Around the same time that he met Kristen, Nate met Jason, in a literary theory class, and through Jason, he met Peter. In some ways it was sensitive, thoughtful Peter with whom Nate felt a strong connection. But three worked better than two. There was something too breathily eager about two guys drinking whiskey and talking endlessly into the night about books and the corporate-financed rightward shift of the nation and whether it was fair to say that Marxism had been tested or not because Soviet-style communism was such a perversion. Jason as a third leavened the dynamic. His cheerful bluster dispelled Nate’s and Peter’s bashfulness and gave their outings the social imprimatur of a guys’ night out.
Senior year of college, alternating his time between Jason-and-Peter and Kristen, Nate was happy. For many years afterward, he wondered if he was happier then than he’d ever be again. It was so new—the girl and the friends. And he’d waited so long for both. After graduation, he followed Kristen to Philadelphia, where she started med school and he wrote freelance pieces for a left-of-center magazine in D.C. He missed Jason, who worked at a glossy magazine in New York, and Peter, who was getting a PhD in American Studies at Yale. Home by himself—freelancing—Nate felt isolated. Perhaps he expected too much of Kristen. She had a different type of mind, and besides she was busy and tired. Medical school fulfilled her, mentally and socially.
Over time, Nate began to grow frustrated by her lack of literary sensibility, the sheer practicality of her intelligence, as well as a certain rectitude or squareness on her part—in other words, by her essential Kristen-ness, which he had once revered. He visited Jason in New York more and more frequently. He started to notice there were women who dressed differently, who wore neat-looking glasses and sexy high-heeled boots and had cool hair that made Kristen’s ponytail seem uninspired. Many of these women seemed to be reading Svevo or Bernhard on the subway. At home, he’d read Kristen bits from Proust, and she’d get this pinched look on her face, as if the sheer extravagance of Proust’s prose was morally objectionable, as if there were children in Africa who could have better used those excess words. Kristen also seemed to disapprove of Nate’s homebound lifestyle on a visceral, almost Calvinistic level that she couldn’t justify according to any of her core principles. (In theory she was devoted to the poor and idle.)
But the animosity accumulated so slowly that for a long time Nate hardly noticed it. He was genuinely shocked when Jason floated the notion that the relationship might be less than perfectly happy: “I don’t know,” he said, “it’s just the way you sound when you talk about her—it’s like ‘Kristen, sigh, this’ ‘Kristen, sigh, that.’ ” Nate had gotten so angry that it was all he could do not to walk out of the bar. Never mind that in the past twenty-four hours he’d silently accused Kristen of being prudish and narrow-minded a dozen times. Never mind that only seconds before Jason had spoken, he had been imagining their Goth-looking waitress going down on him.
That spring, Kristen signed the two of them up to serve as guides for the blind in a 5K at Fairmount Park. The morning of the race Nate wanted to stay in bed and read, and then maybe, maybe, have a Bloody Mary or two a little later, as he read some more at a sports bar with a game on.
“Why does everything always have to be so goddamn wholesome and sunny and do-gooder-y?” he said.
He wasn’t shouting, but he was close.
Kristen was sitting on their desk chair, bent at the waist as she pulled on her sneakers. She glanced at Nate, not with concern but with surprise that curdled quickly into annoyance. Then she returned to the business of her shoes. This angered him even more. “I’m not fucking Jimmy Stewart,” he said, mixing up Pollyanna and It’s a Wonderful Life.
A spasm of irritation—out-and-out contempt, really—flickered across Kristen’s face.
“If you want to sit around in your underwear all day, go right ahead,” she said. “I’ll go get you a beer from the fridge if that’s what you want.”
Nate had brought his laptop into bed. Now he closed it and looked at the wall beyond Kristen’s head. “That’s not what I meant.”
Kristen began pulling her hair into a ponytail. “I’m going to go to the race now,” she said in the doctor’s voice she’d been cultivating: neutral and distancing and only dispassionately empathetic. “I think you should, too, because you said you would, and they’re counting on you, but it’s your decision.”
