The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (12 page)

Nate had chosen Recess on the dual bases of proximity (a block and a half from his apartment) and Beth, who worked behind the counter. He met Beth’s eye now. She smiled and looked questioningly at his computer. He shrugged and made a face, as if he were trying to work without success. In fact, he’d been scanning an e-mail from a national office supply retailer. It seemed there had never been a better time to buy a home copy machine.

In truth, he was having a hard time focusing. His mind kept drifting. Personal stuff. Hannah.

He had not called her the day after his dinner with Aurit. He had waited until the day after. The extra day was sort of a fuck you to Aurit. She had been a real pain in the ass that night. But … calling Hannah seemed like a good idea. It was the right thing. He had spent the night with her. She’d made him breakfast. On the phone, Hannah’s voice, contra Aurit’s dire prognostications, had not been full of tearful reproach, even though he had taken—
gasp
—six days to get in touch with her. She sounded a bit sleepy at first, her consonants not quite distinct. After a pause just long enough to alarm him, she said, “Sure, let’s do something.”

Since then, Nate had been busy making revisions to his review of the Israel book and filling out a long, detailed questionnaire from his publisher’s marketing department. The fact that in February his book was going to be in stores across America was beginning to feel more real. When he thought about seeing Hannah, he felt a mild sense of anticipation. Not only did he like her, but they’d be on good behavior with each other, not touchy and peevish the way he and Aurit had been the other night, but the new-person versions of themselves: attentive, polite, and good-humored. This iteration felt to Nate like not just his better self but his real self, except that, like a skittish housecat, this magnanimous and
engaged person materialized only occasionally, under very particular circumstances. New people brought him out. So did the receipt of good news. Nate had never been more tolerant of other people than in the weeks following the sale of his book.

But he and Hannah were soon going to move past new-person territory. That whole bit about not wanting to sleep with him, about not knowing him well enough, made clear that she wasn’t looking for something casual. He had tacitly agreed to her terms when he asked her out again. (This was the real reason he’d hesitated about calling her, which he would have told Aurit if she hadn’t immediately begun haranguing him.) After the other night, it would be harder, more awkward, for him to tell Hannah he wasn’t looking for anything serious. Also something had stopped him from delivering such a line either time they’d gone out. He had sensed it would be, for Hannah, a deal breaker—that she wouldn’t bat her eyelashes and say, “I’m not looking for anything serious either” the way a lot of girls did, as if this were part of the challenge of dating. Each time he’d been out with Hannah, he had found himself reluctant to say anything that would throw water on their fun, flirty dynamic. No doubt he’d feel the same hesitation tonight.

Outside, the brakes of a bus squealed. Nate set his elbows on the table and rubbed his temples with the heels of his palms. Aurit wouldn’t have been any help anyway. She didn’t understand (she willfully refused to understand) that in the little mental space where she stored fond images of cuddling, Nate saw himself struggling to read in bed while some alien presence breathed moistly at his side and asked if he would be ready to turn off the light soon. He imagined gazing in farewell at his apartment as he closed the door and left for some girlfriend’s place “because it
is
more comfortable, isn’t it?” He saw touchy-feely sex and dutifully concealed porn and movie nights—well-reviewed indie comedies on Netflix, or maybe, if they were feeling especially ambitious, a documentary.

Nate was devoted to humanity in the abstract—to human rights, equal opportunity, the eradication of poverty. He was, in
theory, sympathetic to the limitations of others: you had to take into account root causes, the punishing handicaps posed by stupidity, an infantilizing consumer culture, et cetera. But when he trained the microscope more closely, human beings took on, in his view, an increasingly unattractive cast. They appeared greedy, grubby, hypocritical, self-deceiving. Sex, the sexual impulse, was a lure—an illusion engineered by an animal organism that sought only to perpetuate itself. The makeup, the hairstyling, the waxed limbs and gym-toned musculature, the urbane posturing and protective veneers of youth and achievement and even kindliness—weren’t they all merely cover for the pathetic, grasping “I” underneath? It wasn’t misogyny. Men laid similarly bare, stripped of pretensions, would be equally unappealing. But Nate wasn’t both attracted to and repelled by men. Men didn’t force him into contact with their least attractive aspects. The cesspools of need, the pockets of self-pity, the most vain and ugly of the thoughts that roiled Nate’s male friends as they lay awake in the middle of the night remained largely hidden from him, like foul odors sucked into the exhaust fans of modern bathrooms.

