The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (13 page)

The brunette went inside the bar.

Nate patted Jean on the shoulder. “I’ll be just a minute.”

The girl—and she was indeed young enough that Nate didn’t think calling her a girl was politically incorrect—was leaning over the bar, the soles of her feet rising out of her ballet slippers as she stood on her tiptoes.

Nate took the place next to her. “I think we’re with the same group. You were at the reading, right?”

She sank back into her shoes. She came up to, maybe, his chin. “Yeah,” she said warily.

“So you’ll help?”

“With what?”

Nate pointed with his thumb at the bartender. “You stand a better chance of getting his attention than I do.”

Her name, Nate soon learned, was Cara. She had graduated from Stanford a couple of years before. She had since gotten a master’s degree in writing from Johns Hopkins. She was interning at an august literary magazine and looking for a full-time job. She was open to something in publishing or magazines, but it was hard, in spite of her degrees.

“It’s really awful that there aren’t more full-time jobs for people in our field,” she said. “I’d even take an assistant-level job.”

To Nate, this sounded more than a little entitled. But she was young, and it was no easy task—getting started professionally—and she seemed sweet. It helped also that she was model pretty.

They returned to the backyard with their drinks. It had grown appreciably darker. One by one, windows in the surrounding tenements switched from black to yellow as inside lights were turned on.

Nate and Cara leaned against a brick wall. She let on that she knew who he was, that someone had pointed him out to her and she’d read something of his, or at least heard it spoken of. Naturally Nate was flattered. She told him she lived in the South Slope with roommates. She liked it. She had never felt like a true Californian. And Baltimore? No, she couldn’t say she much liked it, even if it was Nate’s hometown.

After a couple of minutes, Nate found himself eyeing Jason and Eugene, who were huddled together on the other side of the patio. He still hadn’t heard Jason’s gossip. He was growing a little bored, but he wasn’t ready to extricate himself. Cara was petite. Her dark hair fell in long, loose waves around her face, which was delicate and appealing, with well-shaped lips and thick but shapely eyebrows. Olive-skinned, almost Persian-looking, she wasn’t just good-looking; she appeared intelligent, soulful. And clearly she was smart. She would have to be. It was impossible—
wasn’t it?
—that she could actually be as boring as she seemed.

What began, after a few more minutes, to irritate him was that she didn’t even attempt to be engaging—made no effort toward wit or color in her replies. Only an attractive young woman would take for granted a stranger’s interest in the minutiae of her life.

Perhaps she was shy.

He asked how she liked the internship. Her answer was not unintelligent, yet it struck Nate as academic and passionless. At another point in his life, he would have felt a challenge in her stiffness—that air of complacent acquiescence rather than enthusiasm. He would have tried to get her to say something inflected with feeling, if only gossip or a complaint about her coworkers. He would have done so in part because he wouldn’t have wanted her to come away thinking
he
was boring. But he didn’t feel motivated to make that kind of effort. He thought of Hannah and felt a pang—of something, he didn’t know what. He didn’t choose to examine it.

He was getting ready to slip away when he found himself telling Cara that he pretty much had no choice but to live in New York because he was a terrible driver. “I couldn’t live in a place where you need a car to get around.”

“Did I hear you mention driving, Nate?”

Mark approached, holding out his hand to Cara. “Hi, I’m Mark,” he said, his tone self-effacing, as though he doubted whether someone of Cara’s importance would want to meet him. That was part of his shtick.

“Did Nate tell you his theory about driving?” Mark asked.

He sounded bored, lugubriously so, as if he’d told this story a hundred times and was sure she wouldn’t be much interested.

Cara shook her head no.

“Well, let me tell you. He’s a
terrible
driver.”

She smiled. “So he said.”

She already looked more animated than she had when Nate had been alone with her.

A magazine editor, Mark was thin, slight, with tidily cut dark hair; he was always neatly dressed in business casual. He looked at
first to be almost trifling, but he had cultivated a dry, everyman persona that he played to great advantage.

“He says—” Mark began, his voice thick with disapproval. He broke off, as if overcome, and started again. “He told me and our friend Jason a couple years ago, when we were on a road trip, that his brain is like a Mack Truck.”

