The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (26 page)

What stopped him was the realization that it was a bad road to go down. It wasn’t only that he’d grow comfortable lying. He would also have to justify his behavior to himself: caricature Kristen in his mind, exaggerate her limitations and “prudishness,” repeat pop-psych mantras about the uncontainable nature of male sexuality, as certain middle-aged men did, men who tended to strike Nate as not only sleazy but pathetic and distinctly unattractive. He could see, too, that it would destroy the best thing he had with Kristen. While she might not be hurt by what she didn’t know, the need to hide key facets of his private life would mean he’d have to be on guard, think before he spoke, lest he contradict himself or reveal something unwittingly. Besides, it was 1999, and the specter of Clinton loomed large: the accomplished statesman turned into a joke because he couldn’t keep it in his pants. Nate had made a conscious decision not to do it again, not to cheat.

He put Greer’s card back into his pocket and turned to Jason. “Why don’t you just tell Maggie how you feel about her?”

Jason looked surprised. “Don’t you know?”

Nate realized he didn’t, not exactly. He’d chalked it up to Jason’s general weirdness about women.

“Spell it out for me.”

Jason’s Adam’s apple quavered as he took a long sip of beer. He set the glass down on the table and leaned forward. “It’s Saturday morning,” he began, sweeping his arm in front of him with oratorical flourish. “I open my eyes and push off a floral comforter. Sunlight is pouring through a window, reflecting off a gigantic Ansel Adams photograph hanging on the wall. Where am I? I wonder. Oh!”—he cupped his ear—“what’s that I hear? A scampering little footstep? It’s Maggie! She comes skipping into her
bedroom, cute as a button, in her Sewanee T-shirt and flannel pajama bottoms, full of little teeny bumpy nubbins. In her hands, she’s holding a plate full of fresh-baked banana muffins, and she smiles up at me”—Jason paused to flutter his eyelashes, which he did with unexpected skill—“her little-biddy button nose is sweetly pink-tipped, and her smile is so sweet, it breaks your heart. And you know what happens? My cock shrivels up so small, it’s like a tiny, little pink shrimp, like a fucking toddler penis. All I want is to get the hell out of there as fast as I can, get the fuck to some dank club full of models and do some coke. And I hardly even like coke.”

“How do you know, Jase? Seriously. How do you know you wouldn’t be happy?”

Jason traced the rim of his glass with his finger before looking up at Nate. “Well, Miss Lonelyhearts, even if there’s only an eighty percent chance that’s what would happen, I couldn’t do it. Maggie’s a really good person. And it may be hard for you to believe—you think you’re the only one women fall for, you vain fuck—but she really likes me.”

Nate started to respond—to defend himself—but then shut his mouth. Jason’s sensitive side, on the rare occasions when it emerged, seemed infinitely fragile, like glass so fine that even discordant notes of speech could cause it to shatter.

“No,” Jason said, his voice returning to a more familiar register. “What I need is a model with a really good personality. Too bad Brigita turned out to be such a dud.”

Nate grunted sympathetically. They turned back to the chips and guac they were sharing.

After a while, Jason asked how things were going with Hannah.

Nate glanced at the flapping chef’s door between the bar and the kitchen. “Fine. Good.”

Since the night he and Hannah had stayed up drinking bourbon, things had been better. She was resolutely unmopey. She
called him less, would sometimes fail to return his calls until he became increasingly eager to see her. He had taken her out for her birthday, bought her a scarf that Aurit helped him choose. Things were fine. And yet he sometimes felt her eyes on him, watching too closely, trying to read his mood, clearly worried that he was growing bored or distant. When he was especially affectionate, he picked up on an anxious, guarded happiness that she tried but failed to conceal, as if he were a drug addict or a gambler and she the long-suffering wife who detected signs of reformation. This seemed humiliating, for both of them.

Nate suppressed a sigh as he stood up. “I’m going to the bar,” he said. “You want another?”

“Yeah.”

“What I wonder is whether fashion really has gotten more ironic,” Hannah said over brunch a few days later. “I mean, the nerd glasses and mom jeans and the eighties-inspired clothes.”

Nate nodded absently.

