A/N: I found out yesterday that Philip Roth has passed away at the age of 85. He was, to me, one of the very finest writers of the past 50 years, and American Pastoral is a landmark novel that will survive for many generations to come. No other writer save DeLillo has portrayed the post-war American spirit so passionately, with such an honest and candid fervour. He was brash, hilarious, and tragic, and love him or hate him, his influence on literature is undoubtedly titanic, his presence constantly felt. And it is a great presence indeed. I leave this note with a quote I've always loved, taken directly from American Pastoral:

"The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.” 

Thank you, and rest in peace.

XI. LOVE TO LAY

"She told me that to love her is so crazy."

She existed for a while in this sort of paradox of being. Where no thought passed and all thought did, thought of Irene, of the very essence of her existence, all she had been or would ever be, her lips and the sharp line of her jaw and the smell of her perfume and her eyes and in which she could see the atomic truth of the world and of her, small and frightful child standing beside twin suns, so cold and alone and clueless of the future. Of what awaited her. The days seemed almost to cycle. What came and went. What was still to come. This darkness broached by morning light but what of her heart? And elsewhere aside. Of her soul, her spirit. A darkness incurable. If only I were of a different path. If only my heart were mended.

It had been only a week. In truth it felt like years eternal. She had not spoken to Irene nor text her and Irene had not done anything of the sort in return. Perhaps she was right to do so. Perhaps it was best to give her distance. But Seulgi found in moments of quiet contemplation that she yearned for that feeling of closeness between them again though she would not voice it for it was not right, it was not what she needed. Or perhaps it was. She didn’t know anymore. Couldn’t possibly tell. Her mind so clouded, her heart wounded. The kaleidoscopic wayward motions of her waking soul. But it was better to forget. To let go. And to think otherwise was foolish and always would be.

She sat there at the kitchen table with the bottle unopened in front of her and she took it in one hand and held it up to the dim red light to read the label. The brown liquid bobbing about and bubbling and fizzing hot. Like a substance composed entirely from some lethal potion she should have no part of touching. An old whiskey. Seulgi unscrewed the cap and took a sniff and winced and set it back down. She looked around. Quiet and alone. An awful dormant air to that place. She had not been outside in three days. Could not bring herself to face the world in that state. She was dressed only in her underwear and a thin shirt and she took the bottle and drank deep and harsh and grimaced at the pain in . A good pain. All too familiar. Oh drink of drinks how has it come to be that you are my nostrum, my salve in times partial to self-indulgence. And should I weep and will I. Who knows. Who scribes these things but fate.

She sat and drank and sulked in silence for a long time. A light wasting away over the evening. Where the sun or no sun like it simmered sourceless across the firmament and clouds as dark as her aching heart came from hiding to sit amongst her there. It hurt to do much of anything. To rise or to eat or even to sleep and she had not done much of that in the past week. She thought of Irene often. Almost constantly. What it would be like to be with her again, to sit and talk with her, to imagine her there, on the grass or across the table or on a bench or walking, shoulder to shoulder, two shadows passing in light silhouetted like crossing ghosts in a rictus of ordained destiny. What it would be like to confess everything she had felt and was feeling, all those terrible moments of pain, a wavering kindred spirit moving her so often to tears. I’m hurting, Irene. God knows I’m hurting.

But that would be worse. Because what remedy was there for this inexorable state? What theriac to drag her from those plumbed depths and declare with finality her essence fixed, solved, removed of her fears and her indiscretions, absolved of her past transgressions, her sins, what had become of her and what she had not wanted to become of her, of this strict inflexible state of being imposed on her by those she had no affiliation for any longer? How to fix this? Was there such thing? Such a fix? She thought not though she wished for it. Longed for a day to be free of this pain. This aching emptiness where feeling should spring like from a well. Help me. Somebody help me. I’m hurting. I’m wasting away. I just want to feel again. I just want to be normal.

