Nate turned to look at Beth’s broad, friendly face, the kind of face that retained a whiff of the well-loved girl who hung pictures of horses on her bedroom wall. “You’ve got this big scowl going on,” she said.
“Just focusing, I guess. How’re you?”
She waved the rag she was holding. “Oh, you know, another day in paradise.”
On his table, Nate’s cell phone began to vibrate, flailing like an overturned cockroach struggling to right itself. When he reached for it, Elisa’s face stared back at him. In the screen shot, her pouting lips were painted a deep red, and her blonde hair was messily pulled back from her face, with just a few stray clusters falling forward. The flash had flushed her skin, and the angle was askew because she had taken the picture herself with an outstretched arm. She still looked beautiful. But if she had been trying to endear herself to him by setting this picture to appear when she called, she’d miscalculated. The implicitly accusing expression on her face always filled him with dread. He hit DECLINE.
Then he opened a new message window on his computer. “I’m sorry,” he wrote to Hannah. “I got swamped with edits on the Israel book review. I’m not going to be able to get together tonight.”
He added a few pleasantries, signed his name, deleted his name, replaced it with the letter N, deleted the letter N, and finally settled on the lowercase np as signifying just the right amount of intimacy.
As soon as he pressed SEND, relief washed over him.
{ 7 }
The next night an acquaintance of Nate’s was reading from his new book at a bookstore in Lower Manhattan. Nate arrived early, in part because his friend Mark had called and asked Nate to hold a seat for him.
Jason showed up soon after and took one of the seats next to Nate’s. “Hey, man, you’re coming out after, right?” Jason’s voice dropped to a stage whisper. “I’ve got gossip. I can’t tell you here.”
Nate had once suggested to Jason that there was something prurient in the intensity of his interest in other people’s lives. In response, Jason had paraphrased Bellow paraphrasing Allan Bloom: “When I do it, it’s not gossip. It’s social history.”
Nate’s friend Eugene Wu arrived and started to sit on Nate’s other side. Nate was about to tell Eugene that the seat was saved for Mark. He stopped himself. Eugene was a suspicious, bilious sort of person. He was apt to take even this as a personal affront. There was something fey about seat saving anyway.
Mark walked in just as the author was being introduced. Nate waved his arms and made a sad clown face, trying to suggest that he had done his best. The author began to read. Nate tried to focus, but Mark distracted him. Forced to stand beside a rack of foreign periodicals, he visibly shifted his weight from one leg to the other while glowering in Nate’s direction. Nate tried to avoid looking at that part of the room.
Afterward, a large group walked to a nearby bar. On the way, Nate wove in and out of various conversations. The thrashing of car horns and the whoosh of traffic lent a pleasant urban ambience as the group ambled along Houston Street in the humid dusk. Nate felt a wave of contentment. Sometimes he remembered how lonely he had been in high school and the early part of college, even in his early years in New York, after he and Kristen had broken up. Surrounded by friends and reasonably established, he felt lucky. He knew he’d been lucky.
The inside of the bar was scarcely populated, with only a few diehards watching baseball on a flat-screen TV and another group gathered around a pool table. But its large, gravelly backyard was packed. Standing under a scraggly tree, Nate got into a conversation about payday loans with a girl named Jean. She was writing an article about urban poverty.
“I had to take out a couple over the years,” Nate told her.
“Really?” she said. “You’re not exactly the target demographic.”
Jean wore cute faux-librarian glasses and had a cheerful abundance of curly hair that bounced energetically when she nodded, which she did frequently, as if to offer encouragement to the person she was speaking with.
“I had some bad years,” Nate said. “I couldn’t always afford to wait two months for some magazine to get around to cutting me a check.”
As Jean groaned in sympathy, Nate started to roll up his sleeves. He wished he’d worn a T-shirt. The warm air was thick, a physical presence.
“Can I ask why you didn’t just get a cash advance on your credit card?” Jean asked.
