Mr Salary

by Sally Rooney

It was in my nature to absorb large volumes of information during times of distress, like I could master the distress through intellectual dominance.

Sexually I’m very warm and generous, I told my friends. It’s just the other stuff where the frigidity comes through.

They hated each other and I mediated their mutual hatred in a way that made me feel successfully feminine.

Emotionally, I saw myself as a smooth, hard little ball. He couldn’t get purchase on me. I just rolled away.

This way I found that everyone in some sense looks like everyone else.

My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all.

Death was, of course, the most ordinary thing that could happen, at some level I knew that. Still, I had stood there waiting to see the body in the river, ignoring the real living bodies all around me, as if death was more of a miracle than life was. I was a cold customer. It was too cold to think of things all the way through.

I found his distraction comforting. In a way I wanted to live inside it, as if it was a place of its own, where he would never notice I had entered.

It’s not a good idea, Nathan said. Why not? You’re in love with me, aren’t you? Infamously.