She drank between bouts of deep thought and in these bouts she would close her eyes and sit back against the chair and tilt her head up and let the red light pass over her and she would relish it, like some wretched candidate for baptism, born again in a crimson mask, and she would allow thoughts of Irene to enter her head again. Of what she was doing and what she would be doing. Where she would be. How she would be feeling. Would she be thinking of Seulgi in turn? Would they share some form of hidden connection, a sort of telepathic tethering of the fleeting essence that had so very recently brought them together? Or would she have already moved on? Come to the realisation that it wasn’t worth it. That Seulgi was not worth saving. She was irredeemable. Seulgi thought on that for too long. By the time the bottle was half empty she had come to the realisation that it was probably for the best. That it was painfully true. She was who she was, and she was alone. And now that always would be.

She finished the last of the bottle in silence save the soft clink of the glass against the table whenever she put it down and stopped and figured herself in the dim reflection on the amber glass and saw there what she had feared to see, that fabled curse of insobriety painted once again on her face. She mused for a time afterwards on the liberties of life and its many facets of positive expression and where precisely she fitted into those equations and came eventually to the conclusion that there was no place for her anymore nor would there be. It was strange, in a sense. There was this sort of awkward search for the real meaning of her continued struggle with who she was, a terrible spawning of some hunt for the truth of her existence, of the image of the figure she had been crafted in, and of its many intentions. And she knew, in honesty. The meaning was that there was no meaning. Naught but this superficiality, this indelible essence of the essenceless posited upon her by years spent in pursuit of that very thing, though unconsciously, and a startling and unfortunate realisation that the sum of her parts was no less than its whole yet nor was it greater, it was just there, just her, who she was, she was a surmising of so many different pieces, a kind of tinpot construction of lies and deceit and hollow living, a destitute emptiness she had come to recognise and embrace and now she wished and wished harder than she wished for anything else to rid herself of it, to dispatch of that silent murmur in her heart and move on but move to where? And if it were possible, how?

She thought it wasn’t. Already too far gone for that. Too far away. So instead she rose clumsily to her feet and pushed her chair back and with no ease of movement navigated the wide and wider growing apertures of the wood floor until she came at last, mumbling and stumbling and odd-stepping, bowlegged and slowgaited, to the big bedroom mirror. She stood in front of it inspecting herself, seeing there some alien menace in that selfsame shape, flush and distorted and wobbling like an enormous noddingdog, passing her weight from one foot to the other and nodding to herself and smelling very clearly the stench of whiskey on her breath. She squinted and it squinted back. Sluggish and illtempered. It hurt to watch herself there. This child of the morrow in tender spirits and in drink. But was that not good? Was that not for the best? In wine there is truth. Oh, so it goes, so it goes. I shall have all the wine and I shall speak all the truths. Yes I shall.

It was almost eight o’clock. Her head hurt. She put a hand to her forehead and it was hot. She looked at herself again. Eyes narrowed, cheeks reddened, poor light from the window at the far end of the room. Watching herself and thinking. What secrets of the mind did she still hold in that head? What simmering function decocted out of those infernal lobes to beset her with its miseries? I sit amongst sots and sippers and I fit in very well, I do. And I shouldn’t. The room was spinning. It seemed to fire on some godless axis of movement against which she could not right herself, as if by some appalling axel all the world was falling quietly away from her. And hurt now and still her head. She put a hand to her chest. Her heart beating out in a metronome of panic.

After a while she put on a jacket and a pair of jeans and went out. She knew exactly where she was going. The streets at that time were quiet to a fault. She stumbled about as if raised unceremoniously from a dream, her head heavy and sullen, eyes redrimmed, lips swollen. She looked there like some witless mendicant robed in somebody else’s clothes. Nobody stopped to look at her. Or perhaps they did. She didn’t know. They all looked the same. Like one writhing mass of bodies, undulate on the sidewalks, like a great and mighty collection of faceless spectres twisted in locomotion and seeing her there and seeing her so very clearly. They were all so similar. All were but Irene and where was she now? And would she be seen again? No. No she would not.

