The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (15 page)

Something in her smile made Nate suspect she wasn’t personally pouring out gin and tonics for all her guests.

Several years older than Nate, Francesca was a prettyish, stylish writer who’d been extremely successful with her first book at a young age. After that, she’d been less successful, but she was well known. And she made a point of knowing everyone. It was only recently that “everyone” had come to include Nate. When he’d been a struggling freelance writer who did some legal proofreading on the side, she’d been merely polite.

In those years, Nate had often been dismayed not by Francesca in particular but by the vast number of women whose legs, like the doors to an exclusive club, parted only at the proof of a man’s success. Now that he was—barely—on the other side of it, the tendency depressed him for other reasons. There was something in the almost wolfish way that Francesca was looking at him that nullified whatever attractiveness was there.

“Don’t worry about it,” he told her. “I know where the kitchen is. Nice to meet you, Nicholas.”

He didn’t find Hannah in the kitchen, but Francesca’s apartment had a back window that opened to a fire escape and a flight of stairs.

The roof was strung with white Christmas lights that ran from
an extension cord inside the apartment. Francesca’s building was flanked on one side by a tall fortresslike structure with few windows. On the other sides, jagged rows of shorter buildings spread out around them.

Nate saw Hannah standing near the edge of the roof. She was talking to Eugene Wu. Nate walked up to them and looped his arm around her waist. “Hey,” he said. Hannah flushed slightly and pulled back. Nate realized that this was probably the first public gesture of couplehood he’d made. They’d largely spent time together one-onone. Amused by her reticence, he kissed her temple lightly.

Hannah ignored this. “Eugene was just telling me that yoga is the new Orientalism,” she said. “It’s a good thing I do Pilates.”

Nate had to strain to hear her over the roar of an air-conditioning unit atop one of the neighboring buildings. “Same difference, isn’t it?” he said loudly.

“Pilates was invented by an American,” Eugene said. “In the 1920s.”

Nate gaped at him. “How do you know that?”

Eugene held out one of his arms for their perusal. “How do you think I stay so lean?”

When Hannah broke away to talk to a friend she hadn’t seen in a while, Eugene turned to Nate with his arms crossed in front of his chest. “I didn’t know you were dating her.”

From his tone Nate suspected that Eugene had asked Hannah out before and had been shot down. Eugene had long been eager to date a bookish girl, a member of the literary set; for him, Hannah, pretty (if not a knockout by Jason’s standard), pleasant, and smart, would have been a natural object of desire.

“It’s recent,” Nate said.

“Hmm …,” Eugene said. “Well, she has a nice rack.”

Nate didn’t know if Eugene was trying to indicate that he wasn’t envious or if he was simply pissing on Nate’s fire hydrant. Eugene existed in a state of permanent aggrievedness. He felt it his duty to nip at the happiness of those more fortunate. He resented
that Nate had gone to Harvard and had a book deal; he acted as if money and girls and writing gigs had been handed to Nate with his diploma. In fact, their professional lives had been similarly scrappy until several years ago when Nate got the regular reviewing gig and then sold his book. Still, Eugene was smart—and more serious, less exclusively careerist than many people he knew.

“What about you, Eugene?” he asked. “You dating anyone?”

“I’m thinking about going online,” Eugene admitted.

Surprised, Nate tried to remove from his expression anything that Eugene, in his prickliness, might perceive as mocking. “Go for it,” he said. “Can’t hurt, right?”

Soon after Hannah returned. Then Nate saw Jason’s large silhouette emerge from the fire escape stairs. Jason looked around for a moment before he came lumbering toward the corner they’d staked out.

When he had told Jason he was dating Hannah, Jason’s response—“she seems like a nice girl”—had been so bland that Nate had silently seethed, hating himself because the number seven flitted across his mind. He hated himself even more as he heard himself extol Hannah’s virtues:
she’s really cool! fun! smart!
An undertone of desperation had found its way into his voice. Jason had nodded, doing nothing that Nate could call him out on, and yet something in his smile had reminded Nate of a WASPy hostess “overlooking” a breach of etiquette.

“Hannah,” Jason said as he approached. With mock formality, he held out a hand for her to shake.

