The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (21 page)

“I’m not saying that video games make people violent,” Cara said a little pettishly.

Suddenly, Nate felt a bit sorry for
her
. She was pretty, self-possessed, and intelligent enough, but she was fresh out of school and repeating opinions that were no doubt fashionable there. In time, she would catch the tone of New York. Her schoolmarmishness was provincial. Here it was all about the counterintuitive. She’d learn. Besides, being pretty, self-possessed, and intelligent enough would go a long way, and if she wasn’t well connected before she started dating Mark, she would be now.

Their waiter walked briskly past, foodless. Nate squelched a yawn. Time seemed to be moving very slowly. Even Mark was different in Cara’s company. His sense of humor seemed blunted, as if he couldn’t simultaneously exercise it and ensure Cara’s minuteto-minute happiness.

Nate felt a stirring of appreciation for Hannah. He knew that if he had been single, had been eating dinner alone with Mark and Mark’s new girlfriend, he would have gotten a little depressed. Cara would have seemed, however solipsistically, a stand-in for women in general—his future, more or less. He was glad to have met someone so … reasonable, so
not ridiculous
, someone he liked as much as he desired.

When, finally, they were dividing up the check, Nate happened to catch a sidelong glance at Cara. He was momentarily struck by just how good-looking she was. But then Mark had always been a very shallow guy, in terms of women. Then, it occurred to Nate that Mark could very well feel sorry for
him
, just because technically Cara was better-looking than Hannah (although Hannah was, as far as he was concerned, far more appealing). Still, it was a weird thought, and he pushed it aside. Sometimes he wished he could turn his brain off.

Back at his apartment, Hannah told him that her friend Susan was coming to town from Chicago that weekend.

She was sitting Indian-style on his bed, with a weeks-old issue of the
New Yorker
in her lap. “Do you want to have brunch with us on Sunday?” she asked.

Nate was standing in the doorway. He combed a hand through his hair.

This invitation didn’t do much for him. Hannah had described Susan as one of those people who sees her life as a long series of injustices perpetrated against her by various assholes. If you take issue with her account, you’re one of the assholes. A real charmer, she sounded like.

Besides, he wasn’t big on brunch as a social to-do. This one was easy to imagine: 11:00, wait in line with all the other yuppies at hip new restaurant, make tired conversation about whatever Susan does for a living and how New York compares to Chicago; 11:30, order a Bloody Mary, still standing outside, still waiting to be seated; 12:00, at the table, order inadvisable second Bloody Mary in attempt to stave off creeping boredom/existential despair; 12:30, split the check and silently regret blowing thirty dollars (the extra ten for the second Bloody Mary) when he would have been happier with the six-dollar Sunday Special (two eggs, bacon, home fries, and toast) at the nongentrified diner on his street.

Hannah had already taken out her contacts. She peered at him from above the rims of her glasses. Her hair was in a ponytail. Nate’s glance flitted to the milk crate beside his bed. On it sat a stack of upcoming books that he wanted to go through with an eye to pitching reviews or essays. Reading in a leisurely, exploratory sort of way was just the kind of thing he enjoyed doing on a Saturday or Sunday, perhaps at home, perhaps at a sports bar with a game on in the background. He’d intended to spend last weekend this way, but it had gotten away from him. He wasn’t entirely happy about that. When you’re single, your weekend days are wide-open vistas that extend in every direction; in a relationship, they’re like the sky over Manhattan: punctured, hemmed in, compressed.

Nate scratched the back of his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not sure what I’m doing.”

He smiled nervously.

“Okay,” Hannah said.

Nate couldn’t read her expression, but instantly he felt apprehensive. Hannah turned back to the magazine. Almost unconsciously he remained where he was.

After a moment, Hannah looked up. “
What
?”

He stepped back. “Nothing!”

“God! I can’t stand this!”

“Can’t stand
what
?”

“You! Standing there, waiting for me to get mad at you because you don’t want to get brunch.” She made a face at him. “I don’t care. I don’t care if you come or not.”

“Okay …,” Nate said slowly. “But you asked me if I wanted to come, so I just naturally assumed that you cared, at least a little bit?”

Hannah took off her glasses and held them in her hand. “It’s like you want to make me out to be some kind of demanding, hysterical girlfriend,” she said. “That’s not who I am.”

