The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (11 page)

The waitress arrived with Nate’s burger. She brought Aurit a large plate of shootlike leaves and then retreated quickly, as if to forestall any additional requests.

“What is that?” Nate asked Aurit.

“You haven’t answered my question,” she said. “How many days has it been?”

Nate leaned forward for a better look. “Is it arugula? Bamboo shoots?”

“Four? Five?”

“Clovers of some sort? Do you get anything else with it?”

“Do you get off on making her wait? I’d just like to know what men are thinking when they pull this sort of thing.”

“Are you on some kind of extreme diet? Should I be worried?”

Aurit was too proud of her slim figure to let that go. “It’s a
pizza
.”

“Maybe where you come from, they call that pizza. Here in the United States, we call it a grassy knoll.”

“For your information, it’s a prosciutto and arugula pizza.” Aurit used her fork to rake off a section of shrubbery. Nate saw that underneath there did appear to be a fairly standard pizza
with cheese and prosciutto. She set down her fork, and the arugula layer fell back in place.

“So …
Hannah
?”

Nate began pouring ketchup on his burger. “Why are you bent on giving me the third degree? I only went out with her twice. I haven’t even slept with her.”

In Hannah’s bed that night—
four
nights ago, as a matter of fact—they had alternately talked and engaged in what felt like a prolonged and fairly innocent bout of adolescent groping. It had been pretty nice, though. Perhaps he was getting old, but there had been surprising consolation in the knowledge that he was not going to wake up with the chalky feeling of embarrassment that often followed drunken hookups. In the morning, he’d hung around for a while. He walked home along a street he particularly liked, with mansions set back from the sidewalk. Built by nineteenth-century industrialists, the mansions had degenerated, in the mid-twentieth century, into single-room-occupancy boardinghouses. Recently, the neighborhood had turned again, the SROs converted to upscale apartment buildings. On that summer morning, the shady street was lush and fragrant. Nate had felt unusually cheerful as he made his way home.

“So, what?” Aurit said. “It doesn’t matter? You can just do whatever you want because you didn’t slip your thing in?”

For god’s sake.

Nate put the bun on his burger, picked it up with both hands, and took a bite. He winced as some ketchup squirted out from under the bun and onto his hand. He could feel Aurit’s eyes on him. She had a very particular way of staring. She was still except for a slight widening of her pupils, which managed to suggest that her mind was hard at work, trying to accommodate some new and terribly damning truth she’d just discovered. Nate looked intently at the bun of his burger, imagining he was on a gently rocking sailboat. The only thing on the boat with him was a big, juicy cheeseburger. The idyll was short-lived.

“It’s just great, Nate,” Aurit said. “While writing the book review of the year and whatever the hell else you’ve been doing, you happen to go out with a girl a couple times, spend the night with her—who cares if you actually slept together?—but for you, it’s out of sight, out of mind. As soon as she’s not in the room, you’re back in Nateland. What about her?”

Nate wished he’d called Jason instead. You could eat a fucking cheeseburger with Jason.

He eyed the opposite wall, where some kind of menacing lancelike weapon was on display.

“I think it would be a little strange if Hannah were all that invested after two dates,” he said finally. He felt that responding at all was giving in to Aurit, but he didn’t see an alternative that wouldn’t set her off even more. “I don’t think you’re giving her much credit.”

“Two dates that you said yourself went really well,” Aurit said. “So she’s thinking about you and wondering if maybe she imagined it, maybe she was crazy for thinking you guys had a lot of fun, because otherwise why haven’t you called?”

“Maybe she’s thinking I haven’t called because I’ve been busy. Which happens to be true. Or maybe she hasn’t thought anything because
she’s
busy. She’s a smart girl and has stuff going on. I really don’t think you’re being fair to her, turning her into this sad creature who is sitting around waiting for my call. Maybe she doesn’t even like me much.” Nate arranged his features into a smile he hoped was charming. “Shocking as it may seem, not every woman finds me irresistible.”

Aurit plucked a single sprig of arugula from her pizza. “No offense, Nate, but you sound really defensive.”

He dropped his burger to his plate.

Aurit began making dainty little strokes with her fork, clearing away tufts of salad greens from the surface of her pizza. She cut a tiny triangular bite. She was about to put it in her mouth when she spoke instead.