Hannah scrunched her eyebrows quizzically, but she smiled and matched his tone. “Jason,” she said, giving him her hand. “It’s nice to see you.”

“You look lovely. As always.”

“Thank you.”

Nate began rubbing the stubble on his chin. There wasn’t anything he could do. Either Jason would be a dick—he’d call it “shaking things up”—or he wouldn’t. As a distraction, Nate let
himself get drawn into a hair-splitting and incredibly geekish argument with Eugene about libertarianism. After a few minutes, he turned to Jason.

“Can I use your phone to look up something?”

“Dude,” Jason said. “Get your own. You’re like the last person in New York to not have a smartphone.”

“Jesus.”

Hannah reached into her purse. “You can use mine.”

Nate took the phone from her and turned to Jason. “Do you see how it’s possible to do someone a favor without commentary?”

Jason smiled exultantly. “Commentary is what I do,” he said. “I’m a
social commentator
, remember?”

Jason had recently been interviewed on CNN about his essay on obesity.

Hannah let out a short, skeptical laugh. “Harassing Nate about his cell phone is social commentary how?”

Nate looked at her in surprise. The awkwardness he’d been dreading had materialized—from an unexpected corner. His “girlfriend” was stepping in to defend him. He wished she wouldn’t.

“Hannah, Hannah, Hannah,” Jason said. He was leaning on the roof’s railing with his arms extended on either side of his body and his ankles daintily crossed. When he smiled, his wide jawline formed a gratuitously large canvas for his fleshy lips. In his head’s narrower, more delicately constructed upper half, his eyelashes fluttered in a show of affability as disingenuous as the upturn of his mouth.

“There comes a point”—Jason unclasped his hands from the metal rail and lurched toward them like a cuckoo emerging from inside its clock—“when a technology becomes such a part of the mainstream that it is no longer, strictly speaking, optional. This is a social phenomenon; diagnosing it is like diagnosing narcissism in the 1970s. The moment of smartphone saturation, or you might say, of
cultural transubstantiation
, occurred at or around August of 2008, at least for people in our demographic—”

“That’s ridi—” Nate tried to cut in.

“
After that
,” Jason said, “not to have one is a statement. Especially when, like our friend Nate here”—Jason gestured grandly in Nate’s direction—“you aren’t exactly poverty-stricken. At least not anymore.” He flashed Nate a quick, malicious grin before turning back to the others. “For Nate, today, not to have a smartphone is a high-pitched scream that he is a square peg who refuses to be wedged into a round hole. And that,” Jason said, looking directly at Hannah, “is an invitation to the rest of the clan to shame him. That’s how the social order is maintained.”

“So in giving Nate a hard time, what you’re really doing is embodying a repressive social order?” Hannah’s eyebrows were raised and her voice was mocking, but her expression was amused, even a bit flirtatious. “You’re like the guy who sewed the
A
onto Hester Prynne’s dress?” She turned to Nate and Eugene. “And that’s his defense?” she concluded with a shake of her head.

Nate felt his body relax. She’d been perfect.

Jason shrugged in defeat. “No one likes the enforcer,” he said. “I guess that’s just the way it is.”

Nate pulled Hannah closer to him, feeling pleased both with her and in some more obscure way with himself.

“Incidentally, Hester sewed on the
A
herself,” Eugene said.

“Thank you, Brainy Smurf,” Nate said. He turned to Hannah. “Jason’s very big on social order these days,” he said, resting his hand on the place on her hip where her jeans ended and feeling really turned on. “He thinks it’s gotten a bad rap—”

“—because of, you know,” Eugene cut in, “Hitler. Mussolini.”

“Social order, huh?” Hannah said to Jason.

Hannah’s back was lightly touching Nate’s shoulder. Her body language, tilting away from the group, suggested she was ready to shrink away from the spotlight, glad for its attention to refocus on Jason, who sighed loudly, though in fact he enjoyed nothing so much as pontificating, even if he had to play the buffoon to do it.

“As Aristotle said, man is a political animal—”

“I’m going to get a drink,” Eugene said.

“Man alone is worthless,” Jason continued. “Hairless, shivering, and physically puny, he’s no match for animals or the elements. Only through our collective intelligence, through
society
, has man risen. The mistake people make is to consider human evolution from the perspective of the individual. The happiness of individuals is, evolutionarily speaking, irrelevant; what matters is the health of society.”

