The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

by Waldman, Adelle

  “You seem good,” he said. “Happy.”

  “Thanks.”

  Her face was tilted over her wine glass, and she looked up at him from the top of her eyes. Nate remembered her looking at him in just that way when she went down on him. He felt a fluttering belowdecks and automatically shifted in his seat.

  As soon as he realized this, he blinked and rubbed his forehead. It had been a long time since he had reacted this way to Elisa.

  She set her wine glass down and cocked her head. “How’s Hannah?”

  Nate shrugged as he took a sip of his whiskey. “Fine.” He paused, sucking on an ice cube. “Actually, things haven’t been so great with us lately.”

  “I’m sorry,” Elisa said. But the crooked way she smiled suggested that this was just what she had hoped to hear. “Poor Hannah.”

  In spite of the bad character on display, Nate felt unusually fond of Elisa right then, protective and affectionate, feelings born of long familiarity. He leaned his elbow on the bar and smiled at her, resignedly as if to say, “What can you do?” Meanwhile, in the virtual reality chamber of his mind, he began to replay various scenes of fucking her. He had a large cache of raw material from which to draw.

  They hung out for quite a while, until nearly midnight—bent over the bar, laughing a lot, gossiping about Elisa’s coworkers and other mutual acquaintances, pulling apart not just their writing but their disordered personal lives, irritating habits, and personal unattractiveness. Nate allowed himself to slip out from Hannah’s influence, the moral quality that would have made him ashamed to be this catty, this cruel in her presence. Her fairness, her lack of pettiness were things he liked about Hannah generally—he certainly respected her more than he respected Elisa—but the fun he was having felt deserved in light of the strain he’d been under in his relationship.

  When he and Elisa said goodnight at the subway entrance, Nate felt a touch of wistfulness. He gave her a quick peck on the cheek.

  “Good luck with the interview, E,” he said. “You deserve it.”

  The following day he met up with Hannah.

  “Did you have fun last night?” she asked as they walked to a bar. “You were with Elisa, right?”

  She didn’t sound jealous. Nate instinctively attributed that to savvy, not to an absence of jealousy. Immediately, he felt defensive—also a little annoyed to be put on the defensive when, thoughts aside, he had done nothing wrong.

  “Yeah,” he said, daring her with his tone to complain. “I did.”

  “Good,” she said, just as coldly.

  They were on their way to meet some of her friends from journalism school. At the bar, Nate’s mood improved. Hannah’s friends were by and large down-to-earth, hard-drinking reporters who spent a lot of time at City Hall or on the police beat or hanging out with Wall Street types. He soon lost sight of Hannah, but it was okay—they were a fun crowd. After a while, though, he got what Hannah had meant, back when they’d first started dating, when she’d said that she had felt a little bit isolated intellectually. He could see that there were aspects of her personality that she wouldn’t be able to express with these friends. The thought made him feel tender toward her.

  He spotted her talking to two women by a Ms. Pac-Man machine. He made his way to her and placed his hand on her hip. “Hi.”

  “Hey.”

  Her tone was clipped, almost hostile. After a moment, he realized she was drunk.

  She started getting aggressive with him, treating his light remarks as criticisms and responding disproportionately, hitting him “playfully” but actually using a bit too much force. When she said she was going to get a drink, he suggested that maybe she didn’t need another.

  “Who are you to tell me what to do?”

  He shrugged, and she went to the bar.

  At his apartment later, she became downright belligerent, muttering hostile, not-quite-coherent reflections on him almost under her breath, as if to herself as much as to him. Her tone was false, full of a surly and world-weary and utterly put-on cynicism, a strange, unnatural bravado.

  “You know that Irina and Jay and Melissa are nice people,” she said. She spoke as if these were fighting words. Which, he supposed, they were. “That’s what actually matters,” she continued. “You know that the other stuff is all vanity, right? Writing, I mean.”

  She made a sarcastic comment about Nate’s “artfully crafted sentences,” which, she said, mimicked true feeling without knowing what it was. He imitated the stylistic devices of writers he admired without realizing that for those writers these weren’t mere devices but means of expressing something true.

