The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

by Waldman, Adelle

  { 15 }

  Nate was at the counter, asking Stuart—Beth wasn’t working today—for a refill when Recess’s glass door swung open. In walked Greer Cohen, an autumn breeze swirling around her. As the door clicked shut, the rustle in the air subsided. Greer remained at the center of a small whir of activity. A sweater and various bags, one containing a rolled-up yoga mat, swung from her shoulders. Wild locks of wavy hair spilled out from a loose bun.

  “Nate!”

  Her smile expressed such pleasure that Nate couldn’t help but feel touched. “Greer,” he said. “What brings you here?”

  “Yoga. Down the street.”

  Stuart was waiting behind the cash register for his money. Other patrons were looking up from behind their laptops. Greer’s fluttering energy and lilting, girlish voice ruffled the still air of the coffee shop.

  Nate slid a bill to Stuart and then put a hand on Greer’s upper arm to guide her out of Recess’s central corridor. When he felt her small arm through her sweater, a tremor passed through him. Until that moment, he hadn’t consciously noted that Greer had become a recurring figure in his fantasy life, a sort of marquee name among the myriad other pretty girls who wafted in and out of various scenarios.

  As she allowed herself to be led backward, Greer smiled up at him with what felt—absurdly—like complicity.

  Nate asked about her book. They began talking about the dayto-day process of writing at such length.

  “So much staring at the screen,” Greer said. “I’d shoot myself if it weren’t for yoga.”

  The girlishness of Greer’s smile did not at all offset its suggestiveness.

  “I feel you,” Nate said.

  Over time, he had revised his opinion of Greer upward. She was warm, friendly. You had to give her that. And her book deal was not nothing. It took no small degree of skill, in terms of basic writing ability and self-presentation, to manage that. Such savvy wasn’t the same thing as real talent, but it was something. About her writing itself he had nothing to say. It wasn’t his kind of thing.

  They continued to chat for a few minutes. “You’re dating Hannah Leary, right?” she asked at one point.

  Nate shifted his eyes. “Yeah.”

  Greer’s smile merely altered around the edges, becoming more conspiratorial.

  “We should get a drink sometime,” she said as she was getting ready to go. “Talk about book writing.”

  There was a new flurry of activity as a business card was produced from one of her bags. Greer grabbed a Magic Marker from the bulletin board and began scrawling on the back of the card.

  She handed it to Nate. On the front, it said “AMD Global Brand Management.” “Ian Zellman, Senior Strategist” was printed below. Nate looked at Greer questioningly.

  She shrugged. “Just some guy.”

  Nate turned the card over. Greer hadn’t written her name, just the ten digits of her cell phone number. He put the card in his pocket, not without a feeling of satisfaction at having triumphed over Senior Strategist Ian Zellman.

  When Greer was gone, Nate was left in a pleasant state of bewilderment. He didn’t know why Greer was so flirtatious with him. Perhaps she was attracted to his supposed intellectual cachet? Greer had sold her book for more money than he’d sold his, and would probably sell more copies, but as a memoirist of adolescent promiscuity, she lacked a certain … respectability.

  He went back to work on the review he was writing. He forgot about Greer until later that night.

  He was out with Jason, who was talking about Maggie from work. Maggie was thinking about moving in with “that douche,” the Web site designer.

  Nate slipped his hand in his pocket. He found the card with Greer’s number on it. He ran his fingers along its edges.

