The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (17 page)

“He’s never writing for us again,” she said.

“No, I would think not.”

Elisa looked deliberately at him. “What about you? It’s only about, what, six months until your book comes out? You must”—her eyes twitched—“you must be really excited.”

Nate stared at the row of single-malt scotches lined up on the shelf behind the bar. He had written much of his book while he had been with Elisa. In a way, she had been essential to his writing it. Although she had sometimes complained about the time he
took away from her to work on it, she had always believed in the book and in his ability to pull it off. During periods when the writing wasn’t going well, when he had seriously doubted it ever would, her faith had mattered a lot, had maybe been crucial. Then, before the book was finished and sold, he’d broken up with her.

“I try not to obsess about it,” he said.

Elisa pushed her empty glass to the back of the bar. It was immediately whisked away by a bow-tied attendant. Nate began to call him back to ask for the check.

“Why are you in such a hurry?” Elisa asked.

Something familiar snapped back into place as her resigned tone gave way to one of complaint.

Nate held up his hands. “I’m not.”

“Is
Hannah
expecting you?”

“No! I just—oh, never mind. Let’s get another.”

“Not if you don’t want to.”

“I want to!” he insisted. “I do.”

It was after ten when he walked Elisa to her subway station. As she disappeared down the steps, Nate felt the kind of relief that has a physical component, like the release after a long run. On his way to his own subway station, several blocks west, he sent Hannah a text.
Is it weird that I miss you?
They’d seen each other only that morning.

Her reply came a moment later.
Yes, it’s weird.
Seconds after, another arrived:
(but I kinda, sorta miss you too).

After the evening with Elisa, Nate wanted nothing so much as to rebuild his mood in a different key. The light, easy banter he and Hannah tended toward—the implicit reassurance of her presence that he wasn’t a heartless ingrate—was particularly appealing.

Before he got on the train, he wrote back.
I can be there in 45.

That night, Hannah asked what the deal was with him and Elisa. They were sitting in the chairs by her window. Nate paused before answering.

He had met Elisa three years ago at a publishing party. She had arrived with the editor in chief of the Very Important Magazine. Nate asked his friend Andrew about her. Andrew said she was the editor in chief’s new assistant.

When her boss left, Elisa remained. Nate downed two or three thimble-sized glasses of wine. She was standing next to the food table, in front of a small mountain of fruit.

“Hi, I’m Nate.”

She popped a red grape into her mouth. “Elisa,” she said, almost drowsily.

For the next few minutes, she answered his questions, but she seemed slightly put out by the obligation he had imposed on her. Eventually, she asked what he did.

He said he was the book critic for an online magazine. She asked which one. He told her.

She eyed him. Nate tugged at the collar of his blue Oxford shirt. He noticed that one of his shoes was not merely untied but radically untied, as if he had only just now wrested his foot from a
steel trap. Its gaping, brown tongue hung crookedly, crisscrossed with faint indentations where the laces should have been. He stepped on that foot with the other, swaying slightly, like a top-heavy kebab.

She told him that she’d recently finished a master’s degree in comp lit from the Sorbonne. Before that she’d been at Brown. This was her first job in publishing. She wanted to write. She’d love to get coffee with Nate sometime.
She would?
Yeah, she’d love to talk about publishing.

Coffee turned into dinner and, a few days later, a sunset run over the Brooklyn Bridge and then a party at a Harvard friend/hedge fund guy’s Upper West Side triplex and a Saturday night at the Brooklyn Museum. Nate was terrifically impressed by her. She dropped casual references to the work of aging intellectuals who contributed to the
New York Review of Books
. The polysyllabic names of avant-garde eastern European filmmakers rolled effortlessly from her tongue. Her father was a well-known professor whose books Nate knew by reputation. By that point in his life, Nate had dated any number of editorial types. Elisa seemed different, unusually serious and well informed, especially for someone so young. And so attractive.

