If Greer wasn’t rigorous or self-critical, she was impassioned and empathetic, with great reservoirs of feeling about the issues she cared about. Her personality, like her writing, was lilting and engaging. And what Nate had once taken to be a certain artificiality on her part, he came to see as theatricality, which was different and was part of what made being with her so vivid. He soon found himself charmed by her quirky interests—her unpredictable enthusiasms for, say, piñatas this week, or tiny little postcards that fit only one sentence the next. He noticed, too, how other people responded to her. She had a way about her—a charisma, a storytelling verve, an effortless cool in dress that was as fashionable as Elisa’s chic but far less fussy, an instinctive social ease that she used benevolently, lavishing attention upon the shyest and most awkward members of a group. One night she played the guitar for him. Her hair was in a messy ponytail; a thin strap of her tank top had fallen on her upper arm. She was, as she sang a Liz Phair song—her voice small, unschooled, but achingly pretty—about the sexiest, most touching thing he’d ever seen. Sweet and tough and sad and hot all at once.
Not only was she unimpressed by it, Greer was inclined to think Nate’s “intellectual whatever” was kind of a bore, a sort of masturbatory exercise that she tolerated with pretty much the same condescension that he tolerated what he was apt to describe, in his mind, as the “puerile, self-indulgent navel-gazing” that characterized her work. Every once in a while these attitudes toward each other’s writing slipped out in stray remarks, usually during fights, which they began to have nearly as soon as they grew more serious.
Although she prided herself on being honest, Greer wasn’t always, strictly speaking, truthful. She didn’t invent wholesale so much as scramble and rearrange to suit her current purpose, facts reconfiguring themselves like marbles in a tipped bowl. She was hardly aware she was doing it. In the moment, she believed what she was saying wholeheartedly. For her, that was enough. She also slid easily into manipulation when backed into a corner. She felt no qualms about that either. So it was that a minor argument about his being late or failing to do some small thing she thought he ought to—say, pick up his cell phone when she called—would escalate. She’d make all sorts of outlandish claims; he’d become so enraged at her “dishonesty” or “manipulation” or simply her “triviality,” that he felt entirely justified dispensing with tact. All sorts of pent-up criticisms came pouring out, many of which had nothing to do with the ostensible subject of the fight. Once he uttered aloud the phrase puerile, self-indulgent navel-gazing. It bothered her more than the words stupid and cunt, both of which had also found their way out of his mouth. (For Nate, those moments had been, frankly, thrilling, the words accompanied by a frisson of illicit pleasure. It was liberating, the idea that you could talk to a woman this way and nothing worse would happen than that she’d yell back that you were a “fucking piece of shit asshole.”)
Somewhat to his surprise he and Greer came out of these fights scarred but also purged. In between exaggerating her flaws, accusing her of a much greater degree of dishonesty et al. than she was in fact guilty of, things slipped out. He told her, for example, that it was the most annoying thing in the fucking world when she asked, in that voice, “Are you mad at me?” In turn, Greer told him about fifty other, much worse things that he did. Apparently, he was a real asshole. He had innumerable ways of belittling her and women in general. He bullied her when they argued, which is why she sometimes started to cry. She was not, she explained, trying to evade the issue. She was merely frustrated, and if her tears made him stop bullying, made him stop and listen to himself, so much the better. It wasn’t so much that she convinced him—Greer’s feminism often struck him as conveniently self-justifying and inconsistently applied (that is, reliably applied in instances where it bolstered her position and otherwise ignored)—but the fear of setting her off did exert a strong pull on him to modify his behavior. Invariably, their fights ended, for Nate, in relief at realizing that Greer was not in fact nearly as unscrupulous or unintelligent as in anger he had painted her. Also, predictably enough, hot sex. Not even make-up sex so much as making up by way of sex. A moment would come when Nate would simply realize the absurdity of what they were fighting about; his anger would just turn. By that point, Greer—perhaps because she too was tired of fighting, or perhaps because she was turned on by how hot he had become for her—could usually be brought around pretty quickly.
