The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (25 page)

“That might have just been something he said in the moment, not the sum total of his life’s thought on inequality,” Nate suggested.

“Maybe,” Hannah said. “He was kind of a callow guy, though.”

Nate smiled. He knew who the guy was. And he was an asshole. A tall, good-looking asshole.

Hannah squinted at her empty glass and then reached for the bottle of bourbon. Nate nearly told her to cool it but at the last moment stopped himself. Did he want to be that guy? They weren’t in the restaurant, in public, anymore. Why the hell shouldn’t she drink? Why shouldn’t he?

He swallowed the contents of his glass. “Pour me some, too, if you don’t mind.”

Hannah brightened. “Sure!”

“Can I ask you something?” she said after she set the bottle down.

“Sure.”

“What happened?”

Then, as if she knew that Nate would be tempted to feign ignorance, she added. “With us, I mean.”

Nate supposed he’d known all along—when he’d agreed to accompany her to the living room—that this was where things were going. This was what they’d come out here for. Yet he still felt an impulse to pretend he didn’t know what she was talking about—to deflect or postpone this conversation.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Did I
do
something?”

When Nate spoke, his voice came out raspy, more pained than he expected. “I don’t think—no.”

He wished he could blame it on her—assign a cause. But he knew it was him. Whatever had happened, it was him.

“No, you didn’t do anything,” he repeated.

He looked at her. She was pale. The expression on her face so precisely mirrored how he felt, the sense of helplessness that had come over him. Almost without being aware, he got up and walked to her chair, perching on its arm. His irritation had faded. He felt protective and tender toward her. He was glad. It made him feel human and humane.

She scooted over, and he slid down beside her on the seat of the chair.

“I think, maybe, I’m just not very good at relationships,” he said.

“Maybe we should just admit it’s not working,” she said. “I mean, right? A month ago if someone told me what things would be like between us, I would have said, no, I’d never stand for that. But I keep negotiating down what I think is okay. I like you—my problem is that I do like you. There’s something about you …” She stopped and then sat up straighter. She started again in a new, more decisive tone. “But this thing, this thing that we’ve become, is sapping something from me.”

Nate turned to her bookshelf. He began trying to make out individual titles in the dark.

“You can’t be happy either,” Hannah said.

No.
As he tore his eyes from the books to meet hers, he was, as a matter of fact, nearly overwhelmed by sadness. It gusted over him. He felt almost unbearably lonely. He wondered whether he was flawed on some deep level, whether—in spite of all the friends who seemed to think he was a good guy (and he
was
a pretty good friend), in spite of being a fairly decent son—there was something terribly wrong with him. Did romance reveal some truth, a fundamental lack, a coldness, that made him shrink back at just the moment when reciprocity was called for?

He shuddered. As he drew in his breath, he took in the scent of Hannah’s hair. It smelled of coconut—of what he now knew to
be the cheap drugstore coconut shampoo she kept in her bathroom, the kind of shampoo that would make Aurit or Elisa curl their lips in disdain.

He remembered how much fun he’d had with her in the beginning, their early dates, how she’d made him laugh, how she’d surprised him by being so …
interesting
. He thought of how she’d been tonight, at the restaurant with Jason and Peter. (And it wasn’t because Peter liked her. It was because she had been herself, the person he had fallen for.) Even the callow bit. He knew what she meant. And that was the thing, actually. He usually knew what she meant. And he felt that she usually knew what he meant. From the beginning, he had felt at home with her.

He leaned his forehead against hers. “I’m sorry about how things have been. But let’s keep trying, okay? I can do better.”

She stared into the dark, empty air of her apartment.

He traced her bottom lip with his thumb. “I like you a lot,” he said. “You know that, right?”

In fact, he felt right then that he loved her.
Of course
he loved her. Had he merely been punishing her for some unknown crime?
For being nice to him
?

She didn’t respond right away, just continued to stare off. “I need to feel like you’re trying, too,” she said finally. “I need to feel like I’m not in this alone, the only one who cares about what’s going on here.”

He held her chin with his thumb and looked into her eyes. “You’re not,” he said. “You’re not the only one.”

He felt her relax. “Okay,” she said, nodding. “Okay.”

