When Elisa felt that someone had wronged her, she was outraged. Apparently, she was the only person in all of New York with any manners; everyone else behaved like an animal, especially to her, which was very hard for her to understand because—and this was news to Nate—she “bore no ill will toward anyone.” She was furious if Nate didn’t wholeheartedly support her in her indignation toward such-and-such coworker, who had made a comment at lunch, which, though it seemed fairly innocuous when she repeated it to Nate, struck Elisa as unforgivably barbed. To suggest even the possibility of a misunderstanding, let alone an overreaction, was, as far as Elisa was concerned, to undermine her.
She seemed to have no internal sense of justice. When Nate got annoyed because she was late to meet him or because she seemed to him to be acting bored as he told her something he felt was important, he instinctively evaluated his irritation, tried to assess whether it was reasonable or fair, under the circumstances. (Perhaps she hadn’t realized that what he was saying was important to him? Perhaps he hadn’t been clear?) She, on the other hand, treated her emotional responses as infallible. His self-criticism, she seemed to perceive merely as a weakness to be exploited. “No,” she’d say. “You really weren’t clear.”
Nate’s only other serious girlfriend had been Kristen, who was, whatever else you might say about her, an extremely fair-minded person. Elisa was a bit baffling to him. But for a long time, none of her limitations mattered. Nate had grown up on the Old Testament. He didn’t expect his god to be reasonable or merciful. He may have privately grumbled about her demands, he may have tried to reason with her or cajole her, but Elisa’s presence in his life, in his bed, her beauty (sometimes when he was with her he was simply overcome with the desire to touch her silky blonde hair or perfect doll face), the particular pains and pleasures of being with her: these had become, for him, existentially necessary.
Although Elisa was intelligent—and fluent in the things sophisticated people were supposed to be fluent in—Nate had realized fairly early on that her writing was often stilted and awkward. Her ideas tended toward strained attempts at a sort of academic profundity. There was also something brittle about her love of intellect and intellectualism and, more important, intellectuals, like Nate. This passion of hers had impressed him at first. But it was, he learned over time, a form of success mongering, a specialized form, but success mongering all the same. Long before he was ready to call it quits with her—long before even a seed of the thought had entered his mind—he began to assemble a picture of her much less flattering than his initial impression. Her taste, for example, was great—inasmuch as it was received, inasmuch as she absorbed what was fashionably highbrow. She really liked, say, Svevo—was able to see myriad virtues in Svevo—once she was primed to like Svevo, once she knew that Svevo was someone she was supposed to like. Once her father, the professor, or her boss, the Very Important Editor, had sung the praises of Svevo. But other times, railing against the “male literary establishment,” she’d assert (to Nate, never to her coworkers) the value of some schmaltzy if well-meaning piece of middlebrow fiction about a girl and her mother, or a girl and her best friend, or a girl and the black woman who helped to raise her, who together combated predatory males and social injustice and ultimately learned the redemptive power of love. Those were the books she really liked, Nate realized after a while. The Svevo, the aging intellectuals of the New York Review of Books—all that, it turned out, was for show, even if she was putting on the show for herself as much as for anyone else.
Nate wished, for her sake, that she’d relax about it, realize it was okay not to be some kind of highbrow intellectual. She’d surely be happier at a different type of magazine, a less stuffy one, perhaps one of those Web sites for smart, independent women, where she wouldn’t have to disguise her tastes and where, freed from the need to posture, her verbal cleverness, her knack for snappy aperçus, would come into play. (She was always criticizing him in the most clever and imaginative terms.) But, no, the high opinion of people like her father and her boss meant too much to her. She had to do something they valued, not something that she valued. Nate felt tenderness toward her when he saw her situation in those terms. Elisa was a beautiful, intelligent woman trying desperately to make herself into a slightly different kind of intelligent woman.