She sat in the restaurant with her phone in front of her on the table just waiting. As if by some insane chance Seulgi might text her but why? Why would she? She had not the day before nor before that nor for a week entirely and why start now? What benefit to be brought about by that? None, in truth. Irene sat there watching the screen and thinking. A cold and dry evening. Streetlamps in full view of the window. Small and gold on the faces of the buildings and they played to the temperament of some other clock, some ticking holler of the coming night as if in anticipation of something more sinister in origin. Irene checked her phone again. Perhaps she had missed something. But there was nothing.

Yeri arrived not but ten minutes later. She came and sat opposite and smiled and ran a hand through her tangled hair and set her bag down and looked around. It was not a restaurant they were familiar with. Long carmine pews and marbletop tables and small wooden islands holding in cupped hands menus for food and cocktails and small glass shakers of salt and pepper and other sauces and a soft amber glow from the lights. It was almost sordid, that establishment. Like a café for the night. The waiter was a young man with short hair. He came across with a smile and asked them what they wanted. They both ordered steak and chips with garlic bread to start and he smiled and noted their orders and when he was gone Yeri sat there just watching Irene quietly. Her face turned against the window, small and strong line of her side portrait passed back in the mirror, hand resting against her chin. Her fetch thrown back like an echo in the ripples of the glass, so very quiet and vulnerable, this addled dreamer of lighter times, self and counterself in twinned broken countenance.

‘What’s up?’ Yeri said. Irene snapped to her as if woken from a nightmare. She closed her eyes and smiled a weak smile and brushed her hair out of her face.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I was just thinking.’

‘About what?’

‘About a lot of things.’

‘Anything in particular?’

‘A couple things.’

‘You’re being very vague here,’ Yeri said. The waiter came back with their drinks and a big silver platter piled high with steaming garlic bread and slabs of thick butter. He set them down and Yeri thanked him with a smile. When he had shuffled back across the wide velvet expanse of that place she turned back to Irene. ‘What’s bothering you?’ she said.

‘Nothing.’

‘C’mon. Don’t do that again. Tell me.’

Irene sighed. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Everything’s bothering me. I don’t know what to do.’

‘About what?’

‘Everything.’

‘I’m going to need a bit more than that to go on.’

‘About work. About me. About Seulgi.’

‘What about them?’

‘I’m just not feeling me, you know?’

Yeri shook her head and shrugged.

‘I just feel so unfulfilled,’ Irene said. ‘Like there’s this big gaping hole in my life where something should be. Like a big jigsaw puzzle and I’m missing an important piece. And I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s Seulgi. Maybe it’s the fact I don’t know what the I’m going to do when I finish this internship and don’t even want to think about it. Maybe it’s that I feel so lost all the time.’

‘Lost how?’

‘I don’t know. I honestly can’t describe it.’

‘Can you try?’

‘Not really. Sorry. I mean, I don’t know how.’

‘It’s alright. What about Seulgi?’

‘What about her?’

Yeri laughed. ‘You said she was bothering you.’

‘She is.’

‘How?’

‘We haven’t spoken in a week,’ Irene said. ‘Not even a text, a call, anything. Not a word.’

‘What? Why?’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘And you’re going to tell me it all in detail.’

Irene laughed. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what to say about it, really. We met up, and we talked, and we had a good time for a while. And then she got talking about herself, and about her life. About how she’s been raised by the industry, and she feels like she owes something to it even if she doesn’t, and how it’s shaped her as a person, and how that’s affected her so deeply. And I said some stupid I shouldn’t have said to her.’

‘Like what?’

‘I told her I understood what she was going through.’

‘What’s so stupid about that?’

‘It’s not really the sort of thing she wanted to hear. I realise that now but it’s a bit too late. And then she started talking about how ed up she is. About how damaged all this celebrity business has made her, about how deeply it’s affected her and how she’ll never be the same again, she’ll never be normal. What do I say to that? Really. Honestly. Where do I even start? I don’t know what it’s like to be a celebrity but if she’s any sort of standard I never want to. It’s crazy.’

‘And then what happened?’