He pulled her to him. Her chest trembled as she released her breath. He held her tighter. He felt close to her, perhaps closer to her than he’d ever felt, as if they’d been through something together, seen each other not just at their best but in some real capacity, and they were still here. She—she hadn’t given up on him. He buried his face in her hair, mumbling something about love.

Nate was at the counter, asking Stuart—Beth wasn’t working today—for a refill when Recess’s glass door swung open. In walked Greer Cohen, an autumn breeze swirling around her. As the door clicked shut, the rustle in the air subsided. Greer remained at the center of a small whir of activity. A sweater and various bags, one containing a rolled-up yoga mat, swung from her shoulders. Wild locks of wavy hair spilled out from a loose bun.

“Nate!”

Her smile expressed such pleasure that Nate couldn’t help but feel touched. “Greer,” he said. “What brings you here?”

“Yoga. Down the street.”

Stuart was waiting behind the cash register for his money. Other patrons were looking up from behind their laptops. Greer’s fluttering energy and lilting, girlish voice ruffled the still air of the coffee shop.

Nate slid a bill to Stuart and then put a hand on Greer’s upper arm to guide her out of Recess’s central corridor. When he felt her small arm through her sweater, a tremor passed through him. Until that moment, he hadn’t consciously noted that Greer had become a recurring figure in his fantasy life, a sort of marquee name among
the myriad other pretty girls who wafted in and out of various scenarios.

As she allowed herself to be led backward, Greer smiled up at him with what felt—absurdly—like complicity.

Nate asked about her book. They began talking about the dayto-day process of writing at such length.

“So much staring at the screen,” Greer said. “I’d shoot myself if it weren’t for yoga.”

The girlishness of Greer’s smile did not at all offset its suggestiveness.

“I feel you,” Nate said.

Over time, he had revised his opinion of Greer upward. She was warm, friendly. You had to give her that. And her book deal was not nothing. It took no small degree of skill, in terms of basic writing ability and self-presentation, to manage that. Such savvy wasn’t the same thing as real talent, but it was something. About her writing itself he had nothing to say. It wasn’t his kind of thing.

They continued to chat for a few minutes. “You’re dating Hannah Leary, right?” she asked at one point.

Nate shifted his eyes. “Yeah.”

Greer’s smile merely altered around the edges, becoming more conspiratorial.

“We should get a drink sometime,” she said as she was getting ready to go. “Talk about book writing.”

There was a new flurry of activity as a business card was produced from one of her bags. Greer grabbed a Magic Marker from the bulletin board and began scrawling on the back of the card.

She handed it to Nate. On the front, it said “AMD Global Brand Management.” “Ian Zellman, Senior Strategist” was printed below. Nate looked at Greer questioningly.

She shrugged. “Just some guy.”

Nate turned the card over. Greer hadn’t written her name, just the ten digits of her cell phone number. He put the card in his
pocket, not without a feeling of satisfaction at having triumphed over Senior Strategist Ian Zellman.

When Greer was gone, Nate was left in a pleasant state of bewilderment. He didn’t know why Greer was so flirtatious with him. Perhaps she was attracted to his supposed intellectual cachet? Greer had sold her book for more money than he’d sold his, and would probably sell more copies, but as a memoirist of adolescent promiscuity, she lacked a certain … respectability.

He went back to work on the review he was writing. He forgot about Greer until later that night.

He was out with Jason, who was talking about Maggie from work. Maggie was thinking about moving in with “that douche,” the Web site designer.

Nate slipped his hand in his pocket. He found the card with Greer’s number on it. He ran his fingers along its edges.

