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To be fair, she said, you were always very concerned with what people in school would say. He remembered then, about how people had treated her at that time, and how he himself had treated her, and he felt bad.
At that moment he thought: just as their relationship in school had been on his terms, their relationship now was on hers. But she’s more generous, he thought. She’s a better person.
He likes imagining Marianne older sometimes, with children. He imagines they’re all here in Italy together and she’s making a salad or something and complaining to Connell about her husband, who is older, probably an intellectual, and Marianne finds him dull. Why didn’t I marry you? she would say. He can see Marianne very clearly in this dream, he sees her face, and he feels that she has spent years as a journalist, maybe living in Lebanon. He doesn’t see himself so well or know what he’s been doing. But he knows what he would say to her. Money, he would say. And she would laugh without
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Connell is pleased that she has spoken to him, pleased to be singled out as an appreciator of modern art.
I don’t know why we’re bothering with Venice, says Jamie. It’s just full of Asians taking pictures of everything. God forbid you might have to encounter an Asian person, Niall says. There’s a stillness at the table. Jamie says: What? It’s clear from his voice and from the delayed pace of his response that he’s now drunk. It’s kind of racist, what you just said about Asian people, Niall says. I’m not making a big thing of it. Oh, because all the Asians at the table are going to get offended, are they? says Jamie.
She spent all afternoon halving these little bastards, Peggy says. I feel so spoilt, says Elaine. Where’s the cream? Jamie says. It’s inside, says Marianne. Why didn’t you bring it out? he says. Marianne pulls her chair back from the table coldly and stands up to go inside. It’s almost dark out now. Jamie ranges his eyes around the table, trying to find someone who will look back at him and agree that he was right to ask for the cream, or that Marianne was overreacting to an innocent query.
Jamie lifts his glass sarcastically in Connell’s direction, sloshing wine over the rim and onto the floor. Put that down, says Marianne quietly. I’m sorry, what? says Jamie. Put that glass down, please, says Marianne. Jamie smiles and nods to himself. You want me to put it down? he says. Okay. Okay, look, I’m putting it down. He drops the glass on the floor and it shatters. Marianne screams, a real scream from her throat, and launches her body at Jamie, drawing her right arm behind her as if to strike him. Connell steps in between them, glass crunches under his shoe, and he grabs Marianne by
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I don’t know what’s wrong with me, says Marianne. I don’t know why I can’t be like normal people.
I don’t know why I can’t make people love me. I think there was something wrong with me when I was born. Lots of people love you, Marianne. Okay? Your family and friends love you. For a few seconds she’s silent and then she says: You don’t know my family. He had hardly even noticed himself using the word ‘family’; he’d just been reaching for something reassuring and meaningless to say. Now he doesn’t know what to do.
Last time I was home my brother told me I should kill myself. Mechanically Connell sits up straighter, pushing the quilt off his body as if he’s about to get up. He runs his tongue around the inside of his mouth. What did he say that for? he says. I don’t know. He said no one would miss me if I was dead because I have no friends.
He’s trying to visualise this scene, the Sheridans at home, Alan for some reason telling Marianne to commit suicide, but it’s hard to picture any family behaving the way that she has described.
But he always thought she was damaged, he thought it anyway. He screws his eyes shut with guilt.
To me it’s weird when animals pause because they seem so intelligent, but maybe that’s because I associate pausing with thought.
She experiences a depression so deep it is tranquillising, she eats whatever he tells her to eat, she experiences no more ownership over her own body than if it were a piece of litter.
There’s always been something inside her that men have wanted to dominate, and their desire for domination can look so much like attraction, even love.
It depressed her to think people were so predictable. Whether she was respected or despised, it didn’t make much difference in the end. Would every stage of her life continue to reveal itself as the same thing, again and again, the same remorseless contest for dominance?
I guess I just got caught up in how much they seemed to like me.
Could he really do the gruesome things he does to her and believe at the same time that he’s acting out of love? Is the world such an evil place, that love should be indistinguishable from the basest and most abusive forms of violence?
It strikes him now for the first time that they’ve placed a glass screen between this woman and the people in the waiting room. Do they imagine that people like Connell pose a risk to the woman behind the glass? Do they imagine that the students who come in here and patiently fill out the questionnaires, who repeat their own names again and again for the woman to type into her computer – do they imagine that these people want to hurt the woman behind the desk?
Once or twice he’s had major panic attacks: hyperventilation, chest pain, pins and needles all over his body. A feeling of dissociation from his senses, an inability to think straight or interpret what he sees and hears. Things begin to look and sound different, slower, artificial, unreal. The first time it happened he thought he was losing his mind, that the whole cognitive framework by which he made sense of the world had disintegrated for good, and everything from then on would just be undifferentiated sound and colour.
Connell still remembers the too-hard grip of his arms. And on Debs night, Rob showing them those photographs of Lisa’s naked body. Nothing had meant more to Rob than the approval of others; to be thought well of, to be a person of status. He would have betrayed any confidence, any kindness, for the promise of social acceptance.
Oh, I hate to think that. I hate to think he had that on his conscience in some way. I never held it against him, really. You know, it was nothing, we were kids. It wasn’t nothing, says Connell. He bullied you. Marianne says nothing.
If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.
She wishes that she could have forgiven Rob, even if it meant nothing to him. When she thinks of him now it’s always with his face hidden, turning away, behind his locker door, behind the rolled-up window of his car. Who were you? she thinks, now that there’s no one left to answer the question.
It gives Marianne a window onto real happiness, though a window she cannot
Marianne wanted her life to mean something then, she wanted to stop all violence committed by the strong against the weak, and she remembered a time several years ago when she had felt so intelligent and young and powerful that she almost could have achieved such a thing, and now she knew she wasn’t at all powerful, and she would live and die in a world of extreme violence against the innocent, and at most she could help only a few people. It was so much harder to reconcile herself to the idea of helping a few, like she would rather help no one than do something so small and feeble, but that
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Shame surrounded her like a shroud. She could hardly see through it. The cloth caught up her breath, prickled on her skin.
It’s different for men, she says. Yeah, I’m starting to get that.
For a moment she just wants to lie here prolonging the intense silence and staring at the lampshade, enjoying the sensory quality of being here in this room again with him and making him talk to her, but time moves on.
