Topics of Conversation

by Miranda Popkey

Genres: Friendship; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

For fans of Rachel Cusk, Lydia Davis, and Jenny Offill — a compact tour de force about sex, violence, and self-loathing from a ferociously talented new voice in fiction

Miranda Popkey's first novel is about desire, disgust, motherhood, loneliness, art, pain, feminism, anger, envy, guilt — written in language that sizzles with intelligence and eroticism. The novel is composed almost exclusively of conversations between women — the stories they tell each other, and the stories they tell themselves, about shame and love, infidelity and self-sabotage — and careens through 20 years in the life of an unnamed narrator hungry for experience and bent on upending her life.

Edgy, wry, shot through with rage and despair, Topics of Conversation introduces an audacious and immensely gifted new novelist.

Release date: January 7, 2020

Publisher: Vintage

Print pages: 224

Sample

Chapter 2



Ann Arbor, 2002
 
“There’s this girl I know.” She took a drag of her cigarette, exhaled. We were in her apartment, large but the space poorly apportioned, two bedrooms, a bathroom, and then a kitchen jutting off a wide central hallway that served also as the living room, its floor hardwood, dark and scuffed; earlier that night I’d ripped a hole in my stockings, snagged the soft fabric on a splinter. I was sitting on the floor. We were graduate students in the Midwest and our stipends had rented us more space than we knew what to do with. John had been at the party but he had left and it was only women now, four of us: me (female pain in Jacobean revenge tragedies); the apartment’s tenant (American literature since 1981); Laura (the Bloomsbury group, with a focus on Virginia Woolf); and a blonde with heavy eyelids, those eyelids now closed because she was, her head resting against the wall, asleep (female narratives of the Civil War). Because Laura and the tenant were on chairs and I was on the floor and the other woman on the floor was asleep, I felt myself an acolyte or a novice, felt Laura and the tenant to be my teachers. Mostly the tenant. I craned my neck. The tenant was speaking.

“This girl I know. Knew. We went to undergrad together. We weren’t close, but I’d see her around. Not at parties, but in class, or she’d host— she called them soirées: cheese and crackers and flaky puff pas-tries stuffed with meat— and I’d be invited. We had coffee, lunch, a handful of times. Nice girl. Mousy, shy. Had braces her freshman and sophomore years. Pretty. But unpolished. Hair always back in a pony-tail. Overalls. Actual overalls. Like the nerdy girl before the makeover, the makeover that is destined to be, that is a priori successful, because the girl, of course, she was always hot, she was just”— she waved the hand holding the cigarette— “wearing weird glasses or whatever.” She stubbed the cigarette out. “Anyway, her junior year, this was after the braces came off, she started dating this guy. She was— ” The tenant stood and walked into the kitchen to refill her drink. Behind me was a coffee table littered with discarded cups, plastic, most of them, a handful filled with cigarette ash, lipstick- smeared butts. The tenant was standing now, leaning against one edge of the arched threshold that divided the kitchen from the hallway– living room. “She was,” the ten-ant said, “a virgin. I don’t know how I knew this— I don’t think she told me— but I’m sure I knew it and I’m sure it was true. We were part of the same larger circle. All of us English majors.” She smiled. “One semester a whole bunch of us took Chaucer and we would spend our weekends getting drunk and memorizing bits of The Canterbury Tales. We had a game going where the thing was to sneak the word queynte into conversations with anyone who hadn’t done their pre–eighteen hundreds pre-reqs.” She shrugged. “I guess you’ll just have to trust me when I say I’m sure, when I say it was known. Not that we gossiped about it. We were twenty, twenty- one, and I mean we memorized Chaucer for fun, it wasn’t so unusual. Just, it was known.” The tenant lit another cigarette. Laura and I were still sitting. Laura was worrying a cuticle on a finger of her left hand with the thumb of her right, as was her habit when she was no longer and could not foresee when she would again be the center of attention. The blonde made a small noise somewhere between a sneeze and a snore and rolled her head so that it drooped now over her left rather than her right shoulder. “But anyway this guy. He was— we wouldn’t have known to call him a predator then. A sexual predator. Even now, saying the words, I feel kind of”— she shrugged again— “kind of stupid. But he was a grad student and my first year he dated a freshman and then later she dropped out and my second year he dated another freshman and she went on medical leave and in between there were”— she waved the hand that wasn’t holding the cigarette— “rumors. That he could be a little— rough. That he didn’t care if the girl wasn’t into it. That the pretty girls in his section got the best grades. I remember hearing once that he had a wife stashed away somewhere, but that one I never—  Anyway. The point is, my third year, our junior year, this girl, she starts dating this grad student. And the fact that he was dating a junior, this actually seemed like an improvement. She was twenty- one and he was thirty- one, maybe thirty- two, and we, I feel bad about this now, we joked that maybe this was exactly what she needed, like he was the hot guy in the movie about the pretty nerd, how she wouldn’t be a virgin much longer. I want to say— I want to offer as exculpatory evidence, our fear. I want to say that our jokes were born of our relief that he’d picked her and not one of us, and I do think that was part of it, but also—  she was so prissy, she didn’t drink, didn’t go to par-ties, turned all her papers in on time. I think we resented her for being— apparently, of course, not like we knew— untouched by college, unmarred. By this point, this was several semesters post- Chaucer, we’d all humiliated ourselves in one way or another, gotten too drunk and vomited in the bushes or yelled at an ex in the backyard of a frat house or woken up in someone’s bed and not been able to remember how we got there— but this girl; this girl, she hadn’t— not once. We resented her for it. And then also why hadn’t he picked us, that was the other side of it, weren’t we good enough, pretty enough, smart enough. By what criteria had we been judged, in which ways had we been found wanting.

