Shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand, Hannah turned to him. “Elliott Smith? I wouldn’t have guessed.”
“What can I say, I like sad music.”
She tossed her hair over her shoulder. In the sharp light, it glinted red-gold. “Interesting.”
It was one of those cheerful dusks. Puddles that pedestrians would have had to make long arcs around the day before had dried up and disappeared. Convivial laughter rose from sidewalk cafés and echoed through the streets, which, in the fading heat, seemed to unfurl at the edges and relax into evening. People moved jauntily as if choreographed. As he and Hannah stepped from the sidewalk into a street, Nate touched a hand to her lower back. He felt glad to be exactly where he was.
{ 8 }
The following week he brought Hannah to his apartment. The bulbs were out on his stairwell’s third and fourth floors; he and Hannah climbed in near darkness. His door, when he pushed it open, emitted a piteous, multisyllabic whine.
“I hope you’re not expecting much.”
Hannah peered into the kitchen. Then she walked down the narrow hallway toward his bedroom. Nate trailed behind her. He had tidied in preparation for her visit, but his apartment cleaned up was unconvincing, like a career hoodlum dolled up for court by his lawyer. The rag he had used to wipe his desk and dresser sat in a heap on the windowsill. One of his dresser drawers, too crammed to shut all the way, had fallen wide open. He had hastily made the bed, but a triangle of garish black-and-white sheet poked out from beneath the comforter.
“It’s nice,” Hannah said slowly. She pointed to the wall above his desk. “I like that picture.”
Nate had found the print, El Greco’s View of Toledo, on the street. The angry blue sky and hilly green cityscape had appealed to him. He’d fixed the frame with duct tape.
“Thanks.”
He came up behind her and placed his hands on her jeaned hips. Leaning his head against hers, he closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of her hair.
After the concert the Friday before, they had gotten dinner and gone back to her place. Nate had stayed the rest of the weekend. On Saturday, they went out for breakfast and then walked around her neighborhood. They drank Bloody Marys at a well-airconditioned Moroccan restaurant that was nearly empty between the brunch and dinner shifts. Afterward, he tagged along on her evening plans with a couple of her girlfriends from journalism school, skipping a party that he didn’t much want to go to anyway (half the people who would be there he’d seen at the reading the week before). Sunday afternoon, Hannah practically pushed him out of her apartment. “I totally intended to work on my book proposal this weekend: If I don’t get on it, I’m going to be writing health news my whole life.” She had a regular freelance gig writing a weekly roundup of health news for the Times’s Web site.
Now, she relaxed against him, her hips pressing into his. Nate began to get hard. In the course of the weekend he’d spent at her apartment, she had rescinded the ban on sex.
He hadn’t exactly changed his mind about wanting to be in a relationship. But now that he’d met Hannah, now that he found that he liked her, he couldn’t see any other way to be. It was with the pleasure of cynicism defied that he had come to believe that she was in fact different from other women he’d recently dated. Though she came from the same sort of upper-middle-class background as most people he encountered socially, she seemed to him to be sort of savvy, not as blinkered as many of the women he knew—there was nothing precious or sheltered-seeming about her. Smart rather than “smart,” she was neither timid nor humorless in her thinking. She didn’t venture opinions with a question mark at the end. He’d looked up her work online and was surprised he hadn’t noticed her stuff more before. Her reviews and essays were lucid, well-informed, and often wonderfully acerbic. She had a voice of her own, an energetic moral outrage tempered by irony and warm, self-aware humor. And she was nearly as well read as Jason and Peter and even Nate himself. (To be honest, that had surprised him.) She was fun, too—quick to smile and to laugh.
She also had a way of insinuating that she hadn’t entirely made up her mind about him that he enjoyed. He felt as if she was taking his measure, according to some exacting standard of her own devising. He respected her for it. He felt instinctively that her standard was a good one, that she was, in some essential way, good. Not just in the sense of being kind to orphans and kittens, nor in the do-gooder sense in which Kristen had been good, but good in some other way. Honest, fair-minded, unsnobbish.
