She told him that she’d grown up in Ohio and had gone to a big public school, the kind where cheerleading was taken seriously.
She took a sip of wine. “You can imagine why punk seemed really cool.”
“Ohio, huh?”
“Yup.”
She ran a finger along the seam of a cocktail napkin she’d folded into a triangle. “Most of my friends from home are still in Cleveland. Maybe Chicago, if they were ambitious.”
She said she’d gone to Barnard on a whim and wound up staying in the city for journalism school. “Nobody I know from home writes or does anything close,” she said. “They have regular jobs, at banks and insurance companies. Things like that.”
She rested her chin on her palm. A thin silver bracelet slid down her arm and disappeared into the sleeve of her sweater. “What about you?” she asked. “Did you feel remote from this world before you got here? Or is your family … ?”
Nate knew what she meant. “Did I tell you what my dad thinks of writing as a profession?”
Hannah had a warm, throaty laugh.
Nate was charmed by something he couldn’t quite identify, a tone perhaps, a sort of pervading archness. Now that he was alone with her, he found Hannah to be a little different than he’d expected. He’d formed an impression of her as the kind of cheerful, competent person one likes to have on hand at dinner parties or on camping trips, but she struck him as more interesting than that.
“I definitely didn’t grow up in a fancy intellectual environment,” he told her. “But I was determined not to stay in Baltimore. I interned in D.C. one year, and I met kids whose parents were politicians and Washington Post columnists. I knew I wanted that, what their parents had. I felt like if they had it, there was no reason I couldn’t.”
Hannah leaned in, poised to be amused. “What was it you wanted exactly?”
Nate caught a glimpse of cleavage beneath the neckline of her loose-fitting V-neck T-shirt.
He toyed with a whiskey-coated ice cube inside his mouth, pressing it against his cheek. He didn’t have a game plan for the evening. He hadn’t even made a conscious decision to ask her out. The day after he’d gotten her e-mail, he’d simply been restless. In the same spirit that he flipped through stacks of takeout menus, he scrolled through the names on his phone, reaching the end—Eugene Wu—without seeing one that appealed to him. Everyone’s shtick felt tired, overly familiar. Hannah offered, if nothing else, novelty. He wrote back to her suggesting they continue the conversation in person.
“What did I want?” he repeated. “You really want to know?”
“I really want to know.”
He toyed with a whiskey-coated ice cube inside his mouth, pressing it against his cheek. He recalled old daydreams: a generically handsome, professorial man with a strong jaw sitting in a wood-paneled office, a line of students waiting out front and a beautiful wife on the phone. Sometimes, the office wasn’t wood-paneled but chrome and glass, with a secretary who patched his calls through and a wall of windows opening onto the skyscrapers of New York. There was also a little hut in Africa where he’d dispense antibiotics and teach the villagers to love Shakespeare.
“On the one hand, to do something interesting,” he said. “And on the other, to be admired for it.”
Nate remembered something else: the belief that success was something that just happened to you, that you just did your thing, and if you were deserving, it was bestowed by the same invisible hand that ensured that the deli would have milk to drink and sandwiches to buy. Wouldn’t that be nice? Nate sometimes envied people less clear-sighted, people so seduced by success itself that their enthusiasm for successful people was wholly genuine. Nate knew perfectly well when he was currying favor—or trying to—and he was more than capable of feeling dirty about it.
“I used to think—” he started to say. But he didn’t know how to finish. He began fiddling with one of the buttons on his shirt. “It’s more complicated than I thought, the whole thing—ambition and writing,” he said finally. “More sordid.”
Hannah laughed. “Sold your soul lately?”
“Only in bits and pieces.”
“Lucky you,” she said. “I’ve tried. No takers.”
Like him, Hannah was a freelance writer, but Nate was pretty sure she wasn’t as far along yet. He remembered that she was trying to get a book contract. “They’ll come,” he assured her.