“Anyway. We told ourselves she must have known what she was getting herself into. We told ourselves she was an adult, and sure the rumors were wide-spread, sure they were widely believed, but they were also just that, rumors. The porn wars were over and porn had won and we were porn- positive, we were sex- positive, we probably wouldn’t have even called ourselves feminists. Who were we to judge.” The ten-ant walked over to the chair she’d been sitting in and began to lower herself, changed her mind, stood back up. “At first,” she said, “at first they seemed happy. He started going out a little bit less and she started going out a little bit more. Once a month, twice a month, we’d see them at a party together— she’d always be wearing something ridiculous. Once, this was in March or April, nowhere near Halloween, she came in a kind of— classy cowgirl costume, patterned dress, lace trim, hat and boots and a rib-bon around her neck.” She shook her head. “But so anyway they’d show up, arm in arm, and she’d be wearing something ridiculous and she still wouldn’t drink, just sit on the couch and sip from a cup of tonic water all night while he took shots with former students. Now I tell my undergrads, told my under-grads, If a grad student wants to hang out with you, that’s a sign, a sign you should definitely not hang out with them, but back then”— she shook her head— “it didn’t occur to us, how inappropriate it was, this guy at parties with people a decade younger than he was, people whose grades he had recently been, in some cases still was, responsible for. We thought it meant we were— mature, sophisticated, I don’t know, adult.” She lit a fresh cigarette off the butt of the one she had finished, left the butt in a plastic cup to smolder. “Anyway, we thought it said something good about us, his being at our parties, rather than something evil about him. But okay this girl— so at parties she’d sit on the couch and she wouldn’t really talk to anyone, just sit and sip and watch, but also she didn’t seem unhappy. She had this smile like she was”— the tenant made air quotes with the hand that wasn’t holding the cigarette—“  ‘happy, with a secret.’ I heard that somewhere. I’ve always liked it. ‘Happy, with a secret.’ The safest way to be happy, if you think about it. If you keep it a secret, the happiness, it’s harder for someone else to, you know”— the tenant shrugged— “take it from you.”