Cara’s smile was now a little confused. Nate was shaking his head, but he began to laugh, partly in embarrassment, partly in amusement. He’d nearly forgotten this story. He had to give Mark credit as far as Cara went. Mark was bringing far more panache to the job than he himself had.

“Nate says that good drivers are people who can put their brains on cruise control. Their brains are like small Japanese cars. He, on the other hand—well, his brain is this huge roaring engine that needs to be constantly monitored. It’s too powerful to be put on a default setting where it can seamlessly change gears or pick up on a stoplight ahead.”

Mark shook his head reproachfully. Cara, hands on her hips, pivoted toward Nate, for some sort of defense.

Nate tried to look endearing. “What he’s not telling you is that those two—he and Jason—were on my case all weekend about my driving. I had to say something.”

Mark frowned at Nate before turning back to Cara. “Personally, I thought it was extremely elitist. I was very offended.”

“Also,” Cara said with sudden energy. “I think trucks
do
have cruise control. I mean, airplanes do, right? Autopilot? Why not trucks?”

“Smart!” Mark turned to him. “What do you have to say to
that
, Nate?”

Nate held his hands up. “Whether they do or not, I concede. It was a stupid theory.”

He had finally started having fun.

When Cara left to use the bathroom, Mark turned to him. His face was submerged in shadows cast by the tabletop umbrellas. “I
think she kind of dug me, but if you’re—I mean, you got there first.”

“Go for it,” Nate said. He meant it. He still felt a little bad about the seat-saving incident. That wasn’t the main thing, though. “We didn’t have much to say to each other.”

Even in the semidarkness, Nate could see that Mark looked surprised. “I’d do her no matter what she has to say.”

“Best of luck.”

Nate went inside for another drink. While he waited at the bar, shrill peals of laughter rang through the beery air. Nate felt sticky, also rather glum. It was hard to say why. The night simply seemed empty, almost pointless.

When the bartender handed him his drink, he finished it too quickly. It was his third or fourth, and consumed so fast, it was enough to nudge him from buzzed to drunk. He ordered another immediately.

He awoke the next morning to embarrassing recollections—going up to Jean and putting his arm around her, for one. “So, what is your deal?” he’d asked. “Who are you, really?” She’d laughed, but he had felt her edging back from him. He wasn’t, he had realized even through the haze of his drunkenness, coming off as bold and daring, only buffoonish. And sweaty. He also had a distinct memory of passing Cara on his way out. There was something pitying in the way she looked at him.

After four Advils, a large iced coffee, and the passage of several hours, he felt significantly better. In the early afternoon, he called Hannah.

“Well …,” she said slowly, when he asked her to reschedule the date he’d canceled. “It’s not really a great week for me.” Nate played dumb, cheerily suggesting the following week. Hannah said she was busy then too. But there was a slight laugh in her voice that gave him confidence. “What about coffee at ten a.m. on Tuesday?” he asked. “You can’t be booked for ten a.m. on a Tuesday, can
you? It’s not like you have a job or anything—by which I mean no offense. I don’t have one either.”

She conceded that she might have a free evening that she’d forgotten about.

When he arrived in midtown, at Bryant Park, Hannah was already sitting with a book at a small green café table, lightly thumbing the edge of the page as she read. Her hair, lighter than usual in the sunlight, fell forward, on either side of her face. She glanced up from her book as he approached. When she stood up, the spindly metal chair she had been sitting on rocked on the cobblestones.

“Hi.”

Nate felt uncharacteristically nervous as they smiled at each other.

“I brought you something,” he said, reaching into his back pocket. He pushed a copy of Graham Greene’s
Travels with My Aunt
across the table. “I noticed you didn’t have it,” he said, looking not at Hannah but at the book.

“Oh! That was nice of you. Thank you.”

The concert they had come to hear wouldn’t begin for another few minutes, but the park was full of activity. Across the wide swath of grass was the carousel, and to their left, in an old-timey booth, a “sandwich artisan.” A few kids, maybe six or seven years old, were playing on the grass nearby. “Look!” cried a little Asian girl in pigtails and a white dress. She was speaking to two blond boys, twins. The little girl leaped from a chair, her skirt billowing up from her split legs. The boys didn’t even pretend to care. They ran off, and she followed, pigtails flying behind her. “Wait!”

