“We went out for a while,” he said, standing up to signal he was ready to move to the bedroom. “It didn’t work out. Now we’re friends. I guess that’s about it.”
{ 11 }
What had begun as an unusually cool summer by August turned into a very hazy, sticky one. Nate retrieved his clunky old air conditioner and installed it in his bedroom window as he began to work seriously on the magazine assignment that Jason had helped him get. Most days, he went for a run in the park, usually before eight, and then worked straight into the evening, rarely allowing even himself the pleasant distraction of Recess. Often he’d meet up with Hannah for a late dinner. Sometimes he felt he didn’t have time for that, and she’d come over around eleven to spend the night. Though he occasionally regretted not having time to see his friends, he was happy during those weeks. He always felt most alive, most himself when he was immersed in a project.
When he turned in the piece at the end of the month, Hannah said she wanted to cook him a real dinner. “To celebrate the article,” she said. Nate said that sounded nice.
In the meantime, he started in on a list of chores he’d put off while he was working on the piece: Buy birthday present for his mother. Renew driver’s license. Switch banks to avoid punishing new fees recently imposed by current bank. Bills. Haircut. Laundry. Tedious stuff.
Perhaps that was why he wasn’t in the greatest mood when he arrived at Hannah’s for dinner. He couldn’t think of any other reason.
She was stirring herbs into a pot of pasta.
He peered in. “Wow. Real clams. In their shells and everything.”
She looked amused. “That’s how they come. In shells.”
Nate followed her to the table. She was wearing a dress he didn’t remember having seen before, clingy and black.
As they began to eat, he complimented the pasta. She started talking about cooking and the “psychodrama of taste.” Her mother and one of her sisters constantly got into these ridiculously heated squabbles about whose favorite cookbook was better or whether organic really was healthier. What was actually at stake, Hannah said, was the question of which of the two was more tasteful, classier—the mother with her white tablecloths and coq au vin or the sister with her butcher’s block and Alice Waters–inspired recipes.
“Your sister wins,” Nate said. “Definitely.”
“You’re not a neutral judge—you’re her generation, more or less. And you’ve never tasted my mother’s coq au vin.”
Nate smiled, but it was a little forced. He didn’t know if it was his imagination or if there was, tonight, some change in their dynamic, a diminution of the lively, crackling energy that usually infused their talk. Maybe he just didn’t feel like talking. He turned back to the pasta. Not all the clams had opened. It was good, though. So was the salad she’d made to go with it.
When they finished eating, Nate began clearing dishes. As he returned from the kitchen, Hannah stood up to refill her wine glass. Then she reached over the table to refill his.
“That’s okay.”
She looked up, her mouth a surprised O.
“I don’t really feel like it,” he said, a note of apology finding its way into his voice as it occurred to him that she’d cooked him a nice meal and put on a dress. This, this dinner was a thing. In not drinking—in not getting into the spirit—he was failing to do his part.
Hannah clasped the wine bottle with both hands. A small crease appeared between her eyebrows. For an instant, Nate saw her in an unfamiliar light—vulnerable, needy. His guilt flickered into annoyance. Why a thing? Says who? Why should he be made to feel bad just because he wasn’t in the mood to make a romantic fuss about a Tuesday night? He felt like reading. Or fooling around online. So what?
But just as quickly as it had appeared, the furrow in Hannah’s brow disappeared.
“Okay,” she said.
She shot him a quick smile as she pushed the cork back in the bottle. Nate, rocking on his heels, his thumbs hooked into the belt loops of his jeans, smiled back.
She turned and walked to the kitchen. Nate watched as she stood on her tiptoes and reached up to set the bottle on top of the refrigerator. Her black dress rode up her thighs. Her ass, in the clingy fabric, looked good.
A part of him wanted to feel it against his body, to get up behind her and whisper his thanks for the meal. But he was afraid that if he did, he’d raise expectations that, at the moment, he wasn’t up to following through on.
