A Look That Has to Be Paid For

“For three years I was perfect… And not once has he looked at me like that.” Simon answers with the truth — “not to hurt her. Because this was the one thing he understood better than anyone alive”: “He doesn’t look at me like that because he loves me. That’s how he looks at what he thinks is his. You’re jealous of a look that has to be paid for. If you got it, you wouldn’t be glad.” Priscilla does not understand — and in her not-understanding, for one second, everything is visible: she is jealous of what he has been getting, “and he knew the price better than she did — and he was still standing here, in someone else’s T-shirt, and not going anywhere.”

This is Simon’s most mature line in the book. He can already tell ownership from love, knows that Jacob’s look belongs to the former, and knows the price: bruises, the police report, “when the door opens, you throw me to the floor.” And he stays. Not out of stupidity, and not out of “a love of suffering,” but because for him this look is the only experience of being seen at all, and knowing the price does not cancel the hunger (see “A Crack in the Asphalt,” “The Sacrifice Becomes the God”). The codex does not ask the reader to decide whether he is right. It asks the reader to notice that knowledge does not free by itself — an alternative frees, and Simon does not have one yet.