And the narrator, despite her fading attractiveness, continues to call and write to him. She tends to be rebellious. This is the woman who, on page two of the novel, has written an email to the manager of the hotel restaurant where she and Xavier meet to explain “how disappointingly lackluster the cakes and sandwiches were.” She finds it getting “tiring” to spend fifty euros at a flower shop, where Xavier has opened a weekly account so she can choose her own arrangements. Many passages are devoted to criticism of the colorful bouquets she receives from him and her publisher. She discovers their “uninvited arrival in [her] an unreliable world, intrusive, presumptuous and increasingly disorienting” – and this is not a bad look at how she usually perceives the existence of other people. Her relationship with Xavier, touchingly private and sweet in some respects, is also a comedy of miserliness. His calls always come at the most inopportune times; she becomes indignant when he tries to understand her. From the first days, the narrator knew that she would be by Xavier's side when he died. “Will the relationship between us be happy or terrible.” However, as to whether their relationship can withstand real intimacy—not sex, but a tentative journey into another person's reality—Bennett seems dubious.
“Do you like cats? That's like asking me if I like people.” Unlike most of us, the narrator of “The Big Kiss, Bye Bye” has the honor of admitting that most people can't win with her. She hates it when Xavier calls her “homey,” but she would hate it equally if he said the opposite: “I don't understand why he had to say anything.” A person can hardly appear on a page without being immediately irritated by his easy antics. The men with whom she shares her bed are usually nameless and indiscriminate, and her interactions with them smack of paralysis laced with irritation. As for her periodic email correspondence with her former English teacher Terence Stone, she regards it with constant ambivalence, finding it touching one day and infuriating the next.
A barb in her conversation with Stone concerns another former professor, Robert Turner, with whom she tells Stone she had a tense and unpleasant “relationship” while studying. It turns out that she was in love with Turner, and during the course of a degenerative disease, Turner stopped recognizing her. She gets angry when Stone calls the outburst she experienced during this relationship “minor”; she concludes that Stone's dismissal represents all-too-common hypocrisy and fear of scandal. This launches her into a fiery internal monologue about politeness: if someone admits to something terrible, she thinks bitterly: “In fact, you feel like an oik, which is what you are, you are an oik, a clumsy oik who could very well upset the apple cart.” For all Bennett's attention to the orderly, sensual pleasures of life—flowers, food, gardens, and weather—her narrator insists that she “cannot stand pleasant things.” “He seems warm and accepting and sincere, but he’s not at all, he’s completely subtle,” she continues. “You get to the very edge very quickly and then there’s nothing, you’re on your own.”
The book's alienated mood cracks in the only memory of ecstatic intimacy that appears immediately after the narrator's rant against Stone. One rainy afternoon she takes refuge with her lover behind a façade in the Square Mile; in the privacy of the street, he pins her against a column on one leg. When he touches her crotch and discovers that she is soaking wet, her narrative collapses into a raucous, stylized monologue: “the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, now he knows, knows very well… what all this is for and how far it all goes.” This is the only moment in the novel when she is willing to get close to someone, despite years of affectionate quarrels with Xavier. “I was afraid of his eyes and even his fingernails, because what if I got lost in them,” she recalls, “and saw the wheat fields and the sagging bicycle chain and the oil smeared everywhere and his poor forehead…” Bennett’s language becomes painterly here, drawing attention to her own brushstrokes and color scheme, as if she doubts that the scene will convey her decisive emotion. The lover is never named, but all scenes involving Turner are marked by equally passionate, elliptical storytelling; we might assume that the man pinning her against the pillar is him.