A gunshotlike crackle cut through the room. Fireworks, no doubt left over from the Fourth of July holiday several days before. The rumbling soon gave way to the shriek of car alarms and shouts from the street below.
“Sorry about that,” Nate said, letting go of Hannah and pushing the window partly shut. “My neighbors take America’s independence very seriously.”
Hannah walked to the milk crate next to his bed and began examining the books stacked on it.
“Do you want some wine?” Nate asked.
“Sure.”
As he walked to the kitchen, Nate yawned. It was late. They’d already been out to dinner.
The wine he’d purchased earlier from the Tangled Vine was in a plastic bag on the table. He uncorked the bottle and retrieved a pair of wine glasses, holding them in one hand with the stems crisscrossed.
Hannah was standing expectantly, even docilely, in the middle of the bedroom. Nate set the wine and the glasses on the crate before he went to her.
The first time they’d slept together, as well as the second, the following morning, had been urgent, feverish, as if there had been a tremendous amount of buildup, rather than just a few weeks’ worth. He wanted to take it slower this time.
He kissed her. She was nearly his height. He barely had to bend down. He slid his hands around her waist and beneath her shirt. Her back was taut and sinewy. He found the clasp of her bra: he felt her hands on his back, gently kneading the flesh under the elastic of his boxer briefs and moving along his belt line. The area was tender, and he enjoyed her touch, but he grew conscious of being a little thicker there than he would like, a little paunchier on the sides and in front, and he tried to pull in his abdominal muscles.
He nudged her toward the bed. His desk lamp lent the room an institutional cast, so he switched it off. He began unbuttoning his shirt. His eyes adjusted to the dark, and he saw Hannah watching him from the bed. Holding his gaze, she slipped her shirt over her head.
Nate poured wine into one of the glasses and handed it to her. While she sipped it, he sat down beside her and touched her breasts. She gave the glass back to him, and as he drank, she began to unfasten his jeans. He set the glass down. Then he took hold of her, pushing her onto her back and tugging at her jeans as he pressed himself against her.
As he had been the previous times, he was quickly swept up in a current of feeling, the intensity of which surprised him. His most recent encounters before Hannah—months ago now, and with women he’d scarcely known and had had little desire to see again—had been strangely tensionless, almost masturbatory.
He and Hannah had plain missionary-style sex, no theatrics, and it was—for him—really good. He thought it was for her, too. Her body seemed keenly responsive to his touch. That was part of what made it so good for him—that, and its lack of artificiality: he wasn’t conscious of playing a part, conforming to expectation. The intensity, mysterious as it was, and the temporary forgetting of self, was real. After he came, he buried his face in her neck as waves of tenderness, embarrassingly strong, washed over him.
For a few minutes, they remained quietly curled in each other’s arms. Then Nate began to recover himself. Quotidian thoughts pressed upon him. He became aware of feeling clammy and got up to throw out the condom.
Returning to the bed, he took in the sight of her, sprawled out before him. “You have such a nice body,” he said. “People must tell you that all the time.”
He could see the taut muscles of her s
tomach tense up as she laughed.
“I’m, like, totally tired of hearing about it,” she said. She turned on her side. “If there’s one thing women get sick of, it’s being complimented. We’re just so secure about our bodies.”
Nate poured more wine. They began to talk, for some reason, about her ex-boyfriend Steve, whom she’d been with for four years. Nate pressed her for details. She had an intelligent, novelistic way of describing people that he enjoyed. “He had this culturally conservative streak,” she said. “He read a lot. He was a lawyer, but he read philosophy, fiction—even poetry. I respected that, but after a while the gentleman-scholar thing got on my nerves. It seemed like he was trying to recreate something, like he had a little too much nostalgia for the past, for aristocracy and class privilege, really.”