Greer was needy—that is, she needed an audience—but it was not always clear to Nate why she needed him in particular. Sometimes, he’d glance at her, see anew how sexy, how charming she was. Anxiety would creep over him. Wouldn’t she rather be with a guy who was better looking and more fun, someone less ponderous and academic? After a couple months, he asked her, why him? Yes, he remembered what she’d said about attraction, but why—why was she attracted to him instead of someone else? She picked up one of his hands in hers and ran a finger along his palm and up and down his fingers. She told him that his helplessness and incompetence in maneuvering objects in the physical world were endearing. “Sometimes, I look at your big, clumsy hands—these fingers …” She smiled and kissed the tip of his index finger. “Your hands remind me of bear paws … I watch you chop vegetables or button your shirt, and, I don’t know, I’m just filled with affection.” What she said was sweet, but Nate was still partly unsatisfied. It felt exogenous to him, to the real him.
But he knew what she meant about being touched by vulnerability. Greer’s littleness appealed to him. He enjoyed beyond reason being able to encircle her so thoroughly in his arms. He felt protective, especially in her darker moods, when she cried after sex or was rendered helpless by some minor setback. In these moments, the world ceased to be filled with innocent amusements (teeny tiny postcards! piñatas!) and became a sinister X-rated carnival of rapacious, leering men vying constantly to fuck her: “It makes me sick!” And they’d sit on the floor, her knees pulled into her chest, as Nate held her, stroking her small, hunched-over back with his big hands.
In February, his book was published. Although Nate had privately nursed fantasies of being single when this happened, it turned out to be better to have a girlfriend for that. At the parties on his (brief) book tour, he tried to remember the names of people he hadn’t seen for years or had just met a few minutes before. He felt inadequate when he couldn’t or when he wasn’t enthusiastic enough in his chatter. The whole process was exhausting and unnerving—he often felt embarrassed or ridiculous—and he was glad to have someone to call afterward, or better yet to curl up with at the hotel with a movie on. He felt closer to Greer, even grateful to her, after being together through this.
A certain twee quality to her mental landscape, a histrionic, self-dramatizing tendency that occasionally grated, the god-damned manipulative tears—all these bothered him at times. But Greer was nice, sweet-natured, especially when all was going well, when she felt liked, not just by Nate but in general. She was as sensitive as an exotic plant transported from its natural ecosystem, but when she got what she needed, she was radiant. Day-today, they were happy. Nate was rarely bored. With Greer, there was always some distraction, a crisis or a fight or some fantastic scheme of hers. Such as wanting him to watch her fuck a woman.
What Greer lacked in strict rectitude, she made up for in more feminine virtues, such as warmth and compassion. Like Hannah, she was lively and fun to be around. Unlike Elisa, she was willing to do things he enjoyed. She also had a strong caring impulse. She liked to cook for him and to generally see to it that he was well taken care of. Initially, he found this surprising in a girl who was so wild in bed (though the whole sex-between-Greer-and-anotherwoman didn’t happen, and as time wore on, and their dynamic changed, it grew increasingly unlikely ever to happen).
Greer had met his parents briefly at his book party, but in the spring he took her to Maryland to spend time with them. He was struck by how much nicer to them she was than Elisa had been. They didn’t, on the whole,
like her, he could tell. Or, rather, his father liked her okay, and his mother, who was critical of all the women he dated, hardly bothered to conceal, underneath an imperiously cordial bearing, a sniffy personal distaste. Nate, full of tenderness and gratitude for how hard Greer tried, attempted to paper over his mother’s coolness.
