“Pilates was invented by an American,” Eugene said. “In the 1920s.”
Nate gaped at him. “How do you know that?”
Eugene held out one of his arms for their perusal. “How do you think I stay so lean?”
When Hannah broke away to talk to a friend she hadn’t seen in a while, Eugene turned to Nate with his arms crossed in front of his chest. “I didn’t know you were dating her.”
From his tone Nate suspected that Eugene had asked Hannah out before and had been shot down. Eugene had long been eager to date a bookish girl, a member of the literary set; for him, Hannah, pretty (if not a knockout by Jason’s standard), pleasant, and smart, would have been a natural object of desire.
“It’s recent,” Nate said.
“Hmm …,” Eugene said. “Well, she has a nice rack.”
Nate didn’t know if Eugene was trying to indicate that he wasn’t envious or if he was simply pissing on Nate’s fire hydrant. Eugene existed in a state of permanent aggrievedness. He felt it his duty to nip at the happiness of those more fortunate. He resented that Nate had gone to Harvard and had a book deal; he acted as if money and girls and writing gigs had been handed to Nate with his diploma. In fact, their professional lives had been similarly scrappy until several years ago when Nate got the regular reviewing gig and then sold his book. Still, Eugene was smart—and more serious, less exclusively careerist than many people he knew.
“What about you, Eugene?” he asked. “You dating anyone?”
“I’m thinking about going online,” Eugene admitted.
Surprised, Nate tried to remove from his expression anything that Eugene, in his prickliness, might perceive as mocking. “Go for it,” he said. “Can’t hurt, right?”
Soon after Hannah returned. Then Nate saw Jason’s large silhouette emerge from the fire escape stairs. Jason looked around for a moment before he came lumbering toward the corner they’d staked out.
When he had told Jason he was dating Hannah, Jason’s response—“she seems like a nice girl”—had been so bland that Nate had silently seethed, hating himself because the number seven flitted across his mind. He hated himself even more as he heard himself extol Hannah’s virtues: she’s really cool! fun! smart! An undertone of desperation had found its way into his voice. Jason had nodded, doing nothing that Nate could call him out on, and yet something in his smile had reminded Nate of a WASPy hostess “overlooking” a breach of etiquette.
“Hannah,” Jason said as he approached. With mock formality, he held out a hand for her to shake.
Hannah scrunched her eyebrows quizzically, but she smiled and matched his tone. “Jason,” she said, giving him her hand. “It’s nice to see you.”
“You look lovely. As always.”
“Thank you.”
Nate began rubbing the stubble on his chin. There wasn’t anything he could do. Either Jason would be a dick—he’d call it “shaking things up”—or he wouldn’t. As a distraction, Nate let himself get drawn into a hair-splitting and incredibly geekish argument with Eugene about libertarianism. After a few minutes, he turned to Jason.
“Can I use your phone to look up something?”
“Dude,” Jason said. “Get your own. You’re like the last person in New York to not have a smartphone.”
“Jesus.”
Hannah reached into her purse. “You can use mine.”
Nate took the phone from her and turned to Jason. “Do you see how it’s possible to do someone a favor without commentary?”
Jason smiled exultantly. “Commentary is what I do,” he said. “I’m a social commentator, remember?”
Jason had recently been interviewed on CNN about his essay on obesity.
Hannah let out a short, skeptical laugh. “Harassing Nate about his cell phone is social commentary how?”
Nate looked at her in surprise. The awkwardness he’d been dreading had materialized—from an unexpected corner. His “girlfriend” was stepping in to defend him. He wished she wouldn’t.
“Hannah, Hannah, Hannah,” Jason said. He was leaning on the roof’s railing with his arms extended on either side of his body and his ankles daintily crossed. When he smiled, his wide jawline formed a gratuitously large canvas for his fleshy lips. In his head’s narrower, more delicately constructed upper half, his eyelashes fluttered in a show of affability as disingenuous as the upturn of his mouth.
