The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (22 page)

“It’s
fine
,” he said in the kind of cold, flat voice that only someone with serious Asperger’s would take at face value.

Hannah’s expression indicated to Nate that she did not suffer from Asperger’s syndrome.

Nate looked away, a little repelled by the near panic he’d seen on her face. He was also afraid that if he looked at her, he’d feel bad and apologize, and he didn’t want to feel bad or apologize. He didn’t want to feel like the big bad wolf just because he wouldn’t play this particular feminine parlor game.

He stared across the aisle at a little boy who slept with his head on his mother’s shoulder. The boy’s small calves were visible between the bottom of his pants and his socks.

After a minute, Nate’s irritation faded, dissolving almost as quickly as it had come on. She’d been a little insecure; it wasn’t the worst thing.

“Sorry,” he said, turning to her. “I didn’t mean to snap at you.”

The panic had been wiped clean from her face. Her expression
was blank, hard. As she considered his apology, she seemed to relax.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It’s not a big deal.”

Nothing more was said, and for the rest of the evening, they were resolutely light and cheerful.

Nate held his cordless phone to his ear with one hand as he halfheartedly sponged his kitchen counter with the other. He found his parents easier to talk to if he engaged simultaneously in other tasks.

He spoke first to his father, who was not actually that hard to deal with. All Nate had to do was be polite and impersonally pleasant, the way he would if he were talking to a well-meaning but nosy stranger, someone he met, say, in the line at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

“Did you get the next payment from your publisher yet?” his father asked. “You know that every day they hold on to that money, it’s accruing interest that is rightfully yours.”

“They made the payment, right on schedule,” Nate assured him. “My agent has the money. She’ll write me a check.”

“Minus fifteen percent,” his father said in a tone that suggested that this was a “Gotcha!” moment.

“Yes, dad. Minus fifteen percent.”

“You know, Nathaniel … ,” his father began. No argument could convince him that, as an aeronautical engineer, he might not have sufficient knowledge of the publishing industry to determine that the services of a literary agent were unnecessary.

Nate switched the phone from one ear to the other and rested it between his shoulder and his ear so both his hands were free. He began lifting up the grills of his stove and scrubbing the surfaces underneath with a Brillo pad.

“Have you given any thought to self-publishing the next one?” his father asked. “I’ve read that a number of established authors are starting to do that. Once they have a following, they don’t need the publisher’s name. This way, all the profits come to you. Eh?”

“I’ll look into it.”

Nate walked to the window and pulled up the blinds. Sunlight streamed into the kitchen.

His mother got on the line. She began telling him a story about the people at her work, how they were all moony about some television series “on HBO or Showtime or some such nonsense.”

From a hundred and eighty miles away, Nate could feel her gathering energy, the satisfying torrent of contempt she was whipping herself into.

“They say that it’s as good as a nineteenth-century novel,” she said, her speech growing more rapid. “And these are supposed to be the ‘smart’ young people. They went to Georgetown and Columbia—practically Ivy League schools.”

Through the window, the leaves on the trees’ topmost branches were already beginning to fall off.

“Like Tolstoy!”

“That’s nuts …,” Nate agreed.

But his tone was too mild. He felt rather than heard his mother’s silence.

Unlike his father, his mother required that she and Nate be in vociferous accord. In colorful, overheated language, she framed life as a drama between “we” and the rest of the world, otherwise known as “those idiots.” As a child, Nate had loved being on her side. Not only was she beautiful, with her long, honey-colored hair and tightly belted dresses, not only did her exotic French and Russian novels and aristocratic unhappiness appeal to his imagination, but
her side was also so clearly the right one. It was the side of sensible governance: potholes filled in, corruption punished, Democrats elected, Israeli passenger planes and cruise ships not hijacked (the last position reiterated often after sixty-eight-year-old, wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer was pushed overboard from the
Achille Lauro
when Nate was in the fourth grade). Hers was also the side of intelligence. (She had a moral disdain for stupidity and instinctively regarded Nate’s classmates in the slow reading group with suspicion, as children of dubious character.) She stood for the appreciation of culture, especially literature, theater, and museums. When Nate got older, it was her smugness that bothered him. He was put off by the invocation of this all-thwarting “they,” and the certain knowledge that all problems would be summarily solved if only “we” weren’t obstructed at every turn. But if he questioned this presumption, his mother took it as an attack or clucked that he was too young and naive to understand. Their adult relationship was built on his willingness to humor her. Unless he was able to summon the energy and patience to appear to join her in this cloistered, airless “we,” he—the son for whose sake she had left her home to start over in a new country—was rejecting her. With his dad, all he had to do was not argue.

