Hannah laughed. “She’s, uhm, your friend.”
“Yeah.”
He and Hannah didn’t speak much as they walked along quiet streets of brownstones. Nate knew there was a slight edge to his silence. His conscience told him he should say something to set Hannah’s mind at ease—say he was tired or something. He didn’t. Although his irritation was directed primarily at Aurit, it was sprawling enough to take in Hannah at the edges. There had been, in her effort to be agreeable, something slightly insipid, a sort of relaxation of her usual quick, decisive judgment. She had gone along with Aurit, matching Aurit’s girly, gossipy tone. She wasn’t usually like that. But this criticism was so ungenerous that it made him feel guilty. Hannah had, after all, been gamely trying to get on with his friend while he had mostly been sullen and not much help.
As Hannah unlocked her door, it occurred to him that they had been spending a lot of nights at her place. He’d prefer if they alternated between his and hers. Tonight, her place made sense, because of the location of the restaurant, but still … he wasn’t thrilled. Inside, he checked the status of the package he’d sent his mother for her birthday. (It was, as it had been several hours earlier, in transit.) Then he checked the results of a baseball game and scanned the lead stories in the Times. When he finally got into bed, he and Hannah began fooling around. He wasn’t really in the mood, but he went along from tact or inertia.
Soon Hannah was going down on him. It wasn’t working. He started thinking about Eugene and the review. Then he thought about how he hadn’t heard back from the editor he’d written to about his commodification-of-conscience essay. He remembered the day he’d gotten Hannah’s first e-mail, when she’d quibbled with him about the idea. He’d thought to himself that sooner or later his dick was going to wind up in her mouth. Well, here it was.
He shut his eyes, trying to squeeze out all this unpleasant consciousness. He craved blankness, an absence of everything except for the sensation of Hannah’s mouth on his cock. After a moment, he gave up. He guided Hannah away from him, pulling her face to his so he could kiss her.
Not long after, she drew back, tucking herself in like the letter S. “I … uhm …”
“Hmm?” he said.
“I was wondering … Is there maybe something you want me to do differently when I, you know, do that? I just wondered …”
She bit her lower lip.
“Oh!” Nate said.
As it happened, he had, more than once, felt slightly dissatisfied on this very score. It hadn’t reached the level of “problem,” but he had been fleetingly conscious of a small frustration. Strategically timed grunts and moans and gentle manual guidance he’d offered (by way of his hand on her head), intended to point the way toward some minor recalibration, had not been effective. But the complaint had always evaporated in the course of things, when they moved from one act to another. There is, after all, more than one way to skin a cat. Still.
“Uhm …,” he began.
He had always had a hard time talking about sex. That is, he had no problem discussing sex in general terms or sex as an intellectual or psychological or historical concept. When he was younger, he had enjoyed discussing various real or ideal women’s bodies with his friends. But the other kind of sex talk, about what felt good and what didn’t—this thing of giving instructions, saying, “touch me this way,” “please do this, not that,” even “faster” or “harder”—he found, had always found, excruciating. The prospect made him feel lecherous and animalistic and most of all unsexy, as if whatever modicum of sexiness he possessed was derived from careful, curatorial self-presentation.
Typically, the only way he could do it, state aloud what he wanted, was to go all out, sort of become a different person—the kind who could tell, not ask, a woman to take him all the way in her mouth or to suck his balls or to get on her back and spread her legs. His voice, when he said these things, sounded different, hard and flat, stripped of its usual amiability. To get to this state, he had to drum up a certain amount of contempt for the woman (because he didn’t speak to any human being this way, in any other context). He’d feel himself slip out of a more civilized, woman-respecting mind-set, as if this way of being weren’t really of him but merely an acquired habit, like separating out bottles and cans for recycling.
It wasn’t really a place he liked to go. It didn’t matter that many women claimed to like being treated that way, to get off on it. In fact, that depressed him. After he came, he inevitably felt a bit disgusted, with himself and the situation, by which he meant, in large part, the woman he was with.