  It was brutal stuff. Nate didn’t take offense. She was obviously lashing out at him for the way things were between them. All he felt was mild disgust at her lack of control. Mostly he just wanted to go to sleep.

  As they were getting into bed, she told him that he was treated like a big shot because he was a guy and had the arrogant sense of entitlement to ask for and expect to get everything he wanted, to think no honor too big for him. The funny thing was that Nate thought there was a great deal of truth in this. But he thought she could stand to ask for more. His main criticism of her, in terms of writing, was that too often she wasn’t ambitious enough. She should treat each piece as if it mattered, instead of laughing off flaws proactively, defensively, citing a “rushed job” or an “editor who’d mess it up anyway,” or referring to the insignificance of the publication (“How many people even read such-and-such magazine anymore?”). On top of it, she didn’t seem to be writing much at all lately, aside from the routine stuff she did for money. In spite of what she’d said the night she told him she’d been feeling down, she didn’t seem to be making progress on her book proposal. Still, he unreservedly thought she was extremely talented. She deserved more recognition than she’d gotten. It wasn’t fair. He told her so now. Then he leaned over to turn out the light.

  “That’s nice of you to say,” she said as the room went dark. “Every time I want to paint you as a total jerk, you go and say something nice. That’s what kills me.”

  On the ceiling, dark shadows were indistinguishable from dust. Nate wondered for a moment if he should break up with her. But he liked her. And he didn’t want to hurt her.

  He turned onto his side. He was too tired to think about this right now. He’d think about it when his head was clear. Tomorrow. Later.

  In early November, Peter came to town from Maine. Nate was sure Peter would like Hannah and looked forward to introducing them.

  With women he didn’t know well, Peter affected an exaggerated courtliness that some found off-putting and pretentious (“toolish,” Aurit once said bluntly). But, over a dinner that also included Jason, Peter won Hannah over when he remarked that Flaubert had been responsible for untold numbers of men getting laid. “When Leon overcame Emma’s last qualm with the remark that ‘all the women in Paris do it,’ he nailed it. Forget love, forget morality. Appeal to vanity …” Hannah laughed, delighted by this observation. That, in turn, delighted Peter.

  At some point, they got to talking about the name Lindsay and how none of them had known any girls named Lindsay at Harvard or Yale, but apparently, according to one of Peter’s academic friends, NYU was teeming with Lindsays, and could names possibly reflect such minute social distinctions? Nate glanced at Hannah, but she didn’t appear to be outraged by their snobbery. She looked amused. When she spoke, there was just enough irony in her tone to chasten them but not so much as to seem humorless.

  They ordered a couple bottles of wine and several rounds of cocktails. By midnight, Hannah was starting to get a little sloppy. Eager to let a good thing be, Nate corralled her into a cab. He was feeling happy and affectionate. As the taxi careened down Ninth Avenue, he leaned close to her and touched one of her eyebrows with his thumb. “You’re so much fun,” he said.

  When they got back to her place, she disappeared into the bathroom. Nate got into bed. Several minutes later, she returned,
wearing a tank top and high-cut underwear.

  Then Nate looked at her face and saw that she’d been crying. She had tried to cover it up. No, that wasn’t quite right. She looked as if she’d made a halfhearted attempt to cover it up but what she really wanted was for him to know that she was upset and ask what was wrong.

  Although tears, even off-screen tears, were a new development, this didn’t really surprise him—or rather his surprise was limited to the comparatively minor question of “why now?” when they’d had a really good night, when they might very well continue to have a really good night. As she searched for something in one of her overstuffed drawers, her eyeliner smeared and her lips pursed, Nate felt not pity but exasperation. You’re hurting your own cause, he wanted to shout to the crying, not-crying Hannah. Can’t you fucking see that?

  But her droopy vulnerability gave her the moral high ground. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Why don’t you come to bed?”

  He spoke in the patient, patronizing tone of a person accustomed to dealing with the mentally feeble.