‘She started talking about us. About how she doesn’t think it’ll ever work because of her. Because of how messed up she is. Because of all the people have done to her and all the trust they’ve betrayed and how she feels she can’t be close to anyone anymore. That’s what it’s taken her so long to open up to me. Because she feels the same way and she can’t help it even if she wants to. So it came back to that. To how much the world has twisted her. Something like that. And she basically said she needs some time alone.’

‘She said that?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Word for word?’

Irene nodded. ‘She was being vague about it, too. Like, she wouldn’t say we were splitting up or whatever.’

‘Were you even together in the first place?’

‘Honestly? I don’t even know. I don’t know what we were. What we are.’

Yeri looked at her for a minute. She was so tragically worn down, so sullied with the weight of the burden of affection. It was strange, in a sense. This sort of romance or what else aside. How unreal it felt and yet how very natural at the same time. Like a blessing, almost. When the waiter came with their food they ate in silence. After they had finished Yeri pushed her plate to one side and finished her drink and sat back and sighed.

‘What?’ Irene said.

‘What what?’

‘You sighing like that. Like you’re fed up.’

‘I’m not fed up. I just think you need to get to the end of this.’

‘I don’t get you.’

Yeri was quiet a moment. Then she leant forward. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘if you want to know what I think, I’ll tell you straight.’

‘I do.’

‘I think you need to get a proper answer and that’s that.’

‘What would you consider a proper answer?’

‘You need to confront her again and get a yes or no as to whether you’re a thing or not. I don’t know what thing actually is, but I’m guessing you do. Or you have a clue. But you can’t keep going on like this. Back and forth, back and forth. It’s going to get you nowhere and you’re just going to end up getting frustrated and doing something. Trust me, I know you. So yeah, I think you need to confront her and get a straight answer once and for all. And maybe she says no, maybe she wants to move on. But that’s okay. We all come to a point in our lives when we’re faced with something we want to run from, or alter in some way, or imagine wasn’t real, but in reality we’ve got to stand up to them. We’ve got to go out there and accept what we’re dealt and turn it into something else. That’s what you’ve got to do. Because it sounds like you’ve got too many problems at the moment, and you’re dealing with too many things, and you need to take them head-on, one at a time. Start with Seulgi and see where that gets you. I’m willing to bet you’ll feel a lot better once you get that out of the way. Once you get a proper answer.’

‘What if she says no?’

‘Do you think she will?’

Irene was quiet a moment. Then she said: ‘It’s not that easy, Yeri. It really isn’t.’

‘Why?’

‘You don’t know what she’s like. She’s hurting. If there’s still anything between us then I’ve got to let her know that I’m there for her. That she can rant to me whenever she wants. I need to support her.’

‘Then go do it.’

‘Now?’

‘Sure, why not?’

‘I mean…’

‘Look,’ Yeri said, ‘if what you’re saying is true, you need to be persistent. Not annoying or even constant, but persistent. You need to constantly let her know you’re there for her, like you said you were. You need her to realise that, not you. And if she tries to pull you apart, or break you up, that’s fine. Let her. Until she tells you that you’re off completely, let her do whatever she wants. Because if you’re right then she’s coming to terms with her feelings for you, even if she doesn’t want to. And that’s what you need to show her is alright. You know what I mean?’

‘Not really.’

‘Good. I was starting to think I was making sense.’

Irene laughed.

‘But seriously,’ Yeri said, ‘go for it.’

‘Should I text her?’

‘Stop overthinking it. Why not go round and talk to her face to face? You’ve done that before, right?’

‘And it never ended well.’

‘It’s better than texting her and waiting all night for a response. And I know that’s something you’ll do, too.’

‘I probably would.’

‘So you should totally go round. Even if you only talk to her for five minutes, or even if she says she’s not interested in talking right now, or whatever. I think you should.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

Irene smiled. ‘Thanks, Yeri.’

‘Any time. You know I’m here.’

‘Feels weird knowing you’re probably the most well-adjusted of all of us.’

‘Yeah. Feels a bit weird to me, too. So, what are you going to do?’

‘I think I will, you know. I think I’ll go round.’

‘Good. That’s what I want to hear. When?’

Irene didn’t reply. She was looking out the window and she seemed to be contemplating something carefully. Then she said, with a smile on her face, ‘I think I’ll go now.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I will.’