“There comes a point”—Jason unclasped his hands from the metal rail and lurched toward them like a cuckoo emerging from inside its clock—“when a technology becomes such a part of the mainstream that it is no longer, strictly speaking, optional. This is a social phenomenon; diagnosing it is like diagnosing narcissism in the 1970s. The moment of smartphone saturation, or you might say, of cultural transubstantiation, occurred at or around August of 2008, at least for people in our demographic—”
“That’s ridi—” Nate tried to cut in.
“After that,” Jason said, “not to have one is a statement. Especially when, like our friend Nate here”—Jason gestured grandly in Nate’s direction—“you aren’t exactly poverty-stricken. At least not anymore.” He flashed Nate a quick, malicious grin before turning back to the others. “For Nate, today, not to have a smartphone is a high-pitched scream that he is a square peg who refuses to be wedged into a round hole. And that,” Jason said, looking directly at Hannah, “is an invitation to the rest of the clan to shame him. That’s how the social order is maintained.”
“So in giving Nate a hard time, what you’re really doing is embodying a repressive social order?” Hannah’s eyebrows were raised and her voice was mocking, but her expression was amused, even a bit flirtatious. “You’re like the guy who sewed the A onto Hester Prynne’s dress?” She turned to Nate and Eugene. “And that’s his defense?” she concluded with a shake of her head.
Nate felt his body relax. She’d been perfect.
Jason shrugged in defeat. “No one likes the enforcer,” he said. “I guess that’s just the way it is.”
Nate pulled Hannah closer to him, feeling pleased both with her and in some more obscure way with himself.
“Incidentally, Hester sewed on the A herself,” Eugene said.
“Thank you, Brainy Smurf,” Nate said. He turned to Hannah. “Jason’s very big on social order these days,” he said, resting his hand on the place on her hip where her jeans ended and feeling really turned on. “He thinks it’s gotten a bad rap—”
“—because of, you know,” Eugene cut in, “Hitler. Mussolini.”
“Social order, huh?” Hannah said to Jason.
Hannah’s back was lightly touching Nate’s shoulder. Her body language, tilting away from the group, suggested she was ready to shrink away from the spotlight, glad for its attention to refocus on Jason, who sighed loudly, though in fact he enjoyed nothing so much as pontificating, even if he had to play the buffoon to do it.
“As Aristotle said, man is a political animal—”
“I’m going to get a drink,” Eugene said.
“Man alone is worthless,” Jason continued. “Hairless, shivering, and physically puny, he’s no match for animals or the elements. Only through our collective intelligence, through society, has man risen. The mistake people make is to consider human evolution from the perspective of the individual. The happiness of individuals is, evolutionarily speaking, irrelevant; what matters is the health of society.”
Nate circled Hannah’s waist with his arm and cocked his head so that his forehead was touching hers. Her hip grazed his upper thigh, and her hair brushed against his chin and neck. He wanted to get even closer, but as it was, he was already a bit too turned on. He took a few deep breaths.
Above, the strings of white Christmas lights cut diagonal stripes across the darkening sky; several stories below, city traffic streamed around them. Jason droned on.
When they returned to Hannah’s apartment, Nate apologized for Jason. “He doesn’t mean any harm. He’s just kind of a blowhard. Some people hav
e golf, some have girlfriends, Jason has his mouth.”
“I like him, actually,” Hannah said. “He’s … ebullient.”
“Ebullient?” Nate smiled. “I’ll tell him you said so. He’ll like it.”
They were lying on top of Hannah’s bed, staring up at her ceiling as if at the stars. Nate told her that in college he thought he had less in common with Jason than with his friend Peter, but that over the years, the balance had shifted.
“Jason’s weird, especially about women, but he’s not a bad guy,” Nate said. “He’s more, I don’t know how to put it exactly—substantial, maybe?—than a lot of people. He doesn’t look over his shoulder to see what other people think, the way someone like Mark does.” Hannah knew Mark; he had edited her writing at the online magazine where he used to work. “Mark’s great, of course,” Nate continued. “Good at what he does and really funny—but his first allegiance will always be to his reputation.”
