The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (27 page)

Nate shifted his position on the bench, feeling uncomfortably as if she did have reason to be mad at him, though he couldn’t say what it was precisely. He knew he’d hurt her, yet he felt bound by twenty-first-century chivalry to pretend he didn’t know it, lest he seem presumptuous or arrogant.

“You know I think you’re great,” he said.

She merely raised her eyebrows. He felt the triteness of his words.

“The thing that bothers me,” she said after a moment, “is that in the beginning,
my god
, you couldn’t have been more into it. But since then …” She turned to face him. “
Why?
Why did you start this if you didn’t care enough to try and make it work?”

Nate tried not to sigh.
Start this?
Obviously, they’d both had a hand in starting it.

“I did try.”

“
Really?
Did you ever spend three seconds thinking about what the problem was and whether there was anything you could do to make it better? It was like you had nothing at stake, like you were a passive bystander.”

Nate wished he didn’t have to have to listen to this. He felt he’d heard it, or some variant of it, a billion times.

“And you always had your book,” Hannah continued. “Whatever happened between us was not going to affect you much one way or the other because the most important thing for you is that your book is coming out. It’s hard to compete.”

“Are you saying that’s a bad thing? Caring about my book?”

“I—no! Of course not. There was a power imbalance, that’s all I meant. It wasn’t fun being on the wrong side of that.”

Nate wondered if it would be patronizing to suggest that she might be better off if she cared about her book more. It could be difficult to stay motivated sometimes—he knew that—especially when you were unhappy. But he also knew that you had to push through. He had. He had written his book even on days when it was the last thing he felt like doing.

He decided it would be better not to say this.

He stared through the bald trees to the stalls of the farmer’s market that assembled at the park each week. On this gray day, it looked like the threadbare marketplace of some bleak eastern European village. He could smell the diesel from the row of
idling trucks that transported produce and workers from upstate. It reminded him of dreary Sunday afternoons as a child, driving back with his parents from visits to his cousins in New Jersey or to the houses of his parents’ Romanian friends in the D.C. suburbs, of looking out the car window at drab, shabby landscapes and being crushed by a sadness caused at once by everything and nothing—a general sense of life as a bleak, lonely, rather hopeless affair.

He thought of his immediate future, of being single. He remembered the night he and Mark had hit on Cara, the feeling of dullness that had come over him when he had contemplated his single life, the incessant, relentless flirting, its underside of loneliness and cynicism.

“Sometimes I think I’ve lost something,” he said to Hannah. “Some capacity to be with another person, something I used to have.” He laughed mirthlessly. “I feel pretty fucked, to tell the truth.”

Hannah looked incredulous. “I don’t know what to say to that. What am I supposed to say?”

Nate was stung by her tone. “Never mind,” he said. “I’m feeling sorry for myself. It’s stupid.”

Hannah shut her eyes. When she opened them, she spoke slowly. “I feel like you want to think what you’re feeling is really deep, like some seriously profound existential shit. But to me, it looks like the most tired, the most average thing in the world, the guy who is all interested in a woman until the very moment when it dawns on him that he has her. Wanting only what you can’t have. The affliction of shallow morons everywhere.”

“Jesus! If you’re going to—”

“I’m sorry,” Hannah said. “I’m being harsh, but give me a break. If what you say is true, if you just have some ‘problem,’ it kind of sucks for me, too. I can’t sit here and try to make you feel better. It’s like the robber asking his victim to sympathize with his uncontrollable compulsion to rob people.” She squinted up into
the pale sky. “Give me a few years, until you’re on your deathbed or something.”

Nate made a chortling sound. So did Hannah. Their eyes met. Her smile was strangely companionable, as if they were old war buddies.

He knew with near-perfect certainty that there would come a time when he would be feeling down and lonely and crave more than anything Hannah’s company, her warmth, her intelligence, her humor, her ability to understand him. On that night, as he returned home to his empty apartment, he’d regret this day. But he also knew that on all the other nights—the, say, forty-nine out of fifty nights when he wasn’t unhappy in that particular way—he’d be glad to be free of this, of the heavy, unfun yoke of it. This thought made him feel bad all over again.

“I’m sure a lot of it
is
my fault,” he said. He smiled ruefully. “And by a lot, I mean all.”

“Ah, the self-deprecating dude routine,” Hannah said. “ ‘What a lovable fuck-up I am.’ The annoying thing is that it makes you look good, but it doesn’t get
me
anything.”

The return of bitterness in her voice took Nate by surprise. Each time he thought they’d moved beyond reproaches, she turned angry again. He foresaw a potentially endless loop. He was also getting hungry—he hadn’t eaten much at breakfast—and it was growing chillier outside.

“I guess we should get going,” he said.

Hannah turned her face away from his. A wall of straight reddish brown hair moved up and down as she nodded slowly. “Yeah.”

He pretended not to notice as she wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. The truth was he felt a flash of resentment. It seemed manipulative.

Nate had a long and intimate relationship with guilt.

He felt guilty when he passed by the neighborhood homeless guy, a bespectacled, middle-aged man with a salt-and-pepper Afro whose lilting refrain—“Can you spare a dollar, bro?”—echoed as you walked away, like an effect on a dance remix. He felt guilty when, in a Manhattan office building, he saw an elderly janitor stooped over a mop, joints creaking, jowls hanging over his collar. He felt guilty when a blank-faced Hispanic or Asian man refilled his water glass at a restaurant. He thought of ten- and twelve-hour shifts, of returning to squalid apartments shared with a dozen others. He felt guilty on the subway, when, as the train moved deeper into Brooklyn, more and more white people got off. Eventually almost everyone who remained was black—and tired. Overworked, underpaid. He felt guilty when circumstances forced him to get up early on a frigid winter morning, and, hurrying along windswept streets, he saw Southeast Asian vendors blowing on their hands as they set up their coffee carts. What had he done to deserve his easier—his easy—fate?