There had to be another way.
Hannah was sitting upright, naked, her eyes cast downward and her hair falling forward on her face.
Nate pulled the bedsheet up around his waist, covering himself. “I, uh …”
Their eyes met. Hannah’s expression was meek and almost beatific in a kind of nervous desire to please.
Nate saw that it was hopeless. It had been a long day. He was tired. He didn’t, just then, have it in him to look into those big, kind, cruelty-free-chicken-buying eyes and tell her he’d like her to suck his balls first and to please apply gentler but more consistent pressure with her mouth and to go deeper and, simultaneously, to flatten her tongue so it sort of cradled the seam as she moved up and down his shaft, and, finally, that it would also be great if she could caress the skin between his scrotum and his anus with her fingers.
“What you do is great,” he said.
“Because you could tell me if …”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
From somewhere outside Hannah’s apartment, a boom box whose insistent bass Nate had barely been conscious of was abruptly switched off.
He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. He wanted to be outside, in the fresh air. He liked Hannah’s apartment, but he’d never particularly liked her bedroom. She had one of those big, freestanding wooden mirrors, draped with scarves and belts and other feminine things, from which wafted all sorts of artificial floral vapors. The sight of it had always depressed him, recalling to him the fusty home of his childhood piano teacher, a Quakerly widow with a long gray braid down her back. Then there was Hannah’s closet. Teeming with hanging clothes and stacks of blue jeans and sweaters crammed into every available space, with a brigade of boots and pumps and sneakers in clear plastic pouches bounding downward from racks attached to the doors, the closet haunted him even unseen. It almost too neatly embodied so much that was unattractive about women: mustiness, materialism, clutter.
He also realized that he disliked the corduroy throw pillows on her bed, one of which was currently wedged under his shoulder.
He wanted to get up, to walk through the cool night to his apartment, to get in his own bed, by himself, with a book, porn on his computer if he wanted it. Why did she have to be so unsexy about it—so like a wounded dog? How the hell was that supposed to have made him feel? But he knew if he tried to leave, he’d just implicate himself. The only guaranteed way to avoid a scene—“what’s wrong? why are you upset?”—was to stay put, act normal. Cuddle. What did it matter anyway? Soon he’d be asleep, and then it would be morning.
He tossed the throw pillow from the bed and pulled Hannah close to him. “You smell good,” he said. He wasn’t sure who fell asleep first, which probably meant he did.
{ 12 }
Ooh, kale,” Cara said. “I never could find kale in Baltimore.”
Nate and Hannah and Mark smiled in sympathy. They were seated in the backyard of a new and trendy farm-to-table-type restaurant. The night had been billed as a “double date.”
It was a pleasant September evening. The restaurant’s yard was lit up by hanging lanterns and furnished with splintery-looking wooden tables and benches. A waiter arrived and began expiating upon a variety of specials featuring early autumn vegetables. The young man’s checkered shirt and high-waisted pants reminded Nate less of a farmer than a scarecrow.
When the waiter l
eft, Nate tore off a piece of hard-crusted bread. “How’s the job search?” he asked Cara.
She set down her menu. “Terrible. That’s to be expected, I guess. Everyone I know who is my age is vastly overqualified for the jobs that are out there. I mean, answering phones?” She shook her head. “It’s a real problem.”
Nate murmered something that passed for assent.
“Cara’s honors thesis on Baudrillard won the top prize in the comp lit department at Stanford,” Mark said brightly.
“Is that right?”
When Nate met Hannah’s eye, he was relieved to see from her expression that she found Cara as grating as he did. Under the table, he took Hannah’s hand, pressing his fingers into her palm and running his thumb along her knuckles.
After their (non)conversation about blowjobs the week before, he had avoided her for several days, claiming to be busy or tired. He knew his annoyance wasn’t fair, but he had wanted the awkward recollection, and the unfamiliar feeling of her apartment as stifling, to fade from his mind. It had—basically. Maybe they’d begun to see each other a little less than they once had, but surely that was to be expected as time wore on.