She came to Mission just before ten. Had walked the whole way. Her head no clearer. The bouncer did not seem to notice this or perhaps did not care. Perhaps he had recognised her too. She went in and stood by the bar taking in the stink of sweat and alcohol. Hers and others aside. She ordered a drink and stood out by the side of the dancefloor soaking in that sight. It seemed almost like some fever dream, like a trance she had been drawn to by some inexplicable force and called upon to watch lest she be punished for not paying attention. It was almost hypnotic, a sort of slowly rocking mass of bodies, dancing back and forth like a great pendulum, all attuned to such similar movements, all with such similar ambitions and hopes and aspirations for that night long as it was ahead of them, and they would stand in groups of three or six or more and they would drink slowly and they would watch out the corner of their eyes that very same dancing of others beside them, like a sort of reflection cast up genderless in that culture of neon, a sense of homogeny, as if all there had been gathered in some gentilic celebration, a ritual of those values they all took as their own and how similar they all were, and they finished their drinks and turned and talked and they danced again and they kissed and they shared knowing glances and laughed and turned back to their friends and spoke again and then they would repeat their locomotions, like puppets caught in some machine web, stuck on a cycle repeating and repeating, endlessly the same.

It was almost strong enough to wake her up. To drag her kicking and screaming into the clear truth of the world as it stood before her, rocking on its staggeringly bright axis, tilting and whirling and twirling in spectra falling over the slick and the sweatshorn and over her, eyes wide and alert, seeing all there in some strange and inhuman congregation. What drawn up from that sordid display save a temporary fulfilment? What else? There is emptiness and there exists empty fun and these its hollow practitioners. With their shrouds of pinchbeck, their smiles of perjury, and how should they be judged but as that? What defence in their name? I was drunk, Your Honour. I was good, I was.

She could feel it now. The whiskey in her belly, rolling about whenever she took a step. There were perhaps a dozen pairs of eyes already on her. Some with their phones primed, some already having taken pictures. Two up on the first-floor balcony and two against the firedoor on her left and more on the dancefloor and the music building to a rotten crescendo and she its unwitting listener. She finished her drink and set the cup down and stepped into the dancefloor like a thing swallowed up in a swamp, moving lost and alone against that writhing mass of sweat and bodies, pushing left and then back and then right, these faceless people or mirages the same turning to her as if to come in auguring. Hey, you’re that model. You are, aren’t you? Seulgi, right? Yeah. That’s you.

She pushed on through. Came out the other side. Stood by the stairs looking around. People coming down from behind her and people shuffling past and people on the left staggering up from the toilets and the faint odour of piss and cheap perfume. She looked back out at the dancefloor. A blonde girl dancing on her own. Hands caught in her own hair, swaying in time to the music, twisting and contorting and smiling and watching Seulgi with the black and dilated eyes of a hawk and Seulgi watching her back. She was very pretty. Her hair loose as gold spilled across her shoulders and down her back. Face flushed the softest of pinks, lips thin and enticing, eyes still watching. As if to look away would be to lose sight of her forever. Seulgi watched her for a while. Her own head spinning. Time there seemed to exist in some sort of nonsequential order whereby the happenings and not-happenings became one and the same and whenever she blinked she was somewhere else entirely. This awful sickening vortex of movement. She passed from the dancefloor to the toilets and back. Then she was at the door. Out in the cold and dry air. In the back of a taxi, this girl across her lap, hands in Seulgi’s hair, desperate and sloppy and sluggish, stench of vodka on her breath and rose and orange on , her lips roaming across Seulgi’s neck, over her collarbones, pushing her jacket off her shoulders, slipping a hand down Seulgi’s back. The driver eyeing them cautious and disapproving through the rear-view.