When Hannah got up to use the bathroom, she walked with her shoulders hunched and her head tilted slightly down, as if she were accustomed to rooms designed for shorter people. She was wearing a cardigan sweater over her T-shirt and jeans tucked into boots, a style that had reminded Nate of Wonder Woman when girls started adopting it en masse a year or two earlier. Her outfit seemed almost deliberately unsexy. But she had what seemed like a nervous habit of pulling the two sides of her sweater more tightly closed, which had the effect of making her (not insubstantial) breasts more prominent. As she walked away, the long sweater prevented him from getting a fresh read on her ass.
“Want another?”
Nate swiveled his head. The bartender, a young woman, was staring at the place where Nate’s face would have been if he hadn’t been watching Hannah walk away. She wasn’t so much pretty as stylish, with a slightly beakish nose and pouty lips. Her dark hair was separated into two long ponytails that hung on either side of her face.
“Yeah, thanks,” he said. He nodded at Hannah’s empty glass. “And another Chianti for her.”
“She was drinking Malbec.”
“Malbec then.”
She leaned over the bar to scoop up Hannah’s crumpled cocktail napkin. Her cleavage was frank and undisguised. The top few buttons of her plaid shirt were undone, and even though she had on a tank top underneath, it too was low cut.
She glided off to the other end of the bar. While he and Hannah had been talking, more people had filtered in; the room swam with their long, swaying shadows. A disco ball cast roving splotches of red and blue on the walls of the long, narrow space.
When Hannah returned, she glanced at her wine glass. “Thanks. Next round is on me.”
Jason had a theory that girls who offer to pay on dates suffer from low self-esteem. They don’t feel they deserve to be paid for; it’s a sign there’s something wrong with the girl. Nate wasn’t sure he agreed. Sometimes, it was just nice, only fair—especially if you weren’t Jason, who had never been short on cash because he was, Nate was sure, on the receiving end of significant income supplements from his parents or grandparents. Not that he and Jason discussed such things openly. No one in their circle did.
Jason would never go out with Hannah anyway. He was only interested in women who were very conventionally attractive, a preference he had once defended on the grounds of social justice: “If smart people only mated with smart people, class structures would ossify. There’d be a permanent underclass of stupid people. But when smart men mate with beautiful women, smart or not, you undermine that kind of rigid caste system. Dumb rich kids do everyone a favor by eroding any justification for birth-based privilege.” Jason was a jackass. Still, the thought of his friend’s appraisal—Jason would probably call Hannah a seven (“coworker material”)—bothered Nate. He didn’t like the idea of dating girls Jason wouldn’t. That seemed wrong, since Nate was clearly the better person—more successful as well as more deserving.
This was not a helpful line of thinking. “What’s your book proposal about?” he asked Hannah.
“What? Oh … that.” She began to adjust the folds of her cardigan. “Class and college in America,” she said finally. “It’s kind of a history and analysis of a national obsession. The Ivy League as our own version of aristocracy.” She nodded at him. “Nice shirt, by the way.”
Nate looked down. He’d unbuttoned the top buttons of his Oxford. Underneath, he was wearing an old T-shirt. Just visible were the crimson-colored letters A-R-V. He laughed.
Fuck Jason. Nate was having a good time.
&nb
sp; “When does your proposal go out?” he asked.
Hannah touched a hand to one of her earrings, a silver dangling thing. “I’m not finished yet,” she said. “It’s taking longer than I hoped.”
Nate nodded. “It’s a lot of work. You want to make it as strong as possible.”
A moment later, he made a throwaway comment about how it’s sad that so few people read these days. “It’s hard not to feel irrelevant in a world where a book that does really well sells maybe a hundred thousand copies. Even the lamest television show about time travel or killer pets would be canceled instantly if it did that badly.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Hannah said, turning to face him on the bar stool. “I think it’s vanity to want it both ways. You know, to want to write books because that’s your thing but also to want to be treated like a rock star.”
She held her wine glass rather elegantly if precariously by its stem, at nearly chin level. There was about her manner now a certain devil-may-care majesty not quite of a piece with her earlier timidity.