“I forgot my PIN,” Nate said.
Beyond Jean’s shoulder, he noticed a very cute brunette. She was talking to a girl he knew slightly, and she seemed to be looking in his direction. The gravel beneath Nate’s feet crunched as he shifted position to get a better view.
“Seriously?” Jean asked.
Nate turned back to her. “I figured if it was one I knew by heart, it would be too tempting,” he said. “I made up a random one, wrote it down, and lost the paper.”
Jean pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Did you think about retrieving it from the credit card company?”
“I kept answering the security questions wrong.”
“You’re kidding,” Jean said.
“My mother’s Romanian. Her maiden name has a lot of vowels. I may also have been drunk. They didn’t ask so many questions at the payday loan place.”
Jean had a guffawing laugh, which, while not particularly feminine, seemed uninhibited and heartfelt at least.
She was someone Nate liked, someone he was always happy to see at a party. Yet he inevitably ran out of things to talk about with her. She knew a lot about obscure bands and indie actors, but she almost never spoke personally or volunteered an opinion not in accord with right principles and liberal piety. After a while, this unwavering good nature left Nate tongue-tied.
The brunette went inside the bar.
Nate patted Jean on the shoulder. “I’ll be just a minute.”
The girl—and she was indeed young enough that Nate didn’t think calling her a girl was politically incorrect—was leaning over the bar, the soles of her feet rising out of her ballet slippers as she stood on her tiptoes.
Nate took the place next to her. “I think we’re with the same group. You were at the reading, right?”
She sank back into her shoes. She came up to, maybe, his chin. “Yeah,” she said warily.
“So you’ll help?”
“With what?”
Nate pointed with his thumb at the bartender. “You stand a better chance of getting his attention than I do.”
Her name, Nate soon learned, was Cara. She had graduated from Stanford a couple of years before. She had since gotten a master’s degree in writing from Johns Hopkins. She was interning at an august literary magazine and looking for a full-time job. She was open to something in publishing or magazines, but it was hard, in spite of her degrees.
“It’s really awful that there aren’t more full-time jobs for people in our field,” she said. “I’d even take an assistant-level job.”
To Nate, this sounded more than a little entitled. But she was young, and it was no easy task—getting started professionally—and she seemed sweet. It helped also that she was model pretty.
They returned to the backyard with their drinks. It had grown appreciably darker. One by one, windows in the surrounding tenements switched from black to yellow as inside lights were turned on.
Nate and Cara leaned against a brick wall. She let on that she knew who he was, that someone had pointed him out to her and she’d read something of his, or at least heard it spoken of. Naturally Nate was flattered. She told him she lived in the South Slope with roommates. She liked it. She had never felt like a true Californian. And Baltimore? No, she couldn’t say she much liked it, even if it was Nate’s hometown.
After a couple of minutes, Nate found himself eyeing Jason and Eugene, who were huddled together on the other side of the patio. He still hadn’t heard Jason’s gossip. He was growing a little bored, but he wasn’t ready to extricate himself. Cara was petite. Her dark hair fell in long, l
oose waves around her face, which was delicate and appealing, with well-shaped lips and thick but shapely eyebrows. Olive-skinned, almost Persian-looking, she wasn’t just good-looking; she appeared intelligent, soulful. And clearly she was smart. She would have to be. It was impossible—wasn’t it?—that she could actually be as boring as she seemed.
What began, after a few more minutes, to irritate him was that she didn’t even attempt to be engaging—made no effort toward wit or color in her replies. Only an attractive young woman would take for granted a stranger’s interest in the minutiae of her life.
Perhaps she was shy.
He asked how she liked the internship. Her answer was not unintelligent, yet it struck Nate as academic and passionless. At another point in his life, he would have felt a challenge in her stiffness—that air of complacent acquiescence rather than enthusiasm. He would have tried to get her to say something inflected with feeling, if only gossip or a complaint about her coworkers. He would have done so in part because he wouldn’t have wanted her to come away thinking he was boring. But he didn’t feel motivated to make that kind of effort. He thought of Hannah and felt a pang—of something, he didn’t know what. He didn’t choose to examine it.