  He had cheated before. On Kristen. They were living in Philadelphia at the time, but he had been in New York for the weekend. He’d gone to a party at an apartment in what had at the time seemed to be deep Brooklyn but was actually very close to where he now lived. The only person he knew was the guy he came with, who by midnight was nowhere to be seen. Jason, at whose place he was crashing, was supposed to show up at some point, but until then what was Nate supposed to do but talk to girls? Why would a guy want to talk to him? He flirted in the habitual, desultory manner of someone who expects it to come to nothing. He was on a beer run with a girl he’d been chatting with when she turned and fell into him, pushing him into the limestone wall of an apartment building. Nate felt, as he halfheartedly kissed her back, only a startled impulse not to hurt the girl’s feelings, in part because she wasn’t even that pretty. He broke away quickly. But back at the party, he found himself acutely aware of the girl, attuned to every instance when his arm or thigh brushed against her. When she went to speak to someone on the other side of the room, he followed her not just with his eyes but with some animal instinct. It was as if, in order to crowd out all thoughts of Kristen, he had to blow up his desire into something outsized, over-the-top, something that simply didn’t allow for reflection. In fact, the girl was merely a cute-ish, chipmunk-cheeked, slightly neurotic, casually but not convincingly slutty aspiring film … whatever it was people who want to work in film aspire to be. All the same, Nate was pretty much in a blinding fury of desire when they took a cab back to the apartment she shared in Alphabet City. Not-Kristen had her tongue in his mouth, Not-Kristen was unfastening a cheap red bra that clasped in the front, Not-Kristen had a bumpy constellation of moles around her collarbones and a loosygoosy tummy—all of it only contributed to her intoxicating unfamiliarity. At some point, when she had him in her mouth, she created so much suction that the phrase menacing vise grip had come to mind. Nate had had to gird himself to bear it manfully. When they fucked, her multisyllabic mewing sounds were stagy, meretricious, as perfectly timed to his thrusts as if they were playing Marco Polo. And yet it was thrilling.

  The thrill was harder to fathom the following day. On the bus back to Philly, Nate stared out the tinted window at the traffic on the Garden State Parkway. The sky was dull and gray, his face in the glass wan and abject. Whatever frustration he’d felt in his relationship had vanished. His life with Kristen seemed full of fresh air and intelligence and promise. Her austere beauty, the crispness of it, seemed to mark her as one of the elect. Why had he done this thing that could fuck it all up?

  The bus lurched. The smell of other people’s fast food made him feel sick.

  When Kristen pulled up to the bus station, Nate began furiously adjusting the straps of his backpack. Although he told white lies with the same facility as anyone who is generally successful and liked, he had never been a skilled liar when any sort of personal gain was at stake. He’d speak the words as if they were in scare quotes, as if to distance himself from whatever he said.

  He reminded himself, as he tossed his bag into the backseat, that he didn’t really have to lie. He had only to omit certain pieces of information. In the car, he passed into a state of becalmed terror. In bed later, Kristen apologized for being tired—thankfully. Sex would have been one more, exhausting semi-lie, but he would have felt too guilty to say no if she had initiated.

  A few days later, when they were driving out to a suburban shopping center, Kristen turned to him. “You stayed with Jason over the weekend, right?”

  The back of Nate’s neck grew rigid. “Yeah.”

  Kristen’s brow was furrowed. Beads of sweat formed under Nate’s T-shirt as he waited. And waited.

  “That’s what I thought,” Kristen said, after she made her left onto Delaware Avenue. The clicking of the turn signal ceased. “But I thought you might have stayed at Will McDormand’s. I’d love to know what Will’s apartment is like. Probably he has, like, a fireplace and an Andrew Wyeth painting in his living room and a mirror on the ceiling of his bedroom.”

  Nate snorted. “That sounds right.”

  But his heart was still thumping.

  The worst part, though, wasn’t that it was hard. The worst part was that it w
asn’t hard enough. Nate felt guilty, yes, but the knowledge that what Kristen didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her made this easier to bear than even a much more minor offense, such as snapping at her when she interrupted his reading to ask some unimportant question, like whether they should go to Ikea that weekend or if he’d call the phone company about the erroneous bill they’d received. In those instances, the hurt was immediate and palpable and instantly made Nate feel bad. But after this far more serious infraction, Nate experienced much less internal fire-and-brimstone than he expected. He saw that cheating could easily become if not routine, then at least more doable. In spite of the self-loathing, in spite of what was a little bit disgusting about the girl, and what he imagined would be a little bit disgusting about most girls one was likely to cheat with, the fun of it, the variety of it, was enticing: to have what he had with Kristen and, every once in a while, a little bit of that—that crossing into the unknown and unfamiliar. Possibilities occurred to him. He thought of a Goth-looking waitress at a nearby bar who he’d long suspected was flirting with him.