Of course Nate apologized. Of course he began getting ready. But the truth was he still wished he didn’t have to go. He felt he was right somehow, even though he was clearly wrong because he had promised and because it would suck to be blind and he was fortunate to be blessed with the gift of sight.
After that, their squabbles began to feel more like sublimated judgments of the other’s entire person. For a while, each fight was followed—on Nate’s end, anyway—by a strong internal counterreaction. He felt uneasy about the precipice to which his resentful thoughts seemed to lead. He wanted to take back, retract, even in his mind, his criticisms of Kristen and restore the mental status quo (Kristen was the greatest, he adored her) that had served him so well, for so long. But as the fights persisted, his subsequent urge to backtrack began to diminish. Meanwhile, Kristen became increasingly interested in spending time with her classmates. Nate found he was relieved to be left to himself. Soon, they acknowledged that they’d “drifted apart.”
Their breakup was very amicable—it was as if simply by agreeing to part, their frustrations with each other shrank to manageable dimensions—and although Nate was a little surprised by how quickly afterward she got together with one of her medical school classmates, there was, to this day, nobody he respected more than Kristen in that good, sturdy, upright citizen way.
Nate moved to New York. He had high expectations, both professionally and romantically. The growth spurt he’d longed for had never come to pass, but he had filled out. His proportions had harmonized. He also felt as if he’d been vetted and Kristen’s seal of approval would, through some new air of self-confidence, be transmitted to all other pretty girls. After all, when he had still been going out with Kristen and he had, say, exchanged a look with a girl across a subway car, it had felt as if, surely, were it not for the existence of Kristen, he and the attractive stranger would have gotten off the train together and headed to a dive bar for a drink and smart, fizzy conversation. Once single, however, Nate quickly became aware of the vastly complicated chain of events that had to take place before a look translated into a conversation and a phone number, let alone drinks. It turned out that many of these good-looking girls who gleamed so promiscuously on the subway had boyfriends waiting for them aboveground. Or so they claimed.
When he did manage to get a date with a girl he picked up in public, he was usually in for a series of surprises. Yes, those girls with the boxy glasses reading Svevo or Bernhard or, more commonly, Dave Eggers (Nate had to admit that Svevo and Bernhard had always been much rarer sights, even on the F train), were, as a general category, very attractive. And when the sum total of Nate’s knowledge of such a woman had been what he gleaned from her clothing, posture, reading material, and facial expression, he had effortlessly filled in the blanks. She would be nonvegan, catless (or at least only one-catted), left-leaning, sane, and critical of the inadequacies of the American educational system without embodying them personally. He had been extremely naive.
It was around this time that he began to understand what was meant by the phrase low self-esteem, something he used to think he identified with intuitively. But what he had himself experienced was nothing like the total habituation to being treated badly that he encountered in some of the girls he met his first year in New York. He went out with a girl named Justine, a Pratt student who lived in a tiny studio in Bed-Stuy with a poodle named Pierre and a cat called Debbie Gibson. Several nights after Nate had gently suggested they might not have a future, she called him on his cell.
“I thought maybe you’d want to come over,” she said.
It was 2:0
0 a.m. Nate said he probably shouldn’t. “I think—well, I’m not sure I’m over my ex.”
Although Kristen had just told him that her new boyfriend was moving into the apartment they had shared, and although he had been, uhm, surprised by the dispatch with which this had transpired, what he told Justine was not, strictly speaking, true—he wasn’t pining for Kristen. But, it was the best he could come up with on the spot.
Justine started to cry. “I guess Noah was right.”
Noah was her ex. Apparently, he had told her she needed to get breast implants if any guy was going to want her. Obliged to disprove this prince, Nate said he’d be there in twenty minutes.
