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.

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

He was unpredictable, but I didn’t cower in terror of him, and his attempts at manipulation, though heavy, were never effective. I wasn’t vulnerable to them. Emotionally, I saw myself as a smooth, hard little ball. He couldn’t get purchase on me. I just rolled away.

occasionally he came home late and I could hear him through my bedroom wall having sex with other women. If I happened to meet the woman the following morning, I would discreetly inspect her for any physical resemblance to myself. This way I found that everyone in some sense looks like everyone else. I wasn’t jealous.

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

I had read that infant animals formed attachments to inappropriate things sometimes, like falcons falling in love with their human breeders, or pandas with zookeepers, things like that. I once sent Nathan a list of articles about this phenomenon. Maybe

people chatted and smiled, as if standing in the lobby of a theatre or university rather than a building for the sick and dying. Trying to be brave, I thought. And then I thought: or after a

while it just becomes life again.

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.

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. I thought of saying: I don’t want to go back to Boston. I want to live here with you. But instead I said: Put the sound back on if you’re watching it, I don’t mind.

It’s not a good idea, Nathan said.

Why not? You’re in love with me, aren’t you? Infamously.

These cells may look fairly normal, but they are not.