“The thing is, Hannah seems cool, like someone you might actually like.” Aurit spoke in a deliberately soothing tone, wagging the fork with the pizza across the air above her plate. “You usually pick the wrong women. You see someone pretty, and you come up with a reason to find her interesting. Then, when it doesn’t work, you act like the problem is ‘women’ or ‘relationships,’ instead of the women you choose … Like that ditzy Emily, who might as well have been sixteen years old.”

“Which Em—?” Nate started to ask. But she obviously meant Emily Berg. He closed his eyes for a moment. “I really don’t want to talk about this,” he said when he opened them. “Can we please drop it?”

He knew that Aurit would interpret his reaction as “defensive.” He was not defensive. He was frustrated by her (unjust) dig at Emily and her facile analysis of his personal life—delivered, naturally, with unwavering certainty of tone.

“Fine,” Aurit said.

“Thank you.”

Nate took a bite of his burger.

“It’s just that I don’t understand,” Aurit said. “It seems to me that when you do meet someone suitable and you have a nice time with her, you should tread carefully, take it seriously …”

Nate felt like he was the subject of a highly sophisticated type of torture in which the torturer listens to your objections, even seems sympathetic, and then continues to administer electric shocks.

Aurit had once espoused a system of categorizing people that he found useful. She said some people were horizontally oriented, while others were vertical. Horizontally oriented people were concerned exclusively with what others think, with fitting in or impressing their peers. Vertically oriented people were obsessed only with some higher “truth,” which they believed in wholeheartedly and wanted to trumpet no matter who was interested. People who are horizontally oriented are phonies and sycophants, while those who are entirely vertically oriented lack all
social skill—they’re the ones on the street shouting about the apocalypse. Normal people are in the middle, but veer one way or the other. Nate was tempted to tell Aurit that she had been sliding into tone-deaf vertical territory.

“Can we please talk about something other than dating?” he said instead. “I mean, there is a lot more in the world than who wants to date whom and ‘Oh my god, have you called her yet?’ We might as well be on fucking
Sex and the City
.”

Aurit raised her eyebrows and tossed her head back, chin up in the air, so that, diminutive as she was, she seemed to be looking down at him from some kind of perch. “Oh, I’m sorry, Nate. I forgot how deep you are. Silly me, I can’t believe I bored you with my girlish prattle. Maybe we should talk about nuclear disarmament.”

How did he come to be in the wrong? Nate didn’t know what happened, but now there was no help for it.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just tired.”

“Whatever.” Aurit shrugged. “It’s fine. I just hate the way so many men treat ‘dating’ as if it’s a frivolous subject. It’s boneheaded.” She smiled frostily and tilted her head in his direction, lest there be any uncertainty about who exactly she was calling boneheaded. “Dating is probably the most fraught human interaction there is. You’re sizing people up to see if they’re worth your time and attention, and they’re doing the same to you. It’s meritocracy applied to personal life, but there’s no accountability. We submit ourselves to these intimate inspections and simultaneously inflict them on others and try to keep our psyches intact—to keep from becoming cold and callous—and we hope that at the end of it we wind up happier than our grandparents, who didn’t spend this vast period of their lives, these prime years, so thoroughly alone, coldly and explicitly anatomized again and again. But who cares, right? It’s just girl stuff.”

Classic Aurit. Take whatever she was personally interested in and apply all her ingenuity to turning it into Something Important. It never occurred to her that there was anything more worth caring about or thinking about than upper-middle-class women’s
search for happiness, in the cozily coupled, fatally bourgeois sense of the word. She thought if she could just convey
how much this meant
to women—articulate it once and for all—the world would come around. Never did she realize how limited her perspective was, how insensible she was to all that fell outside the sphere of her own preoccupations.

“I don’t know,” Nate said in a tone intended to be placating even though he was about to disagree. “It’s easy to overstate the importance of whatever you’re personally affected by. It’s like mothers whose kids don’t test well think standardized tests are the worst thing in the world. I just don’t think dating is quite the scourge of modern life you’re making it out to be. I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. It’s just one aspect of life and certainly not the most important one.”

“No, you wouldn’t think it was that big a deal, would you?” Aurit mused. Her voice was no longer pissy but thoughtful, as if she were a naturalist classifying a homely new species. “Next time you feel lonely, my guess is that you’ll think it’s a pretty big deal. But as long as you’re feeling calm and collected and you’re able to focus on your book and your highly intellectual, oh-so-important book reviews and whatever else, I can see why it reinforces your sense of self to act as if you’re too deep to care much.”