“Are you really so indifferent to the fate of books?” Nate asked. “You said the other night you love Nabokov. Wouldn’t it be a bad thing if people stopped reading Lolita?”
“I think people who are likely to appreciate Lolita will read Lolita,” she said, her expression challenging—flirtatious. “I don’t care about the rest. I mean, I don’t care what they do for fun.”
It flashed through Nate’s mind that Hannah’s position wasn’t very feminine. She sounded more like an aesthete than an educator, and women, in his experience, tended by disposition to be educators. He felt intuitively that she was paraphrasing someone else (a professor? Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature?) and that the someone was a man.
“You’re saying most people are philistines and no amount of education or cultural outreach will change that?” he asked.
She raised an eyebrow. “Not exactly. I mean, who even says ‘philistine’ anymore?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t think they are worse people because they don’t like novels, if that’s what you mean.”
“You don’t?”
“They could be, I don’t know, scientific geniuses or Christians who devote their lives to charity. I don’t see why being a person who reads novels makes me or anyone else superior.”
“Do you really mean that? Or are you just paying lip service to the idea because it’s politically correct?”
Hannah laughed and her cardigan fell open, revealing the contours of her breasts through her T-shirt.
“I mostly mean it,” she said. “I try to mean it.”
Nate realized he was having a conversation with Hannah—that is, he wasn’t going through the motions of having a conversation with her while privately articulating her tics and mental limitations. When it came to dating, his intelligence often seemed like an awkward appendage that failed for the most part to provide him with whatever precisely was wanted—dry, cynical humor; gallantry; an appreciation for certain trendy novelists—but nonetheless made a nuisance of itself by reminding him when he was bored. He wasn’t bored now.
“Is it snobbery to think that Lolita is better than a television show about pets?” he persisted.
“It’s snobbery to think you’re a better person than someone else just because they don’t happen to get off on the world’s most elegant account of child molestation.”
Her eyes flashed in the light cast by the disco ball.
Nate suggested they order another round.
As the bartender brought their drinks, he remembered something. “I didn’t know you and Elisa were friends,” he said.
Hannah looked at the black Formica bar. With her fingertips, she pushed her wine glass along its surface, guiding the glass like a hockey puck on ice.
“We’re not really,” she said. “To be honest, I was surprised when she invited me to her dinner party.” She looked up. “Pleasantly surprised, I should say.”
This made perfect sense. Elisa wasn’t great at maintaining friendships with women. She often pursued new female friends eagerly, but from year to year there was high turnover. Nate didn’t think it a coincidence that half the guests at her dinner party had been his friends rather than her own.
“What about you?” Hannah asked. “You and Elisa … ?”
“We used to date,” Nate said quickly.
Hannah nodded. Nate nodded back. He suspected that Hannah already knew about him and Elisa. For a moment, they continued to nod at each other.
“It’s great you’re still friends,” she said.
She suggested they go outside for a cigarette. Nate was glad for the chance to stand up.
It had been a chilly June; the outside air was cool. He and Hannah stood with their backs to the bar. Across the street, in a brightly lit new bodega, a table was piled high with pineapples and bananas. Its back wall was lined with stacks of Nature’s Harvest toilet paper wrapped in bucolic green cellophane. Next to the bodega stood a shabby, glass-fronted insurance office.
Hannah sifted through her purse and passed Nate a pack of cigarettes. He held the yellow box at a distance from his body, like a teetotaler forced to handle a martini glass.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” he said.
She continued to dig through her bag. “Only when I’m drinking,” she said. Her voice had become a bit singsong. She’d kept up with him drink for drink. That had surprised him.
The traffic light turned green. Two yellow cabs with their empty lights on shot past, hightailing it back to Manhattan. Hannah retrieved a plastic lighter. Nate watched as she put a cigarette in her mouth, cupping it with one hand and lighting it with the other. When she inhaled, her mouth formed a small O. Her eyelids drooped languidly. Pleasure seemed to ripple through her.
“You’re like a junkie.”