She paused and while she paused I had two thoughts. First, that the phrase “happy, with a secret” did not necessarily imply happy because of a secret, did not necessarily imply keeping the source of happiness secret, could just as easily indicate happy and also, unrelatedly, keeping a secret and, second, that I was pretty sure I knew where this story was going, not only because the man in the story had been identified as a sexual predator but also because it was late and it was only women and we were all a little drunk and under those conditions there is only one place a story about a boy and a girl ever goes. So I knew where this story was going and I was thinking that I wanted her to get on with it, get it over with, but also, as I looked up at the tenant, who was standing, sipping bourbon from a mug, taking a drag of her cigarette— there was now a layer of smoke in the hallway– living room, a halo hovering four or so feet off the ground, the tenant at its empty center— as I stared up at the smooth slope of the ten-ant’s throat, at the declivity above her collarbone, a further thought entered my mind, not a thought but a wish, specifically the wish that she not get on with it, get it over with, stop talking. The wish was that she would go on talking so that I could go on staring. She was two years ahead of us, us being me and John and Laura and the blonde, wasn’t teaching anymore, on dissertation fellowship, and I liked to imagine her days, their discipline, her waking up and making coffee and sitting down in front of the computer with a stack of books, liked to imagine the glass of wine at six o’clock, the cigarette on the porch, a book in hand, reading for pleasure now, chopping cloves of garlic, an onion, sautéing them in a cast iron pan; she would know how to season a cast iron pan. I didn’t know her that well, this ten-ant, this not- girl, this woman, but she was slightly older and very beautiful and she carried herself like she was one body, a whole, not a collection of dis-jointed limbs, and for this reason I believed her to be very intelligent and I was in awe of her and a little bit in love with her and also I loathed her, not furiously or passionately but attentively, careful to keep the flame of— it wasn’t quite hatred; something closer to envy, something tinged with lust— anyway, whatever flame I was nurturing I was nurturing it with care, so that, on this night as on all nights, it was burning fierce.

But she was speaking again. “This went on,” the tenant said, “for months. Six months, maybe.” She counted on her fingers. “November, December, January, February, March, April. So yes, six. And then it was May. And all this time the girl had remained a virgin. I don’t know how I knew this but I did know it.” The blonde hiccupped in her sleep. The seat Laura had been occupying was now empty. “Middle of May, there was a concert. Middle of campus, four bands, day drinking. We mixed mimosas for break-fast, stashed martinis in water bottles, laid out blankets on the lawn. All day I drank orange juice, ate olives. Someone had a baguette, sliced meats. They were on a blanket near ours, this girl and the grad student. She was wearing what looked like a maternity dress, a length of green cloth, short- sleeved and high- necked, brocade detailing across the chest. Her hair was down and her cheeks were stiff and pink from smiling and the freckles on her neck, down her forearms, dotting her ankles, they were shining, they were giving off some kind of heat, she was glowing. It took me a second to realize she was drinking a beer. The grad student tucked her head under his chin and turned to me and winked.” The tenant paused. She stubbed her cigarette out, swallowed the last of her bourbon, sat down. She’d been, as she spoke, standing, pacing, moving from the chair to the arched threshold and back. The bathroom door opened and Laura appeared, wiping her hands on her jeans. The blonde was snoring. “You know how this ends,” she said. “That night there was a party. Big house, two floors, five bedrooms. Or, they were using five bedrooms. Five were upstairs but there was one downstairs, a spare. It was ten or eleven by then and she was bright and loud and dancing, arms everywhere, and then she was unsteady on her feet, and then she was sitting on the floor and the grad student came over and put his hands under her arms and lifted her up and carried her to the spare bedroom. He said he was going to put her to bed, let her get some sleep, it was too far to carry her home, or maybe he didn’t say anything, maybe that’s just what we all allowed ourselves to believe. I was drinking bourbon. Some Beatles song was playing and we were all singing along. I was doing the twist. I only ever did the twist in college, never any other kind of dance— letting other people see my body in ungoverned motion, it seemed too chancy. You know— ” She paused for a moment and when she spoke again she was speaking more quickly: “I didn’t drink before college, had greasy bangs, wore long skirts because I hated my calves, wouldn’t wear pants because I hated my thighs. We should have been friends. If not friends, allies. Instead I hated her. Her vulnerabilities, her weaknesses— she wasn’t hiding them and because she wasn’t hiding them I felt she was exposing me, too. Maybe the grad student sensed this also, our kinship, because when he left the spare bedroom, fifteen, twenty minutes later, fiddling with his belt, he caught my eye, raised an eyebrow. He didn’t say anything, just went back to the party. When people started trickling out, he went back to the bedroom, woke her up, gave her a glass of water, walked her home. But we all knew. Maybe the next day a friend of mine talked to a friend of hers, or maybe someone saw her crying. Somehow it was confirmed, though I didn’t need confirmation, I understood the moment he raised that eyebrow, the moment he left that bedroom, the moment he entered it.” The tenant cleared her throat, stood, began collecting cups and mugs from the coffee table behind me, taking them to the sink. “I only thought of her because she was in the paper today. The Times had her wedding announcement.” I gathered a few cups and brought them into the kitchen. “She’s a writer,” the tenant said, “freelance. She published a book review in The New Yorker, I read it, recognized her name. And she was smiling in the picture. The engagement picture. She was. Only the smile”— the tenant’s back was to me, she was washing a mug out, but I could see her shoulders rise and fall— “of course it was a portrait, posed, but still the smile was different. That’s all. That’s all I really wanted to say.”