Nate was momentarily confused. He certainly hadn’t expected her to be
this
angry. Then it sunk in what she was accusing him of. He heard his voice rise as he spoke. “Can you maybe tell me how exactly I made you out to be ‘demanding and hysterical’? Was it something I said? Because I don’t remember saying a damned thing.”

“It’s like … you just … ugh!”

Hannah stood up, and the magazine slid from her lap, landing in a heap on the floor. “It’s just this vibe.”

“A
vibe
?” Nate repeated, the word inflected with weeks of unspoken tension.

Hannah flushed.

Her discomposure had the effect of making Nate feel more composed.

“As far as I recall,” he said coolly, “you asked me a question and I answered, and now you are mad at me for assuming, like a complete asshole, that you cared about my answer.”

Hannah closed her eyes and inhaled through her nose. “What I mean is that it’s not some test. I care like I care if we get Thai food or sushi whether you come or not.”

“Great. Brunch. Not a test. Noted.”

“Will you quit it with the sarcasm?
I get it.
It’s not about brunch. It’s how you’ve been acting. I feel you putting me into this box. I am not that person, and I resent you for making me out to be that person.”

They were now standing head to head, with only about a foot of space between them. Nate felt energized—wholly awake.

“You realize I have no clue what you are talking about,” he said. “What person am I making you out to be?”

She didn’t blink. “The person forcing you to give up your freedom.”

“Wait, am I the one in the box? Who’s in the box? You or me?”

Nate felt himself shifting his weight from one leg to the other the way he did when he played football.

“Fuck you, Nate,” Hannah said. “Just fuck you. You know what I mean. Or you would if you were being honest.”

He threw up his hands in a pantomime of disbelief. “Excuse me for listening and trying to understand what you’re saying.”

“Fine.” She shook her head. “Have it your way. I’m just being ridiculous.”

Nate didn’t contradict her. They stared at each other. “I’m going to brush my teeth,” he said finally.

“Great.”

The bathroom’s fluorescent light was oppressively bright. A few of Hannah’s long hairs were stuck to the grimy white porcelain of his sink. Nate felt a little shaky as he lingered over his teeth. He’d been mean, he knew he’d been mean, but she’d started it. There was no denying that.
Making her out to be demanding and hysterical?
He hadn’t done
anything
.

He decided to floss. It occurred to him that maybe she’d have gotten up and gotten dressed. Maybe she’d pack up her things and leave. He approached the bedroom warily. Hannah was on the bed.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice was contrite but not otherwise emotional. “I’m sorry I blew up like that.”

Nate was surprised to find himself disappointed. Not that she hadn’t left—he hadn’t really expected her to—but that she seemed normal again. When she’d been acting crazy, he’d had license to give vent to that pent-up tension, and yet to be also beautifully, effortlessly
right
. Something he’d learned with Elisa: it was not always unpleasant to deal with a hysterical woman. One feels so thoroughly righteous in comparison. Now he felt as if he were deflating. Although he hadn’t been conscious of being turned on before—he’d been fairly disgusted by Hannah’s hair in the sink—he felt his cock slackening, as if without his noticing it, he had been a bit hard.

“It’s no big deal,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I think we should talk about it.”

“Everyone needs to blow off steam sometimes.”

“I mean, the reason why.”

Of course she did.

Nate sank into his desk chair, feeling dispirited, vanquished. He crossed his legs and then immediately uncrossed them.

“I’m sure it seemed to come out of nowhere to you,” Hannah said in a fair and reasonable tone of voice, an aggravatingly fair and reasonable tone of voice. A voice that compelled him to be fair and reasonable too. “I think I reacted the way I did because I felt like you were waiting for me to burst into tears about brunch with Susan. It just seemed narcissistic or something. I don’t know, it just pissed me off.”

In spite of himself, Nate smiled.

She went on. “It’s just that lately I’ve had this sense that something is different. With you, or with us, and I keep waiting for you to say something … I don’t want to be the kind of girlfriend who analyzes every little thing or makes us talk things to death—I really don’t—but if something is up, I wish you’d just tell me. I
don’t expect things to be exactly like they were when we first started dating. But don’t
oblige
me, like you’re the put-upon boyfriend.” Hannah sat up very straight; her tone became more insistent, almost defiant. “If you don’t want this, fine. I’m not some girl who is dying to be in a relationship.”

