the performance of happiness

"We couldn't fill a room. I don't mean that we didn't have enough stuff: she had loads of books (she was an English teacher), and I had thousands of records, and the flat is pretty poky anyway — I've lived here for over ten years, and most days I feel like a cartoon dog in a kennel. I mean that neither of us seemed loud enough, or powerful enough, so that when we were together, I was conscious of how the only space we occupied was that taken up by our bodies. We couldn't project the way some couples can. Sometimes we tried, when we were out with people even quieter than we; we never talked about why we suddenly became shriller and louder, but I'm sure we both knew that it happened. We did it to compensate for the fact that life was going on elsewhere, that somewhere Michael and Charlie were together, having a better time than we with people more glamorous than us, and making a noise was a sort of defiant gesture, a futile but necessary last stand. (You can see this everywhere you go: young, middle-class people whose lives are beginning to disappoint them making too much noise in restaurants and clubs and wine bars. 'Look at me! I'm not as boring as you think I am! I know how to have fun!' Tragic. I'm glad I learned to stay home and sulk.) Ours was a marriage of convenience as cynical and as mutually advantageous as any, and I really thought that I might spend my life with her. I wouldn't have minded. She was OK. There's a joke I saw in a sitcom once — Man About the House, maybe? — a terribly unsound joke, wherein a 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?"

- High Fidelity (Nick Hornby)