The waiter brought their drinks. Cara said something about video games. Their popularity portended badly for American society. She mentioned Europe and sighed in a way that suggested young men never played video games there.
“I don’t know,” Hannah said. “The people I know who play a lot of video games could be up to a lot worse. You know, doing actual harm to others. At least this keeps them occupied.” She shrugged. “Maybe I just know some fucked-up people.”
Nate chortled.
Cara was less amused. Her face was slow to change expression, like an old clock face behind which heavy wheels had to turn. It took a moment for the set of her eyebrows and lips to register perplexity.
“That’s one way of looking at it, I guess,” she said.
Mark jumped in to say that Hannah was onto something with the “distraction from worse” argument. “There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that people are less violent than they used to be.”
As soon as he realized that he’d basically taken up the opposing side, Mark looked nervously at Cara. Nate recognized the anxious solicitude of a guy who gets laid only when certain conditions are met. Poor Mark, Nate thought.
“I’m not saying that video games make people violent,” Cara said a little pettishly.
Suddenly, Nate felt a bit sorry for her. She was pretty, self-possessed, and intelligent enough, but she was fresh out of school and repeating opinions that were no doubt fashionable there. In time, she would catch the tone of New York. Her schoolmarmishness was provincial. Here it was all about the counterintuitive. She’d learn. Besides, being pretty, self-possessed, and intelligent enough would go a long way, and if she wasn’t well connected before she started dating Mark, she would be now.
Their waiter walked briskly past, foodless. Nate squelched a yawn. Time seemed to be moving very slowly. Even Mark was different in Cara’s company. His sense of humor seemed blunted, as if he couldn’t simultaneously exercise it and ensure Cara’s minuteto-minute happiness.
Nate felt a stirring of appreciation for Hannah. He knew that if he had been single, had been eating dinner alone with Mark and Mark’s new girlfriend, he would have gotten a little depressed. Cara would have seemed, however solipsistically, a stand-in for women in general—his future, more or less. He was glad to have met someone so … reasonable, so not ridiculous, someone he liked as much as he desired.
When, finally, they were dividing up the check, Nate happened to catch a sidelong glance at Cara. He was momentarily struck by just how good-looking she was. But then Mark had always been a very shallow guy, in terms of women. Then, it occurred to Nate that Mark could very well feel sorry for him, just because technically Cara was better-looking than Hannah (although Hannah was, as far as he was concerned, far more appealing). Still, it was a weird thought, and he pushed it aside. Sometimes he wished he could turn his brain off.
Back at his apartment, Hannah told him that her friend Susan was coming to town from Chicago that weekend.
She was sitting Indian-style on his bed, with a weeks-old issue of the New Yorker in her lap. “Do you want to have brunch with us on Sunday?” she asked.
Nate was standing in the doorway. He combed a hand through his hair.
This invitation didn’t do much for him. Hannah had described Susan as one of those people who sees her life as a long series of injustices perpetrated against her by various assholes. If you take issue with her account, you’re one of the assholes. A real charmer, she sounded like.
Besides, he wasn’t big on brunch as a social to-do. This one was easy to imagine: 11:00, wait in line with all the other yuppies at hip new restaurant, make tired conversation about whatever Susan does for a living and how New York compares to Chicago; 11:30, order a Bloody Mary, still standing outside, still waiting to be seated; 12:00, at the table, order inadvisable second Bloody Mary in attempt to stave off creeping boredom/existential despair; 12:30, split the check and silently regret blowing thirty dollars (the extra ten for the second Bloody Mary) when he would have been happier with the six-dollar Sunday Special (two eggs, bacon, home fries, and toast) at the nongentrified diner on his street.
