Capital

never experienced before, because from one point of view, and one point of view only, he was ecstatically happy: his body liked what was happening. Right from the first time, when Davina had come screaming at exactly the moment he came into her, they had had amazing sex; the best sex of Zbigniew’s life. This was not a question of tricks or specific acts; it wasn’t any single thing Davina did that no other girl had ever done; it was just that they somehow worked together. It was hard not to reach for engineering metaphors. The mechanism simply worked. Perfectly. And repeatedly. Every time. It was, considered purely as sex, the best sex of his life: the most inventive, the dirtiest, the most satisfying, the noisiest. His body was crazy about what was happening.
    The trouble was that his mind, his spirit, his soul, his feelings, were in convulsions. The thing was – he couldn’t stand Davina. He had noticed this at an early point, a very early point, indeed during their first conversation; if it came to that, he had noticed it before he even spoke to her, since she smoked and he couldn’t stand smoking, even if it did look sexy. He had mentioned this to her after a few weeks and – she had given up! There and then! That was how bad the situation was!
    It wasn’t that Davina was overtly clingy. But she was completely, irrevocably dependent. He was her world; he knew that because she told him so. ‘You are my world.’ That made no sense to Zbigniew, as a thing to say, because it could never be true. People were people, one by one, individuals, and the world was the world. That was the whole point of it, that it was everything else. A person could not be your world. That was the whole point of what people and the world were.
    The dependency, which appeared only after they had slept together for the first time, was a big issue. Every time they met – which if it had been up to her would be every day, in fact if it were up to her they would already have moved in together, in fact if it were up to her they would already be married – she would ask what he had been doing and wait on the answer with her eyes large, her mouth slightly parted, as if ready to be thrilled, amazed, aghast. There was a note of paranoia and jealousy there right from the start. She was jealous of his work, his friends, his stock portfolio, Piotr, everything. She tried not to show it, or tried to show it in a way that looked like a convincing attempt not to show it.
    All this, while obviously not all right, might have been bearable, if it were not for two other traits which interacted with and magnified each other. The first was her theatrical way of acting everything out. She did everything with a consciousness of being watched. She exaggerated everything she said or felt, often by pretending to underplay her reactions; this was a particularly epic phenomenon when she was pretending not to be hurt or upset. When Zbigniew had through pressure of work to cancel a ‘drink’, i.e. a bottle of wine followed by sex followed by a bitter contest over whether he stayed the night at her flat, the next time they met she would act like a cat greeting an owner who had gone on holiday: looking away, shrugging and saying ‘Nothing’ when he asked what was wrong, saying ‘Whatever’ to any suggestions or plans of any sort. (‘Shall I ask for the bill?’ ‘Whatever.’) Then there would be strenuous, tumultuous reconciliation sex.
    The second trait, the one which finally meant that Zbigniew found his girlfriend impossible to be with for any time without wishing he were somewhere else, was her gloominess, what she called her ‘black dog’. (Even the way she said that, theatrically, looking down or away, as if the subject was too difficult, too painful, as if the very words themselves were a burden which a man as coarsely at ease with himself as Zbigniew would have difficulty imagining . . .) Once every three or four meetings, she would be lost in herself, barely able to speak – or that was how she acted. But her histrionic side meant that it was impossible to tell. She might not have had anything much on her mind at all, but just been wanting a little more attention – this is what he often thought was the case. Or she might have been a bit down and needing cheering up, but instead of just asking for cheering up, she had decided to exaggerate how down she was on the basis that it was a more effective way of getting his attention, only to find