  What stopped him was the realization that it was a bad road to go down. It wasn’t only that he’d grow comfortable lying. He would also have to justify his behavior to himself: caricature Kristen in his mind, exaggerate her limitations and “prudishness,” repeat pop-psych mantras about the uncontainable nature of male sexuality, as certain middle-aged men did, men who tended to strike Nate as not only sleazy but pathetic and distinctly unattractive. He could see, too, that it would destroy the best thing he had with Kristen. While she might not be hurt by what she didn’t know, the need to hide key facets of his private life would mean he’d have to be on guard, think before he spoke, lest he contradict himself or reveal something unwittingly. Besides, it was 1999, and the specter of Clinton loomed large: the accomplished statesman turned into a joke because he couldn’t keep it in his pants. Nate had made a conscious decision not to do it again, not to cheat.

  He put Greer’s card back into his pocket and turned to Jason. “Why don’t you just tell Maggie how you feel about her?”

  Jason looked surprised. “Don’t you know?”

  Nate realized he didn’t, not exactly. He’d chalked it up to Jason’s general weirdness about women.

  “Spell it out for me.”

  Jason’s Adam’s apple quavered as he took a long sip of beer. He set the glass down on the table and leaned forward. “It’s Saturday morning,” he began, sweeping his arm in front of him with oratorical flourish. “I open my eyes and push off a floral comforter. Sunlight is pouring through a window, reflecting off a gigantic Ansel Adams photograph hanging on the wall. Where am I? I wonder. Oh!”—he cupped his ear—“what’s that I hear? A scampering little footstep? It’s Maggie! She comes skipping into her bedroom, cute as a button, in her Sewanee T-shirt and flannel pajama bottoms, full of little teeny bumpy nubbins. In her hands, she’s holding a plate full of fresh-baked banana muffins, and she smiles up at me”—Jason paused to flutter his eyelashes, which he did with unexpected skill—“her little-biddy button nose is sweetly pink-tipped, and her smile is so sweet, it breaks your heart. And you know what happens? My cock shrivels up so small, it’s like a tiny, little pink shrimp, like a fucking toddler penis. All I want is to get the hell out of there as fast as I can, get the fuck to some dank club full of models and do some coke. And I hardly even like coke.”

  “How do you know, Jase? Seriously. How do you know you wouldn’t be happy?”

  Jason traced the rim of his glass with his finger before looking up at Nate. “Well, Miss Lonelyhearts, even if there’s only an eighty percent chance that’s what would happen, I couldn’t do it. Maggie’s a really good person. And it may be hard for you to believe—you think you’re the only one women fall for, you vain fuck—but she really likes me.”

  Nate started to respond—to defend himself—but then shut his mouth. Jason’s sensitive side, on the rare occasions when it emerged, seemed infinitely fragile, like glass so fine that even discordant notes of speech could cause it to shatter.

  “No,” Jason said, his voice returning to a more familiar register. “What I need is a model with a really good personality. Too bad Brigita turned out to be such a dud.”

  Nate grunted sympathetically. They turned back to the chips and guac they were sharing.

  After a while, Jason asked how things were going with Hannah.

  Nate glanced at the flapping chef’s door between the bar and the kitchen. “Fine. Good.”

  Since the night he and Hannah had stayed up drinking bourbon, things had been better. She was resolutely unmopey. She called him less, would sometimes fail to return his calls until he became increasingly eager to see her. He had taken her out for her birthday, bought her a scarf that Aurit helped him choose. Things were fine. And yet he sometimes felt her eyes on him, watching too closely, trying to read his mood, clearly worried that he was growing bored or distant. When he was especially affectionate, he picked up on an anxious, guarded happiness that she tried but failed to conceal, as if he were a drug addict or a gambler and she the long-suffering wife who detected signs of reformation. This seemed humiliating, for both of them.

