Marianne gets in the front seat of Connell’s car and closes the door. Her hair is unwashed and she pulls her feet up onto the seat to tie her shoelaces. She smells like fruit liqueur, not in a bad way but not in a fully good way either. Connell gets in and starts the engine. She glances at him.
Is your seatbelt on? he says.
He’s looking in the rear-view mirror like it’s a normal day. Actually it’s the morning after a house party in Swords and Connell wasn’t drinking and Marianne was, so nothing is normal. She puts her seatbelt on obediently, to show that they’re still friends.
Sorry about last night, she says.
She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional feigned embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to ‘make a big deal’.
Forget about it, he says.
Well, I’m sorry.
It’s alright.
Connell is pulling out of the driveway now. He has seemingly dismissed the incident, but for some reason this doesn’t satisfy her. She wants him to acknowledge what happened before he lets her move on, or maybe she just wants to make herself suffer unduly.
It wasn’t appropriate, she says.
Look, you were pretty drunk.
That’s not an excuse.
And high out of your mind, he says, which I only found out later.
Yeah. I felt like an attacker.
Now he laughs. She pulls her knees against her chest and holds her elbows in her hands.
You didn’t attack me, he says. These things happen.
*
This is the thing that happened. Connell drove Marianne to a mutual friend’s house for a birthday party. They had arranged to stay the night there and Connell would drive her back the next morning. On the way they listened to Vampire Weekend and Marianne drank from a silver flask of gin and talked about the Reagan administration. You’re getting drunk, Connell told her in the car. You know, you have a very nice face, she said. Other people have actually said that to me, about your face.
By midnight Connell had wandered off somewhere at the party and Marianne had found her friends Peggy and Joanna in the shed. They were drinking a bottle of Cointreau together and smoking. Peggy was wearing a beaten-up leather jacket and striped linen trousers. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, and she was constantly throwing it to one side and raking a hand through it. Joanna was sitting on top of the freezer unit in her socks. She was wearing a long shapeless garment like a maternity dress, with a shirt underneath. Marianne leaned against the washing machine and retrieved her gin flask from her pocket. Peggy and Joanna had been talking about men’s fashion, and in particular the fashion sense of their own male friends. Marianne was content just to stand there, allowing the washing machine to support most of her body weight, swishing gin around the inside of her mouth, and listening to her friends speaking.
Both Peggy and Joanna are studying History and Politics with Marianne. Joanna is already planning her final-year thesis on James Connolly and the Irish Trades Union Congress. She’s always recommending books and articles, which Marianne reads or half-reads or reads summaries of. People see Joanna as a serious person, which she is, but she can also be very funny. Peggy doesn’t really ‘get’ Joanna’s humour, because Peggy’s form of charisma is more terrifying and sexy than it is comic. At a party before Christmas, Peggy cut Marianne a line of cocaine in their friend Declan’s bathroom, and Marianne actually took it, or most of it anyway. It had no appreciable effect on her mood, except that for days afterwards she felt alternately amused at the idea that she had done it and guilty. She hasn’t told Joanna about that. She knows Joanna would disapprove, because Marianne herself also disapproves, but when Joanna disapproves of things she doesn’t go ahead and do them anyway.
Joanna wants to work in journalism, while Peggy doesn’t seem to want to work at all. So far this hasn’t been an issue for her, because she meets a lot of men who like to fund her lifestyle by buying her handbags and expensive drugs. She favours slightly older men who work for investment banks or accounting agencies, twenty-seven-year-olds with lots of money and sensible lawyer girlfriends at home. Joanna once asked Peggy if she ever thought she herself might one day be a twenty-seven-year-old whose boyfriend would stay out all night taking cocaine with a teenager. Peggy wasn’t remotely insulted, she thought it was really funny. She said she would be married to a Russian oligarch by then anyway and she didn’t care how many girlfriends he had. It makes Marianne wonder what she herself is going to do after college. Almost no paths seem definitively closed to her, not even the path of marrying an oligarch. When she goes out at night, men shout the most outrageously vulgar things at her on the street, so obviously they’re not ashamed to desire her, quite the contrary. And in college she often feels there’s no limit to what her brain can do, it can synthesise everything she puts into it, it’s like having a powerful machine inside her head. Really she has everything going for her. She has no idea what she’s going to do with her life.
In the shed, Peggy asked where Connell was.
Upstairs, said Marianne. With Teresa, I guess.
Connell has been casually seeing a friend of theirs called Teresa. Marianne has no real problem with Teresa, but finds herself frequently prompting Connell to say bad things about her for no reason, which he always refuses to do.
He wears nice clothes, volunteered Joanna.
Not really, said Peggy. I mean, he has a look, but it’s just tracksuits most of the time. I doubt he even owns a suit.
Joanna sought Marianne’s eye contact again, and this time Marianne returned it. Peggy, watching, took a performatively large mouthful of Cointreau and wiped her lips with the hand she was using to hold the bottle. What? she said.