I walked home alone. Laura and I shared an apartment but I insisted on staying to help clean up and anyway Laura wanted to walk with the blonde, was worried about her getting back to the floor- through loft she insisted on calling, with faux modesty and technical accuracy, a “studio.” I wasn’t a smoker, that is to say I smoked only other people’s cigarettes, and before I left, I bummed three from the tenant, lit the first inside the apartment and chain- smoked the second and then the third on the short walk to my building and then in my building’s court-yard. As I walked I thought of a thread being cut, of two fingers snapping. What was it a hypnotist said when it was time to awaken his patient? An image in black and white— a man, portly and mustachioed; a woman, supine; a pocket watch swaying— and the phrase You are getting very sleepy. He made her stand and squawk like a chicken and the audience laughed and then she woke up, and she didn’t understand why her fists were in her armpits, why her right leg was raised. Maybe he just clapped his hands? Strange that I couldn’t remember because of course that was the awful part, not the bit where you squawked but the bit when you realized you were squawking.

There were things that horrified me about the story— the raising of the eyebrow, for example, and how afterward everyone knew. Knowing that after-ward everyone knew. And the act itself, of course— wrong, that was indisputable, criminal even, and further degraded by the choice of location. But also, walking the length and width of the courtyard, trying to keep warm, wishing I’d taken the tenant up on her offer of what remained of her pack— “Really you’d be doing me a favor, every cigarette you smoke is a cigarette I don’t smoke”— but also wasn’t there, beneath the details, something— to be overwhelmed, to have no choice in the matter, wasn’t there some-thing—  Obviously not if you were drunk. Obviously not your first time. Obviously not if you didn’t, somewhere deeper, somewhere— less acceptable and so less accessible, really want it. But no, that was what they said, what rapists said, that the girl, the woman, had really wanted it. So no, in addition, there would— I mean there would have to be some kind of understanding, it couldn’t be just the man’s—  But if there was. I mean, mightn’t it, couldn’t it—  To be in someone else’s power, not to have to make decisions, to be in fact prevented from making all decisions except where to move your— in fact maybe those decisions also were being made for you so that—  I had finished the third cigarette. Something to do with being chosen, something to do with release of responsibility. Could what the graduate student did be wrong and what I sometimes felt I wanted also be right. I crushed the butt beneath my heel. Was it nostalgia I was feeling or was it guilt. Either the desires I had were possible desires and these desires had been fulfilled—either I had allowed these desires to be fulfilled, either I had encouraged, had chased their fulfilment—or, this was the other option, I had been tricked. The other option was I was wrong. The other option was I could not trust myself, not how my stomach fell and then how my muscles tightened around the place where my stomach had been, not how the blood drained from my face and how cold sweat pooled under my armpits. Either there was a way to see this so that—or else there was something fundamentally—  But really it was so cold. And the twenty-four-hour convenience store was too far to walk to and anyway I wasn’t a smoker. There were maybe two fingers of bourbon left in the bottle on my dresser. It was so late. I would go upstairs. I would drink the two fingers and maybe one of the beers in the fridge. I would remember to brush my teeth. I would put on my pajamas and get into my bed. I would go right to sleep.