Read Online High Fidelity by Nick Hornby - Free Book Online Page A

airhead in L. A.! I understand that I was in dire need of symptoms to help me understand that I have been deeply traumatized by recent events, but did they have to be this extreme? Couldn’t God have settled for something just mildly awful—an old Diana Ross hit, say, or an Elton John original?
    And it doesn’t stop there. As a result of Marie LaSalle’s cover version of “Baby, I Love Your Way” (“I know I’m not supposed to like that song, but I do,” she says with a cheeky smile when she’s finished), I find myself in two apparently contradictory states: a) I suddenly miss Laura with a passion that has been entirely absent for the last four days, and b) I fall in love with Marie LaSalle.
    These things happen. They happen to men, at any rate. Or to this particular man. Sometimes. It’s difficult to explain why or how you can find yourself pulled in two different directions at once, and obviously a certain amount of dreamy irrationality is a prerequisite. But there’s a logic to it, too. Marie is pretty, in that nearly cross-eyed American way—she looks like a slightly plumper, post– Partridge Family, pre– L.A. Law Susan Dey—and if you were going to develop a spontaneous and pointless crush on somebody, you could do a lot worse. (One Saturday morning, I woke up, switched on the TV, and found myself smitten with Sarah Greene from Going Live, a devotion I kept very quiet about at the time.) And she’s charming, as far as I can tell, and not without talent: once she has got Peter Frampton out of her system, she sticks to her own songs, and they’re good, affecting and funny and delicate. All my life I have wanted to go to bed with—no, have a relationship with—a musician: I’d want her to write songs at home, and ask me what I thought of them, and maybe include one of our private jokes in the lyrics, and thank me in the sleeve notes, maybe even include a picture of me on the inside cover, in the background somewhere, and I could watch her play live from the back, in the wings (although I’d look a bit of a berk at the Lauder, where there are no wings: I’d be standing on my own, in full view of everybody).
    The Marie bit is easy enough to understand, then. The Laura thing takes a bit more explaining, but what it is, I think, is this: sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful all at the same time. Marie’s the hopeful, forward part of it—maybe not her, necessarily, but somebody like her, somebody who can turn things around for me. (Exactly that: I always think that women are going to save me, lead me through to a better life, that they can change and redeem me.) And Laura’s the backward part, the last person I loved, and when I hear those sweet, sticky acoustic guitar chords, I reinvent our time together, and, before I know it, we’re in the car trying to sing the harmonies on “Love Hurts” and getting it wrong and laughing. We never did that in real life. We never sang in the car, and we certainly never laughed when we got something wrong. This is why I shouldn’t be listening to pop music at the moment.
    Tonight, it really doesn’t matter either way. Marie could come up to me as I was leaving and ask if I wanted to go for something to eat; or I could get home, and Laura would be sitting there, sipping tea and waiting nervously for absolution. Both of these daydreams sound equally attractive, and either would make me very happy.
    Â 
    Marie takes a break after an hour or so. She sits on the stage and swigs from a bottle of Budweiser, and some guy comes out with a box of cassettes and puts them on the stage beside her. They’re £5.99, but they haven’t got any pennies, so really they’re six quid. We all buy one from her, and to our horror she speaks to us.
    â€œYou enjoying