But maybe he was kidding himself. Certainly abstract ideas hadn’t prevented him from enjoying many other things he found philosophically objectionable, such as consumer goods from China, jet travel, Tori Amos. If he wanted to be in a relationship, no argument would change his mind. Perhaps the salient issue was not
why
but simply
that
he didn’t want to be in a relationship. His work fulfilled him, and his friends provided all the conversation and companionship he needed.

Was this so wrong? Why do women get away with pathologizing men for not wanting girlfriends? There are entire Web sites written by supposedly smart, “independent” women who make no bones about calling such men immature at best, assholes at worst. Nate wanted to argue, if only he had someone to argue with, that women want to be in relationships because on a gut level they don’t like being alone. They aren’t noble, high-minded
individuals, concerned about the well-being of the nation or the continuity of the species. They simply swoon at images of cooking dinner together, of some loving boyfriend playfully swatting their ass with a dishtowel while the two of them chop vegetables and sip wine and listen to NPR (preferably in a jointly owned prewar apartment with an updated kitchen). And that’s their prerogative. But what right do they have to demonize a counterpreference? If Nate’s idea of a nice dinner involved hunching over his kitchen table with a Celeste Pizza for One and a copy of Lermontov’s
A Hero of Our Time
, who is to say that his ideal is worse?

Nate knew what the response would be: maturity, it’s what adults do, et cetera, et cetera. But the same women who are so quick to call men immature when they don’t order their lives around snug domestic relationships would never call a woman immature because she doesn’t want to pop out babies. They resent the hell out of anyone who implies there’s anything wrong with
her
choice. No, women only pull out that talk about mature adulthood when it’s convenient, when they want grounds to resent some poor guy who doesn’t want what they want. It isn’t merely inconsistent: it suggests an unwillingness to take seriously other people’s preferences. As such, it’s a tyrannical impulse. And somebody really needs to say so.

Out the window, sunlight reflected off the windshields of parked cars. Nate finished the last of his coffee and set his mug down.

The problem was that no matter how unfair they are, no matter how insanely bent on domestication, Nate was unable to entirely discount the claims of women—those he slept with or might sleep with. If only, like those cock-swinging writers of the last century—Mailer, Roth, et al.—he could see the satisfaction of his sexual desire as a triumph of spirit, the vital and needful assertion of a giant, powerful virility whose essence was intellectual as well as erotic. Either Nate was less poetic, unable to rise to such dazzling heights of imaginative fancy, altogether more pedestrian and
earthbound—and no doubt he was—or he was less self-dramatizing. He didn’t, couldn’t, adorn his basic desire to get off,
to squirt his stuff
, with such baroque justification; so it was harder to see why his desire ought to trump everything else, trump women’s post-coital unhappiness. The dreary voice of Kant, insisting on impartiality, and the egalitarianism of the age—every person equal as a claimant to empathy—were, for him, lodged too deep.

“You okay, Nate?”

Nate turned to look at Beth’s broad, friendly face, the kind of face that retained a whiff of the well-loved girl who hung pictures of horses on her bedroom wall. “You’ve got this big scowl going on,” she said.

“Just focusing, I guess. How’re you?”

She waved the rag she was holding. “Oh, you know, another day in paradise.”

On his table, Nate’s cell phone began to vibrate, flailing like an overturned cockroach struggling to right itself. When he reached for it, Elisa’s face stared back at him. In the screen shot, her pouting lips were painted a deep red, and her blonde hair was messily pulled back from her face, with just a few stray clusters falling forward. The flash had flushed her skin, and the angle was askew because she had taken the picture herself with an outstretched arm. She still looked beautiful. But if she had been trying to endear herself to him by setting this picture to appear when she called, she’d miscalculated. The implicitly accusing expression on her face always filled him with dread. He hit
DECLINE
.