He was getting ready to slip away when he found himself telling Cara that he pretty much had no choice but to live in New York because he was a terrible driver. “I couldn’t live in a place where you need a car to get around.”
“Did I hear you mention driving, Nate?”
Mark approached, holding out his hand to Cara. “Hi, I’m Mark,” he said, his tone self-effacing, as though he doubted whether someone of Cara’s importance would want to meet him. That was part of his shtick.
“Did Nate tell you his theory about driving?” Mark asked.
He sounded bored, lugubriously so, as if he’d told this story a hundred times and was sure she wouldn’t be much interested.
Cara shook her head no.
“Well, let me tell you. He’s a terrible driver.”
She smiled. “So he said.”
She already looked more animated than she had when Nate had been alone with her.
A magazine editor, Mark was thin, slight, with tidily cut dark hair; he was always neatly dressed in business casual. He looked at first to be almost trifling, but he had cultivated a dry, everyman persona that he played to great advantage.
“He says—” Mark began, his voice thick with disapproval. He broke off, as if overcome, and started again. “He told me and our friend Jason a couple years ago, when we were on a road trip, that his brain is like a Mack Truck.”
Cara’s smile was now a little confused. Nate was shaking his head, but he began to laugh, partly in embarrassment, partly in amusement. He’d nearly forgotten this story. He had to give Mark credit as far as Cara went. Mark was bringing far more panache to the job than he himself had.
“Nate says that good drivers are people who can put their brains on cruise control. Their brains are like small Japanese cars. He, on the other hand—well, his brain is this huge roaring engine that needs to be constantly monitored. It’s too powerful to be put on a default setting where it can seamlessly change gears or pick up on a stoplight ahead.”
Mark shook his head reproachfully. Cara, hands on her hips, pivoted toward Nate, for some sort of defense.
Nate tried to look endearing. “What he’s not telling you is that those two—he and Jason—were on my case all weekend about my driving. I had to say something.”
Mark frowned at Nate before turning back to Cara. “Personally, I thought it was extremely elitist. I was very offended.”
“Also,” Cara said with sudden energy. “I think trucks do have cruise control. I mean, airplanes do, right? Autopilot? Why not trucks?”
“Smart!” Mark turned to him. “What do you have to say to that, Nate?”
Nate held his hands up. “Whether they do or not, I concede. It was a stupid theory.”
He had finally started having fun.
When Cara left to use the bathroom, Mark turned to him. His face was submerged in shadows cast by the tabletop umbrellas. “I think she kind of dug me, but if you’re—I mean, you got there first.”
“Go for it,” Nate said. He meant it. He still felt a little bad about the seat-saving incident. That wasn’t the main thing, though. “We didn’t have much to say to each other.”
Even in the semidarkness, Nate could see that Mark looked surprised. “I’d do her no matter what she has to say.”
“Best of luck.”
Nate went inside for another drink. While he waited at the bar, shrill peals of laughter rang through the beery air. Nate felt sticky, also rather glum. It was hard to say why. The night simply seemed empty, almost pointless.
When the bartender handed him his drink, he finished it too quickly. It was his third or fourth, and consumed so fast, it was enough to nudge him from buzzed to drunk. He ordered another immediately.
He awoke the next morning to embarrassing recollections—going up to Jean and putting his arm around her, for one. “So, what is your deal?” he’d asked. “Who are you, really?” She’d laughed, but he had felt her edging back from him. He wasn’t, he had realized even through the haze of his drunkenness, coming off as bold and daring, only buffoonish. And sweaty. He also had a distinct memory of passing Cara on his way out. There was something pitying in the way she looked at him.
After four Advils, a large iced coffee, and the passage of several hours, he felt significantly better. In the early afternoon, he called Hannah.
