2014-08-15 - 12:37 a.m.
There's a scene, in Never Let Me Go, that I think about a lot. It's a sex scene, but it's not really about sex in the way that the best sex scenes are not. In it, the two lovers are finally together, and it's not their first time together, or their second, but instead they're far enough along that they've begun to be comfortable together, known to each other.
Kathy and the boy (I can't just now remember his name) are living in a sort of communal house. Everyone's poor. Everyone's young. There is no heat in the house, and no real blankets, and so they make love in a cold room warmed only by scraps of old carpet, the carpet piled on top of them, mismatched and overlapping. The old carpet is perfect, because these two characters are doomed, of course, but also because regular sheets, regular blankets, would have been not right at all. The carpets are thrown-together, broken, unwanted, dirty, and perfect. They huddle together under those bits of forgotten fabric (naked, sure), clinging to each other, for warmth, for the humanity of it, in order to be alone together.
And the real reason, I think, why I like the scene so much, is that, to them, it doesn't matter that their blankets are really carpets. They are, in that moment, happy, and as for what's on top of them, they just don't care.
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