“I mean—” he began.
“I know what you mean,” she said. “I just think any overarching theory based on a misconception, or an exaggeration, is bound to be off.”
She smiled innocently.
Nate laughed. Why did women say men were threatened by women who challenged them?
The waiter poured the last of the wine into their glasses. When they left the restaurant, the buildings and sidewalks were slick and shiny. Nate wiped a large drop of water from his forehead. Hannah looked indignantly skyward.
Nate waved the umbrella victoriously. “I knew it!”
Hannah rolled her eyes, with the sort of mock exasperation women like to affect when they’re flirting. As she got under the umbrella with him, her hip brushed his. She was so close Nate could almost feel her hair on his face.
“Let’s go to your place,” he said.
Hannah’s expression became searching. She pushed her hair back behind her ear and pulled back from him as much as she could while remaining under the umbrella. She seemed to be considering the question very seriously. Nate was tempted to touch her, but something, perhaps the fact that she was busy “considering,” held him back, as if to do so would constitute an illegitimate interference, like jury tampering.
“I want to see your book collection,” he said instead.
“Gag me.”
“I’m taking that as a yes.”
The cab he hailed seemed to move like a bumper car on the shimmering street, spewing water as it slid to a halt about twenty feet in front of them. They ran toward it, laughing drunkenly as they scrambled into the backseat. The small, balding driver grumbled when they told him they were going to Brooklyn and, muttering into his cell phone in a South Asian language, banged a fist against his doily-covered steering wheel. This also struck them as extremely funny.
Crossing the bridge, Nate turned to take in the Manhattan skyline behind them. The chains of white lights lining the cables of the other East River bridges were like dangling necklaces beneath the brightly lit towers, a fireworks display frozen at its most expansive moment. The view, familiar and yet still—always—thrilling, in combination with the plastic smell of the taxi, made him feel almost giddy. He had sort of a Pavlovian reaction to cabs. He rarely took them except on his way to bed with a new girl.
Hannah’s apartment was right off Myrtle, on the second floor of a walk-up building. Nate waited near the door as she circled the living room, switching on a succession of small lamps. The space lit up only gradually, as she got to the third or fourth one. Its wood floors were scuffed, but the walls were a very clean, stark white with original moldings at the top and very few pictures on them. One wall was lined with bookshelves. On the other side, a half-wall separated the kitchen from the living area. The room seemed unusually spacious for New York, in part because it had relatively little furniture. There was, Nate noticed, no couch. No television, either.
Hannah gestured for Nate to sit near the window where two mismatched upholstered chairs sat on either side of a small, triangular table. On the windowsill sat an ashtray.
A breeze blew through the window screen. The air, heavy with moisture, smelled clean and fresh. Hannah put some music on a record player, a stoned-sounding guy on a guitar, his voice ethereal and sad.
“I thought you were into punk,” Nate called as Hannah walked toward the kitchen.
“What?”
She turned around. “Oh, right … the Descendents. Different epoch.”
Epoch. Nate liked that. The music wasn’t bad, either, though it reminded him of Starbucks.
The breeze rustled up the air again. Nate leaned back in his chair, experiencing the pleasant sensation of being outside time and normal life. It was officially the first day of summer, and for a change his mood was in sync with the calendar. He felt free and heady, the way he had when he was young, when summer was a long possibility, a state of mind, not a period when work was slow because editors were on vacation.
Hannah moved around the apartment with dizzy cheer, pivoting shakily on the balls of her feet every time she changed direction. On her tiptoes, she retrieved a bottle of bourbon and two thin, blue-rimmed glasses from a kitchen cabinet. She placed the glasses on the little table next to Nate and began to pour the bourbon, holding the bottle high above, like a bartender, the long, amber stream glimmering in the lamplight. As she moved from one to the other, she spilled a little so that a dotted trail of liquid linked their drinks.
Nate picked up the one closer to him. “Cheers.”
