by
Sally Rooney
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[...] Minor regrets, like asking that woman Margaret whether she played chess, horrible, and major regrets like declining or rather failing to say anything at his own father’s funeral. Major regrets like devoting his life to competitive chess only to watch his rating drop steadily over several years to the point where, etc. He’s been over all that before, the irretrievability of the past, what’s done being done, and now is not the time in any case. Instead he’s going to eat the small chocolate bar he brought with him in his suitcase and drink a cup of coffee. It’s good to visualise these actions in advance, how he’ll unwrap the chocolate bar, what the coffee will taste like, whether it will be served with a saucer or just in a cup by itself. These are the right kinds of things for him to think about at this moment: precise things, tangible, replete with sensory detail. And then the games will begin.
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[...] Most of the time she can go through life interacting pleasantly with the people around her, pleasantly and superficially, never thinking or wanting to think about the profound and so carefully concealed sexual personalities of others. But it is not possible all the time to be so unconscious of other people, the disguised aspects of their lives. This young man with the braces on his teeth, who spends his weekends visiting arts centres to play chess in front of spectators, carrying a cheap black suitcase around and leaving it in the corners of rooms, this young man also has sexual thoughts and feelings, almost certainly, almost everyone does, especially at the age of twenty-two. He’s still looking at her even now. Why did she say the word ‘passionate’ to him when they were talking? And why did he repeat it so many times, three or even four times? Is the word ‘passionate’, or is it not, basically an obscene item of vocabulary? No, it isn’t. But is it like a small bandage placed over an item of vocabulary that is in fact obscene? Maybe, yes. A word with blood running through it, a red word. In casual conversation it’s better to use words that are grey or beige. Where did it come from, then, this word ‘passionate’? She knows where. From that so firmly suppressed feeling, present all along, that when he looks at her, when he speaks to her, he is addressing not only the superficial but also the deep concealed parts of her personality – without meaning to, without knowing how not to. Looking at her, his eyes communicate: I know that you are a person with desires, and so am I, even if I am helpless to do anything about this knowledge. Has she, unconsciously, half-consciously, been enjoying the little interplay between their respective roles? His repressed but perceptible impatience with the other men, his attentiveness towards her, his quiet searching looks, the colour that rose to his face just now. Beside them the other men are talking about a famous chess player from the nineteenth century. You know he was Irish, Ollie says. His father was an Irishman. Murphy. The others disagree about that. Ivan sits drinking from his glass and looking at Margaret, she can feel the pressure of his eyes on the side of her face still, while she goes on pretending to listen, pretending to smile. Finally she turns and meets his gaze. They look at one another without speaking. Belonging, it could not be clearer, to the same camp, separate from the rest. And he puts his glass down on the table. Clearing his throat he says to the others: Listen, thank you. I’ll see you in the morning. They all want to congratulate him again, and slap him on the back, and Margaret needs a minute anyway to put her raincoat back on, and to find her scarf hanging over the back of a chair.
Would you like to come inside? he asks.
Doubtingly, he goes on looking at her, as if to say he’s sorry to ask, and he waits for her to answer. There’s something so vulnerable in his look, in his tone of voice. Is there anything she can say to explain? About her job, and how much older she is, and her life situation. But her explanations will only sound like lies. Nobody when they’re rejected believes it’s really for extraneous reasons. And it almost never is for extraneous reasons, because mutual attraction – which even makes sense from the evolutionary perspective – is simply the strongest reason to do anything, overriding all the contrary principles and making them fall away into nothing. She lets her eyes drop down for just a fraction of a second to his hands, which are resting in his lap: fine-looking, sensitive hands, she noticed that earlier, when he was playing chess.
Okay, she says.
I don’t know, he says. The one thing I said to myself in the car was, if she comes inside with you, don’t start talking to her about chess. It takes up too much of my life already, to be quite honest. Like to say the absolute truth, I spend too much time on it, because I’m not even that good. Although it makes me really sad to admit that. You know, a lot of people told me I was letting it take up too much time, and I just thought they didn’t understand. But now I think, maybe I’ve really wasted a lot of my life. Like when other people were out having fun, getting girlfriends or whatever, I was at home basically reading. You have to read a lot of opening theory – that’s the beginning of a game, the first moves. Which have all been played before, so you just have to learn them. It’s not even that interesting, but it has to be done. So you have all these openings that come from books, and you have all these endgame strategies, which can be honestly kind of formulaic. And you’re learning all this for what? Just to get to an okay position in the middle game and try to play some decent chess. Which most of the time I can’t even do anyway. Sometimes I think, if I could go back to age fifteen, I would just give up. I was already pretty good then, I haven’t gotten much better. And I could have used that time to get more of a social life. I don’t lie in bed every night just thinking about chess, you know. I won’t go into detail on what I do think about, but I can tell you it’s usually not related to chess at all.
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She looks up at him now, and he’s looking back at her, an intense silent look. She tries to laugh, and her laughter has a helpless sound. Margaret, he says, can I kiss you? She doesn’t know what to do, whether to laugh again, or start crying. Okay, she says. He comes over to where she’s standing against the fridge and kisses her on the mouth. She feels his tongue move between her lips. Drawing away slightly he murmurs: Sorry about my braces, I hate them so much. She tells him not to apologise. Then he kisses her again. It is, of course, a desperately embarrassing situation – a situation which seems to render her entire life meaningless. Her professional life, eight years of marriage, whatever she believes about her personal values, everything. And yet, accepting the premise, allowing life to mean nothing for a moment, doesn’t it simply feel good to be in the arms of this person? Feeling that he wants her, that all evening he has been looking at her and desiring her, isn’t it pleasurable? To embody the kind of woman he believed he couldn’t have – to incorporate that woman into herself, and allow him to have her. Pressed against her, his body is thin and tensed and shivering. And what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?
