Read High Fidelity for Free Online

guy takes a really fat girl with specs out for the evening, gets her drunk, and makes a move on her when he takes her home. “I’m not that kind of girl!” she shrieks. He looks at her aghast. “But…but you must be,” the bloke says. It made me laugh when I was sixteen, but I didn’t think about it again until Sarah told me she had met someone else. “But…but you can’t have,” I wanted to splutter. I don’t mean that Sarah was unfanciable—she wasn’t, by any means, and anyway, this other guy must have fancied her. I just mean that her meeting someone else was contrary to the whole spirit of our arrangement. All we really had in common (our shared admiration of Diva did not, if truth be told, last us much beyond the first few months) was that we had been dumped by people, and that on the whole we were against dumping—we were fervent antidumpers. So how come I got dumped?
    I was being unrealistic, of course. You run the risk of losing anyone who is worth spending time with, unless you are so paranoid about loss that you choose someone unlosable, somebody who could not possibly appeal to anybody else at all. If you’re going to go in for this stuff at all, you have to live with the possibility that it won’t work out, that somebody called Marco, say, or in this case, Tom, is going to come along and upset you. But I didn’t see it like that at the time. All I saw then was that I’d moved down a division and that it still hadn’t worked out, and this seemed a cause for a great deal of misery and self-pity.
    And then I met you, Laura, and we lived together, and now you’ve moved out. But, you know, you’re not offering me anything new here; if you want to force your way onto the list, you’ll have to do better than this. I’m not as vulnerable as I was when Alison or Charlie dumped me, you haven’t changed the whole structure of my daily life like Jackie did, you haven’t made me feel bad about myself like Penny did (and there’s no way you can humiliate me, like Chris Thomson did), and I’m more robust than I was when Sarah went—I know, despite all the gloom and self-doubt that bubbles up from the deep when you get dumped, that you did not represent my last and best chance of a relationship. So, you know. Nice try. Close, but no cigar. See you around.

NOW…

ONE
    LAURA leaves first thing Monday morning with a hold-all and a carrier bag. It’s sobering, really, to see how little she is taking with her, this woman who loves her things, her teapots and her books and her prints and the little sculpture she bought in India: I look at the bag and think, Jesus, this is how much she doesn’t want to live with me.
    We hug at the front door, and she’s crying a little.
    â€œI don’t really know what I’m doing,” she says.
    â€œI can see that,” I say, which is sort of a joke and sort of not. “You don’t have to go now. You can stay until whenever.”
    â€œThanks. But we’ve done the hard part now. I might as well, you know…”
    â€œWell, stay for tonight, then.”
    But she just grimaces, and reaches for the door handle.
    It’s a clumsy exit. She hasn’t got a free hand, but she tries to open the door anyway and can’t, so I do it for her, but I’m in the way, so I have to go through on to the landing to let her out, and she has to prop the door open because I haven’t got a key, and I have to squeeze back past her to catch the door before it shuts behind her. And that’s it.
    I regret to say that this great feeling, part liberation and part nervous excitement, enters me somewhere around my toes and sweeps through me in a great wave. I have felt this before, and I know it doesn’t mean that much—confusingly, for example, it doesn’t mean that I’m going to feel ecstatically happy for the next few weeks. But I do