The next day he felt ashamed. What did boxy glasses and edgy tattoos matter if you were talking about a girl who suggested, in a heartbreakingly resigned monotone, that he might like to do her with porn on “because that’s how Noah liked it”? (Nate wondered how Noah felt about Pierre-the-poodle’s wiry-haired silhouette flitting across scenes of spanking and anal penetration as the ill-natured canine chased Debbie Gibson around the room.) Nate felt bad for Justine—because she’d grown up in an infinitely bleaker suburbia than the one he had known; because her mother had repeatedly chosen “the asshole” (her stepfather) over her; because, art school notwithstanding, she grimly expected to be a waitress or secretary all her life (“I don’t know the right people”); and because guys like Noah and Nate himself took advantage of her. But pity couldn’t be transmuted into romantic feeling, and Nate knew the best thing he could do for Justine was to stop seeing her.
Besides, he had problems of his own. Unhappy with the way one of his articles had been edited, he had—in a moment of pique or high principle, depending on how you looked at it—vowed never again to write for the left-wing magazine that had been his main source of income as well as credibility. This decision had disastrous consequences for his career and his finances.
When he first moved to New York, he’d had some notion that he’d paid his dues during his years in Philly. This turned out to be false, risibly so. Even with Jason’s connections at up-market men’s magazines, Nate had trouble getting assignments in New York. He took a temp job that became a full-time, indefinitely termed job in the library of a private equity firm, with the intention of writing at night. The job was so demoralizing that he wound up mostly drinking during his off-hours. It was a bad year (closer to two, actually). His industrious parents, who for his sake had emigrated to an unfamiliar land and whose uncreative and not particularly fulfilling labors had funded his lavish education, were, understandably, displeased. They wanted him to get a real job or go to graduate school. Nate was, however, determined to make a living writing.
Looking back, he was proud that he’d “persevered,” by which he meant that he hadn’t gone to law school. He’d moved to a cheaper apartment, which allowed him to quit the private equity job in favor of shorter bouts of temp work and freelance proofreading for a law firm. He worked on fiction and pitched articles and book reviews, getting assignments here and there. His critical voice improved. He began to get more assignments. Toward the end of his twenties, it became evident that he’d managed to cobble together an actual career as a freelance writer. The achievement was capped off when a major online magazine offered him a position as its regular book reviewer.
By then, he’d mostly stopped picking up girls at bars (let alone on the subway), having learned that he had a better chance of meeting someone he could have a conversation with if he dated women he met at publishing parties—editorial assistants and assistant editors, publicists, even interns. They weren’t all brilliant, but chances were slim that they had an ex-boyfriend named Noah who told them to get breast implants. They’d never met anyone like Noah, not in a romantic context anyway, not at Wesleyan or Oberlin or Barnard. And if they hadn’t read Svevo or Bernhard—and let’s face it, most hadn’t—at least they knew who they were. (“Zeno’s Conscience, right? Doesn’t James Wood, like, love that book?”)
Conveniently, such women tended increasingly to like him. The well-groomed, stylishly clad, expensively educated women of publishing found him appealing. The more his byline appeared, the more appealing they found him. It wasn’t that they were outright social climbers so much as they began to see him in a flattering light, the light in which he was beginning to see himself. He was not underemployed and chronically low on cash—he wasn’t only those things, anyway. He was also a young, up-and-coming literary intellectual.
Nate felt not only glad but vindicated, as if a long-running argument had finally been settled in his favor. His unpopularity, though persistent, had never seemed quite right. He was not and had never been a nervous, nebbishy sort; his interest in science fiction, never very intense, had peaked at age thirteen. He had always been a rather well-disposed and agreeable sort of person, if he said so himself.
He knew he’d truly arrived when he began dating Elisa the Beautiful. Not long after, he began making rapid progress on the book that had gone on to win him a six-figure advance from a major publishing house, further enhancing both his professional reputation and personal popularity. Water, as they say, eventually finds its level.
{ 3 }
The block of text that appeared on his computer screen was oppressively dense. Nate reached for his coffee mug before he began to read.