He noticed some blue-and-white china crockery on Hannah’s countertop. “That reminds me of stuff my mother brought with her from Romania,” he said. Though he’d brushed her off when she asked, he’d wanted to tell Hannah about his family ever since she told him about hers. She wasn’t at all like Elisa.
He told her about the redbrick ranch house they’d lived in when he was growing up. After school, Nate and his mother would sit at the table, a Formica thing, in their sunny 1960s kitchen and drink tea—this was before his mother worked full-time. He remembered stirring in sugar cubes from a porcelain bowl with delicate fluting around the rim and gold-plating inside. Because the little bowl was one of the few things she’d been able to take with her when she and his father emigrated, it was regarded in their household as a treasure of inestimable value. In retrospect, he told Hannah, it was striking how his mother conveyed something aristocratic about her life in Romania, something very Old World and romantic, in spite of the poverty, the anti-Semitism, the dreariness. “She still has some of that European snobbery,” he said. Over tea, she had told him that children there don’t read “this, this”—and she’d scrunched up her nose—“Encyclopedia Brown.” She gave Nate a copy of Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It was also over tea that she first spoke to him about the novels she loved. She’d tossed her long, honey-colored hair over her shoulders as she explained how Anna Karenina simply couldn’t take it anymore. Mr. Karenin was a good man, but his kind of goodness—and Nate could remember the way his mother grasped his arm with a bony hand as she said this—his kind of goodness could be stultifying. The rim of her teacup had been stained with red lipstick.
“I guess she didn’t have many friends back then,” Nate said quickly, feeling suddenly that he’d said too much. “She and my dad are really different.”
Hannah nodded.
Nate was relieved that she didn’t question him about his parents’ marriage, and what, as an adult, he had come to think of as his mother’s somewhat self-serving interpretation of it.
He got up to peruse her bookshelves. “You’ve got a lot of Greene.”
She had mostly old paperback editions, their titles printed in modish 1960s fonts above Graham Greene’s name.
“I did grow up Catholic,” she said.
She had padded to his side, bringing with her the sweet scent of bourbon. Nate turned and kissed her.
A moment later, she pulled away. She looked at the ground. Lamplight glinted on her long eyelashes, giving her face a languorous, abandoned aspect. The next words out of her mouth spoiled the effect. She told him that he was welcome to stay over if he wanted, but she’d rather not … well, you know. She bit her lip. “I probably should have told you before you came over.”
Nate stepped back as if he’d been reproached. He wished she wouldn’t look so nervous. He wasn’t some brute who was going to fly into a rage because she wouldn’t fuck him. He looked toward the kitchen.
“That’s fine,” he said. “Whatever makes you comfortable.”
“It’s just …” Hannah’s eyes shot from the ground to his face. “Just that we don’t know each other that well. That’s the main thing.”
Nate began to crack the knuckles of his right hand with his left one. He’d live without sex, but he really didn’t want to get drawn into a long and uncomfortable conversation about it.
“Hannah,” he said. “I get it. It’s not a problem. Really.”
He must have
sounded impatient because she seemed to bristle. She flashed a quick smile. “Great,” she said.
Nate put his hands in his pockets. He began looking at the bookshelf again.
“Just tell me one thing,” he said after a moment. “Does this have to do with your being Catholic?”
For an instant, Hannah looked taken aback. Then she raised an eyebrow. “No. It has to do with your being Jewish.”
Nate laughed, a real and hearty laugh. When he stopped, the awkwardness he’d felt the minute before was gone. Hannah, too, seemed to have gotten past her irritation. She leaned against the bookshelf, looking amused. Nate touched her cheek.
“If it really is all right, I’d like to stay.”
She nodded. “It’s all right.”
{ 6 }
Nate and Aurit had a go-to restaurant. Located halfway between their apartments, the place was moderate enough in price to suit him but not so devoid of culinary pretension as to be unacceptable to her. It was also, somewhat mysteriously, as far as Nate was concerned, hip. Certain medieval touches—dark walls, tall wooden benches, torchlike lighting from iron ceiling fixtures—had a themey-ness that could easily have gone the other way.