She said Steve was practical and organized and critical of her for being too careless, making her out to be some kind of hapless wild-child. Over time, their relationship devolved into a series of proxy battles. “In the last year we were together, I could feel him constantly inspecting me from top to bottom. A missing button or tiny stain was an aha moment in which my fundamental failure as a person was exposed.” She began toying with a lock of her hair. “But I’m not being fair. The truth is I was doing the same to him at the end—building a case as to how rigid and unsubtle and bullying he was. He was always accusing me of rolling my eyes or smirking at him. I guess I was.”
An hour had gone by. They had lost interest in the wine. Nate brought glasses of water from the kitchen.
He found himself telling her about Kelly Krebs, the girl he’d lost his virginity to between freshman and sophomore years of college.
“We met at the beach. Ocean City. She was a type I’d never really known before—middle-class, all-American, gentile. Not all that smart and not at all concerned about it. She thought it was weird I went to Harvard. I think she was embarrassed for me.”
Because of her ski-slope nose and because she attended a second-tier state college, his friends from high school called Kelly a grit, which he explained to Hannah was a Baltimore term for a hick. (“They called her that to her face?” Hannah asked, aghast. “No, no,” he assured her. “Of course not. Just to me.”) He told her that it said more about his friends’ provincial, suburban Jewishness—to say nothing of their dickishness—than it did about Kelly. They lumped all gentiles together (except for the very rich ones, from whose ranks senators and presidents were culled). Kelly was no hick. Her dad was an accountant. Her mom worked part-time in a boutique. To Nate, who had none, she had what seemed a superabundance of siblings. Their house in Towson, a suburb adjacent to Nate’s, was a crowded jumble of sports equipment—hockey sticks tilting out of umbrella stands, kneepads abandoned on the coffee tables—and unmissable signs of female habitation. Jars of nail polish were left open, their contents spilling onto the pages of fashion magazines. There always seemed to be a hair dryer on upstairs. His own house seemed funereal in comparison. The Krebses were warm; as a family, they seemed happy. Nate liked them. He was especially taken with Mr. Krebs, a plump bearded man with a booming voice who coached Little League and soccer and was constantly shepherding one or another Krebs child to a sporting event or to the mall. Nate had rarely encountered a father as cheerful as he was.
Nate could see that as a family the Krebses were proud of their salt-of-the-earth-ness, their friendly, unpretentious Americanness. Nice as they were, they exuded their own brand of self-satisfaction. He compared them to his own parents, with their pride in their bookish intelligence, their sobriety and self-restraint. He had wondered if everybody took the quality they had and treated it as the most important thing—used it as a basis for feeling superior to others.
Nate had been on his back, looking at the ceiling. He turned to Hannah. “The answer, I decided, was yes.”
She was leaning on her elbow, with her chin in her palm. “It sounds like the germ of relativism.”
He began fondling her breasts. While he’d been talking about the Krebs family, Hannah had reached for her shirt. He’d swatted her hand away. “Please don’t,” he’d said. “I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to look at your breasts.”
She asked what happened with Kelly.
“She broke up with me for a guy from her college. I was a little relieved, to tell you the truth.”
It must have been close to three o’clock by then. At some point, Hannah went off on a writer she thought was overrated. He happened to be the son of a very prominent journalist.
“Couldn’t it possibly be,” Nate said, “that you just don’t like his stuff as much as some people do? Or is every article you dislike proof of an industry-wide conspiracy—a plot on behalf of nepotistic overlords to keep down good, hardworking, talented writers, such as, ahem, Hannah Leary?”
She laughed. It pleased him that her laughter was not a prelude to hurt feelings or sulkiness.
“Maybe you have a point,” Hannah said. “Maybe it’s a defense mechanism on my part.”
Nate reached for a clump of her hair and gently pulled her close to him. They started to fool around again.
Nate wanted to freeze and preserve an image of her, from afterward. She was standing naked at his window with her back to him. Her hair fell in clumps against her flushed skin as the orange tip of a cigarette glowed pensively in the dark.
It was after four when they finally fell asleep. Nate’s nose was buried in her hair, an arm draped over her side. His hand rested on her breast, and her ass brushed against his now limp dick.