The next moment she was in the lobby. Then she was fumbling with her keys. And the blonde girl beside her, arms around Seulgi’s waist, kissing her neck and over her right shoulder and softly and waiting so very patiently. Then she was in the bedroom, and somewhere along that uncoordinated tangle of sin she had lost her jacket, and her shirt lay on the floor by the door and so did her belt and her jeans, and her shoes out in the kitchen hallway, and this faceless girl with the absurd and unnatural attraction for her neck and the flush of now half and stark white under the small light afforded to them amidst utter darkness, her own dress scattered haphazardly by the bed, all looking like some sordid crime scene, a breadcrumb trail of indecency leading them precisely to the bed, and the girl so quick to push Seulgi down and kiss across her chest and moan and move to pull aside her underwear, so slick with sweat and breathing intensely against her skin and tracing over her covered s a long line of kisses marking her.

‘Stop,’ Seulgi said. ‘Stop.’

She pushed the girl back. She sat there at the end of the bed looking at Seulgi the way a child observes a parent when they cannot understand their own error, all slackjawed and dumbstruck. Seulgi took a moment in her rousing sobriety to study this creature, this pale and slender inebriate, her makeup soot and piping on her cheeks, her cold and small face and her delicate lips, her eyes wide and enflamed with a disturbing hunger. She was indeed gorgeous. This faceless recipient of her most painful antipathy. She did not know her name nor would she ever.

‘Put your clothes on,’ Seulgi said. The girl just looked at her a moment. As if in a rut as to process these queer words.

‘I said put your clothes on and go. Please.’

When the girl did not move she said, in quiet voice: ‘Look, I’m sorry. Really, really ing sorry. I shouldn’t have done this. I shouldn’t have led you on. I shouldn’t have come onto you, or kissed you, or taken you home. I shouldn’t have done any of that. I’m a bit of a up right now. I didn’t mean to do it. I promise I’m not trying to you over or anything like that. I really shouldn’t have done this.’

‘You shouldn’t?’

Seulgi didn’t respond for a while. She just sat there thinking: She sounds like Irene.

After a minute she pushed herself up against the headboard and roused herself. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I think it’d be better for the both of us if you just went.’

‘What?’

‘Please. I can get you some water or something. Anything. I’ll call you a taxi.’

‘ you.’

‘Look, I’m sorry. There’s someone I need to talk to. Someone I need to sort a lot of out with. And I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m sick of it. And I think she needs to know that. She needs to hear it from me.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘I’m really sorry.’

It seemed this girl did not hear her. She was already half way to the door and she bent down to fetch up her dress and cover herself when Seulgi stood and looked at her again. She was so very tender in that bloodred light. So easily manipulated. Oh God. What the have I done.

The girl was almost at the door when they heard it knock. Like an echo reverbed across the tender skin of the earth. Fit to tune her heart to some irregular metronome. The girl looked back at her once. Makeup thick and wet on her cheeks. Maybe she had been crying. Maybe not. She brushed her hair back and adjusted her dress and put on her heels and stumbled up to the door and Seulgi followed. She was still somewhat drunk and in that dim red light the room looked like some enormous charnel house or place of worship, alien shapes flitting in the corner of her eye whenever she turned or moved or did much of anything save sit and sleep quietly.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Don’t.’

The girl opened the door. From the bedroom doorway Seulgi heard her before she saw her. The startled gasp. And then the blonde girl examining her the way all drunks examine somebody they feel threatened by. A rude and uncomfortable sizing of her proportions, of who she was and what challenge she posed. Then she was out in the corridor and tapping her way towards the elevator and then like an echo of a person she was gone and Seulgi was stood there waiting. She went up to the door still half .

Irene was standing there. She was dressed in a casual jacket and trousers and her cheeks were flushed red and there was a glint in her eyes however slight of some unbearable agony loosed on her heart that Seulgi could not bear to witness. She regarded Seulgi with a wayward glance and she smiled weakly.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘This doesn’t look like a good time.’

‘No. It’s okay.’

‘No, no. Sorry for disturbing you.’

By the time she was in the doorway Irene was half way back down the corridor. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Please.’

‘Sorry,’ Irene said from the elevator.

‘Irene, please. It’s not what it looks like. Please.’

The last thing she saw was Irene’s eyes welling with tears. Then the doors closed and she was gone and Seulgi was alone.