Hannah had already taken out her contacts. She peered at him from above the rims of her glasses. Her hair was in a ponytail. Nate’s glance flitted to the milk crate beside his bed. On it sat a stack of upcoming books that he wanted to go through with an eye to pitching reviews or essays. Reading in a leisurely, exploratory sort of way was just the kind of thing he enjoyed doing on a Saturday or Sunday, perhaps at home, perhaps at a sports bar with a game on in the background. He’d intended to spend last weekend this way, but it had gotten away from him. He wasn’t entirely happy about that. When you’re single, your weekend days are wide-open vistas that extend in every direction; in a relationship, they’re like the sky over Manhattan: punctured, hemmed in, compressed.
Nate scratched the back of his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not sure what I’m doing.”
He smiled nervously.
“Okay,” Hannah said.
Nate couldn’t read her expression, but instantly he felt apprehensive. Hannah turned back to the magazine. Almost unconsciously he remained where he was.
After a moment, Hannah looked up. “What?”
He stepped back. “Nothing!”
“God! I can’t stand this!”
“Can’t stand what?”
“You! Standing there, waiting for me to get mad at you because you don’t want to get brunch.” She made a face at him. “I don’t care. I don’t care if you come or not.”
“Okay …,” Nate said slowly. “But you asked me if I wanted to come, so I just naturally assumed that you cared, at least a little bit?”
Hannah took off her glasses and held them in her hand. “It’s like you want to make me out to be some kind of demanding, hysterical girlfriend,” she said. “That’s not who I am.”
Nate was momentarily confused. He certainly hadn’t expected her to be this angry. Then it sunk in what she was accusing him of. He heard his voice rise as he spoke. “Can you maybe tell me how exactly I made you out to be ‘demanding and hysterical’? Was it something I said? Because I don’t remember saying a damned thing.”
“It’s like … you just … ugh!”
Hannah stood up, and the magazine slid from her lap, landing in a heap on the floor. “It’s just this vibe.”
“A vibe?” Nate repeated, the word inflected with weeks of unspoken tension.
Hannah flushed.
Her discomposure had the effect of making Nate feel more composed.
“As far as I recall,” he said coolly, “you asked me a question and I answered, and now you are mad at me for assuming, like a complete asshole, that you cared about my answer.”
Hannah closed her eyes and inhaled through her nose. “What I mean is tha
t it’s not some test. I care like I care if we get Thai food or sushi whether you come or not.”
“Great. Brunch. Not a test. Noted.”
“Will you quit it with the sarcasm? I get it. It’s not about brunch. It’s how you’ve been acting. I feel you putting me into this box. I am not that person, and I resent you for making me out to be that person.”
They were now standing head to head, with only about a foot of space between them. Nate felt energized—wholly awake.
“You realize I have no clue what you are talking about,” he said. “What person am I making you out to be?”
She didn’t blink. “The person forcing you to give up your freedom.”
“Wait, am I the one in the box? Who’s in the box? You or me?”
Nate felt himself shifting his weight from one leg to the other the way he did when he played football.
“Fuck you, Nate,” Hannah said. “Just fuck you. You know what I mean. Or you would if you were being honest.”
He threw up his hands in a pantomime of disbelief. “Excuse me for listening and trying to understand what you’re saying.”
“Fine.” She shook her head. “Have it your way. I’m just being ridiculous.”
Nate didn’t contradict her. They stared at each other. “I’m going to brush my teeth,” he said finally.
“Great.”
The bathroom’s fluorescent light was oppressively bright. A few of Hannah’s long hairs were stuck to the grimy white porcelain of his sink. Nate felt a little shaky as he lingered over his teeth. He’d been mean, he knew he’d been mean, but she’d started it. There was no denying that. Making her out to be demanding and hysterical? He hadn’t done anything.
He decided to floss. It occurred to him that maybe she’d have gotten up and gotten dressed. Maybe she’d pack up her things and leave. He approached the bedroom warily. Hannah was on the bed.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice was contrite but not otherwise emotional. “I’m sorry I blew up like that.”
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Page 16