  Nate suppressed a sigh as he stood up. “I’m going to the bar,” he said. “You want another?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What I wonder is whether fashion really has gotten more ironic,” Hannah said over brunch a few days later. “I mean, the nerd glasses and mom jeans and the eighties-inspired clothes.”

  Nate nodded absently.

  “Or does it just start to seem ironic as you get older, because you’ve seen all the trends come and go, and you can no longer take them seriously? You’ve watched the waistlines of jeans move up, up, up and then down, down, down and now up again. And the glasses! They got smaller and smaller until it seemed like you needed glasses just to see your glasses, and then, boom, one day they are all of a sudden big and owlish again? But maybe to twenty-year-olds, who haven’t become jaded by this cycle, those big glasses just look cool? Not ironic, but just nice, the way people our age genuinely thought tapered jeans looked nice in the nineties?”

  While Hannah was talking, an attractive woman had entered the restaurant. She had a long mane of light-brown hair, thick but smooth and shiny, the kind of hair that awakens a primitive appreciation for good health and breeding. Her face was nice, too. The hair’s-breadth difference between the exact set of her features and classic beauty (her nose was a little wide, her chin too prominent) didn’t make her any less attractive. She was wearing a blazer that gave her a cute, grad-student sort of look but was cinched at the waist and short enough so that her legs looked extremely long. When she passed their table, Nate saw that her jeans clung tenaciously to her ass, which appeared to have benefited from years of horseback riding and lacrosse.

  He turned back to Hannah. She was staring at him with her mouth open.

  Nate looked away, taking refuge in his coffee mug, where oily droplets clung to the surface like small, prismatic reflecting pools. He’d looked at another woman. Big fucking deal. He didn’t have the energy right then to deal with this unbearable, this boring tension between the two of them.

  He started talking about the cover of his book, about how he wanted a few minor changes made, to rearrange the order of some of the blurbs and make the font color of the jacket copy more vivid against the book’s background.

  Now Hannah seemed to be nodding absently, playing with a glass saltshaker, rolling it between her thumb and fingers. This struck Nate as rude. She was, supposedly, his girlfriend, and this—his book—was only the biggest thing in his life. It wasn’t as if he were talking about fashion.

  The waitress appeared. “French toast over here, and eggs Benedict for you. How are we doing otherwise? Do we need more coffee?” She nodded her head as she spoke as if to guide them to the correct answer. Then she picked up the little white jug of cream from their table, tilting it toward her so she could peer inside. “I’ll get some more. Ketc
hup for your potatoes? You got it. Be right back!”

  Nate resumed his narration about the book jacket. He was glad he’d rejected the first design. He had felt bad doing it—he didn’t want to be troublesome—but he felt it looked old and stodgy. Oscar, the designer, had done a brilliant job in the end. The new cover conveyed seriousness but also freshness, hipness.

  Nate was in the middle of making this last point when Hannah cut him off. “I can’t do this, Nate.”

  “Do what?”

  “Sit here and be your cheering section. I’m not in the mood to ooh and ah about your big book and all your little successes.”

  “That’s a nice thing to say,” Nate said. (In fact, he felt relieved that she’d given him an opening to vent his irritation.) “That’s a really kind, considerate thing for your girlfriend to tell you as you try to discuss something that’s just slightly important to you. Do you want to talk about fashion again? Would that be more interesting to you?”

  Hannah swallowed and closed her eyes. When she opened them, they trained in on his with angry precision. “Why don’t we talk about the woman you were checking out? She was very pretty.”

  “For Christ’s—”

  “Don’t bother,” Hannah said. “I know how this plays out. You’re going to tell me—or better yet, not tell me, just imply—that I am being irrational, that I am neurotic and jealous and impossible. After all, don’t all liberated people in the twenty-first century know that it’s no big deal for men to check out women? It’s just biology. Only some impossible, ridiculous woman would mind.

  Nate glared at the table.

  Hannah kept talking. “But we both know you weren’t just checking her out. You were being incredibly, spitefully obvious about it. You were broadcasting your contempt for me, or your boredom, or whatever. Don’t worry, I got the message.”