The weeks that followed ran together in what seemed like a near-continuous stream of conversation and sex, punctuated by bouts of sleep and work. Nate was productive, workwise, perhaps even more productive than usual (he finished the commodification-ofconscience essay). But the hours at his computer, the occasional evening he spent by himself, resting with a pizza and a book, even his weekly soccer games at the park, felt almost like extensions of sleep. The time he spent with Hannah—narrating his life, listening to her do the same, exchanging opinions, fucking—seemed like the real awake time.
He told her about his book, the way it had evolved in the years he’d spent working on it. He’d first intended to write a scathing critique of the suburbs, featuring an immigrant family with one child. A son. This son was intended to be the book’s central character, from whose lips precocious wit and wisdom would flow and whose struggles—girls and popularity—would arouse readers’ sympathy. He told her how the novel had started to come together only when this “insufferable” character had been shunted to the sidelines, in favor of the parents, with their quietly troubled marriage and off-kilter but also in certain ways sharp-sighted responses to American life. Hannah told him that growing up she’d felt underestimated. “People expect girls from good middle-class families to be smart—but what they mean by smart for a girl is to have nice handwriting and a neat locker and to do her homework on time. They don’t expect ideas or much in the way of real thought.” She said, for her, writing had been a way to be heard.
One night they went to a party hosted by a girl Nate was friendly with and Hannah knew slightly.
When they arrived at Francesca’s apartment on the Lower East Side, Francesca ran up to Nate and hugged him. “I want to introduce you to my friend Nicholas,” she told him. He reminded her of Hannah’s name. “Hannah, that’s right. It’s so nice to see you,” she said. She turned back to Nate. “Nicholas is a huge fan of yours. He’s looking forward to your book.”
Francesca pulled him to the other side of the room. He lost sight of Hannah.
“Nicholas is very big in Canada,” Francesca whispered.
Nicholas was a burly, mustachioed guy with an unlit cigarette hanging out of his mouth. After he and Nate exchanged a few words, Francesca laid a hand on Nate’s arm. “What would you like to drink?”
Something in her smile made Nate suspect she wasn’t personally pouring out gin and tonics for all her guests.
Several years
older than Nate, Francesca was a prettyish, stylish writer who’d been extremely successful with her first book at a young age. After that, she’d been less successful, but she was well known. And she made a point of knowing everyone. It was only recently that “everyone” had come to include Nate. When he’d been a struggling freelance writer who did some legal proofreading on the side, she’d been merely polite.
In those years, Nate had often been dismayed not by Francesca in particular but by the vast number of women whose legs, like the doors to an exclusive club, parted only at the proof of a man’s success. Now that he was—barely—on the other side of it, the tendency depressed him for other reasons. There was something in the almost wolfish way that Francesca was looking at him that nullified whatever attractiveness was there.
“Don’t worry about it,” he told her. “I know where the kitchen is. Nice to meet you, Nicholas.”
He didn’t find Hannah in the kitchen, but Francesca’s apartment had a back window that opened to a fire escape and a flight of stairs.
The roof was strung with white Christmas lights that ran from an extension cord inside the apartment. Francesca’s building was flanked on one side by a tall fortresslike structure with few windows. On the other sides, jagged rows of shorter buildings spread out around them.
Nate saw Hannah standing near the edge of the roof. She was talking to Eugene Wu. Nate walked up to them and looped his arm around her waist. “Hey,” he said. Hannah flushed slightly and pulled back. Nate realized that this was probably the first public gesture of couplehood he’d made. They’d largely spent time together one-onone. Amused by her reticence, he kissed her temple lightly.
Hannah ignored this. “Eugene was just telling me that yoga is the new Orientalism,” she said. “It’s a good thing I do Pilates.”
Nate had to strain to hear her over the roar of an air-conditioning unit atop one of the neighboring buildings. “Same difference, isn’t it?” he said loudly.
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Page 11