“Do you mind if I check my e-mail?” he asked.
“Go ahead,” Hannah said, walking back to the table. “I’ll just hang out here.” She lifted her glass. “With my wine.”
The next morning, Nate put on running clothes and jogged toward the park. He was conscious of trying to evade, literally to outrun, a feeling of restlessness.
The night before had been sort of a drag. He’d sat by himself at Hannah’s desk for a while, fiddling on her laptop, but he’d been uncomfortably conscious of her movements in the living room. He’d been glad when after about half an hour she came into the bedroom and asked if he wanted to watch a movie. He did. The film, an indie comedy that they watched in bed, on the laptop, cheered him. Temporarily. He’d woken up to the same feeling of dullness.
Yet everything was going well. Strong blurbs were coming in for his book. On the phone a few days before, his father had made an uncharacteristically approving remark about Nate’s career choices. (His years of underpaid freelance work, previously seen as “bumming around,” had been recast as evidence of “entrepreneurial spirit.”) And he was getting laid.
When he went too long without sex, he invariably felt depressed. The pent-up sexual energy seemed to corrode his self-esteem. One-night stands mostly failed to satisfy. (Since the main criterion one selected for was willingness, perhaps this wasn’t surprising.) Casual dating, he had learned, didn’t work all that well either. Too many hurt feelings. What he had with Hannah—sex with a woman he liked—was better, clearly, than any of the other options.
Of course, it was a lot more than sex, what he had with Hannah.
The air, as he entered the park, was thick with humidity. When he stepped onto the running path, he glanced at his phone to check the time, then sped up.
Free-floating ennui wasn’t something Nate experienced much until the past year. Before he’d sold his book, his adult life had been so circumscribed financially and so uncertain professionally—yet so charged with the beating pulse of his ambition—that he hadn’t hungered for drama. Through no choice of his own, bohemianism, in the sense of not always knowing how he’d pay the rent, had been thrust upon him. The fear of failure had been real and constant. He supposed some part of him missed it, missed the urgency.
The running path, a utility road, really, curved through a wooded area. The foliage crowded out all signs of urban life. For a moment, Nate just listened to the sound of his footfalls on the asphalt.
A few days ago, he’d received a solicitation from the nonprofit that maintains the park. He’d felt a pang of guilt when he tossed the letter in the trash, but he had a tall stack of solicitations from various do-gooder outfits.
Once he would have thrown them all out unopened. It had seemed obvious they were intended for someone else. Someone more like the rest of his Harvard classmates. Someone who wasn’t broke. But though he was far from free of financial worry, Nate knew he no longer had quite the same excuse of poverty as he used to have. Yet he felt depressed whenever he thought about writing out a check to any of these worthy organizations, of then making a note of it for his accountant to get the tax deduction. He would have denied it, even to himself—deemed it a laughable affectation—but it seemed to him now that he had always secretly believed that in the way he lived (he refused to say his “lifestyle”), in his freelance, un-health-insured, sparsely thinged life, he was in a small way registering a rejection—of conformity, of middle-class convention, of not just acquisitiveness but enslavement to the idol of “security.” Neverth
eless, he’d wound up in the same place as everyone else. Was this—latte liberalism—his inescapable fate? Surely it was. It was sheer vanity to pretend otherwise. What’d he think he was going to do, foment revolution with his precious essay about the commodification of conscience? Still, no matter how worthwhile the cause, no matter how many dissidents were spared torture or children saved from preventable disease, he never could send in his hundred dollars without feeling like he’d crossed over and that something had been lost along the way.
Nate realized he’d slowed down. About a hundred feet in front of him, a blonde woman with a long ponytail was moving at a good clip. She had shapely legs and a long narrow waist. She reminded him a little of Kristen. He began using her as a pacesetter.
