High Fidelity

As Barry and Rob bicker about a top five list of songs, Dick reveals that he has a date planned. Barry teases Dick and, in doing so, reveals that he knows about Rob’s night with Marie. Rob is shocked. He intervenes in Barry’s taunting, before Barry storms out of the shop. Left alone, Rob realizes that Barry’s incessant mockery comes from a place of fragility. Like Rob’s encounter with the pitying man in the cinema queue, Dick’s date makes Barry realize that he is “worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are the bitterest of them all” (151). 

The store has one record which they cannot seem to sell but which they refuse to throw away. The record has become a recurring joke among the staff and the regulars. One day, a man excitedly finds the record and purchases it. The moment gives Rob hope that “surely anything good can happen at any time” (153). Rob meets Laura and notices how much she has changed. He cuts through the small talk and immediately asks whether Laura has slept with Ian yet. She refuses to answer, so Rob leaves.

The next day, the excited customer comes back to the store to return the unsellable record. Laura calls Rob that afternoon but they say little. Rob calls her back throughout the day, even looking up Ian’s phone number. He then goes to Ian’s new address and realizes that he has “lost it again” (156), just like he did when he broke up with Charlie. He decides that he should meet up with every woman on his top five list of bad breakups to try and find some kind of resolution. 

Rob meets Dick’s new girlfriend, Anna. She is as awkward and anxious as Dick, and Rob realizes that they adore one another, even if she likes music that they would normally consider embarrassing. A few days later, Lisa intervenes to bring a stop to Rob’s incessant phone calls to Laura. Lisa warns Rob that his behavior is not helping his cause. She does not like Ian, even if she still thinks Rob’s behavior toward Laura was terrible. She also explains that Rob’s constant mocking of Ian helped to show Laura that Rob had become sour and bitter. 

Rob begins to look up his old girlfriends, beginning with Alison. He reaches Alison’s mother on the telephone and tries to explain that he was Alison’s first boyfriend. Alison’s mother does not believe him. She insists that Alison married her first boyfriend and now they live together in Australia. She reveals that the name of Alison’s husband is Kevin Bannister. Kevin was the boy Alison left Rob to be with. He is delighted by this news.

At work, Rob sells a record to a man of a similar age. The man’s obvious professional success makes Rob reflect on his life, and he wonders whether he is wasting his time working in a record store. He realizes that, even though he spends most of his time listening to songs about love, he has learned nothing that has helped him in his romantic endeavors. 

Rob moves through his list of breakups. Penny is easy to track down as her parents are still friends with Rob’s parents. They go to the movies together as Penny is now a film reporter. Afterward, they have dinner in an Italian restaurant. As they eat, Rob tries to half-jokingly explain the situation whereby he broke up with Penny because she did not want to have sex with him, only for her to sleep with one of his friends immediately after. Penny is not amused. She reveals that Rob pestered her for sex frequently. While she wanted to have sex with him eventually, she felt that they were too young. Rob broke up with her, she reminds him, and she was so emotionally devastated that she found herself in a situation with his friend and felt unable to refuse him. Penny struggled to deal with the ramifications of Rob’s break up for many years, and she did not develop a healthy attitude toward sex until a long time after. She blames Rob. After this outburst, Rob realizes that Penny did not reject him; he rejected her, so Penny is “another one [he doesn’t] have to worry about” (174).