“Or does it just start to seem ironic as you get older, because you’ve seen all the trends come and go, and you can no longer take them seriously? You’ve watched the waistlines of jeans move up, up, up and then down, down, down and now up again. And the glasses! They got smaller and smaller until it seemed like you needed glasses just to see your glasses, and then, boom, one day they are all of a sudden big and owlish again? But maybe to twenty-year-olds, who haven’t become jaded by this cycle, those big glasses just look cool? Not ironic, but just nice, the way people our age genuinely thought tapered jeans looked nice in the nineties?”

While Hannah was talking, an attractive woman had entered the restaurant. She had a long mane of light-brown hair, thick but smooth and shiny, the kind of hair that awakens a primitive appreciation for good health and breeding. Her face was nice, too. The
hair’s-breadth difference between the exact set of her features and classic beauty (her nose was a little wide, her chin too prominent) didn’t make her any less attractive. She was wearing a blazer that gave her a cute, grad-student sort of look but was cinched at the waist and short enough so that her legs looked extremely long. When she passed their table, Nate saw that her jeans clung tenaciously to her ass, which appeared to have benefited from years of horseback riding and lacrosse.

He turned back to Hannah. She was staring at him with her mouth open.

Nate looked away, taking refuge in his coffee mug, where oily droplets clung to the surface like small, prismatic reflecting pools. He’d looked at another woman. Big fucking deal. He didn’t have the energy right then to deal with this unbearable, this
boring
tension between the two of them.

He started talking about the cover of his book, about how he wanted a few minor changes made, to rearrange the order of some of the blurbs and make the font color of the jacket copy more vivid against the book’s background.

Now Hannah seemed to be nodding absently, playing with a glass saltshaker, rolling it between her thumb and fingers. This struck Nate as rude. She was, supposedly, his
girlfriend
, and this—his book—was only the biggest thing in his life. It wasn’t as if he were talking about fashion.

The waitress appeared. “French toast over here, and eggs Benedict for you. How are we doing otherwise? Do we need more coffee?” She nodded her head as she spoke as if to guide them to the correct answer. Then she picked up the little white jug of cream from their table, tilting it toward her so she could peer inside. “I’ll get some more. Ketchup for your potatoes? You got it. Be right back!”

Nate resumed his narration about the book jacket. He was glad he’d rejected the first design. He had felt bad doing it—he didn’t
want to be troublesome—but he felt it looked old and stodgy. Oscar, the designer, had done a brilliant job in the end. The new cover conveyed seriousness but also freshness, hipness.

Nate was in the middle of making this last point when Hannah cut him off. “I can’t do this, Nate.”

“Do what?”

“Sit here and be your cheering section. I’m not in the mood to ooh and ah about your
big
book and all your little successes.”

“That’s a nice thing to say,” Nate said. (In fact, he felt relieved that she’d given him an opening to vent his irritation.) “That’s a really kind, considerate thing for your girlfriend to tell you as you try to discuss something that’s just slightly important to you. Do you want to talk about fashion again? Would that be more interesting to you?”

Hannah swallowed and closed her eyes. When she opened them, they trained in on his with angry precision. “Why don’t we talk about the woman you were checking out? She
was
very pretty.”

“For Christ’s—”

“Don’t bother,” Hannah said. “I know how this plays out. You’re going to tell me—or better yet, not tell me, just
imply
—that I am being irrational, that I am neurotic and jealous and impossible. After all, don’t all liberated people in the twenty-first century know that it’s no big deal for men to check out women? It’s just biology. Only some impossible, ridiculous woman would mind.

Nate glared at the table.

Hannah kept talking. “But we both know you weren’t just checking her out. You were being incredibly,
spitefully
obvious about it. You were broadcasting your contempt for me, or your boredom, or whatever. Don’t worry, I got the message.”

From other tables, laughter, strands of animated conversation curled through the air. Nate felt sweaty, conspicuous, as if Hannah
were making a scene, even though she wasn’t speaking loudly. There was an intensity that marked out their conversation from the others.
Which of these pairs of diners enjoying high-end hipster comfort food doesn’t fit in?

“So now I’m stuck,” Hannah was saying. “If I complain, I look ridiculous, but if I ignore it, am I really then supposed to sit here and act like I’m all gooey-eyed and happy for you because you are just so successful and your book is so exciting? That kind of makes me feel ridiculous, too. Either way, I’m screwed.”