Nate was amused. “I’m boneheaded is what you’re saying.”

Before Aurit could respond, the waitress approached. “You done?”

“Uh,
no
,” said Aurit, who was poised to bite into a forkful of pizza.

The waitress scowled and walked away. Aurit’s nostrils flared. Bad service was a source of great frustration for her, an irritant that might at any moment set her off, like science was for the medieval church.

“When she comes back, I’m going to tell her there was too much arugula on my pizza.”

“Hi guys.”

Both Nate and Aurit looked up. Standing beside their booth was Greer Cohen—Greer Cohen whose book advance had aroused such animosity at Elisa’s dinner party. Greer was smiling gaily, as if running into them was the best thing that had happened to her in weeks.

Seeing Greer wasn’t such a surprise, really. In Brooklyn, everyone turned up everywhere. Though the parts of Brooklyn congenial to people in their demographic had expanded dramatically in a widening web of faux-dives and mysteriously hip restaurants, to Nate the place seemed never to have been smaller, so dense was it with people he knew.

“I thought it was you guys,” Greer said, in her girlish, vowel-elongating lilt.

Greer’s manner of speaking was not merely flirty but flirty like a teenage girl with bubblegum in her mouth and a tennis skirt and tanned thighs.

“We heard about your book,” Aurit said. “Congratulations. That’s a great opportunity.”

Greer smiled and shrugged a little bit, as if to say “Who me?” As though the book deal had simply fallen into her path, and she’d barely taken the time to notice it. Now,
Greer
was a horizontally oriented person. Even her sexiness had something artificial in it. Some people reeked of sex; Greer, in spite of a tomboyish style of dress, reeked of a manufactured sexiness more tartish than slutty, like a pinup girl from the 1940s.

The last time Nate had seen her, at a party, they had gotten into a long and tiresome argument. Nate had said that in a certain sense, and only in a certain sense, it’s harder for men to say no to sex than it is for women. When a woman says no, nobody’s feelings are hurt. Men expect to be shot down. But when a man says no, the woman feels as if he’s just said she’s fat and undesirable. That makes him feel like a jerk. Greer thought he was being a sexist asshole who didn’t think women should hit on men and refused to grasp the seriousness of sexual harassment and rape. Nate thought she was
strident and unsubtle, either deliberately misunderstanding him for effect or simply unable to grasp the distinction he was making.

Now, however, as Greer described her book to Aurit (“it’s partly a memoir about my teenaged misadventures but also sort of an art book with photos and drawings and song lyrics”), he was entranced by her cleavage. She began nodding vigorously at something Aurit said. Greer’s breasts, snug in an olive-green tank top, were his favorite size, just big enough to fill a wine glass (a red one). When he tried to meet her eye, they were squarely in his line of vision.

“It was good to see you guys,” she said finally. “I’ll see you later.”

Nate watched Greer’s heart-shaped ass bounce in tandem with her jaunty little stride as she turned the corner into the bar area.

“Did I tell you Hans is coming to town in a couple weeks?” Aurit asked.

Aurit’s boyfriend Hans was an affable German journalist who wore circle-rim glasses and sometimes struck Nate as more of a prop of Aurit’s than a figure in his own right. His existence in her life, however semimaterial given the long-distance nature of their relationship, gave her authority to lecture others about their romantic lives.

Nate was still contemplating Greer’s ass. “That’s nice.”

Sunlight sloped through the windows of “Recess, open 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.” (no ungrammatical dashes there), and collected in glittering eddies of dust underneath chairs and behind display counters laden with coffee beans.

Whatever his feelings about gentrification, Nate appreciated the abundance of coffee shops that had lately appeared in his neighborhood. It was hard to believe that, once upon a time, the pale, bleary-eyed freelancers and grad students who gathered daily at places like Recess would have typed away all by themselves, grimly holed up in rooms of their own. “Sometimes you just want to see another human being, you know?” Nate had tried to explain to his
dad, who clucked about the waste of money and extolled the virtues of the home espresso machine. Nate didn’t tell his father that working at Recess prevented him from looking at porn, easily boosting his productivity enough to earn back what he spent on coffee.