Nate arrived first and was seated at a table near the kitchen.
Aurit showed up ten minutes later. She scanned the room. “I don’t know why you’d want to sit here when there are booths free,” she said.
Nate glanced at the time on his phone.
After they changed tables, Aurit began telling him about a party she’d gone to the weekend before. “I overheard these two ugly, completely lame guys talking, at full volume, about which woman there they most wanted to go home with. I wanted to be like, ‘Do you not understand that people can hear you? Do you imagine that you are speaking in some exotic tongue?’ ” She shook her head. “Did I mention they were ugly?” Another night, she’d had dinner with a friend, who “is otherwise nice but has this habit that drives me up the wall. You remark on anything, and she starts explaining it to you, as if you are totally clueless. You say, ‘So many people are moving to the South Slope these days,’ and she says, ‘Well, it’s more affordable than other neighborhoods,’ and you’re like, ‘Thanks, and by the way, I’m not an idiot.’ ” Nate laughed. “It’s actually amazingly annoying,” Aurit continued. “But it’s also kind of tragic. She must alienate people all the time without having any idea why.”
Their waitress had white-blonde hair with dark roots and elaborately tattooed forearms. After she took their orders, Aurit asked Nate what had been going on with him. He told her about his book review, leaving out aspects that he thought she’d find objectionable.
“Hmm … uh huh, uh huh … That’s interesting.”
She seemed far more interested when he mentioned that he’d gone out with Hannah again. She leaned in. “Do tell.”
Nate described their date, surprising himself by how effusive he sounded. Aside from that one tense moment, it had been a really nice night.
“That was, when, Wednesday? Thursday?” Aurit asked. “What about since?”
She was buttering a slice of bread. When Nate didn’t immediately answer, she put the bread down. “Nate. Have you not called her?”
Sometimes Aurit reminded him of the Lorax, the glowering little Dr. Seuss character who climbs out of tree stumps to hector the greedy capitalist. Like the rook in chess, she was short and big on top, with large maternal breasts and broad shoulders that were like the top of a triangle, tapering to petite hips that she liked to show off in close-fitting jeans. She had dark skin and attractive, small, almost gaunt features. Her black hair was short, but it had a baffling quality of not seeming short, or at least not striking Nate as androgynous the way short hair sometimes did. It had lots of wispy layers so that there was always plenty of it around her face, longish pieces that fell almost to her chin and were always tumbling forward and being pushed back behind her pixieish ears.
Aurit had long ago explained to Nate that the two of them had never gotten romantically involved because when they started spending time together, he was going out with Elisa. By the time he and Elisa broke up, it was too late: he and Aurit were already in the “friend zone.” For a long time Nate had believed this because Aurit said it so authoritatively and it sounded plausible and he was in the habit of thinking that Aurit had more insight than he did into such things. Until it occurred to him that he’d never been attracted to her. He had been perfectly capable of finding women other than Elisa attractive. She just wasn’t one of them. This realization had scared him a little. He’d nearly been convinced of a false account of his own feelings merely because Aurit was so emphatic. He was also relieved. Aurit had a way about her. If she had wanted him for her boyfriend, there was a good chance that, attraction or not, he would at this very moment be carrying her shopping bags.
The waitress arrived with Nate’s burger. She brought Aurit a large plate of shootlike leaves and then retreated quickly, as if to forestall any additional requests.
“What is that?” Nate asked Aurit.
“You haven’t answered my question,” she said. “How many days has it been?”
Nate leaned forward for a better look. “Is it arugula? Bamboo shoots?”
“Four? Five?”
“Clovers of some sort? Do you get anything else with it?”
“Do you get off on making her wait? I’d just like to know what men are thinking when they pull this sort of thing.”
“Are you on some kind of extreme diet? Should I be worried?”
Aurit was too proud of her slim figure to let that go. “It’s a pizza.”
“Maybe where you come from, they call that pizza. Here in the United States, we call it a grassy knoll.”