“Jesus! I—I—can we please just eat our food?”

“I have an idea,” Hannah said. “I can play the game you’re playing. See that guy over there?” She gestured toward a man in a leather jacket sipping coffee on a stool at the bar. “Isn’t he good-looking? He’s so
tall.
I think I’m going to chat him up.”

Nate met her eye. “Go right ahead.”

Hannah winced and then shook her head. They eyed each other for a long, languorous moment, reveling in the cool pleasure of open hostility. Then Hannah leaned her face down into her hands, covering her eyes with the tips of her long, tapered, cellist fingers. Her hair fell forward on her cheeks. When she looked up, Nate sensed her anger was spent. This frightened him.

“Never mind,” she said. “I can’t do this. I don’t want to.”

With his fork, Nate moved some egg around his plate.

“I’ve tried playing that game,” Hannah continued. “Pretending I don’t care. And you know what? It worked. You always responded to it.”

Nate willed himself not to move a muscle in his face, not to let on that he had a pretty good idea as to what she was talking about. To admit it seemed intolerably humiliating, a too-open acknowledgment of the dinky little rinse-and-repeat melodrama their relationship had devolved into.

“But I don’t want to do it anymore,” she said. “You’ll always win this game because I’m only playing at it, and you—well, you …” She dropped her knife and fork, which apparently she’d
been holding for quite some time like some kind of ritualistic accoutrements. They clattered as they landed on her plate. “Well, I don’t know what you’re doing.”

Her eyes shone.

Nate realized, with some surprise, that he’d never actually seen Hannah cry, not in all these months. The closest had been the time when he could tell she’d been crying.

“And by the way,” she said, no longer on the verge of tears but with feeling. “I think it’s stupid. The whole thing is stupid. It doesn’t reflect well on you.”

Nate had lost the will to fight. “No, certainly not,” he said quietly. “Listen, why don’t we get out of here?”

A few minutes later, they set out for the park in the center of Hannah’s neighborhood. Without touching each other as they walked down the street—their hands were buried deep in the pockets of their jackets—they spoke pleasantly, about topics of no consequence.

Hannah nodded toward a kitchen store on the other side of the street. “That’s new.”

“It’s convenient,” Nate said. “Next time you need a frying pan or something.”

He looked away when they passed the bar they had gone to on their first date.

The park felt barren, the grass a dull green and the trees skeletal, their leaves long since shed. He and Hannah walked to a bench on the crest of a hill. For a while, they were silent.

“I guess we both know this isn’t working,” Hannah said finally.

Her hands were still in her pockets, but her arms were extended on her lap, so her jacket was pulled forward and made a sort of tent in front of her. Nate nodded slowly, careful not to show too much eager assent.

“I don’t know why,” she said. “I’ve tried and tried to figure it out, but after a while, I guess the only thing we can say for sure is that it isn’t working.”

Her voice was even, unemotional, but her eyes, when she turned to face him, were so imploring that Nate had to look away. He felt sure that she wanted him to contradict her, as he had that night in her apartment. But he couldn’t do it again. The intensity of feeling he’d experienced that night hadn’t lasted. The facts had become too obvious. Relationships shouldn’t be this hard.
Nobody
thought so. He’d have to be crazy. And the simple fact was he no longer wanted this.

Greer popped into his mind: the way she’d smiled at him at Recess, the way he’d
felt
when she smiled at him. That had to mean something—that real, spontaneous longing. The card with her number on it was sitting on his dresser. “Global brand management?” Hannah had remarked dryly, when she’d noticed it there, amid the bitten-up pens and the torn-off dry-cleaning tags. “Thinking about a career change?”

The thought of Greer made him feel guilty. Why should it, though? It wasn’t as if he’d called her. Yet it did. As much as he was beginning to feel relieved—and indeed he felt an easing of a deep, almost muscular tension that he hadn’t even known was there—he simultaneously began to feel, as if in exact counterreaction, both sad and ashamed.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He made out a faint and fleeting bit of condensation in his breath.

“I guess I haven’t been exactly perfect either,” Hannah said. She took her hands out of her pockets and hugged her body with her arms. “I’m not mad at you. I’ve been mad at you, but I don’t think I am anymore. I don’t see the point.”