Back in the 1980s, the sociologist William Whyte said that you couldn’t have found a more villainous-looking crew of dope dealers than the ones who hung out at this park if you hired them. Nate told Hannah that, and she laughed.

“Did you write something about him?” she asked. “I seem to remember reading something. It was … good.”

Nate was pleased she’d read it. The piece was one he liked, about the materialism of the age.

The musicians began to play. Hannah turned to face them. She had suggested the free evening concert. “They’re going to play some late Beethoven quartets that are really wonderful,” she’d said. Nate was less keen on these kinds of performances. He thought there was something grating about upper-middle-class New Yorkers’ love of high culture in city parks. It was so full of self-congratulation, as if a few lousy performances made up for systemic economic inequality. “Uh huh,” Hannah had said. “You know you sound like one of those, uhm,
philistines
who doesn’t see the use in art, right?” That had shut him up.

Now, Nate began to wonder what Hannah had really thought of his essay. There had been something coy, something withholding, in the way she’d said it was good.

The music stopped. Nate nearly started clapping before he realized it was only the end of the movement. Hannah whispered that the next one would be slower. Nate nodded meaningfully. When the musicians resumed playing, he closed his eyes to filter out distractions. Hannah had told him that these quartets were bridges between the classical and romantic periods. That was interesting. But the crisscross slats of the metal chair were gnawing the flesh on the back of his legs. It seemed as if the chair had been designed back in the 1980s to keep the dope dealers from getting too comfortable.

He was contemplating some of the wording his editor had suggested for his book’s catalog copy when people abruptly started clapping. As soon as he realized, he began banging his hands together with great zeal.

He failed to convince. “I take it you aren’t a classical music lover?” Hannah asked.

Nate let his hands drop. “I took piano lessons as a kid. I guess they didn’t take.”

When they left the park, he and Hannah were swept into a mass of people exiting an office tower. All around them briefcases bumped against thighs; cell phones clicked shut. They passed a subway entrance, and the crowd began to thin. They walked west, toward the setting sun.

Hannah told him that she played the cello through college. She asked what kind of music he liked.

“Honestly, I’m kind of an idiot about music,” Nate said. “I usually wind up liking what people tell me is good.” He glanced at her, a little shyly. “I liked the music you played at your apartment the last time.”

Shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand, Hannah turned to him. “Elliott Smith? I wouldn’t have guessed.”

“What can I say, I like sad music.”

She tossed her hair over her shoulder. In the sharp light, it glinted red-gold. “Interesting.”

It was one of those cheerful dusks. Puddles that pedestrians would have had to make long arcs around the day before had dried up and disappeared. Convivial laughter rose from sidewalk cafés and echoed through the streets, which, in the fading heat, seemed to unfurl at the edges and relax into evening. People moved jauntily as if choreographed. As he and Hannah stepped from the sidewalk into a street, Nate touched a hand to her lower back. He felt glad to be exactly where he was.

The following week he brought Hannah to his apartment. The bulbs were out on his stairwell’s third and fourth floors; he and Hannah climbed in near darkness. His door, when he pushed it open, emitted a piteous, multisyllabic whine.

“I hope you’re not expecting much.”

Hannah peered into the kitchen. Then she walked down the narrow hallway toward his bedroom. Nate trailed behind her. He had tidied in preparation for her visit, but his apartment cleaned up was unconvincing, like a career hoodlum dolled up for court by his lawyer. The rag he had used to wipe his desk and dresser sat in a heap on the windowsill. One of his dresser drawers, too crammed to shut all the way, had fallen wide open. He had hastily made the bed, but a triangle of garish black-and-white sheet poked out from beneath the comforter.

“It’s nice,” Hannah said slowly. She pointed to the wall above his desk. “I like that picture.”

Nate had found the print, El Greco’s
View of Toledo
, on the street. The angry blue sky and hilly green cityscape had appealed to him. He’d fixed the frame with duct tape.