It will make me very happy. Okay? Please. Opening his eyes damp and stinging. Oddly bright the lights seem, condensation on the tiles. Parcel of her breathing body small and wet in his arms. To make you happy: yes, I want to. Stay, please. Let me. Anything, I’ll do anything, whatever you want.
[...] Her friendship with Anna. Folk records they used to listen to together, French novels they would lend one another after school. Adolescent dream of attending university in Paris: sunlit boulevards, tempestuous love affairs, autumn afternoons at the Louvre. Went instead to Galway, hung around in poorly ventilated apartments smoking hash with boys who played acoustic guitar. The romance of those years. Her first boyfriend, the American, with his ironed shirts. His accent she thought glamorous. Fifteen years ago, more. Anna didn’t like him, she said he was arrogant. Actually he was arrogant, but I liked that about him. I suppose it made me feel special, that he liked me. They were eating dinner together, and Ivan was smiling. It’s a stereotype, I hope you know, he said. Pretty girls always go for the most arrogant guys. But go on, what happened? Crisp bedlinen, fragrance of cut flowers, cold winter sunlight. Her simple physical sense of being in the world again: renewed, as if after a long absence. Turning of the seasons. At work, the dim buzz of her phone against the desk.
[...] At least their marriage isn’t a secret, Margaret said. Ivan shrugged his shoulders. If it bothers you to keep secrets, you can tell people, he replied. But I think the only reason you’re not telling is because you think people would react stupidly. That has nothing to do with right and wrong. Margaret said that in fact she sincerely feared the judgement of others, and Ivan said that to fear judgement was not the same thing as believing that the judgement was valid. You’re making yourself anxious, he remarked. What’s the point? We have a nice time together, no one is getting hurt. Margaret fell silent then for some time, thinking. And finally she said: I suppose I’m afraid that someone will get hurt, in the end. Ivan gave no sign of shock or distress at this, he just went on refilling his coffee cup. Yeah, obviously, he answered. I mean, it’s possible. It’s probable, if you want to put it that way. But you still have to live your life, in my view. He swallowed a mouthful of the coffee then and put the cup back down. And if it’s any consolation, if someone does get hurt, it will definitely be me, he said. Getting my heart broken in the end, let’s be honest, it won’t be you. With a horrified laugh Margaret said that was no consolation at all, and that it made her feel terrible. Ivan smiled then, looking at her, and replied: Oh, well, okay. Maybe it will be you. I doubt it, but you can think that if you prefer. She put her hands in her hair, and her head was shaking. I think you’re going to meet a nice girl your own age, she said. Some beautiful nineteen-year-old, and she’ll be able to play chess with you. He started laughing at that. Hm, he said. I was about to say that nineteen seems a little young for me. But maybe that wouldn’t be tactful. They looked at each other, and they were both laughing, sheepishly, flushed. [...]
!!!
[...] To work in a nice place with a few interesting people, to have friends with whom to discuss life and ideas. To attend the theatre, to hear live music, to arrange the use of the studio room on Monday nights for the local philosophy reading group. Oh, Kierkegaard, that’ll be interesting. To exercise once again, for a little time, who knows how long, the power to charm and fascinate, to be the object of an intense and searching desire. And to feel inside herself the reciprocating force of desire, this is what she gets, a life of her own.
[...] Sylvia too was becoming emotional, he could see that, and she put her arms around him, saying he deserved to be happy, he deserved all the happiness in the world. And the feeling between them in that moment, wasn’t that true? Doesn’t the feeling between people have a truth of its own? Not in the sense of formal propositional truth-value, no. But then why does that word, ‘truth’, have a certain sensation to it, which is not exhausted by the formal definition?
As of this week, Ivan’s online chess rating is within six points of his highest ever, a record achieved when he was only eighteen. Every time he begins a new game now, he feels a light buoyant sensation, like his brain is floating up above the game, up to a vantage point very high and refined, from which he can see everything clearly. When a move suggests itself to him for no obvious reason, he need only apply the slightest pressure to his intuition, a few seconds or minutes of conscious calculation, in order to feel the strength of the intuition asserting itself forcefully in response: because after the exchange, for instance – forcing his opponent to withdraw the rook and then taking with the pawn on g5, exposing the light-squared bishop, trading, after all that – then white’s knight will be trapped. And this image, this idea of the trapped knight, was there in Ivan’s mind, unexpressed, not even visualised, but present, folded into itself, preparing to be made real. There inside him, the trapped knight: the hidden idea that manifested its own reality, the idea that created itself. And after the game is over, pacing around his flat, or maybe walking the streets, breathing the cold winter air, breath of his body blossoming into mist, he feels impressed and humbled by the work his brain has done for him, humbled and impressed. Like, thank you, brain, whatever you are. A strange little room in his head where things happen secretly: which in fact seems so impressive it crosses over into being alarming. Of course, he thinks, all his other vital organs also perform their work without his conscious knowledge, carrying out all their various finely calibrated tasks. What makes the brain any different? It has always been Ivan’s philosophy, at least in previous phases of his life, that the brain is indeed different, that the body is merely a sack of flesh and the brain an animating consciousness. But on his walks around the city lately – after long arduous chess games in which his brain has played a role he has not entirely understood – it has occurred to him that perhaps the mind and body are after all one, together, a single being. And that he should be humbled not only by his brain, but by his body also, a complex and beautiful system for the sustenance of life itself. When he and Margaret are together, for instance, the intelligence that animates instinctively his gestures, touching, is that not the same intelligence that suggests to him the move that will later trap the knight? It is the same, himself, his own intelligence, his personhood. And for this he feels a tender wounding gratitude, a sense of blessing, that he exists simply in this body, in this mind, that he is himself, this one person, rich in priceless resources which to his conscious mind remain almost infinitely unknown.
[...] He will finally have the opportunity to qualify for his second IM norm, moving him one step closer to the three norms he needs to secure the title, but he will also have the opportunity to fail, to lose rating points, to slip further away from his goal, perhaps even unreachably far, so far that the goal is no longer attainable. And in that case, rather than forging ahead to become a grandmaster, he would just drop out of the chess world in his early twenties as so many failed hopefuls do, with his sad little FM title more like an embarrassment than an accolade. But that won’t happen, he thinks, not with the way he’s playing lately. And even if it does happen: so be it. There is more to life than great chess. Okay, great chess is still a part of life, and it can be a very big part, very intense, satisfying, and pleasant to dwell on in the mind’s eye: but nonetheless, life contains many things. Life itself, he thinks, every moment of life, is as precious and beautiful as any game of chess ever played, if only you know how to live.