Then he opened a new message window on his computer. “I’m sorry,” he wrote to Hannah. “I got swamped with edits on the Israel book review. I’m not going to be able to get together tonight.”

He added a few pleasantries, signed his name, deleted his name, replaced it with the letter
N
, deleted the letter
N
, and finally settled on the lowercase
np
as signifying just the right amount of intimacy.

As soon as he pressed
SEND
, relief washed over him.

The next night an acquaintance of Nate’s was reading from his new book at a bookstore in Lower Manhattan. Nate arrived early, in part because his friend Mark had called and asked Nate to hold a seat for him.

Jason showed up soon after and took one of the seats next to Nate’s. “Hey, man, you’re coming out after, right?” Jason’s voice dropped to a stage whisper. “I’ve got gossip. I can’t tell you here.”

Nate had once suggested to Jason that there was something prurient in the intensity of his interest in other people’s lives. In response, Jason had paraphrased Bellow paraphrasing Allan Bloom: “When I do it, it’s not gossip. It’s social history.”

Nate’s friend Eugene Wu arrived and started to sit on Nate’s other side. Nate was about to tell Eugene that the seat was saved for Mark. He stopped himself. Eugene was a suspicious, bilious sort of person. He was apt to take even this as a personal affront. There was something fey about seat saving anyway.

Mark walked in just as the author was being introduced. Nate waved his arms and made a sad clown face, trying to suggest that he had done his best. The author began to read. Nate tried to focus, but Mark distracted him. Forced to stand beside a rack of foreign periodicals, he visibly shifted his weight from one leg to
the other while glowering in Nate’s direction. Nate tried to avoid looking at that part of the room.

Afterward, a large group walked to a nearby bar. On the way, Nate wove in and out of various conversations. The thrashing of car horns and the whoosh of traffic lent a pleasant urban ambience as the group ambled along Houston Street in the humid dusk. Nate felt a wave of contentment. Sometimes he remembered how lonely he had been in high school and the early part of college, even in his early years in New York, after he and Kristen had broken up. Surrounded by friends and reasonably established, he felt lucky. He knew he’d been lucky.

The inside of the bar was scarcely populated, with only a few diehards watching baseball on a flat-screen TV and another group gathered around a pool table. But its large, gravelly backyard was packed. Standing under a scraggly tree, Nate got into a conversation about payday loans with a girl named Jean. She was writing an article about urban poverty.

“I had to take out a couple over the years,” Nate told her.

“Really?” she said. “You’re not exactly the target demographic.”

Jean wore cute faux-librarian glasses and had a cheerful abundance of curly hair that bounced energetically when she nodded, which she did frequently, as if to offer encouragement to the person she was speaking with.

“I had some bad years,” Nate said. “I couldn’t always afford to wait two months for some magazine to get around to cutting me a check.”

As Jean groaned in sympathy, Nate started to roll up his sleeves. He wished he’d worn a T-shirt. The warm air was thick, a physical presence.

“Can I ask why you didn’t just get a cash advance on your credit card?” Jean asked.

“I forgot my PIN,” Nate said.

Beyond Jean’s shoulder, he noticed a very cute brunette. She was talking to a girl he knew slightly, and she seemed to be looking
in his direction. The gravel beneath Nate’s feet crunched as he shifted position to get a better view.

“Seriously?” Jean asked.

Nate turned back to her. “I figured if it was one I knew by heart, it would be too tempting,” he said. “I made up a random one, wrote it down, and lost the paper.”

Jean pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Did you think about retrieving it from the credit card company?”

“I kept answering the security questions wrong.”

“You’re kidding,” Jean said.

“My mother’s Romanian. Her maiden name has a lot of vowels. I may also have been drunk. They didn’t ask so many questions at the payday loan place.”

Jean had a guffawing laugh, which, while not particularly feminine, seemed uninhibited and heartfelt at least.

She was someone Nate liked, someone he was always happy to see at a party. Yet he inevitably ran out of things to talk about with her. She knew a lot about obscure bands and indie actors, but she almost never spoke personally or volunteered an opinion not in accord with right principles and liberal piety. After a while, this unwavering good nature left Nate tongue-tied.