Incidentally, this was also the answer to the question that had so perplexed him initially: the matter of why she was with him. At that moment in her life, Elisa was, he realized, almost pathologically attracted not to status or money or good looks but to literary and intellectual potential. Nate possessed many of the same mental qualities as her father and her boss. And he had to admit that, no matter how much Elisa criticized his dress, manners, personality, and habits, her faith in his mind had been strong and constant.
She was a good influence on him in certain ways, compelling him to go to plays and concerts and gallery openings and well-reviewed restaurants in obscure corners of the city. His default had always been the neighborhood bar. In retrospect, though, Nate supposed that even when they’d been at their best, even as she’d clung to his arm sweetly when they walked from the subway to the pizza parlor in a once-Italian neighborhood in deep Brooklyn, even when they’d sat together drinking hot cocoa on a stone bench outside the Cloisters, staring across the Hudson at the red-brown New Jersey Palisades, even at those moments he had been on some level cataloging her inadequacies for future reference. By the time they’d been going out for seven or eight months, she’d become an increasingly frequent topic of conversation between Nate and his friends. “Is it normal for your girlfriend to have what’s basically a temper tantrum if you make plans for a Friday night without consulting her?” he would ask. “What does it mean that when she pronounces judgment on someone, my first instinct is to assume the opposite is true?”
After he and Elisa had been together for about a year, his dissatisfaction overwhelmed whatever it was—love? need? infatuation?—that had attached him to her. “When a friendship ceases to grow, it immediately begins to decline,” said the amoral Madame Merle, and so it seemed to Nate. One day he found that Elisa’s hold over him had loosened. He could contemplate her being mad at him without the thought triggering successive jolts of anxiety that inexorably, almost against his will, directed his energies toward effecting reconciliation.
Initially he treaded lightly—said no to more of her proposed outings, stayed at his place when he felt like it, made plans to go away with Jason and Mark one weekend without checking with her first. He brushed off her annoyance and waited to see if the old anxiety would reassert itself. It didn’t. Elisa quickly sensed the change, with, it seemed, the same gut-level instinct that some animals sense an approaching storm. She became nicer, more accommodating. She suggested a barbecue restaurant, albeit a trendy one reviewed in the Times. She stifled her irritation when Nate told her he wouldn’t spend a week at her parents’ summerhouse because he wanted to work on his book. She slept with him more often and even bought lacy lingerie and garter belts and teddies with furry pom-poms over the breasts, and the sight of her thin, too-thin, body in these costumes touched him as much as it turned him on. “For me you did this?” he marveled, as she approached him in a red-and-black-striped corset that called to mind the costume of one of Zola’s prostitutes. He had always enjoyed sex with Elisa. From the beginning, her aloofness, that bored, preoccupied quality she had, combined with the intensity of his attraction, had imbued it with a sense of quest, of contest; his satisfaction on those occasions when he’d succeeded, and she’d squealed beneath him, had been almost unparalleled in his erotic life. These occurrences became more frequent.
But except for sex, Nate’s ardor did not appear to be coming back. The things that had bothered him most about Elisa—her selfishness, her criticism, her demands—were disappearing one by one, and still he felt no slackening in the pace with which indifference, even distaste, was overwhelming everything else he felt for her.
Then he ruptured his
Achilles tendon and was on crutches. He stayed with her for a couple weeks because there were fewer stairs to climb to reach her apartment. She behaved beautifully, picking things up from his place, cooking for him, anticipating almost all of his needs. Nate returned to his apartment as soon as he possibly could. Being at Elisa’s he had felt like a criminal harbored by the person he has wronged. He had by then almost entirely ceased to feel romantic interest. In its stead: a dispassionate appraisal of her merits and demerits that wasn’t entirely to her credit. Even the sex, that blissful second honeymoon, had sputtered out. Increasingly conscious of his changed feelings, Nate couldn’t escape the sense that he was taking advantage of her, taking something on false pretenses. He began to shrink from sleeping with her.