“Well …,” she said slowly, when he asked her to reschedule the date he’d canceled. “It’s not really a great week for me.” Nate played dumb, cheerily suggesting the following week. Hannah said she was busy then too. But there was a slight laugh in her voice that gave him confidence. “What about coffee at ten a.m. on Tuesday?” he asked. “You can’t be booked for ten a.m. on a Tuesday, can you? It’s not like you have a job or anything—by which I mean no offense. I don’t have one either.”
She conceded that she might have a free evening that she’d forgotten about.
When he arrived in midtown, at Bryant Park, Hannah was already sitting with a book at a small green café table, lightly thumbing the edge of the page as she read. Her hair, lighter than usual in the sunlight, fell forward, on either side of her face. She glanced up from her book as he approached. When she stood up, the spindly metal chair she had been sitting on rocked on the cobblestones.
“Hi.”
Nate felt uncharacteristically nervous as they smiled at each other.
“I brought you something,” he said, reaching into his back pocket. He pushed a copy of Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt across the table. “I noticed you didn’t have it,” he said, looking not at Hannah but at the book.
“Oh! That was nice of you. Thank you.”
The concert they had come to hear wouldn’t begin for another few minutes, but the park was full of activity. Across the wide swath of grass was the carousel, and to their left, in an old-timey booth, a “sandwich artisan.” A few kids, maybe six or seven years old, were playing on the grass nearby. “Look!” cried a little Asian girl in pigtails and a white dress. She was speaking to two blond boys, twins. The little girl leaped from a chair, her skirt billowing up from her split legs. The boys didn’t even pretend to care. They ran off, and she followed, pigtails flying behind her. “Wait!”
Back in the 1980s, the sociologist William Whyte said that you couldn’t have found a more villainous-looking crew of dope dealers than the ones who hung out at this park if you hired them. Nate told Hannah that, and she laughed.
“Did you write something about him?” she asked. “I seem to remember reading something. It was … good.”
Nate was pleased she’d read it. The piece was one he liked, about the materialism of the age.
The musicians began to play. Hannah turned to face them. She had suggested the free evening concert. “They’re going to play some late Beetho
ven quartets that are really wonderful,” she’d said. Nate was less keen on these kinds of performances. He thought there was something grating about upper-middle-class New Yorkers’ love of high culture in city parks. It was so full of self-congratulation, as if a few lousy performances made up for systemic economic inequality. “Uh huh,” Hannah had said. “You know you sound like one of those, uhm, philistines who doesn’t see the use in art, right?” That had shut him up.
Now, Nate began to wonder what Hannah had really thought of his essay. There had been something coy, something withholding, in the way she’d said it was good.
The music stopped. Nate nearly started clapping before he realized it was only the end of the movement. Hannah whispered that the next one would be slower. Nate nodded meaningfully. When the musicians resumed playing, he closed his eyes to filter out distractions. Hannah had told him that these quartets were bridges between the classical and romantic periods. That was interesting. But the crisscross slats of the metal chair were gnawing the flesh on the back of his legs. It seemed as if the chair had been designed back in the 1980s to keep the dope dealers from getting too comfortable.
He was contemplating some of the wording his editor had suggested for his book’s catalog copy when people abruptly started clapping. As soon as he realized, he began banging his hands together with great zeal.
He failed to convince. “I take it you aren’t a classical music lover?” Hannah asked.
Nate let his hands drop. “I took piano lessons as a kid. I guess they didn’t take.”
When they left the park, he and Hannah were swept into a mass of people exiting an office tower. All around them briefcases bumped against thighs; cell phones clicked shut. They passed a subway entrance, and the crowd began to thin. They walked west, toward the setting sun.
Hannah told him that she played the cello through college. She asked what kind of music he liked.
“Honestly, I’m kind of an idiot about music,” Nate said. “I usually wind up liking what people tell me is good.” He glanced at her, a little shyly. “I liked the music you played at your apartment the last time.”
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Page 10