Blinking into the sun as he gazed out the window, Nate knew he had failed. She’d sensed condescension in his tepid agreement.
He went to Harvard, and now he thinks he’s too good for me.
She sucked in her breath sharply, as if it were her very soul she’d offered up to him and which she was now withdrawing. As clearly as if she were standing before him, he could see her nostrils flare once or twice.

It was too much, he knew—what his mother wanted of him. It wasn’t fair or reasonable, his friends would tell him. But neither had her life been fair or reasonable. In Romania, she’d been denied all sorts of academic honors because she was Jewish. She wasn’t even permitted to major in literature, as the humanities were
almost entirely closed to Jews. She’d slept on a couch in the living room of her parents’ one-bedroom apartment in a concrete tenement until the day she married Nate’s father, whose family was a little better off. Then she’d come here and worked as a computer programmer—so that Nate could attend private school, so that he could go to a good college.

Nate leaned his forehead against the glass windowpane. “How have you been, Mom?”

“Fine.” Her voice was tight and small.

He closed the blinds and shuffled back to the sink, sliding a little on the linoleum in his socks and tightening his grip on the phone. They were the reason he had this stupid cordless phone. His parents had insisted on a landline—“in case of an emergency.” The only people who used it were the two of them and the telemarketers.

“You think I’m old-fashioned,” his mother said after a moment. “Narrow-minded.”

The sigh that punctuated this remark was a finely honed symphony of self-pity.

“
Mom
,” Nate said. “I don’t even
have
a TV. Of course I don’t think you’re narrow-minded.”

She let out a small chuckle. “I guess we’re both a little bit backward.”

“I guess so.”

There was another, less fraught silence.

“How’s Hannah?” she asked finally.
Henna
was how it sounded from her lips.

Nate squeezed the water from his sponge.

“She’s okay.”

Several evenings later, he was sitting in Hannah’s living room, reading Eugene’s review of the British novelist’s new book.

“Nate?”

The review was good—very good, Nate had to admit. Eugene was good.

“Nate?” Hannah said again.

Reluctantly, Nate laid the article down. Hannah was standing with her hands in her back pockets. “Yes?”

“What do you feel like doing tonight?”

Nate closed his eyes. What did he and Hannah usually do together? For a moment, he couldn’t remember. Then he thought of the long nights of animated conversation they used to have, over the summer—nights when they’d never needed to “do” anything. He wasn’t in the mood for that sort of …
communion
of togetherness. Certainly not.

He thought maybe he felt like watching baseball. The playoffs were approaching, and there was a game he was mildly interested in for its potential negative impact on the Yankees.

Hannah said sure, they could go to a sports bar.

They went to a place called Outpost, an unfortunate name, in Nate’s opinion, for a newish establishment that appeared to be patronized almost exclusively by the white people who’d begun to move into the historically black neighborhood in which it was located.

The game hadn’t started yet. When they sat down, Hannah told him she’d decided to take on some copyediting work for extra money. She started describing the exacting requirements of the publisher she was doing the work for.

Was this his life now? Nate wondered as she spoke. Sitting across from Hannah at various tables, in various restaurants and bars? Ad infinitum. Was this what he’d committed himself to the night they’d had that fight about brunch and he’d reassured her, told her that it was safe—that he was into this?

He tore off the slip of paper that kept his napkin rolled up and began toying with his knife and fork.