[...] Is this how it feels, he thinks, to get what you want? To desire, and at the same time to have, still desiring, but fulfilled. It was beautiful, thank you. Ah, I feel really happy, he says. Or, I don’t know, that’s not even the right word. Her eyes are closed then. Me too, she murmurs. He’s nodding his head, feeling for no reason a powerful sense of protectiveness over her. Sensing that she wants to sleep, he draws away, and she turns over on her side to face him. He leaves the condom on the carpet beside the bed, he’ll get it in the morning, and pulls the duvet up over them both. Other people might experience these feelings all the time, whatever they are. Strong, powerful feelings of happiness, satisfaction, protectiveness. It could all be very ordinary, in the aftermath of mutually pleasant episodes like just now. Or even if it’s rare, to have a few times in life and no more, still worth living for, he thinks. To have met her like this: beautiful, perfect. A life worth living, yes.
[...] Then he’s gone, the door swinging shut behind him. The door of her own workplace, with its flat rectangular handle, with one glass panel broken at the bottom and repaired with brown tape. She has been contained before, contained and directed, by the trappings of ordinary life. Now she no longer feels contained or directed by these forces, no longer directed by anything at all. Life has slipped free of its netting. She can do very strange things now, she can find herself a very strange person. Young men can invite her into holiday cottages for sexual reasons. It means nothing. That isn’t true: it means something, but the meaning is unfamiliar.
An effort to emphasise that he expects nothing in return for his money, thinks nothing of it, and may not even be available in any case to collect on the debt his money very pointedly does not incur. Then on a purely human interpersonal level she feels hurt and rejected by his coldness, maybe. Someone just seems like they have to be exploiting someone here. But who, and how? He her, financially, sexually. Or she him, financially, emotionally. It can be exploitative to give money; also to take it. Money overall a very exploitative substance, creating it seems fresh kinds of exploitation in every form of relationality through which it passes. Greasing with exploitation the wheels of human interaction generally. Now he feels bad, and actually does want to call her, to hear her gossiping about her friends, or describing what she’s reading for college, to interject occasionally with unsolicited advice or commentary, that kind of thing, but it’s too late. Why does everything have to be so complicated? He knows why. Flashing eyes of two animals through the undergrowth. Yes: what they want from each other.
[...] How do you guys know each other. Know of course what he’s talking about. One of her fans. Spent enough money maybe to level-up to real life. Girlfriend experience. What they must think, laughing. Actually we met in a bar one night after Christmas, he could say. She asked for my number. Walked her home afterwards, talked about her living situation, profile she had up on the website. Harmless flirtation, that was all. I was seeing someone else anyway. Just enjoyed the attention. Exchanging looks. Text messages afterwards, meeting up now and then on nights out. Nothing happened. I told a friend about her at the time, showed her some of the pictures, she said I was playing with fire. I thought it was an overreaction. I guess we danced together, maybe I bought the drinks. Complicated little game. Intelligence in her eyes. All the other men who wanted to talk to her, ignored. Kind of intoxicating the sense of power. Like a drug. Contest for dominance: each to make the other give in, confess. On the doorstep one night she asked me to stay. Shivering in her fake-fur jacket. She asked me. What do you want me to do, I said, break up with my girlfriend? She said yes. I told her I would think about it. Stupid situation. Let things get out of hand. Became kind of infatuated with her, or whatever. I mean, for God’s sake, she was twenty-two. Also legally homeless, and borderline what you might call a sex worker. Obviously when you put it that way, yeah. Peter, I told myself, you’re a lawyer, you’re in your thirties. Your dad is in cancer treatment, you have responsibilities. Don’t wreck your life for this girl. She doesn’t care about you, it’s just a game. Think for a second. What would people say. Your friends, family. Your reputation. Useless to reason by then of course. Blood no longer reaching the brain. Mouth just wet for the taste of her. [...]
For a moment he considers this question: whether it is a good idea for them to see each other again. Is it different, to want something, and to think the wanted thing is a good idea? Yes, it could be different, he thinks, if the long-term consequences of the event were foreseeably worse than the short-term gratification involved. And indeed, the long-term consequences of seeing someone again who you like very much, who doesn’t really hand on heart seem to like you in the same way, while unrelatedly you’re still grieving and feeling distraught about a recent death in your family, those consequences could be pretty bad, devastating even, in the long term, if you got to like her more and more and she understandably, due to your bad personality and looks, did not experience the same thing on her side. A lot of negative feelings could follow on from that: sadness, low self-esteem, anger at yourself and the other person, despair. People probably have lost their minds over less, and gone actually crazy from the misery. And yet, at the same time, it seems incredibly possible now, tantalisingly possible, that he might once again hear her voice murmuring his name in a low pleasurable satisfied tone while he makes love to her. And for this, he thinks, whatever: despair, heartbreak, even losing his mind and going insane later on, anything. Literally, anything, any price. Yeah, he says. I think it’s a good idea. I do.
i kind of agree with this in principle. not because of what is possible, but because even the misery would be meaningful in any case