Nate leaned back in his desk chair so its two front wheels were raised off the ground. Pretty much every relationship conversation he had ever been party to included more or less the same caveats. Apparently, no woman in the early twenty-first century is the kind of woman who (a) wants a boyfriend or (b) wants to talk about her relationship, no matter how much she (a) wants a boyfriend and (b) wants to talk about her relationship.

As he rocked the chair back to face her, Nate cleared this unnice thought from his mind.

“Hannah,” he said gently, “I’m not ‘obliging’ you. I don’t know what gave you that idea.”

She tugged at her ponytail. “It’s just—well, I hope you know that I don’t think we have to spend every second together. I don’t
want
to. But if you make excuses not to see me, as if you think I’m going to get mad at you, or if you skulk around and act guilty because you don’t want to have brunch with my friend, it makes me feel like it’s a bigger deal, like there’s something else you’re trying to tell me.”

With his foot, Nate traced a circle on the floor. He said, “I thought you might be disappointed, that’s all. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Hannah nodded. “That’s fair,” she said. “I overreacted. I’m sorry.”

She looked the way she sounded—sincere. An uncomfortable feeling had come over Nate. Now that he’d been accorded the full power to forgive, he didn’t feel sure he deserved it. Even when they’d been fighting, he’d had some inkling of the box she’d been referring to. He might have feigned a bit more ignorance than he could honestly claim. But then the whole thing had happened so fast—he had just been defending himself.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, feeling that the least he could do was be gracious. “I’m just glad you’re not mad. And I’m sorry I was mean before. I guess I felt attacked.”

“I can understand that,” Hannah said. “And I’ll drop this, I promise, but just to be clear … I don’t care about Sunday. Susan isn’t a close friend. But”—she paused and looked at him intently, her hazel eyes round and luminous in the light from his lamp—“if you
are
on some level unhappy, it would be better to say so now, before—”

“Hannah.”

Nate rested a hand on each of her knees. Whatever mild dissatisfaction he had felt recently had been displaced by the fight, by Hannah’s feistiness, by the moment’s intensity.

“I like you. I want to be with you. The only thing I’m trying to tell you is that I don’t want to have brunch with your friend Susan on Sunday. I hate to say it, but you didn’t really make her sound all that appealing.” He cocked his head. “You might want to work on your sales pitch next time.”

“It’s just that lately you sometimes seem a little—”

“I’ve been a little stressed,” he cut in. “I thought by now I’d be well into another book, but I’m not. All I’ve got is an idea, and even that’s vague. I feel as if I ought to be working night and day until I figure that out. I don’t have a regular gig the way you do with the health news.”

Hannah hugged her knees to her chest. “You want to do the health news?” she said. “Be my guest.”

Nate sat down beside her on the bed. When she stretched, he could make out her nipples through the thin fabric of her T-shirt. “You know what I mean,” he said.

The issue seemed, to him, to have been resolved, but they continued to talk for a while longer. This didn’t really surprise him. In his experience, women, once they got started, exhibited a rather insatiable desire to confess, elaborate, iron out, reveal, and so on and so forth. Nate exerted himself to be patient. Hannah was generally an extremely easygoing girlfriend, more easygoing
than anyone he’d dated since Kristen. He didn’t begrudge her a little girlishness. They went to bed on good terms.

But she brought it up again the next time he saw her. They were on the subway, coming back from Manhattan.

“I feel kind of ridiculous about the other night,” she said. “Getting so mad and then making us talk and talk. I hope you don’t think I’m really … I don’t know …”

The words trailed off, and she smiled helplessly as she waited for him to rescue her from her own sentence.

Nate’s thoughts had been far removed from relationship issues, and he didn’t feel like getting drawn into another of those conversations. He also didn’t like being pressured to provide reassurances on demand, being made to perform his affection at someone else’s bidding, like a trained seal. Besides, it seemed that in soliciting assurance—after everything that had been said the other night—Hannah was allowing herself to give in to a neurotic compulsion. That wasn’t something he wanted to reward.