Although that kernel of uncertainty kept him keenly awake to his feeling for her—he couldn’t help fearing that Greer’s inexplicable attachment to him would turn off as suddenly and as mysteriously as it had turned on—he was also, over time, afflicted from the other end, by her jealousy. Whether he liked it or not, this was a fact of life, part and parcel of being with Greer. The fear of a jealous fit imposed limitations on not only his behavior but his conversation. Nate toned down his praise of other women, even of their writing. Aurit became a sore subject. (“I’ve never been attracted to her!” Nate insisted. But Greer, he finally realized, was astute enough to know that. She was jealous not of Aurit’s sexual appeal but of the respect he had for her, grudging and qualified though it seemed to him. “You treat whatever Aurit says as if it has special weight because she said it,” Greer said once. “If I say the same thing as she did, you act like her agreeing with me gives what I said legitimacy.”)
Greer was always on the lookout for ways she was being belittled or denied her due. Never would Nate have checked out another woman when he was sitting across from her. He didn’t know if she’d wave her steak knife in the vicinity of his heart or start crying, but it didn’t matter because it never happened.
They celebrated their six-month anniversary. “I guess you don’t have a problem with relationships after all,” Aurit remarked one day, on one of the ever-rarer occasions that she and Nate got together, just the two of them. “I guess you just hadn’t met the right person.”
Although Aurit had mostly come around on Greer—had come to respect her feminism and emotional insight, even if the two of them hadn’t really hit it off as friends—something in her tone irritated Nate. “Maybe it was just the right time,” he said, largely to contradict her.
Aurit narrowed her eyes. “Do you know that you often subtly undermine Greer when she’s not around?”
“Well, I can’t very well do it when she is around, now can I?”
Aurit didn’t look especially amused.
“Relax, I was kidding,” he said. “I just think timing has something to do with it. Don’t you?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Aurit said. “For women, it’s almost always the right time.” She spoke rather edgily. Hans was just then considering going back to Germany because he still hadn’t found a job in New York. “The thing that I think sucks,” she added after a moment, “is that whenever you—men, I mean—decide that it is the right time, there’s always someone available for you to take up with.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Nate said. “What about Peter? Or Eugene?”
“Eugene has a toxic chip on his shoulder. And Peter lives in Buttfuck, Maine.”
Despite what he’d said to Aurit, Nate did feel that he’d simply found the right person. After the first few months—which, between the sex, her moods, and their fights, had been for him a dizzying adventure—he and Greer began to fight less. Over time, ground was ceded, claims granted. Now he always took Greer’s calls when he was out. He was supportive in certain required ways. (He had learned, for example, that it was not ridiculous for her to want him to come over in the middle of the night because a friend of a friend had been mugged the evening before and she felt scared.) If sometimes he felt frustrated by her demands, he felt something else, too: his very exasperation contained the suprisingly pleasant reassurance that he was reasonable, far more reasonable than she was. Besides, he had come to accept that he was happier, more productive, less distracted by loneliness and horniness with a girlfriend than without. If that meant he had to make certain compromises for the sake of the relationship, so be it.
There were times when he was embarrassed by Greer, when he cringed a little inside. She could be too much—too cutesy and childish, too likely to proudly proclaim a poorly thought-out and poorly informed opinion, too self-enamored to see that she sometimes betrayed a glib superficiality that at its worst bordered on vulgarity. But these were just isolated moments, flashes of feeling that passed quickly. And who was he to judge? He—bookish, moody, work-focused as he was—certainly wasn’t perfect. Perhaps what disturbed him more was an occasional feeling of loneliness. Sometimes Greer, in perfect innocence, would say something that devastated him, a remark that in its substance or even in its mere elisions expressed volumes of casual, reflexive indifference to, even derision toward, many of the things he cared about most. Certain aspects of who he was were simply incomprehensible to her. It was all just “intellectual whatever.” For Greer, writing was a way of monetizing her charisma. It allowed her to spend her time thinking about what she most liked thinking about: herself, her feelings. It was impossible for him to explain to her what it was for him, what certain books, and a certain type of thinking, were to him. He didn’t really try. It’d probably come out sounding wrong anyway—hollow. Pretentious.
