Beautiful World, Where Are You

Eileen opens her letter with a broad theoretical question: “do you think the problem of the contemporary novel is simply the problem of contemporary life?” She explains that a modern lived experience “seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent” and that “to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilisation is facing collapse” (111) appears to disavow its severity. She wonders if perhaps existential theorizing is a means of averting emotional resources to theoretical concepts instead of actual friends and lovers. Eileen then updates Alice that she slept with Simon but also that she is ambivalent and a bit confused. She describes how he went to Mass the next morning, and she joined him out of jealousy, wondering if she is bitter that Simon’s love for God outweighs his preference for her. She is struck by the oddness of Catholic rituals and is simultaneously impressed by Simon’s sincerity in performing them. She writes that Catholic religiosity is as absurd as Simon worshipping “a turtle as the son of God, for example” (115) but admits to admiring the ritualistic aspects of the ceremony: “If I say the Mass was strangely romantic I hope you’ll know what I mean” (116). She expresses confusion at the parable of the woman washing and drying Jesus’s feet with her hair. In response to Alice’s musings about sexuality, Eileen recommends Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic” for further reading.

At the same time that Eileen attends Mass, Alice asks Felix for help fixing a broken shower. He asks her to google the product code, but his phone is open to a porn search for “rough anal.” Alice goes quiet and leaves, and he flushes, now embarrassed. They spend the morning separately, awkwardly sharing a few words until Felix asks if she’s mad with him because she’s acting funny. She shrugs and he waits for her to say something. He presses her, and they argue, she accusing him of liking degrading imagery and he accusing her of being self-righteous. After a while, Felix sits down beside her and talks about the worst things he’s ever done, including impregnating a girl when they were both teens. They share personal regrets and mistakes, realizing they know the same anguished feeling that comes with unrighted wrongs. Felix admits that he likes her, and when she “acts badly it drives [him] up the wall” (125). They reach an unspoken understanding of forgiveness.

Later that night, they sit in bed, talking about sexual fantasies. Felix asks Alice about her fantasy, and she says she likes to imagine that he deeply desires her. They both shyly flirt and touch each other’s bodies until Felix calls her intimidating, and she takes offense, which cools the mood. He calls out her superiority complex, saying that when she gets angry, she acts condescending. The two talk about their time in Rome, and if the other was thinking of them while in separate rooms. They have sex, and Alice asks if her nervousness is okay while looking “at one another uncertainly then—Alice perhaps uncertain of what he was thinking, Felix maybe uncertain of what the question signified” (132).

Alice reacts with joy to Eileen’s news about sleeping with Simon because she “deserves” romance. She also shyly admits that she already suspected Simon was in love with Eileen but that she didn’t want to call it out. She describes her talk with Felix and her immediate desire to forgive him for his past. However, she realizes she cannot step in as a “disinterested third party and absolve him of his sins” (135), so she questions whether she felt forgiveness or something more elusive, like pity or empathy. Alice wonders if we punish all truly bad people, will there be any people left. She addresses the parable of the woman (traditionally understood as Mary Magdalene) that Eileen heard in Mass, offering the fact that the woman in the story is really only distinguished by the fact that “she’s led a sinful life” (136) and that the story is kind of strange and erotic. Alice tells Eileen that she finally slept with Felix, remarking dryly that with “humanity on the cusp of extinction, here I am writing another email about sex and friendship. What else is there to live for?” (138).

This chapter opens by describing Simon’s empty apartment on a Monday evening. The omniscient narrator describes Simon’s empty apartment on a Monday evening, how “in silence the room lay as the light faded” (139). Eventually, “[a]t twenty to nine came the noise of a key slipped into the lock, and then the apartment door opened. Simon was talking on the phone as he entered” (139) and hung up his things. Still on the phone, he makes himself a cup of tea and sits until a text from Eileen distracts his attention. She teases him for texting like an old man, and they flirt gently. The television screen “reflected on its surface the bulb of the ceiling light in its glass shade overhead” (144) and Simon calls a cab for Eileen to visit him. Later, on the same couch, the two idly play chess and flirt, Eileen saying coyly, “It’s funny, I think I enjoy being bossed around by you. A part of me is just like, yes, please, tell me what to do with my life” (151).

She admits to being turned on when he calls her “princess.” She tells him that she likes being a “good girl” for him in bed. The two have sex on the couch. “I love you, she said. He breathed in carefully and said nothing. Looking up at him she asked: Simon, do you like it when I say that? Awkwardly, trying to smile, he said yes” (153). He is slow to say I love you, but he is just as romantic when he says to Eileen, “If God wanted to give you up, he wouldn’t have made me who I am” (158), adding that he wouldn’t give up their friendship for anything. Eileen asks if he’s happy platonically that she’s there, and he insists that it’s not platonic.

Eileen isn’t sure though that she is more special than other women when it comes to romance, seeing as Simon is always guarded and too suave for comfort. He admits he has a bit of a “Messiah complex” and enjoys being a provider, saying “Whenever a girl asks me to open a jam jar, I kind of fall in love with her” (151). After sex, the two eat ice cream and joke about the fictional wife Eileen created for Simon. He romantically disavows this wife as inferior compared to Eileen, but he fails to explicitly declare his love. The scene ends with the two closing the bedroom door behind them, and “through the door her laughter was softened and musical” as the “sky began to lighten in the east-facing living room window, from black to blue and then to silvery white” (159).