Even Nate, who had had to be told by Jason not to wear pants with pleats, could tell somehow that among all the well-dressed young women of Brooklyn, Elisa looked especially nice. She knew where to buy anything, which stores were not so much expensive as tasteful, and also what was okay to buy at Target (from what Nate gleaned, things that started with the letter
T
: Tupperware, tights, toothpaste). In theory, Nate disdained “bourgeois status signifiers,” but in practice he took pride in Elisa’s whiff of smart chic. She radiated the effortless worldly ease of the popular girl. She was clearly first-rate, top-shelf, the publishing world equivalent of Amy Perelman in high school and Will McDormand’s best-looking gal pals at Harvard: she was the thing that was clearly, indisputably desirable.

Her demeanor was smooth and preoccupied, even slightly sullen, and she spoke at times with an unnerving, almost anhedonic lack of affect. She often seemed bored. This edge of perpetual dissatisfaction made it all the more thrilling for Nate when he cajoled her into laughter and good humor: to impress her, one felt—he felt—was really something.

Back then he didn’t have a book deal. His book-reviewing gig ensured a regular paycheck, but to call it modest, relative to the cost of living in New York, was an overstatement bordering on a lie. To get by, he needed to hustle for all the additional assignments he could get, both proofreading and writing. He worked alone, in his dirty apartment. Some days, he didn’t bother to shower. He blew his nose with toilet paper. Cheap toilet paper. (Once when he was visiting from New Haven, Nate’s college friend Peter had surreptitiously nabbed a few squares from the roll and folded them into the breast pocket of his shirt. He waited until their friends were assembled at a bar to pass them around. “Just feel it. Can you believe that
this
—the world’s most diaphanous sandpaper—is what our Nate uses to wipe his ass? Talk about self-loathing.”)

Nate had no health insurance, hadn’t had it for years. After a while, he’d come to take for granted that he was the kind of scruffy, marginal person whose well-being was not deemed important by society. Elisa’s well-being, on the other hand, was incontrovertibly important—to her, to her parents, to the magazine that lavished her with extensive dental, optical, and mental-health benefits. The universe itself seemed bent on accommodating her, with free drinks from bartenders, gentle treatment from otherwise gruff cab drivers, and kindly offers of advice from avuncular grandees of magazine publishing who never returned Nate’s e-mails.

Nate was usually still sleeping each day when Elisa, lovely and carefully groomed, sailed past the guards in the lobby of that midtown Manhattan skyscraper, zoomed up to the zillionth floor in the express elevator, and took her seat at a desk with her nameplate above it. There, she answered phones, calmly assuring
nervous writers that her boss would get back to them. She escorted various Important People into the big corner office. She sat in on certain editorial meetings and even, when asked, offered ideas about the magazine’s content. For the most part, though, her work was administrative. It was, nonetheless, the start of a career. She was taking great care not to become someone fringy like Nate, at home in his underwear, sweating up his sheets, pondering such questions as whether he should take the earned income tax credit if he qualified, or if that would be wrong, since it was clearly intended for real poor people, not Harvard grads who eschewed regular jobs to pursue their idiosyncratic intellectual ambitions.

When he met up with Elisa at the end of a workday, he felt like he’d clawed his way out of a Morlockean underworld. With her, he was treated differently at restaurants. Other men sized him up with their eyes. Waiters and maître d’s were more deferential. Even among his circle of friends and acquaintances, his stock rose subtly.

So it hardly seemed to matter that she was not a particularly nice girlfriend. Unless they coincided with hers, Elisa treated his desires as perverse whims, wholly negligible. An expensive restaurant she liked was a healthy indulgence; his craving for barbecue was “disgusting.” A somewhat down-market local barbecue chain he especially liked? “Out of the question.” After social engagements, she enjoyed regaling him with a list of criticisms of his behavior. She seemed to think that everything he did was first and foremost a reflection on her. When, at a dinner party, he made a bad joke, Elisa was mad at him for embarrassing her. “What made you think that would have been funny?” she demanded as soon as they’d rounded the corner from the Park Slope brownstone where they’d spent the evening. Nate was forced to admit he had absolutely no idea why he had thought that responding to someone’s comment that we are living in an age of anxiety by saying that he thought it was the Age of Aquarius would be funny. As soon as the words had escaped from his mouth, he was humiliated
by their lameness. This provoked no sympathy from Elisa. She thought he owed it to her to be someone she could respect. That meant not making bad jokes. It also meant being affectionate but not too affectionate, complimentary but not too complimentary, smart but not pedantically so, and a host of other things.