When finally he broke up with her, she was more upset than he’d expected. Although he pretended at sympathy, he felt it in only the shallowest sense: he saw her cry and in the moment felt bad. On another level, her tears gratified him: So now you think I’m such hot shit? What about six months ago when you gave me crap the whole weekend we spent at my parents’ house because they were too “shrill,” and gave you a headache, and you had too little to talk about with them? But he didn’t say anything. He knew that if she said she was sorry, if she promised to change even more than she had already, it wouldn’t matter.
She called him the next day, sounding alarmingly distressed. He agreed to meet her for coffee a few days later; this prospect calmed her down. Over coffee, he told her again that he was sorry but it was just too late, no, he didn’t know why, it was nothing she did, he simply needed to focus on finishing his book and probably he wasn’t fit to be in any relationship, maybe there was something wrong with him—anything to avoid the truth: that over time he had come to see her as overprivileged and underinteresting.
“It’s just—” Elisa set her coffee cup in her saucer and looked at him with watery eyes. “I never really felt loved before. I thought this was it.”
Something tugged at him. Back when he had been enamored with her, and incredulous that she had chosen him, hadn’t he done a thousand little things to make her feel as fully, as wholly loved as possible? He had thought it would give him more of a hold on her.
But, then, he told himself, wasn’t that just what happens in a relationship? It wasn’t as if he had intentionally misled her.
They agreed, that day, to remain friends. But Nate soon found himself growing frustrated. Nearly every time they got together she brought up their failed relationship, insisting she just wanted to clear up a few things. When the conversation didn’t go the way she wanted—and what she wanted sometimes seemed to be no less than for him to declare that he’d made a mistake in breaking up with her—she’d get upset. With tears came mawkishness and recrimination, unanswerable questions intended, it seemed to him, only to make him feel guilty. “You don’t think I’m smart enough, do you?” “How am I ever supposed to trust anyone after I let myself trust you, after you made me trust you?” Meanwhile, he remembered with perfect clarity how little sympathy she’d had for him when she had been the one with more power.
Over time, though, another current of feeling began to build within him. No matter how much he told himself that he had done nothing wrong with regard to her, not according to the standards that he and everyone he knew lived by (if anything she was in the wrong in her clinginess and undignified hysteria), on some intuitive level, Nate began to feel culpable. A stentorian, Faulkner-like voice within him insisted on seeing the relationship in stark moralistic terms. He’d been drawn—this voice intoned—to Elisa because of her beauty, because she seemed first-rate, because of her well-known father and shining pedigree, and he, nerd, loser that he’d long been, had always suspected that people like her, people like Amy Perelman, with their good looks and popularity, had something he didn’t, something impenetrable by intelligence alone, a sort of magic and grace, a wordless wisdom about how to live, and a corresponding access to unknown pleasures. Unlike with Kristen, to whom he’d felt a real kinship, Nate had glommed onto Elisa from reptilian ambition. And then, like a dog that sniffs at a foreign object before deciding it doesn’t interest him, he trotted off, on to other attractions. Except his experiment hadn’t been so painless for Elisa. Perhaps the strength of her attachment wasn’t even as strange as it had once seemed to him. Before him, Elisa had dated a string of guys she seemed to have chosen on the basis of their good looks and propensity to treat her badly. Although he was less good-looking, Nate had apparently hit some sort of sweet spot, being both a nicer boyfriend and more desirable in terms of professional prospects than the parade of broad-shouldered sociopaths who’d preceded him. And as Elisa, not without basis, rated her claims to worldly admiration higher than she rated Nate’s, it was easy to understand why she had felt secure in his affection.
If she was now sort of pathetic—shameless in her lack of pride and in her unreasonable anger—wasn’t all that of a piece with everything he had long known of her? She had been spoiled by her good looks and good fortune; she lacked inner resources; she was petulant and childish when things didn’t go her way. He had known all that since practically the first time they’d gone out. If he had wanted her when he knew she was immature, could he really use that as a reason to throw her over now, just because he no longer wanted what else she had on offer? Well, yes, he could, the answer was obviously yes—but still it made him feel bad.