Nate circled Hannah’s waist with his arm and cocked his head so that his forehead was touching hers. Her hip grazed his upper thigh, and her hair brushed against his chin and neck. He wanted to get even closer, but as it was, he was already a bit too turned on. He took a few deep breaths.

Above, the strings of white Christmas lights cut diagonal stripes across the darkening sky; several stories below, city traffic streamed around them. Jason droned on.

When they returned to Hannah’s apartment, Nate apologized for Jason. “He doesn’t mean any harm. He’s just kind of a blowhard. Some people have golf, some have girlfriends, Jason has his mouth.”

“I like him, actually,” Hannah said. “He’s …
ebullient
.”

“Ebullient?” Nate smiled. “I’ll tell him you said so. He’ll like it.”

They were lying on top of Hannah’s bed, staring up at her ceiling as if at the stars. Nate told her that in college he thought he had less in common with Jason than with his friend Peter, but that over the years, the balance had shifted.

“Jason’s weird, especially about women, but he’s not a bad guy,” Nate said. “He’s more, I don’t know how to put it exactly—substantial, maybe?—than a lot of people. He doesn’t look over his shoulder to see what other people think, the way someone like Mark does.” Hannah knew Mark; he had edited her writing at the online magazine where he used to work. “Mark’s great, of course,” Nate continued. “Good at what he does and really funny—but his first allegiance will always be to his reputation.”

Hannah asked what Peter was like.

“Smart. Lonely. He really wants a girlfriend. He lives in Watertown, Maine—he got a job teaching up there. There aren’t very many single women in Watertown. And, well, he’s kind of awkward with women.”

Nate realized that in the past couple weeks he and Hannah had talked about many aspects of their lives, but they hadn’t spent much time on their friends. “What about you?” he asked. “What are your friends like?”

Hannah told him that her close friends dated back to journalism school and her days as a newspaper reporter. They were reporters who covered politics and business. Although she and Nate had a number of common friends and acquaintances, she felt her foothold in Nate’s literary circle was tenuous. For the past few years, since she and Steve had broken up, she had felt a little bit lonely, intellectually. Her choice to try and write a book while taking miscellaneous freelance gigs was mysterious to many of her journalist friends in a way that it wasn’t, couldn’t possibly be, to Nate.

Nate stroked her cheek with his thumb. “I find that strangely touching,” he said. “I mean, it makes me glad that I can do that for you. Understand that part of you. I promise you’re doing the right thing. Your book will be terrific.”

She kissed his chin. “Thank you. That’s really nice.”

The desire Nate had been holding back since the party started to well up again, and he began to touch her breasts through her tank top. But he could tell she was distracted.

“What are you thinking about?”

She turned on her side, so they faced each other. She didn’t answer right away.

“Nothing really,” she said finally. “Just that you’ve been kind of great. I mean, it’s been really great, these past few weeks.” She touched his chest lightly through his T-shirt. “I’ve been really … happy.”

He curled a finger into her hair. “Me too,” he said. “Me too.”

Like Freud, Aurit had a coherent theory of the universe. From a single foundational myth, she had derived a large and growing labyrinth of substories, all internally logical and surprisingly convincing, as long as you accepted her initial premises. The most important of these was the belief that being part of a couple was
the
primary marker of psychological health. On such a basis, she came up with far-reaching analyses of everyone she encountered. This one, she would announce, was sexually dysfunctional due to a painful formative relationship. That one was stunted by a series of early professional successes that kept him committed to the same immature belief structure he’d possessed during his period of peak glory. (Single men were deemed particularly lacking in emotional well-being.) Aurit took her analyses very seriously, often liking, disliking, or feeling sorry for people based almost entirely on the narratives she constructed. In particular, the men who’d hurt her most had become objects of such a virulent strain of pity that one might suspect her motives for dating them had been philanthropic.

Nate was reminded of this the following Saturday afternoon. He and Aurit were walking to Prospect Park, where some friends
were hosting a picnic to celebrate their recent City Hall marriage. Aurit wanted to hear all about Hannah.