Hannah asked what Peter was like.
“Smart. Lonely. He really wants a girlfriend. He lives in Watertown, Maine—he got a job teaching up there. There aren’t very many single women in Watertown. And, well, he’s kind of awkward with women.”
Nate realized that in the past couple weeks he and Hannah had talked about many aspects of their lives, but they hadn’t spent much time on their friends. “What about you?” he asked. “What are your friends like?”
Hannah told him that her close friends dated back to journalism school and her days as a newspaper reporter. They were reporters who covered politics and business. Although she and Nate had a number of common friends and acquaintances, she felt her foothold in Nate’s literary circle was tenuous. For the past few years, since she and Steve had broken up, she had felt a little bit lonely, intellectually. Her choice to try and write a book while taking miscellaneous freelance gigs was mysterious to many of her journalist friends in a way that it wasn’t, couldn’t possibly be, to Nate.
Nate stroked her cheek with his thumb. “I find that strangely touching,” he said. “I mean, it makes me glad that I can do that for you. Understand that part of you. I promise you’re doing the right thing. Your book will be terrific.”
She kissed his chin. “Thank you. That’s really nice.”
The desire Nate had been holding back since the party started to well up again, and he began to touch her breasts through her tank top. But he could tell she was distracted.
“What are you thinking about?”
She turned on her side, so they faced each other. She didn’t answer right away.
“Nothing really,” she said finally. “Just that you’ve been kind of great. I mean, it’s been really great, these past few weeks.” She touched his chest lightly through his T-shirt. “I’ve been really … happy.”
He curled a finger into her hair. “Me too,” he said. “Me too.”
{ 9 }
Like Freud, Aurit had a coherent theory of the universe. From a single foundational myth, she had derived a large and growing labyrinth of substories, all internally logical and surprisingly convincing, as long as you accepted her initial premises. The most important of these was the belief that being part of a couple was the primary marker of psychological health. On such a basis, she came up with far-reaching analyses of everyone she encountered. This one, she would announce, was sexually dysfunctional due to a painful formative relationship. That one was stunted by a series of early professional successes that kept him committed to the same immature belief structure he’d possessed during his period of peak glory. (Single men were deemed particularly lacking in emotional well-being.) Aurit took her analyses very seriously, often liking, disliking, or feeling sorry for people based almost entirely on the narratives she constructed. In particular, the men who’d hurt her most had become objects of such a virulent strain of pity that one might suspect her motives for dating them had been philanthropic.
Nate was reminded of this the following Saturday afternoon. He and Aurit were walking to Prospect Park, where some friends were hosting a picnic to celebrate their recent City Hall marriage. Aurit wanted to hear all about Hannah.
“It’s been, what? A month? A little longer?”
“Something like that.” It had been six weeks since he and Hannah first went out, about four since they’d begun to see each other in earnest.
“I’m really glad for you, Nate.”
Aurit was nodding and smiling at him like he’d made it through naptime without wetting his pants.
Suddenly, it was essential to Nate that he complicate Aurit’s narrow viewpoint. “It’s not that big a deal. Who knows what will happen?”
Aurit had just purchased an iced coffee. Through the plastic lid, she had been stabbing at the caramel-colored liquid with her straw.
“Oh?” She looked up at him. “Is something wrong?”
“No. I just don’t want to blow it out of proportion, that’s all.”
Aurit frowned. “Uh huh.”
What he wanted to get across was a general demurral from Aurit’s romantic monomania. He didn’t see his getting together with Hannah as quite the epic, life-defining event that Aurit’s relationships were for her. His new relationship, though consuming when he was with Hannah, wasn’t the only thing on his mind, especially as time wore on and he became more acclimated to her presence in his life. Particularly in the past few days he’d had new preoccupations. He had gotten a journalism assignment that he was pleased about, a big and well-paid piece for a glossy magazine. Jason had recommended him for it. He had also had the germ of an idea for another book. And it wasn’t only writing. The relationship, nice as it was, shared space in his mind with other things—with his interest in thinking abstractly, about things other than his personal life, for one, even with his interest in sports. But he couldn’t think of a way to explain this to Aurit that wouldn’t seem to her to imply discontent with Hannah.
