The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (20 page)

While he and Hannah waited for Aurit to arrive, Nate scanned the menu and saw that the place was more expensive than he would have liked. He felt a twinge of irritation.

He had lately started to worry that he was spending too much, little by little letting his standard of living edge upward, as if his book advance money could never be depleted. As he’d just been reminded, freelance journalism assignments were unpredictable.
And no matter how much he sometimes romanticized the past, he really didn’t want to ever have to temp again.

“Hello! Sorry!” Aurit trilled a few minutes later as she sent semi-ironic air kisses at them.

A large leather purse and a pair of sunglasses and a set of headphones were peeled away and placed in a pile on the table. Once unencumbered, Aurit collapsed into the chair next to Nate’s. “I’ve been on the phone with my mother,” she said breathlessly. “Here’s the thing about my mother …”

The story that followed dated back to childhood. Aurit’s mother, in this telling, had long nursed an idea of herself as very sensible and self-sacrificing and unfrivolous. She propped up her self-image by constantly invoking a comparison between herself and these other women, “who’ve never had a job, who never,
ever
cook—they hire caterers whenever more than two people come over—who shop all the time, who resent their daughters’ youth, who never read. As a kid, I bought the whole thing. It’s only over time that I started to wonder where all these vapid, lazy, superficial women are. I’ve never encountered anyone quite so bad, let alone an army of such women, except maybe on
Dallas
. Then I realized the only place they exist is in her head, where they play a very important role. She can justify almost anything she does because she truly, deep-down believes she’s more than entitled to have her ‘modest’ wishes granted, given the extreme and almost unparalleled excellence of her character, relative to other women.”

Both Nate and Hannah were laughing.

Aurit shook her head. “It’s like someone who surrounds himself with people who are less intelligent than he is so he can feel smart. Only she does it in her head.
So
fucked up.”

“I know just what you mean,” Hannah said.

It soon became evident to Nate that Hannah and Aurit liked each other. This had not been a given, particularly not on Aurit’s end. Aurit was very picky and frequently evinced what seemed, to him, to be an arbitrary dislike for people he liked, especially
women. But Aurit’s approval didn’t make him as happy as he’d hoped. Throughout the meal, he experienced a disorienting and rather emasculating feeling of being subsumed by a klatch of gabbing women. Aurit’s and Hannah’s combined selves created a stronger pull than either woman on her own. Instead of settling halfway between Nate’s sensibility and Hannah’s or Aurit’s, the conversation was weighted toward the feminine. There was a giddily confidential, almost salacious quality to it. Moreover, Aurit and Hannah seemed to have decided beforehand to express only unequivocal agreement with whatever the other said. (When Hannah said she bought only cruelty-free chickens, did Aurit have to nod and coo quite so agreeably?—when, as Nate well knew, Aurit felt nothing but scorn for “Americans’ childish sentimentality about animals.”) Their enthusiastic supportiveness created a close, cloying atmosphere that made Nate clamor to get out.

“Did you have an okay time?” Hannah asked when the two of them were walking back to her place. “You seemed kind of quiet.”

“It was fine.”

He glanced through the open doorway of a restaurant kitchen. A white-smocked Hispanic man was stirring a steaming pot. “I just think Aurit sometimes dominates the conversation,” he said. “Not to mention the way she pronounces judgment on everyone but herself. Does she really think she’s above reproach?”

Hannah laughed. “She’s, uhm,
your
friend.”

“Yeah.”

He and Hannah didn’t speak much as they walked along quiet streets of brownstones. Nate knew there was a slight edge to his silence. His conscience told him he should say something to set Hannah’s mind at ease—say he was tired or something. He didn’t. Although his irritation was directed primarily at Aurit, it was sprawling enough to take in Hannah at the edges. There had been, in her effort to be agreeable, something slightly insipid, a sort of relaxation of her usual quick, decisive judgment. She had gone along with Aurit, matching Aurit’s girly, gossipy tone. She wasn’t
usually like that. But this criticism was so ungenerous that it made him feel guilty. Hannah had, after all, been gamely trying to get on with his friend while he had mostly been sullen and not much help.

