Robert

Robert is the older man whose courtship of Margot begins with a small ritual at a cinema snack counter and culminates in an encounter that leaves her humiliated and unsure how to judge what happened. His behavior shifts between gestures of apparent tenderness and sexual conduct that disregards her comfort, a contrast that gives their brief relationship its uneasy force.

Identity and Introduction

Robert meets Margot on a Wednesday evening near the end of her first semester, when she is working at the snack kiosk of a downtown art-house cinema. He enters to buy a large popcorn and a box of strawberry Red Vines. Margot remarks that the candy is an unusual choice and says she has hardly ever sold a box before. Her teasing draws on the flirtatious manner she developed while working as a bartender, where it helped bring in tips; at the cinema, where customers do not tip, it offers some relief from a dull job. She also finds Robert attractive enough to flirt with, though not striking enough that she would have approached him at a party.

Margot notices his height and the edge of a tattoo showing beneath his rolled-up shirt sleeve, alongside details that make her attraction qualified: he has a few extra pounds, an overgrown beard, and shoulders that slope forward as if he were protecting something. She thinks he has finished college and is at least twenty-five, while she is twenty. His first response to her provocation is difficult to read: he seems to retreat in a way that prompts her to lean toward him and make more effort. He then collects his change and leaves without extending the exchange.

The following week, Robert returns and buys another box of Red Vines. He teases Margot about having improved as a cashier because she has managed not to insult him this time. The repeated purchase gives their brief banter a pattern: her mock criticism and his dry reply become a way of acknowledging one another, though the exchange remains at first confined to the counter. His return, rather than any open declaration, is the first clear sign that he intends to continue their contact.

Courtship and Uneasy Tenderness

When Robert appears again, his clothes sharpen the impression Margot has already formed of him. A rabbit-fur hat hangs over his ears, and an outdated, bulky down jacket gives him a slightly odd, lumberjack-like air. She thinks the hat suits him; the coat conceals his stomach and drooping shoulders. He addresses her as the snack girl, though by then he surely knows her name, and she expects him to kiss her. Instead, he takes her by the arm and gently kisses her forehead, as if she were something precious. He tells her to study hard and says they will meet again. Walking back toward her dorm, Margot recognizes the buoyant feeling as the beginning of a crush.

Their age difference and Margot’s sense of being out of place surface during a later evening together. Robert treats her account of her age as a point he can contest, bringing up her gap year; she insists that she is twenty. The exchange leaves her unexpectedly close to tears, with the feeling that everything has gone wrong and she cannot understand why it is all so difficult. Seeing her face crumple changes Robert’s manner: his tension disappears, he straightens, and he wraps his arms around her. He soothes her, asks her not to be upset, and kisses the top of her head. Against him, Margot again feels delicate and precious, as she had outside the 7-Eleven; his embrace lets her laugh and wipe away her tears.

Margot makes light of crying because she was refused entry to a bar, and imagines that Robert must see her as foolish. Instead, she reads his gaze as reassurance: in the snowy lamplight, she sees herself as pretty, smiling despite the tears. The tenderness, however, does not lead to a tender kiss. Robert lunges at her and kisses her badly, pushing his tongue into her mouth. Margot finds the kiss frightening and startlingly inept, yet also feels a reluctant tenderness and the sense that, despite his being older, she understands more than he does. He takes her hand and leads her to another bar, where pool tables, pinball machines, sawdust on the floor, and the absence of an entrance ID check make it possible for them to get in. There, Margot spots the recent graduate who had been her English teaching assistant during her first year, bringing her student life unexpectedly into the evening.

Sex and the Collapse of Tenderness

Robert reassures Margot that she need not be nervous and that they can take things slowly, but his actions immediately contradict the assurance. He is soon on top of her again, kissing her and pressing down with his weight. Margot realizes that any remaining hope of enjoying the encounter has disappeared, yet decides to let him finish. When he is naked and puts on a condom, she feels repulsion at the sight of his partly obscured body; after he inserts a finger roughly, that repulsion turns into self-disgust and humiliation. She imagines herself seen from above, naked and spread out, and registers the humiliation as a perverse cousin of arousal.

During sex, Robert moves her through a series of positions with what the narration describes as rough efficiency, turning and pulling her. Margot feels like a doll again, but no longer something precious: she is a flexible rubber prop in a film he seems to be making in his own head. He slaps her thigh and makes a comment implying that she enjoys it; when he turns her over, he speaks crudely about her breasts. Margot has to bury her face in the pillow to keep from laughing. The laughter sits beside her discomfort, not as evidence that she welcomes his treatment but as part of her bewildered distance from the scene.

When Robert is above her in the missionary position, he repeatedly loses his erection and responds aggressively by insisting that she is making him hard. At last, after a frantic burst of movement, he shudders, comes, and collapses on her with the weight of a felled tree. Pinned beneath him, Margot thinks that this is the worst decision she has ever made; for an instant, she is also surprised by herself, as if the person who has just done this remains a mystery to her. The encounter thus ends not in the intimacy promised by his earlier tenderness but in physical discomfort and a sharp division between what Margot experiences and what Robert appears to imagine.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

After the encounter, Margot collapses over a table, feeling as though a blood-swollen leech has finally detached from her and left a painful bruise. The image gives physical form to her uncertainty: she wonders whether she is being unfair, since Robert may have done nothing wrong beyond being attracted to her, being bad in bed, and perhaps lying about having cats, which might simply be in another room. Her question is not resolved by a clear verdict on his intentions. Instead, the account holds together her discomfort and her doubt about whether she is entitled to feel it.

A month later, Margot sees Robert alone at the bar she had suggested for their evening out, in the student neighborhood. He sits at a table in the back, hunched over a beer, neither reading nor looking at his phone. Margot grabs her friend Albert and whispers that the man from the cinema is there. Albert has heard a version of the story, though not the true one; he steps between her and Robert, and they hurry back to their friends. When Margot tells the group Robert is present, they react with surprise, then gather around her and escort her out together. Their conspicuous protectiveness makes her wonder whether she is behaving cruelly, even as she feels frightened and thoroughly tired of the situation.

That night, curled up on her bed with Tamara, Margot reads Robert’s messages as they arrive. He says he saw her at the bar and thought she looked pretty, hopes she is well, then says he misses her. He acknowledges that she told him not to write, but continues by asking what he did wrong and pressing her for a yes-or-no answer. The sequence moves from a compliment and a claim of concern to demands for a response, and finally to an insult. His language turns the separation into a question of what Margot owes him, while her silence and the friends who shield her mark the distance she is trying to keep.

Robert’s brief arc is shaped by the widening gap between the tenderness Margot sometimes experiences in his gestures and the pressure of his later actions. The forehead kiss and the comfort after she cries make her feel precious; the sexual encounter leaves her feeling used as a prop in a scene of his making, and the messages continue to press against her stated boundary. The story does not settle her uncertainty by declaring a simple explanation for his behavior. It instead shows how care, discomfort, self-doubt, fear, and anger can coexist, and how Robert’s escalating texts make the imbalance between his desire for an answer and Margot’s wish to withdraw increasingly visible.