They walked in silence. The plastic bag with the bottle of wine Nate bought for the picnic bumped rhythmically against his knee and shin.
“Is she coming today?” Aurit asked finally.
“No. She wanted to do some work. She’s working on a book proposal.”
Aurit nodded. Then she took a big sip of her drink and glared into the plastic cup.
“Ugh. An iced mocha shouldn’t taste like chocolate milk.”
Nate had nothing to say to that.
For the last day of July, the afternoon was lovely—not too humid, the sky a non-washed-out shade of blue—and the scene, as they entered the park, was idyllic, almost too idyllic. Technically, Prospect Park’s natural amenities (wooded hills, rolling meadows, crescent-shaped pond with requisite ducks and swans) probably didn’t outshine those of other parks in other cities. But unlike the parks Nate had known growing up in the suburbs, frequented almost exclusively by delinquent teens, gay cruisers, and sundry procurers of crack, this one didn’t feel rickety and abandoned. (“When people have their own backyards, they grill alone,” Jason had said once.)
Prospect Park teemed with cheerful people doing cheerful things: walking, running, biking, playing Little League, watching Little League, eating drippy ice cream cones while watching Little League. Groups of young professionals toting canvas bags from local bookstores staked out places on the grass next to Caribbean families with plastic coolers full of elaborate foods that somehow all smelled of plantains. The park was a liberal integrationist’s wet dream: multiracial, multiethnic, multiclass.
When he and Aurit arrived at the picnic, a rapid-fire exchange of effusions ensued. “Congrats!” “It’s official!” “Thanks for coming!” “Have something to eat!”
On an adjacent picnic blanket, Jason was holding court. “I’m sorry to have to tell you, but no amount of quality day care or liberal education is going to produce a nation of self-critical adherents to the Golden Rule,” he was saying. He was speaking to two bemused-looking women and paused only long enough to nod at Nate and Aurit. “It’s just not in everybody’s DNA. Virtue is i
ts own reward for some—but not for everyone. And that’s a good thing. There are a lot of things that moralists are incapable of doing.”
“Like what, building pyramids?” Aurit muttered. “It’s amazing what you can do if you’re willing to use slave labor.”
“Exactly!” Jason said. “Pyramids, the settling of the New World, industrialization. Think of the brutality!” He beamed. “Moral people wouldn’t have pulled off any of it. And then where would we be? Not sitting here in lovely Prospect Park with our cushy jobs and preening social consciences.”
The women he was talking to—or at—exchanged a glance. “What about the victims of these immoral people?” asked one, a friendly-looking redhead.
“Of course, there’s a social tax we pay for having psychopaths running around,” Jason conceded. “But society needs the cunning to make things happen, just like it needs the conscientious to enforce the rules, to keep the thing from turning into a game theorist’s nightmare. Just like it needs artists”—he spoke the word with mocking emphasis—“by which I include writers, musicians, and the like, to attract would-be loners to the communal campfire and fold them into the clan.”
“That’s a moving theory,” the redhead said.
The argument petered out. The redhead, whom Nate sat down next to, told him she was a grad student in art history. Before she went back to school she had been an editor at his publishing house. She and Nate began running through various common acquaintances.
Jason turned to him. “Where’s Hannah?”
Nate’s jaw tightened. He knew Jason thought he had the temperament of a sad, whipped schmuck, a conviction that certain women might have found hard to credit but was nonetheless unshakable as far as Jason went. (Jason had, in the past, attributed this to Nate’s “squirrelly, smarmy” need for everyone to like him.)
“We’re not attached at the hip,” Nate said.
He turned back to the redhead. After a few minutes, their conversation began to run dry. He wished there were a way to politely exit, but she was so smiley and friendly that Nate didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Finally, she nodded at the red wine he was drinking. “I think I’m going to look for some white,” she said.
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Page 12