Without meeting his eye, she gave him the finger. The gesture surprised Nate into laughter.
“I just get so sick of the antismoking thing,” she said. “It’s so totalitarian.”
Before he knew what he was doing, Nate leaned in and kissed her. He descended upon her so swiftly that she made some sort of girlish, giggling noise of surprise-cum-accommodation before she began kissing him back. He felt the cigarette fall to the ground.
Her mouth tasted mildly of ashtray. It didn’t bother him. He liked that she found the antismoking thing “totalitarian.”
He began walking her backward until her upper back touched the brick front of an adjacent building. He leaned into her, one hand on the wall above her head for support, as his other moved down to the curve of her hip. Then, abruptly, he felt a tightening in his chest, as his body reacted to a thought before it had fully formed in his mind. Without at all wanting to, he had begun to wonder whether this was a good idea, if the spontaneous affection he felt for Hannah weren’t a signal that this was the last thing he ought to be doing.
No. The hand on the wall balled into a fist, scratching against the brick; the other found its way to where the small of Hannah’s back dimpled and flared into her ass, which was indeed nice, very nice. Through his shirt, he felt her hand climbing up his back. He told himself to shut the fuck up and enjoy the moment.
{ 5 }
Nate held his coffeepot up to the light. Its bottom half was a mash-up of pale brown stains with dark outlines, a fossil record of every pot of coffee he’d made since the last time he cleaned the thing. He began scrubbing the inside with a warm sponge.
After a little while, his thoughts turned to Hannah. He’d had fun with her the other night. That wasn’t so unusual. He generally liked first dates. What was unusual was the impression of her he had taken away, one of both reasonableness and intellectual depth. Although it wasn’t something he’d admit aloud, he often thought women were either deep or reasonable, but rarely both. Aurit, for example, was deep but not reasonable. Kristen was reasonable but not deep.
Sometimes he wondered whether he was a bit misogynistic. Over the years, va
rious women had complained that almost all the writers he admired were not only dead and white but male. Although this was pointed out to him with prosecutorial glee, Nate didn’t think it meant all that much. Women had faced systemic barriers to education and opportunity for most of history. They hadn’t written as much.
What he didn’t say—why aid the prosecution’s case?—was that the kind of writing he preferred seemed inherently masculine. The writers who impressed him most weren’t animated by a sense of personal grievance. (They were unlikely to, say, write poems called “Mommy.”) Of course that wasn’t an accurate characterization of all, or most, writing by women. Still, the fact was that when he read something he admired, something written today—fiction, nonfiction, didn’t matter—there was about an 80 percent chance that a guy wrote it.
He thought women were every bit as intelligent as men, every bit as capable of figuring out how long it would take for train A to crash into train B if the two were moving toward each other at an average speed of C. They were as capable of rational thought; they just didn’t appear to be as interested in it. They were happy to apply rational argument to defend what they already believed but unlikely to be swayed by it, not if it conflicted with inclination or, worse, intuition, not if it undercut a cherished opinion or nettled their self-esteem. So many times, when Nate had been arguing with a woman, a point was reached when it became clear that no argument would alter her thinking. Her position was one she “felt” to be true; it was, as a result, impermeable.
Even self-consciously intellectual women seemed to be primarily interested in advocacy, using intellect to serve a cause like feminism or the environment or the welfare of children, or in the interpretation of their own experience. Take Aurit. She was one of the smartest women—people—Nate knew. She was clear-sighted and original, and not, like a certain type of woman, intellectually timorous; she was comfortable challenging conventional wisdom. But her subjects—Zionism, Judaism, patriarchy—stemmed from her life. When she tried to do more abstract writing, the result was comparatively thin. She wasn’t interested in international relations or Middle Eastern politics; she was interested in growing up in a crazy, conflicted Israeli family that functioned like a two-headed monster, liberal socialism and primitive tribalism everywhere bumping up against each other. In other words, she was interested in being Aurit. And that was fine. But it was a difference.
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Page 6