Well, isn’t he from a fairly working-class background? said Joanna.
That’s so oversensitive, Peggy said. I can’t criticise someone’s dress sense because of their socio-economic status? Come on.
No, that’s not what she meant, said Marianne.
Because you know, we’re all actually very nice to him, said Peggy.
Marianne found she couldn’t look at either of her friends then. Who’s ‘we’? she wanted to say. Instead she took the bottle of Cointreau from Peggy’s hand and swallowed two mouthfuls, lukewarm and repulsively sweet.
Some time around two o’clock in the morning, after she had become extremely drunk and Peggy had convinced her to share a joint with her in the bathroom, she saw Connell on the third-storey landing. No one else was up there. Hey, he said. She leaned against the wall, drunk and wanting his attention. He was at the top of the stairs.
You’ve been off with Teresa, she said.
Have I? he said. That’s interesting. You’re completely out of it, are you?
You smell like perfume.
Teresa’s not here, said Connell. As in, she’s not at the party.
Then Marianne laughed. She felt stupid, but in a good way. Come here, she said. He came over to stand in front of her.
What? he said.
Do you like her better than me? said Marianne.
He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
No, he said. To be fair, I don’t know her very well.
But is she better in bed than I am?
You’re drunk, Marianne. If you were sober you wouldn’t even want to know the answer to that question.
So it’s not the answer I want, she said.
She was engaging in this dialogue in a basically linear fashion, while at the same time trying to unbutton one of Connell’s shirt buttons, not even in a sexy way, but just because she was so drunk and high. Also she hadn’t managed to fully undo the button yet.
No, of course it’s the answer you want, he said.
Then she kissed him. He didn’t recoil like he was horrified, but he did pull away pretty firmly and said: No, come on.
Let’s go upstairs, she said.
Yeah. We actually are upstairs.
I want you to fuck me.
He made a kind of frowning expression, which if she had been sober would have induced her to pretend she had only been joking.
Not tonight, he said. You’re wasted.
Is that the only reason?
He looked down at her. She repressed a comment she had been saving up about the shape of his mouth, how perfect it was, because she wanted him to answer the question.
Yeah, he said. That’s it.
So you otherwise would do it.
You should go to bed.
I’ll give you drugs, she said.
You don’t even— Marianne, you don’t even have drugs. That’s just one level of what’s wrong with what you’re saying. Go to bed.
Just kiss me.
He kissed her. It was a nice kiss, but friendly. Then he said goodnight and went downstairs lightly, with his light sober body walking in straight lines. Marianne went to find a bathroom, where she drank straight from the tap until her head stopped hurting and afterwards fell asleep on the bathroom floor. That’s where she woke up twenty minutes ago when Connell asked one of the girls to find her.
*
Now he’s flipping through the radio stations while they wait at a set of traffic lights. He finds a Van Morrison song and leaves it playing.
Anyway, I’m sorry, says Marianne again. I wasn’t trying to make things weird with Teresa.
She’s not my girlfriend.
Okay. But it was disrespectful of our friendship.
I didn’t realise you were even close with her, he says.
I meant my friendship with you.
He looks around at her. She tightens her arms around her knees and tucks her chin into her shoulder. Lately she and Connell have been seeing a lot of each other. In Dublin they can walk down long stately streets together for the first time, confident that nobody they pass knows or cares who they are. Marianne lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment belonging to her grandmother, and in the evenings she and Connell sit in her living room drinking wine together. He complains to her, seemingly without reservation, about how hard it is to make friends in Trinity. The other day he lay on her couch and rolled the dregs of wine around in his glass and said: People here are such snobs. Even if they liked me I honestly wouldn’t want to be friends with them. He put his glass down and looked at Marianne. That’s why it’s easy for you, by the way, he said. Because you’re from a rich family, that’s why people like you. She frowned and nodded, and then Connell started laughing. I’m messing with you, he said. Their eyes met. She wanted to laugh, but she didn’t know if the joke was on her.
He always comes to her parties, though he says he doesn’t really understand her friendship group. Her female friends like him a lot, and for some reason feel very comfortable sitting on his lap during conversations and tousling his hair fondly. The men have not warmed to him in the same way. He is tolerated through his association with Marianne, but he’s not considered in his own right particularly interesting. He’s not even smart! one of her male friends exclaimed the other night when Connell wasn’t there. He’s smarter than I am, said Marianne. No one knew what to say then. It’s true that Connell is quiet at parties, stubbornly quiet even, and not interested in showing off how many books he has read or how many wars he knows about. But Marianne is aware, deep down, that that’s not why people think he’s stupid.
How was it disrespectful to our friendship? he says.
I think it would be difficult to stay friends if we started sleeping together.
He makes a devilish grinning expression. Confused, she hides her face in her arm.
Would it? he says.
I don’t know.
Well, alright.