Such talk wasn’t really what their relationship was about anyway. Their conversations were flirty and cheering, a change of pace, especially after a day of work. With her, Nate went into Greer mode, which was lighter, more indulgent, sillier than his normal way of being. This granted him a certain amount of privacy. He retained a separate self, distinct from his Greer self, which was untouched, free, no matter how obliged his physical person was to, say, come to Greer’s aid when she got scared. And the truth was, even then, when he trekked out to her apartment in the middle of the night, he was almost always glad to see her. Even after the passage of so much time, the particular way that Greer was pretty called out to him deeply. There was about her, in her smile, her sweet little laugh, her light, birdlike touch, her very littleness, something that didn’t just turn him on but made him positively feel—well, something he’d never felt before.
One day Greer asked if he’d broken up with Hannah for her. Nate made the mistake of saying not really. “It was on its last legs anyway.”
“So am I, like, your rebound thing?” she snapped. “I know you think she’s so smart.”
“Greer! I was never even serious about Hannah. You and I have already been going out for longer than she and I went out for.”
Nate learned a few days later that Hannah had sold her book proposal. Greer had probably heard that, too; it was probably what set her off. Privately, Nate was glad for Hannah. He had a fondness for her that was not really changed by the way things had broken down at the end. He thought of her sometimes, thought of things he’d like to tell her, observations she’d appreciate, and felt a pang of disappointment when he realized that was impossible. Sometimes he thought of the good times they’d had together, but more often, those memories were drowned out by the recollection of his unhappiness toward the end.
He felt guilty when he thought of various women in his past (although he was pleased, and somewhat egotistically relieved, to hear, from both Jason and Aurit, that Juliet’s wedding announcement was in the Times one Sunday). When he thought of Hannah, he felt something else as well. He and Hannah had related on levels that he and Greer didn’t. This was not, for Nate, a comfortable thought. His relationship with Hannah had shown him things about himself that he wasn’t entirely proud of, about what he really valued in a woman and what he claimed to value but in fact could live without.
When he and Greer had been together for a little over a year, they decided to move in together. It seemed to make sense. Things were going well with them. His lease was up. Even he had to admit his apartment left something to be desired. Greer’s wasn’t great, either.
In the midst of packing, he took a break to go to Cara’s birthday party. Over time, Cara had grown on him some. She was a nice person. Nate had even, at Mark’s request, helped her get a job, putting in a good word for her with a magazine editor who
needed an assistant. The important thing was that she and Mark were happy (although, out of her hearing, Mark did spend an awful lot of time riffing about how “women” lack humor).
Before the party, Nate was to have dinner with Jason and Aurit and Hans, who had decided to stick it out in New York after all, and Peter, who was in town, and Peter’s new girlfriend. He’d actually met someone up in Maine. She was nice, Peter’s new girlfriend, an archivist in Portland. Cute, too, if a little out of place in New York, in her ponytail and fleece jacket.
Greer had texted him earlier in the day to say she wouldn’t be joining them. Nate felt a little guilty that he was relieved. When Greer hung out with his friends, she invariably wound up feeling bad. She thought they didn’t think she was smart enough for them, or for him. There was no way for Nate to explain that that wasn’t it. It was a matter of conversational style. Greer liked to charm and entertain with her Greerness, to regale the group with tales of her latest quirky hobby or comic misadventure—her half-ironic interest in astrology and consequent visit to a psychic, her run-in with a neighbor who complained about the garlic smell emanating from her apartment when she cooked. Maybe a pet theory about reality television or 1990s teen movies. The kind of impersonal argument, aggressive back-and-forth, and different brand of humor that he and Jason and Aurit and Peter engaged in made Greer feel left out, even rebuffed. But contrary to what Greer thought, his friends liked her fine. They were happy to pay tribute to her charm for five minutes in the beginning of the evening and at interstices throughout, between conversations, but the bulk of the time, they simply wanted to talk normally—that is, in the way that was normal for them. There was no way for Nate to explain this to Greer without hurting her feelings.
Over dinner, Jason told him that Elisa had been promoted at the newsmagazine where she now worked.
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Page 24