He had cheated before. On Kristen. They were living in Philadelphia at the time, but he had been in New York for the weekend. He’d gone to a party at an apartment in what had at the time seemed to be deep Brooklyn but was actually very close to where he now lived. The only person he knew was the guy he came with, who by midnight was nowhere to be seen. Jason, at whose place he was crashing, was supposed to show up at some point, but until then what was Nate supposed to do but talk to girls? Why would a guy want to talk to him? He flirted in the habitual, desultory manner of someone who expects it to come to nothing. He was on a beer run with a girl he’d been chatting with when she turned and fell into him, pushing him into the limestone wall of an apartment building. Nate felt, as he halfheartedly kissed her back, only a startled impulse not to hurt the girl’s feelings, in part because she wasn’t even that pretty. He broke away quickly. But back at the party, he found himself acutely aware of the girl, attuned to every instance when his arm or thigh brushed against her. When she went to speak to someone on the other side of the room, he followed her not just with his eyes but with some
animal instinct. It was as if, in order to crowd out all thoughts of Kristen, he had to blow up his desire into something outsized, over-the-top, something that simply didn’t allow for reflection. In fact, the girl was merely a cute-ish, chipmunk-cheeked, slightly neurotic, casually but not convincingly slutty aspiring film … whatever it was people who want to work in film aspire to be. All the same, Nate was pretty much in a blinding fury of desire when they took a cab back to the apartment she shared in Alphabet City. Not-Kristen had her tongue in his mouth, Not-Kristen was unfastening a cheap red bra that clasped in the front, Not-Kristen had a bumpy constellation of moles around her collarbones and a loosygoosy tummy—all of it only contributed to her intoxicating unfamiliarity. At some point, when she had him in her mouth, she created so much suction that the phrase
menacing vise grip
had come to mind. Nate had had to gird himself to bear it manfully. When they fucked, her multisyllabic mewing sounds were stagy, meretricious, as perfectly timed to his thrusts as if they were playing Marco Polo. And yet it was thrilling.

The thrill was harder to fathom the following day. On the bus back to Philly, Nate stared out the tinted window at the traffic on the Garden State Parkway. The sky was dull and gray, his face in the glass wan and abject. Whatever frustration he’d felt in his relationship had vanished. His life with Kristen seemed full of fresh air and intelligence and promise. Her austere beauty, the crispness of it, seemed to mark her as one of the elect. Why had he done this thing that could fuck it all up?

The bus lurched. The smell of other people’s fast food made him feel sick.

When Kristen pulled up to the bus station, Nate began furiously adjusting the straps of his backpack. Although he told white lies with the same facility as anyone who is generally successful and liked, he had never been a skilled liar when any sort of personal gain was at stake. He’d speak the words as if they were in scare quotes, as if to distance himself from whatever he said.

He reminded himself, as he tossed his bag into the backseat, that he didn’t really have to lie. He had only to omit certain pieces of information. In the car, he passed into a state of becalmed terror. In bed later, Kristen apologized for being tired—thankfully. Sex would have been one more, exhausting semi-lie, but he would have felt too guilty to say no if she had initiated.

A few days later, when they were driving out to a suburban shopping center, Kristen turned to him. “You stayed with Jason over the weekend, right?”

The back of Nate’s neck grew rigid. “Yeah.”

Kristen’s brow was furrowed. Beads of sweat formed under Nate’s T-shirt as he waited. And waited.

“That’s what I thought,” Kristen said, after she made her left onto Delaware Avenue. The clicking of the turn signal ceased. “But I thought you might have stayed at Will McDormand’s. I’d love to know what Will’s apartment is like. Probably he has, like, a fireplace and an Andrew Wyeth painting in his living room and a mirror on the ceiling of his bedroom.”

Nate snorted. “That sounds right.”

But his heart was still thumping.

The worst part, though,
wasn’t
that it was hard. The worst part was that it wasn’t hard enough. Nate felt guilty, yes, but the knowledge that what Kristen didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her made this easier to bear than even a much more minor offense, such as snapping at her when she interrupted his reading to ask some unimportant question, like whether they should go to Ikea that weekend or if he’d call the phone company about the erroneous bill they’d received. In those instances, the hurt was immediate and palpable and instantly made Nate feel bad. But after this far more serious infraction, Nate experienced much less internal fire-and-brimstone than he expected. He saw that cheating could easily become if not routine, then at least more doable. In spite of the self-loathing, in spite of what was a little bit disgusting about the girl, and what he imagined would be a little bit disgusting about most girls one was
likely to cheat with, the fun of it, the variety of it, was enticing: to have what he had with Kristen
and
, every once in a while, a little bit of that—that crossing into the unknown and unfamiliar. Possibilities occurred to him. He thought of a Goth-looking waitress at a nearby bar who he’d long suspected was flirting with him.