  She swallowed and looked down, blinking as if in pain or embarrassment. Then—something happened. An idea or a mood seemed to take hold of her. Her face brightened, and her demeanor became less glum, more definite—animated.

  “Come on,” she said, her eyes glittering. “Let’s go in the other room and have a drink.”

  Her voice had an inexplicable, almost lunatic pull. As he followed her into the living room Nate’s irritation gave way to curiosity to see what would happen next.

  Without turning on the light, she went and got the bourbon from on top of the refrigerator and then the two blue-rimmed glasses. Nate sat down by the window. The only sound in the apartment was the refrigerator’s hum. Hannah returned from the kitchen and sat in the other upholstered chair, tucking her naked legs underneath her. She poured out the bourbon and handed him a glass.

  He wasn’t really in the mood to drink, hadn’t been since the moment at the restaurant with Jason and Peter when he realized he needed to keep an eye on her drinking.

  Hannah downed nearly half of hers in one gulp. She shuddered.

  “It’s so fucked up,” she said. The words were clear and lucid, but her voice had a bitter, reckless quality. “I see it, but I can’t do anything about it.”

  “See what, Hannah?”

  She looked at the window. Their reflections in the glass were faded and translucent, crisscrossed by the slabs of brick on the apartment building across the street. She turned to face him, the liquid in her glass a luminous amber.

  “I don’t even smoke around you anymore. How great is that?”

  “Do you want a cigarette? If you want one, go ahead and have one.”

  “Shut up! You’re so patronizing. That’s what I thought when I first met you. I thought you were so smarmy and self-satisfied and not that interes—I remember thinking, How many times is he going to mention fucking Harvard?” She laughed. “I never thought I’d—” She shook her head. “Oh, never mind.”

  Her voice had become singsong, as if she were speaking to a slightly daft elderly person.

  When she spoke again, the pleasant quality was gone. “What was that tonight?” She fixed her eyes on him. “You were so affectionate.”

  Nate’s grip on his glass tightened. Whatever was coming, he didn’t want.

  “Why?” Hannah continued. “Because your friend Peter liked me.”

  The pulsing of the blood in his temples felt like an aggressively ticking alarm clock.

  “No offense,” Hannah said. “But it kind of made me sick. I mean, what kind of person are you that your friends’ opinions are so fucking important?”

  “You’re drunk, Hannah.”

  “And who am I that I go along with it? Perform for your friends so you’ll …” She shivered as the words trailed off. “I’m ashamed of myself, too, just so you know.”

  Nate looked out the window, at the yellow crescent of light cast by a streetlamp.

  “The thing is, the last guy I dated”—Hannah began to speak earnestly, as if they were in the middle of hashing out something important together—“he was a writer. You probably know him—not Steve—this was just someone I went out with a few times. But, see, he had a trust fund and a great apartment, and one day we were there, and he had these Hispanic guys doing some work on his roof deck, and I asked him if he ever felt weird, you know, because he sat around all day and half-worked on his writing while these guys were right outside his sliding glass door, in the heat and everything. And he said, ‘Yeah, all the time,’ but, like, because that’s what he was supposed to say. Because then he went on and said that writing poetry was hard work, just like being a day laborer is hard work, and the guys on the roof wouldn’t want to trade with him, any more than he’d want to trade with them. And that was it, that was how he talked himself out of feeling uncomfortable about all his advantages. So callow, you know?” She looked at Nate intently. “You’re not like that. No, you’re sort of decen—”

  “That might have just been something he said in the moment, not the sum total of his life’s thought on inequality,” Nate suggested.

  “Maybe,” Hannah said. “He was kind of a callow guy, though.”

  Nate smiled. He knew who the guy was. And he was an asshole. A tall, good-looking asshole.

  Hannah squinted at her empty glass and then reached for the bottle of bourbon. Nate nearly told her to cool it but at the last moment stopped himself. Did he want to be that guy? They weren’t in the restaurant, in public, anymore. Why the hell shouldn’t she drink? Why shouldn’t he?