He tried to focus on what Hannah was saying—still about the copyediting job—but he found himself wondering how much she
needed the money. At the rate she was going, she’d never finish her book proposal. Besides, her father was a corporate lawyer. He didn’t doubt she could get money from him if she needed it. A nice luxury if you had it.

Though it was the last day of September, the evening was warm. Hannah had taken off her jacket. Underneath she was wearing a strappy tank top. It became her. She had nice shoulders. But when she moved her arms in emphasis of some point, Nate noticed that the skin underneath jiggled a little bit, like a much older woman’s. It was odd because she was quite fit. He felt bad for noticing and worse for being a little repelled. And yet he was transfixed. The distaste he felt, in its crystalline purity, was perversely pleasurable. He kept waiting for her to wave her arms again.

When she finished her story, he just nodded.

He was hungry. Where was their food? he wanted to know. “Why do you think it’s taking so long?” he said.

Hannah looked a little surprised by his vehemence. She raised her hands, her palms facing up. “No idea.”

She asked him a few questions about what he’d been up to. His answers were short. He couldn’t rouse himself to match her mood of cheerful pleasantry. If she were a stranger—a mere friend or acquaintance—it would be nothing, nothing at all, to fall into the rhythms of polite if banal conversation. But it was different with Hannah. Being with her had rarely entailed that kind of obligatory social performance; to start treating it that way now seemed like a defeat. Or a capitulation.

Hannah tried to fill the vacuum. As she flitted from topic to topic, Nate began to feel as if he were watching her from a remove, evaluating her. Even though she spoke with a fair amount of wit—she was telling a story about a friend’s “almost aggressive tactfulness; she doesn’t wait until you finish talking to start agreeing with you and supporting you”—something in her tone, an eagerness to please, a quality that was almost pleading, grated on him.

“Nate?” she asked finally.

“Yeah?”

“Is everything okay? You seem kind of … I don’t know …
distracted
?”

“I’m fine,” he said. He flashed a quick smile to compensate for what was unconvincing in his voice.

A moment later, Hannah got up to use the ladies’ room. As he watched her walk away, he noticed that the jeans she was wearing made her bottom half look bigger than her top half, her hips and ass strangely wide and flat. He wondered why none of her girlfriends had told her this, about the jeans. Why hadn’t she herself noticed? After all, a huge, full-length mirror took up a quarter of her bedroom.

When she returned, she asked if he was mad at her.

As if she had done anything that would have entitled him to be mad at her. Why the fuck did women, no matter how smart, how
independent
, inevitably revert to this state of willed imbecility? It wasn’t as if he had the emotional register of a binary system, as if his only states of being were “happy” and “mad at her.”

“No,” he said. “I’m not
mad
at you.”

She drew back.

Before anything more was said, the waiter brought their burgers.
Finally.
The game began. As he ate, Nate turned his attention to the television screen above the bar. He began to feel better.

“That really hit the spot,” he said of his burger.

Hannah was doing something on her phone and didn’t look up.

Nate pretended not to notice. “How’s yours?”

She raised her gaze slowly and blinked several times, as if trying to determine by this means if he could really be such a moron. “You’re asking me how my burger is?”

“
I’m sorry
,” he said. “Sometimes I get grouchy when I’m hungry. It’s no excuse, but I am sorry.”

“Whatever.”

“I should probably start carrying nuts in my pockets.”

He saw the barest hint of a smile. She immediately suppressed it. But it was a start.

In the process of wheedling Hannah back into good humor, Nate, too, was revived. Having a project—getting back into Hannah’s good graces—dispelled boredom and silenced that critical voice. He told her (because women love talking about personal life) about Aurit, who was flipping out because Hans was still balking about moving to New York.

“She treats his concern for his career like it’s a transparent excuse. I’ve got to get her to quit that before she really pisses him off.”

By the time their plates were cleared, all traces of Nate’s former mood were gone. He appreciated that Hannah had gone along with his desire to watch baseball. He had a good time.