Intermezzo

by Sally Rooney

Margaret sips her coffee, hot and velvet bitter, while out the window the dry leaves scatter and fall.

need

She was smiling, lying there half-undressed, and when they looked at one another, she laughed, touching her face, and there was no need even to say anything, he understood completely, and he started laughing as well. They were both embarrassed, he thinks, but happy at the same time, and there was a pleasant feeling of foolishness between them that made them want to laugh even though nothing was funny.

exactly

Peace so intense and complete he could weep. Just to inhabit lightly the space that is cleared for him by her tactful silence.

Her irrepressible love of life, he thinks. Pulling fried chicken apart with oily fingers. Last sip of soft drink rattling in the straw. Or trying on a new dress, the way her body luxuriates in tactility. Pleasure of her own gorgeousness in the mirror. Deep complete joy she finds in being alive.

She doesn’t want to receive insane declarations of love from someone she only met a few weeks ago. Ivan understands completely. Still it can be difficult to hold the words back, and there’s a feeling of sadness with it, for some reason.

After lunch, back upstairs to the gallery of the Law Library, laptop open in front of him, white light from the windows crossing slowly the room below. Reading up for a case on the Sectoral Employment Order. Sixteen tabs open and a draft email full of half-sentences. Just to get some work done: not to start thinking. All this for what. Handing his hard work over to the senior in the end and watching him make a hames of it, probably. Take the blame when it all goes wrong, name hardly mentioned when they win. What did he expect.

hmmm.. Been pondering law school recently.. Is it what i want?

to fear judgement was not the same thing as believing that the judgement was valid.

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.

to live, to overcome the terrible event, yes, it was needed. But now that the event has come and gone, the funeral, the various rituals, only the loss remains, which can never be recuperated. The event is over, the event has been overcome, and yet the loss is only beginning. Every day, it grows deeper, more and more is forgotten, less and less really known for certain.

Sense of all the windows and doors of her life flung open. Everything exposed to the light and air. Nothing protected, nothing left to be protected anymore. A wild woman, her mother called her. A shocking piece of work. And so she is. Lord have mercy.

A mother is not an endless thing.

Help, says Naomi. My girlfriends have unionised.

she’s holding two coffee cups, umbrella hooked over her arm. She sees him, starts to smile, waiting for him to cross. That feeling, he thinks: all he has wanted, all his life. To walk towards her, to reach her, to accept from her extended hand the warm paper cup of coffee.

The necessity of an ecological aesthetics, or not. We need an erotics of environmentalism.

Taking the side of the downtrodden, the marginalised, not out of self-interest, nothing to do with him, but from pure conviction. To be himself unaffected, to have no skin in the game.