The e-mail was from Hannah, from Elisa’s dinner party. “I was wondering something,” she had written. “The other night you said that the indifference to suffering that was normal in Dickens’s times still exists. We’ve just gotten better at keeping it at a remove. But back then things like child labor were tolerated in a way that they aren’t tolerated now. They have, literally, been outlawed. Doesn’t that matter?” She continued in this vein for another couple paragraphs before ending on a friendly note: “I had a lot of fun the other night. It was nice talking to you.”
Nate’s coffee mug contained flat Coke. This was not his top-choice beverage first thing in the morning, but he didn’t have the wherewithal to make coffee, in part because he hadn’t had the wherewithal to make coffee for so many mornings in a row that he was afraid to face the live cultures colonizing his coffeemaker.
After reading Hannah’s e-mail, he set down the mug. Its impact on the desk caused a stack of books to wobble. As he reached out to steady it, the stapler that was perched atop an adjacent stack fell forward, landing on the back of his outstretched hand. He yelped.
Several minutes passed before he clicked back on Hannah’s message. He frowned as he reread it. Sober, in the daylight, he felt strangely hesitant to pursue the connection. The reason for this was unclear.
On the other hand, he wasn’t awake enough to start writing his commodification-of-conscience essay. And he didn’t have anything else in particular to do. When he’d been working on his book, he’d always had something to work on. Even when he wasn’t up to writing new material, he could always go back and tweak sentences he’d already written. Now that the book was in the hands of his publisher, he missed that.
He hit REPLY. “Isn’t it true, though”—his fingers tap-tap-tapped across his keyboard in a pleasing clatter of productivity—“that we are as acquisitive, if not more, than people were back then? We want comfortable lives, and if we don’t have servants, we have laborsaving devices made in China. Only now we want to feel good about it, too. So we make sure the exploitation happens out of sight. China is ideal.”
After he pressed SEND, Nate checked for new mail. He was expecting something from Peter, who had recently moved from New Haven to Maine for an academic job. But, no, nothing.
He got up and looked out the window. His street was barren, the trees that lined its sidewalks short and spindly, their leaves sparse even at the height of spring. They had been planted a few years ago as part of an urban revitalization scheme, and they had about them a sad, failed look, as if no one but civil servants had ever cared for them. Maybe they were also the wrong species or simply poor examples of their type. The wealthy residen
ts of, say, Park Slope, one neighborhood over, would have known better than to let the city plant such gnarled, runtish saplings on their streets. The people of Park Slope probably imported their own lush, verdant, perhaps even fruit-bearing trees.
The smell of bacon wafted through the window. Nate wondered if he’d missed anything the last time he’d scrounged around his cupboards for food.
As he walked to the kitchen, his socks stuck on the hardwood floor. Coffee droplets, dating from the days before he’d sworn off the coffeemaker, had congealed, turning his hallway into a strip of flypaper for dust and balled-up receipts and the tiny paper disks spewed by his hole puncher.
He gazed into his refrigerator, looking for he didn’t know what. A ready-made breakfast of eggs Benedict with a strong cup of coffee would have been nice. Alas. Not even a stray carton of rice from his favorite Chinese delivery place, whose motto was Always YOU Will Find Deliciousness. He poured the last of the Coke into his mug and threw out the bottle. A rancid odor rose from the trash can. He pressed the lid shut.
From the other room, his computer pinged. Nate hurried back to his desk. “Even so,” Hannah had written, “doesn’t it matter that forms of exploitation that were openly tolerated in the past have been forced under the table? Doesn’t that say something about how our conception of what’s acceptable has changed?”
She had a point. Nate leaned back in his chair. It was not a deal-breaking point, but something he’d have to address in his essay. Perhaps as we become more ethically ambitious, we have more incentive to hide our failings from ourselves? He scrawled “Rawls” on a Post-It note and stuck it to the screen of his laptop.
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Page 4