When Elisa felt that someone had wronged her, she was outraged. Apparently, she was the only person in all of New York with any manners; everyone else behaved like an animal, especially to her, which was very hard for her to understand because—and this was news to Nate—she “bore no ill will toward anyone.” She was furious if Nate didn’t wholeheartedly support her in her indignation toward such-and-such coworker, who had made a comment at lunch, which, though it seemed fairly innocuous when she repeated it to Nate, struck Elisa as unforgivably barbed. To suggest even the possibility of a misunderstanding, let alone an overreaction, was, as far as Elisa was concerned, to undermine her.

She seemed to have no internal sense of justice. When Nate got annoyed because she was late to meet him or because she seemed to him to be acting bored as he told her something he felt was important, he instinctively evaluated his irritation, tried to assess whether it was reasonable or fair, under the circumstances. (Perhaps she hadn’t realized that what he was saying was important to him? Perhaps he hadn’t been clear?) She, on the other hand, treated her emotional responses as infallible. His self-criticism, she seemed to perceive merely as a weakness to be exploited. “No,” she’d say. “You really weren’t clear.”

Nate’s only other serious girlfriend had been Kristen, who was, whatever else you might say about her, an extremely fair-minded person. Elisa was a bit baffling to him. But for a long time, none of her limitations mattered. Nate had grown up on the Old Testament. He didn’t expect his god to be reasonable or merciful. He may have privately grumbled about her demands, he may have tried to reason with her or cajole her, but Elisa’s presence in his life, in his bed, her beauty (sometimes when he was with her he
was simply overcome with the desire to touch her silky blonde hair or perfect doll face), the particular pains and pleasures of being with her: these had become, for him, existentially necessary.

Although Elisa was intelligent—and fluent in the things sophisticated people were supposed to be fluent in—Nate had realized fairly early on that her writing was often stilted and awkward. Her ideas tended toward strained attempts at a sort of academic profundity. There was also something brittle about her love of intellect and intellectualism and, more important,
intellectuals
, like Nate. This passion of hers had impressed him at first. But it was, he learned over time, a form of success mongering, a specialized form, but success mongering all the same. Long before he was ready to call it quits with her—long before even a seed of the thought had entered his mind—he began to assemble a picture of her much less flattering than his initial impression. Her taste, for example, was great—inasmuch as it was received, inasmuch as she absorbed what was fashionably highbrow. She really liked, say, Svevo—was able to see myriad virtues in Svevo—once she was primed to like Svevo, once she knew that Svevo was someone she was supposed to like. Once her father, the professor, or her boss, the Very Important Editor, had sung the praises of Svevo. But other times, railing against the “male literary establishment,” she’d assert (to Nate, never to her coworkers) the value of some schmaltzy if well-meaning piece of middlebrow fiction about a girl and her mother, or a girl and her best friend, or a girl and the black woman who helped to raise her, who together combated predatory males and social injustice and ultimately learned the redemptive power of love. Those were the books she really liked, Nate realized after a while. The Svevo, the aging intellectuals of the
New York Review of Books
—all that, it turned out, was for show, even if she was putting on the show for herself as much as for anyone else.

Nate wished, for her sake, that she’d relax about it, realize it was okay not to be some kind of highbrow intellectual. She’d
surely be happier at a different type of magazine, a less stuffy one, perhaps one of those Web sites for smart, independent women, where she wouldn’t have to disguise her tastes and where, freed from the need to posture, her verbal cleverness, her knack for snappy aperçus, would come into play. (She was always criticizing him in the most
clever
and
imaginative
terms.) But, no, the high opinion of people like her father and her boss meant too much to her. She had to do something they valued, not something that she valued. Nate felt tenderness toward her when he saw her situation in those terms. Elisa was a beautiful, intelligent woman trying desperately to make herself into a slightly different kind of intelligent woman.