“For your information, it’s a prosciutto and arugula pizza.” Aurit used her fork to rake off a section of shrubbery. Nate saw that underneath there did appear to be a fairly standard pizza with cheese and prosciutto. She set down her fork, and the arugula layer fell back in place.
“So … Hannah?”
Nate began pouring ketchup on his burger. “Why are you bent on giving me the third degree? I only went out with her twice. I haven’t even slept with her.”
In Hannah’s bed that night—four nights ago, as a matter of fact—they had alternately talked and engaged in what felt like a prolonged and fairly innocent bout of adolescent groping. It had been pretty nice, though. Perhaps he was getting old, but there had been surprising consolation in the knowledge that he was not going to wake up with the chalky feeling of embarrassment that often followed drunken hookups. In the morning, he’d hung around for a while. He walked home along a street he particularly liked, with mansions set back from the sidewalk. Built by nineteenth-century industrialists, the mansions had degenerated, in the mid-twentieth century, into single-room-occupancy boardinghouses. Recently, the neighborhood had turned again, the SROs converted to upscale apartment buildings. On that summer morning, the shady street was lush and fragrant. Nate had felt unusually cheerful as he made his way home.
“So, what?” Aurit said. “It doesn’t matter? You can just do whatever you want because you didn’t slip your thing in?”
For god’s sake.
Nate put the bun on his burger, picked it up with both hands, and took a bite. He winced as some ketchup squirted out from under the bun and onto his hand. He could feel Aurit’s eyes on him. She had a very particular way of staring. She was still except for a slight widening of her pupils, which managed to suggest that her mind was hard at work, trying to accommodate some new and terribly damning truth she’d just discovered. Nate looked intently at the bun of his burger, imagining he was on a gently rocking sailboat. The only thing on the boat with him was a big, juicy cheeseburger. The idyll was short-lived.
“It’s just great, Nate,” Aurit said. “While writing the book review of the year and whatever the hell else you’ve been doing, you happen to go out with a girl a couple times, spend the night with her—who cares if you actuall
y slept together?—but for you, it’s out of sight, out of mind. As soon as she’s not in the room, you’re back in Nateland. What about her?”
Nate wished he’d called Jason instead. You could eat a fucking cheeseburger with Jason.
He eyed the opposite wall, where some kind of menacing lancelike weapon was on display.
“I think it would be a little strange if Hannah were all that invested after two dates,” he said finally. He felt that responding at all was giving in to Aurit, but he didn’t see an alternative that wouldn’t set her off even more. “I don’t think you’re giving her much credit.”
“Two dates that you said yourself went really well,” Aurit said. “So she’s thinking about you and wondering if maybe she imagined it, maybe she was crazy for thinking you guys had a lot of fun, because otherwise why haven’t you called?”
“Maybe she’s thinking I haven’t called because I’ve been busy. Which happens to be true. Or maybe she hasn’t thought anything because she’s busy. She’s a smart girl and has stuff going on. I really don’t think you’re being fair to her, turning her into this sad creature who is sitting around waiting for my call. Maybe she doesn’t even like me much.” Nate arranged his features into a smile he hoped was charming. “Shocking as it may seem, not every woman finds me irresistible.”
Aurit plucked a single sprig of arugula from her pizza. “No offense, Nate, but you sound really defensive.”
He dropped his burger to his plate.
Aurit began making dainty little strokes with her fork, clearing away tufts of salad greens from the surface of her pizza. She cut a tiny triangular bite. She was about to put it in her mouth when she spoke instead.
“The thing is, Hannah seems cool, like someone you might actually like.” Aurit spoke in a deliberately soothing tone, wagging the fork with the pizza across the air above her plate. “You usually pick the wrong women. You see someone pretty, and you come up with a reason to find her interesting. Then, when it doesn’t work, you act like the problem is ‘women’ or ‘relationships,’ instead of the women you choose … Like that ditzy Emily, who might as well have been sixteen years old.”
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Page 8