As Hannah unlocked her door, it occurred to him that they had been spending a lot of nights at her place. He’d prefer if they alternated between his and hers. Tonight, her place made sense, because of the location of the restaurant, but still … he wasn’t thrilled. Inside, he checked the status of the package he’d sent his mother for her birthday. (It was, as it had been several hours earlier, in transit.) Then he checked the results of a baseball game and scanned the lead stories in the
Times
. When he finally got into bed, he and Hannah began fooling around. He wasn’t really in the mood, but he went along from tact or inertia.

Soon Hannah was going down on him. It wasn’t working. He started thinking about Eugene and the review. Then he thought about how he hadn’t heard back from the editor he’d written to about his commodification-of-conscience essay. He remembered the day he’d gotten Hannah’s first e-mail, when she’d quibbled with him about the idea. He’d thought to himself that sooner or later his dick was going to wind up in her mouth. Well, here it was.

He shut his eyes, trying to squeeze out all this unpleasant consciousness. He craved blankness, an absence of everything except for the sensation of Hannah’s mouth on his cock. After a moment, he gave up. He guided Hannah away from him, pulling her face to his so he could kiss her.

Not long after, she drew back, tucking herself in like the letter
S
. “I … uhm …”

“Hmm?” he said.

“I was wondering … Is there maybe something you want me to do differently when I, you know, do that? I just wondered …”

She bit her lower lip.

“Oh!” Nate said.

As it happened, he had, more than once, felt slightly dissatisfied
on this very score. It hadn’t reached the level of “problem,” but he had been fleetingly conscious of a small frustration. Strategically timed grunts and moans and gentle manual guidance he’d offered (by way of his hand on her head), intended to point the way toward some minor recalibration, had not been effective. But the complaint had always evaporated in the course of things, when they moved from one act to another. There is, after all, more than one way to skin a cat. Still.

“Uhm …,” he began.

He had always had a hard time talking about sex. That is, he had no problem discussing sex in general terms or sex as an intellectual or psychological or historical concept. When he was younger, he had enjoyed discussing various real or ideal women’s bodies with his friends. But the other kind of sex talk, about what felt good and what didn’t—this thing of
giving instructions
, saying, “touch me this way,” “please do this, not that,” even “faster” or “harder”—he found, had always found, excruciating. The prospect made him feel lecherous and animalistic and most of all unsexy, as if whatever modicum of sexiness he possessed was derived from careful, curatorial self-presentation.

Typically, the only way he could do it, state aloud what he wanted, was to go all out, sort of become a different person—the kind who could tell, not ask, a woman to take him all the way in her mouth or to suck his balls or to get on her back and spread her legs. His voice, when he said these things, sounded different, hard and flat, stripped of its usual amiability. To get to this state, he had to drum up a certain amount of contempt for the woman (because he didn’t speak to any human being this way, in any other context). He’d feel himself slip out of a more civilized, woman-respecting mind-set, as if this way of being weren’t really of him but merely an acquired habit, like separating out bottles and cans for recycling.

It wasn’t really a place he liked to go. It didn’t matter that many women claimed to like being treated that way, to get off
on it. In fact, that depressed him. After he came, he inevitably felt a bit disgusted, with himself and the situation, by which he meant, in large part, the woman he was with.

There had to be another way.

Hannah was sitting upright, naked, her eyes cast downward and her hair falling forward on her face.

Nate pulled the bedsheet up around his waist, covering himself. “I, uh …”

Their eyes met. Hannah’s expression was meek and almost beatific in a kind of nervous desire to please.

Nate saw that it was hopeless. It had been a long day. He was tired. He didn’t, just then, have it in him to look into those big, kind, cruelty-free-chicken-buying eyes and tell her he’d like her to suck his balls first and to please apply gentler but more consistent pressure with her mouth and to go deeper and, simultaneously, to flatten her tongue so it sort of cradled the seam as she moved up and down his shaft, and, finally, that it would also be great if she could caress the skin between his scrotum and his anus with her fingers.

“What you do is great,” he said.