  He swallowed the contents of his glass. “Pour me some, too, if you don’t mind.”

  Hannah brightened. “Sure!”

  “Can I ask you something?” she said after she set the bottle down.

  “Sure.”

  “What happened?”

  Then, as if she knew that Nate would be tempted to feign ignorance, she added. “With us, I mean.”

  Nate supposed he’d known all along—when he’d agreed to accompany her to the living room—that this was where things were going. This was what they’d come out here for. Yet he still felt an impulse to pretend he didn’t know what she was talking about—to deflect or postpone this conversation.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “Did I do something?”

  When Nate spoke, his voice came out raspy, more pained than he expected. “I don’t think—no.”

  He wished he could blame it on her—assign a cause. But he knew it was him. Whatever had happened, it was him.

  “No, you didn’t do anything,” he repeated.

  He looked at her. She was pale. The expression on her face so precisely mirrored how he felt, the sense of helplessness that had come over him. Almost without being aware, he got up and walked to her chair, perching on its arm. His irritation had faded. He felt protective and tender toward her. He was glad. It made him feel human and humane.

  She scooted over, and he slid down beside her on the seat of the chair.

  “I think, maybe, I’m just not very good at relationships,” he said.

  “Maybe we should just admit it’s not working,” she said. “I mean, right? A month ago if someone told me what things would be like between us, I would have said, no, I’d never stand for that. But I keep negotiating down what I think is okay. I like you—my problem is that I do like you. There’s something about you …” She stopped and then sat up straighter. She started again in a new, more decisive tone. “But this thing, this thing that we’ve become, is sapping something from me.”

  Nate turned to her bookshelf. He began trying to make out individual titles in the dark.

  “You can’t be happy either,” Hannah said.

  No. As he tore his eyes from the books to meet hers, he was, as a matter of fact, nearly overwhelmed by sadness. It gusted over him. He felt almost unbearably lonely. He wondered whether he was flawed on some deep level, whe
ther—in spite of all the friends who seemed to think he was a good guy (and he was a pretty good friend), in spite of being a fairly decent son—there was something terribly wrong with him. Did romance reveal some truth, a fundamental lack, a coldness, that made him shrink back at just the moment when reciprocity was called for?

  He shuddered. As he drew in his breath, he took in the scent of Hannah’s hair. It smelled of coconut—of what he now knew to be the cheap drugstore coconut shampoo she kept in her bathroom, the kind of shampoo that would make Aurit or Elisa curl their lips in disdain.

  He remembered how much fun he’d had with her in the beginning, their early dates, how she’d made him laugh, how she’d surprised him by being so … interesting. He thought of how she’d been tonight, at the restaurant with Jason and Peter. (And it wasn’t because Peter liked her. It was because she had been herself, the person he had fallen for.) Even the callow bit. He knew what she meant. And that was the thing, actually. He usually knew what she meant. And he felt that she usually knew what he meant. From the beginning, he had felt at home with her.

  He leaned his forehead against hers. “I’m sorry about how things have been. But let’s keep trying, okay? I can do better.”

  She stared into the dark, empty air of her apartment.

  He traced her bottom lip with his thumb. “I like you a lot,” he said. “You know that, right?”

  In fact, he felt right then that he loved her. Of course he loved her. Had he merely been punishing her for some unknown crime? For being nice to him?

  She didn’t respond right away, just continued to stare off. “I need to feel like you’re trying, too,” she said finally. “I need to feel like I’m not in this alone, the only one who cares about what’s going on here.”

  He held her chin with his thumb and looked into her eyes. “You’re not,” he said. “You’re not the only one.”

  He felt her relax. “Okay,” she said, nodding. “Okay.”

  He pulled her to him. Her chest trembled as she released her breath. He held her tighter. He felt close to her, perhaps closer to her than he’d ever felt, as if they’d been through something together, seen each other not just at their best but in some real capacity, and they were still here. She—she hadn’t given up on him. He buried his face in her hair, mumbling something about love.