*
One night in the basement of Bruxelles, two of Marianne’s friends were playing a clumsy game of pool while the others sat around drinking and watching. After Jamie won he said: Who wants to play the winner? And Connell put his pint down quietly and said: Alright, yeah. Jamie broke but didn’t pot anything. Without engaging in any conversation at all, Connell then potted four of the yellow balls in a row. Marianne started laughing, but Connell was expressionless, just focused-looking. In the short time after his turn he drank silently and watched Jamie send a red ball spinning off the cushion. Then Connell chalked his cue briskly and resumed pocketing the final three yellows. There was something so satisfying about the way he studied the table and lined the shots up, and the quiet kiss of the chalk against the smooth surface of the cue ball. The girls all sat around watching him take shots, watching him lean over the table with his hard, silent face lit by the overhead lamp. It’s like a Diet Coke ad, said Marianne. Everyone laughed then, even Connell did. When it was just the black ball left he pointed at the top right-hand pocket and, gratifyingly, said: Alright, Marianne, are you watching? Then he potted it. Everyone applauded.
Instead of walking home that night, Connell came back to stay at hers. They lay in her bed looking up at the ceiling and talking. Until then they had always avoided discussing what had happened between them the year before, but that night Connell said: Do your friends know about us?
Marianne paused. What about us? she said eventually.
What happened in school and all that.
No, I don’t think so. Maybe they’ve picked up on something but I never told them.
For a few seconds Connell said nothing. She was attuned to his silence in the darkness.
Would you be embarrassed if they found out? he said.
In some ways, yeah.
He turned over then, so he wasn’t looking up at the ceiling anymore but facing her. Why? he said.
Because it was humiliating.
You mean like, the way I treated you.
Well, yeah, she said. And just the fact that I put up with it.
Carefully he felt for her hand under the quilt and she let him hold it. A shiver ran along her jaw and she tried to make her voice sound light and humorous.
Did you ever think about asking me to the Debs? she said. It’s such a stupid thing but I’m curious whether you thought about it.
To be honest, no. I wish I did.
She nodded. She continued looking up at the black ceiling, swallowing, worried that he could make out her expression.
Would you have said yes? he asked.
She nodded again. She tried to roll her eyes at herself but it felt ugly and self-pitying rather than funny.
I’m really sorry, he said. I did the wrong thing there. And you know, apparently people in school kind of knew about us anyway. I don’t know if you heard that.
She sat up on her elbow and stared down at him in the darkness.
Knew what? she said.
That we were seeing each other and all that.
I didn’t tell anyone, Connell, I swear to god.
She could see him wince even in the dark.
No, I know, he said. My point is more that it wouldn’t have mattered even if you did tell people. But I know you didn’t.
No, no. Eric just mentioned it at the Debs, that people knew. No one cared, really.
There was another short silence between them.
I feel guilty for all the stuff I said to you, Connell added. About how bad it would be if anyone found out. Obviously that was more in my head than anything. I mean, there was no reason why people would care. But I kind of suffer from anxiety with these things. Not that I’m making excuses, but I think I projected some anxiety onto you, if that makes sense. I don’t know. I’m still thinking about it a lot, why I acted in such a fucked-up way.
She squeezed his hand and he squeezed back, so tightly it almost hurt her, and this small gesture of desperation on his part made her smile.
I forgive you, she said.
Thank you. I think I did learn from it. And hopefully I have changed, you know, as a person. But honestly, if I have, it’s because of you.
They kept holding hands underneath the quilt, even after they went to sleep.
*
When they get to her apartment now she asks if he wants to come in. He says he needs to eat something and she says there are breakfast things in the fridge. They go upstairs together. Connell starts looking in the fridge while she goes to take a shower. She strips all her clothes off, turns the water pressure up as high as it goes and showers for nearly twenty minutes. Then she feels better. When she comes out, wrapped in a white bathrobe, her hair towelled dry, Connell has eaten already. His plate is clean and he’s checking his email. The room smells like coffee and frying. She goes towards him and he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, as if he’s nervous suddenly. She stands at his chair and, looking up at her, he undoes the sash of her bathrobe. It’s been nearly a year. He touches his lips to her skin and she feels holy, like a shrine. Come to bed, then, she says. He goes with her.
Afterwards she switches on the hairdryer and he gets in the shower. Then she lies down again, listening to the sound of the pipes. She’s smiling. When Connell comes out he lies beside her, they face one another, and he touches her. Hm, she says. They have sex again, not speaking very much. After that she feels peaceful and wants to sleep. He kisses her closed eyelids. It’s not like this with other people, she says. Yeah, he says. I know. She senses there are things he isn’t saying to her. She can’t tell whether he’s holding back a desire to pull away from her, or a desire to make himself more vulnerable somehow. He kisses her neck. Her eyes are getting heavy. I think we’ll be fine, he says. She doesn’t know or can’t remember what he’s talking about. She falls asleep.