Nick Hornby - High Fidelity

High Fidelity
http://www.fictionbook.ru/author/hornby_nick/high_fidelity/hornby_high_fidelity.html
Page 41 of 112
6/20/2006
lose interest and, as she had no interest in the first place, that would put me into a minus interest
situation. I’d be in the red, interest-wise.
Barry and Dick are asking T-Bone about Guy Clark; Marie’s listening, but then she turns to me and
asks me, conspiratorially, if everything went all right. Bastard Barry big-mouth.
I shrug.
“She just wanted to pick some stuff up. No big deal.”
“God, I hate that time. That picking-up-stuff time. I just went through that before I came here. You
know that song called ‘Patsy Cline Times Two’ I play That’s about me and my ex dividing up our
record collections.”
“It’s a great song.”
“Thank you.”
“And you wrote it just before you came here”
“I wrote it on the way here. The words, anyway. I’d had the tune for a while, but I didn’t know what to
do with it until I thought of the title.”
It begins to dawn on me that T-Bone, if I may Cuisinart my foodstuffs, is a red herring.
“Is that why you came to London in the first place Because of, you know, dividing up your record
collection and stuff”
“Yup.” She shrugs, then thinks, and then laughs, because the affirmative has told the entire story, and
there’s nothing else to say, but she tries anyway.
“Yup. He broke my heart, and suddenly I didn’t want to be in Austin anymore, so I called T-Bone, and
he fixed up a couple of gigs and an apartment for me, and here I am.”
“You share a place with T-Bone”
She laughs again, a big snorty laugh, right into her beer. “No way! T-Bone wouldn’t want to share a
place with me. I’d cramp his style. And I wouldn’t want to listen to all that stuff happening on the other
side of the bedroom wall. I’m way too unattached for that.”
She’s single. I’m single. I’m a single man talking to an attractive single woman who may or may not
have just confessed to feelings of sexual frustration. Oh my God.
A while back, when Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what
you are like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for prospective partners, a two- or three-page
multiple-choice document that covered all the music/film/TV/book bases. It was intended a) to dispense
with awkward conversation, and b) to prevent a chap from leaping into bed with someone who might, at
a later date, turn out to have every Julio Iglesias record ever made. It amused us at the time, although
Barry, being Barry, went one stage further: he compiled the questionnaire and presented it to some poor
woman he was interested in, and she hit him with it. But there was an important and essential truth
contained in the idea, and the truth was that these things matter, and it’s no good pretending that any
relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn’t
even speak to each other if they met at a party.
If I’d given Marie a questionnaire, she wouldn’t have hit me with it. She would have understood the
validity of the exercise. We have one of those conversations where everything clicks, meshes,
corresponds, locks, where even our pauses, even our punctuation marks, seem to be nodding in
agreement. Nanci Griffith and Kurt Vonnegut, the Cowboy Junkies and hip-hop, My Life as a Dog and
A Fish Called Wanda, Pee-Wee Herman and Wayne’s World, sports and Mexican food (yes, yes, yes,
no, yes, no, no, yes, no, yes) … You remember that kid’s game, Mousetrap That ludicrous machine you
had to build, where silver balls went down chutes, and little men went up ladders, and one thing knocked
into another to set off something else, until in the end the cage fell onto the mouse and trapped it The
evening goes with that sort of breathtaking joke precision, where you can kind of see what’s supposed to
happen but you can’t believe it’s ever going to get there, even though afterwards it seems obvious.
When I begin to get the feeling that we’re having a good time, I give her chances to get away: when
there’s a silence I start to listen to T-Bone telling Barry what Guy Clark is really like in real life as a
human being, but Marie sets us back down a private road each time. And when we move from the pub to
the curry house, I slow down to the back of the group, so that she can leave me behind if she wants, but