Most of the time, Nate quieted the fundamentalist preacher’s voice in his head. It was not to be trusted—it was simplistic, it was self-aggrandizing, according him a godlike power over others; it assumed, problematically, that he was smarter and stronger than Elisa and thus solely responsible for everything that happened between them. Yet his attitude did become more sympathetic toward her. He could always, in an effort to justify himself, list the ways in which she was lacking as a person (she was shallow and her concerns, even her disappointments, were narrow; her ill-concealed pride in her upper-class family was itself vulgar; she was acquisitive, not so much for money as for status and a “suitable”—i.e., alpha male—partner, et cetera), but what, really, did it signify? She may not be a particularly admirable or noble-minded person, but she was indisputably a person. She bled if you pricked her. Although he didn’t buy Elisa’s most histrionic claims as to the irreparable damage he had supposedly done her—all told they had only been together for a year and a half, they hadn’t even lived together—Nate did come to acknowledge that he had hurt her badly. He promised to try, to really try, to be kinder to her, to help her if he could. Even though from his perspective the best possible thing would be to just drop out of each other’s lives, he promised her he wouldn’t “abandon” her.
But he messed up. He not infrequently found her maddening, particularly when she started in on her favorite/his least favorite topic of conversation: their relationship and all psychic wounds appertaining to it. He took too long to return her calls. The worst of it, though, was that he slept with her far too many times after they broke up, convincing himself that it was okay, that she “understood” the situation. Drunk, lonely, horny, feeling for her a tepid nostalgic affection, he’d contrive for a moment not to see what was obvious: that, apparently, he was willing to fuck with her head, to lead her on a little, because he wanted not just sex but to revel for a short while in the balm of her continued, perhaps even increased, affection. (She seemed to forget that for much of the time they’d actually been together, she’d found him lacking.) And for all he knew, she did understand the situation perfectly, better than he did. Maybe she had never for a single minute thought that this backsliding would amount to more than sex. Still, if she wasn’t yet entirely over him, Nate knew he hadn’t exactly helped. At least, he had stopped—that is, they had stopped sleeping together. They had agreed not to do it anymore.
This hadn’t, of course, prevented her from coming on to him the night of her dinner party. But as she said, she’d been unhappy. A lot of that had nothing to do with him. Life had ch
anged for Elisa since he and she had first met. Three and a half years was too long to be an assistant, even to the editor in chief of a Very Important Magazine. But her forays into writing for the magazine had been painful. Her pieces had been received by editors somewhat poorly and had been so extensively rewritten that she’d been stung. Nate tried to convince her that this was not unusual. Most people her age don’t start off writing for magazines of this caliber. They work up to it over time. That was what he had done in his twenties. But Elisa had always been successful at whatever she’d undertaken; she wasn’t emotionally prepared for failure of any sort. Without much in the way of humor or humility to put it in perspective, the crash of her expectations was crippling. She clung all the more tenaciously to her job: although she found it at times demeaning, she relied utterly on the prestige of the magazine, and of her boss, to feel important—that is, safe.
While she was still beautiful, she’d lost some of the freshness that she’d had when he first met her, when she was brand-new to the city and adult life and the literary scene, when she’d first entered their social universe as an unknown and nubile young commodity, whose good looks ensured a warm and enthusiastic welcome. Over time, the very quality that he had been drawn to, that indisputable first-rate-ness, had begun to diminish. She had become another attractive, unhappy single woman who could be seen at certain types of parties, complaining about her job and the men she’d been with. She was also known as his ex, which, accurate as it was, was not quite fair. He wasn’t classified in the same condescending way as her ex.
Nate rubbed the back of his head.
What was the deal with him and Elisa? Hannah had asked. Sitting in the chair across from him, she smiled encouragingly as she waited for his answer.
She had told him about her ex. But his relationship with Elisa would be difficult to explain. There were things he wasn’t proud of. Also, Hannah knew Elisa. He’d feel unchivalrous divulging certain unflattering facts about her to the woman he was currently sleeping with. Besides, he was suddenly very tired.
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Page 14