It was useless to lament what he’d lost—if he’d lost anything, if it weren’t pure self-indulgence to think this way. He’d been extremely lucky. Sure, writing his book hadn’t been entirely easy. To finish it, he’d eventually quit his biweekly book-reviewing gig, which had been the only claim to status he’d had in the eyes of the world. Even Elisa, who’d believed in the book, had wondered if giving it up was a mistake. “You never know what’ll happen,” she pointed out. But the reviews hadn’t paid enough to justify the time and energy they required. He’d gone back to temping, which paid more, per hour, and required less mentally. He had proofread. He had done what he had to—for the sake of something that existed only as a Microsoft Word document, a sprawling tale of a young immigrant family grappling with life in the American suburbs in the 1970s and 1980s, a work he’d been revising and rewriting since he was in his midtwenties without ever having earned a penny from it. But writing his book—at least after a certain point, years in, when, by shifting its focus from the son to the parents, he’d finally seemed to find the thing’s pulse and the novel began to take shape almost of its own accord—had also been the greatest pleasure of his life. That a publisher was then willing to pay him for it, pay him generously, was nothing to complain about. He’d do it again for free, in a minute. Many of those late nights, when he’d paced his apartment, his mind roaming the world he’d painstakingly created and could finally inhabit—moving within it from character to character, feverishly distilling into words thoughts not his own but theirs—had been ecstasies of absorption and self-forgetfulness.
Of course, life couldn’t always be lived at that pitch. Day-today life was bound, sometimes, to be mundane, full of workaday tasks and minor decisions. Amnesty International or Doctors Without Borders? Dinner in or dinner out? Some nights were bound to contain little more than a movie on Netflix.
As he emerged from the wooded part of the park, the heat began to wear on him. He started counting out his breaths.
The gap between him and the Kristen-like runner narrowed. He sped up even more, fighting his body’s yearning toward comfort. As the path wound around the pond, the tall yellow grasses that lined its shore waved slightly in spite of the air’s stillness. Nate overtook the blonde.
When he began to climb the last and longest hill of the running loop, thought was edged out by the need to focus on his breathing. All he could do was register in short, sensory bursts of intake the scene around him: leafy trees on his right, meadow on his left, an Asian chick in a Duke T-shirt running in the opposite direction, a swarm of passing bicyclists.
At the top of the hill, he was breathing hard. He forced himself to run faster. The last eighth of a mile, slightly downhill, was more tunnel-like, lined with trees on both sides. Each time his foot hit the pavement, he silently repeated the word will, as in I will, as in willpower, as in the thing that had made him get off his ass and write, night after night, when he’d been in his twenties, working those interminable temp jobs, long before writing the book had been fun, when all he’d wanted to do was get wasted, or at the very least do something passive, like read.
He reached the end of the loop and almost collapsed at the waist. Panting, he stumbled past a gaggle of Orthodox Jewish girls in long sleeves and long skirts. After a moment his breath became more regular. He checked his time on his phone. Twenty-seven minutes, twenty-two seconds. Not his best for 3.42 miles. The humidity had gotten to him.
Although he had come up with an idea for another book, by early September he hadn’t made any headway on it. He decided he needed more time to hash out the idea before he’d be ready to start writing. In the meantime, he yearned for something else to do. Because his review of the Israel book a couple months before had gone over well, he wrote to his editor at that publication and asked to review an upcoming novel by a prominent young British author. He was a little surprised not to get a response right away.
It came several days later. It wasn’t the one he was looking for. Eugene Wu had been given the assignment. Nate couldn’t believe it. He had done such a good job with the Israel book. (He thought he had anyway.) He had pretty much assumed this one was his for the asking. He couldn’t believe he’d been turned down in favor of Eugene.
He and Hannah were having dinner with Aurit that night. On their way to the restaurant, Nate told Hannah about Eugene getting the assignment, but he downplayed his disappointment. He didn’t want her pity. And it was embarrassing. He hated that being passed over in favor of Eugene bothered him as much as it did. It suggested a pettiness and an insecurity that he associated with mediocrity. It was not exactly the light in which he wanted Hannah, who was nobody’s fool, to see him. Besides, between the two of them, he had always played the role of the more successful writer. He had been the one to champion her work, to build her up. For their roles to be reversed, even temporarily, would only add to his sense of indignity.