“Because you could tell me if …”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

From somewhere outside Hannah’s apartment, a boom box whose insistent bass Nate had barely been conscious of was abruptly switched off.

He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. He wanted to be outside, in the fresh air. He liked Hannah’s apartment, but he’d never particularly liked her bedroom. She had one of those big, freestanding wooden mirrors, draped with scarves and belts and other feminine things, from which wafted all sorts of artificial floral vapors. The sight of it had always depressed him, recalling to him the fusty home of his childhood piano teacher, a Quakerly widow with a long gray braid down her back. Then there was Hannah’s closet. Teeming with hanging clothes and stacks of blue jeans
and sweaters crammed into every available space, with a brigade of boots and pumps and sneakers in clear plastic pouches bounding downward from racks attached to the doors, the closet haunted him even unseen. It almost too neatly embodied so much that was unattractive about women: mustiness, materialism, clutter.

He also realized that he disliked the corduroy throw pillows on her bed, one of which was currently wedged under his shoulder.

He wanted to get up, to walk through the cool night to his apartment, to get in his own bed, by himself, with a book, porn on his computer if he wanted it.
Why did she have to be so unsexy about it—so like a wounded dog? How the hell was that supposed to have made him feel?
But he knew if he tried to leave, he’d just implicate himself. The only guaranteed way to avoid a scene—“what’s wrong? why are you upset?”—was to stay put, act normal. Cuddle. What did it matter anyway? Soon he’d be asleep, and then it would be morning.

He tossed the throw pillow from the bed and pulled Hannah close to him. “You smell good,” he said. He wasn’t sure who fell asleep first, which probably meant he did.

Ooh, kale,” Cara said. “I never could find kale in Baltimore.”

Nate and Hannah and Mark smiled in sympathy. They were seated in the backyard of a new and trendy farm-to-table-type restaurant. The night had been billed as a “double date.”

It was a pleasant September evening. The restaurant’s yard was lit up by hanging lanterns and furnished with splintery-looking wooden tables and benches. A waiter arrived and began expiating upon a variety of specials featuring early autumn vegetables. The young man’s checkered shirt and high-waisted pants reminded Nate less of a farmer than a scarecrow.

When the waiter left, Nate tore off a piece of hard-crusted bread. “How’s the job search?” he asked Cara.

She set down her menu. “Terrible. That’s to be expected, I guess. Everyone I know who is my age is vastly overqualified for the jobs that are out there. I mean, answering phones?” She shook her head. “It’s a real problem.”

Nate murmered something that passed for assent.

“Cara’s honors thesis on Baudrillard won the top prize in the comp lit department at Stanford,” Mark said brightly.

“Is that right?”

When Nate met Hannah’s eye, he was relieved to see from her expression that she found Cara as grating as he did. Under the table, he took Hannah’s hand, pressing his fingers into her palm and running his thumb along her knuckles.

After their (non)conversation about blowjobs the week before, he had avoided her for several days, claiming to be busy or tired. He knew his annoyance wasn’t fair, but he had wanted the awkward recollection, and the unfamiliar feeling of her apartment as stifling, to fade from his mind. It had—basically. Maybe they’d begun to see each other a little less than they once had, but surely that was to be expected as time wore on.

The waiter brought their drinks. Cara said something about video games. Their popularity portended badly for American society. She mentioned Europe and sighed in a way that suggested young men never played video games there.

“I don’t know,” Hannah said. “The people I know who play a lot of video games could be up to a lot worse. You know, doing actual harm to others. At least this keeps them occupied.” She shrugged. “Maybe I just know some fucked-up people.”

Nate chortled.

Cara was less amused. Her face was slow to change expression, like an old clock face behind which heavy wheels had to turn. It took a moment for the set of her eyebrows and lips to register perplexity.

“That’s one way of looking at it, I guess,” she said.

Mark jumped in to say that Hannah was onto something with the “distraction from worse” argument. “There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that people are less violent than they used to be.”

As soon as he realized that he’d basically taken up the opposing side, Mark looked nervously at Cara. Nate recognized the anxious solicitude of a guy who gets laid only when certain conditions are met. Poor Mark, Nate thought.