The restaurant they were meeting Aurit at had opened only recently. Aurit had chosen it. But the dinner had been his idea. He wanted Hannah and Aurit get to know each other better. Although Aurit got on his nerves in a thousand different ways, he had never ceased to consider her one of the most intelligent and interesting women he’d ever met. Over the years, he had compared various women he’d dated to her, in terms of conversation. Until Hannah, the comparison had not tended to flatter the woman he was sleeping with.
While he and Hannah waited for Aurit to arrive, Nate scanned the menu and saw that the place was more expensive than he would have liked. He felt a twinge of irritation.
He had lately started to worry that he was spending too much, little by little letting his standard of living edge upward, as if his book advance money could never be depleted. As he’d just been reminded, freelance journalism assignments were unpredictable. And no matter how much he sometimes romanticized the past, he really didn’t want to ever have to temp again.
“Hello! Sorry!” Aurit trilled a few minutes later as she sent semi-ironic air kisses at them.
A large leather purse and a pair of sunglasses and a set of headphones were peeled away and placed in a pile on the table. Once unencumbered, Aurit collapsed into the chair next to Nate’s. “I’ve been on the phone with my mother,” she said breathlessly. “Here’s the thing about my mother …”
The story that followed dated back to childhood. Aurit’s mother, in this telling, had long nursed an idea of herself as very sensible and self-sacrificing and unfrivolous. She propped up her self-image by constantly invoking a comparison between herself and these other women, “who’ve never had a job, who never, ever cook—they hire caterers whenever more than two people come over—who shop all the time, who resent their daughters’ youth, who never read. As a kid, I bought the whole thing. It’s only over time that I started to wonder where all these vapid, lazy, superficial women are. I’ve never encountered anyone quite so bad, let alone an army of such women, except maybe on Dallas. Then I realized the only place they exist is in her head, where they play a very important role. She can justify almost anything she does because she truly, deep-down believes she’s more than entitled to have her ‘modest’ wishes granted, given the extreme and almost unparalleled excellence of her character, relative to other women.”
&nb
sp; Both Nate and Hannah were laughing.
Aurit shook her head. “It’s like someone who surrounds himself with people who are less intelligent than he is so he can feel smart. Only she does it in her head. So fucked up.”
“I know just what you mean,” Hannah said.
It soon became evident to Nate that Hannah and Aurit liked each other. This had not been a given, particularly not on Aurit’s end. Aurit was very picky and frequently evinced what seemed, to him, to be an arbitrary dislike for people he liked, especially women. But Aurit’s approval didn’t make him as happy as he’d hoped. Throughout the meal, he experienced a disorienting and rather emasculating feeling of being subsumed by a klatch of gabbing women. Aurit’s and Hannah’s combined selves created a stronger pull than either woman on her own. Instead of settling halfway between Nate’s sensibility and Hannah’s or Aurit’s, the conversation was weighted toward the feminine. There was a giddily confidential, almost salacious quality to it. Moreover, Aurit and Hannah seemed to have decided beforehand to express only unequivocal agreement with whatever the other said. (When Hannah said she bought only cruelty-free chickens, did Aurit have to nod and coo quite so agreeably?—when, as Nate well knew, Aurit felt nothing but scorn for “Americans’ childish sentimentality about animals.”) Their enthusiastic supportiveness created a close, cloying atmosphere that made Nate clamor to get out.
“Did you have an okay time?” Hannah asked when the two of them were walking back to her place. “You seemed kind of quiet.”
“It was fine.”
He glanced through the open doorway of a restaurant kitchen. A white-smocked Hispanic man was stirring a steaming pot. “I just think Aurit sometimes dominates the conversation,” he said. “Not to mention the way she pronounces judgment on everyone but herself. Does she really think she’s above reproach?”
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Page 15