His intelligence was just something he’d been born with. Luck of the draw, like being beautiful. It was a rationalization to say that he’d worked hard. It was like being given a fine knife and taking
the trouble to polish and sharpen it: it’s great that you make the effort, but someone had to give you the knife. And it wasn’t just intelligence. Nate felt guilty when he thought about his grandparents and great-grandparents in eastern Europe—shtetls and pogroms and worse.

In such a context, the small-scale romantic disappointments of privileged single women in New York City did not even remotely make the cut. Yet the day after he and Hannah broke up, Nate was riled by a strong sense of guilt.

At the park, he’d been so—well, he hadn’t been able to see beyond a great cloud of irritation, which had seemed not only to justify his actual behavior but much worse behavior as well. He’d felt that he behaved remarkably well, that, in an effort to extricate himself from such a subtle and uncomfortable snare, he could have been much meaner. There had been times with Hannah, in the past month or two, when he had found himself feeling so harassed that it had seemed an act of heroism that he hadn’t told her exactly what he was thinking in the bluntest possible terms. And yesterday, at brunch and after, he’d been at moments so aggravated that his endurance of the whole breakup scene had seemed, on the whole, a display of magnanimity. He hadn’t said “enough” and taken off, as many guys would have. Many guys would have told her she needed to chill out—implied she was obsessive, fucked-up.

Yet, now, as he wandered around his apartment, shuffling listlessly from room to room, Nate didn’t feel so hot. He felt guilty about various things. Checking out that woman at the restaurant, for one. For the way he’d been in general.

He was also baffled. So many times, as their relationship had begun to deteriorate, he had gone from being irritated by Hannah to feeling remorse once his irritation passed. He’d always thought that in the aftermath, when he felt bad, he was clearheaded, seeing the situation for what it was. Only now it seemed to him that he’d been in some kind of fugue state the whole time, going back and forth from one mood to the other, without ever stopping to
consider what was driving the insane back-and-forth. Instead, he’d just avoided her for stretches.

At the park, he had thought Hannah was unreasonable when she accused him of not trying, but now he wondered if he had, at some point, stacked the deck against her—decided he didn’t want her and then set things up so she’d justify his slackening interest. Because he knew—of course he knew, he wasn’t stupid—that his behavior had contributed to, if not entirely caused, her insecurity. And of course her insecurity (
Are you mad at me? Can I please, please make you breakfast?
) just made her more annoying. But it had felt as if he couldn’t help the way he behaved. When he had behaved badly—snapped at her, checked out that woman, whatever—he had been acting from some overpowering compulsion. And yet he had once liked her quite a bit.

He stopped pacing and stood by the window, blinking at the paper-white sky. The truth was he hadn’t stopped liking her. Even now. That was what had been, what continued to be, so confusing.

The stentorian voice inside his head told him he’d been a jerk. He’d known his behavior had confused her. He’d watched her diminish, grow nervous and sad, become in certain ways someone he didn’t recognize. Whenever he’d felt bad about it, he told himself that he wasn’t forcing her to stay with him. She could break up with him any time she wanted.

But now he thought of something Aurit had said—written, actually, in a truly excellent piece of expository writing. She’d described her parents’ fucked-up dynamic, how her father’s response to any criticism was “if you don’t like it, leave.” Aurit argued that for the person with more power in a relationship to refuse to take seriously the unhappiness of the other, simply because nothing is forcing them to, is the ultimate dick move: “It’s like if the United States in the 1950s said, ‘Sorry, black people in the South, but if you don’t like the way you’re being treated, you can go back to Africa.’ ”

On the other hand, Hannah
wasn’t
a disenfranchised minority,
Nate thought, leaving the window and padding from the bedroom to the kitchen. Why should he have had more power? He didn’t ask for it. When he remembered that, he began to resent her, for her meek willingness to put up with his bad behavior. For her willingness to be his victim. Sure, she’d snapped back, gotten pissy, but these had been empty little torrents, the indignant flailing of a small animal caught in a trap. By and large, she’d put herself at his disposal, made it easy for him to hurt her. And now he had to be his own judge and jury. But he had his own feelings to worry about. It wasn’t fair to make him responsible for both of them.

That made him feel a bit better, for a little while. Then it occurred to him that she’d put up with him because he had wanted her to. Until he didn’t. He had always stopped being a dick to her as soon as he sensed he’d crossed the line and she might actually walk away. She’d allowed him to torment her in this way because
she liked him.
Maybe she even loved him.

The thought made him wince.

Because, come on, was he ever going to find someone with no annoying tics or physical imperfections? What real criticism did he have of her? That she sometimes drank too much? So did he. That she seemed not serious enough about her writing? The truth was that before their downward-spiraling relationship seemed to consume her, she had struck him as quite serious. That she was sometimes insecure?
All
women were sometimes insecure. The ones who claimed they weren’t were craziest of all.

He pictured Hannah, at Francesca Whatshername’s rooftop party. He remembered how she’d held her own against Jason. He remembered how, well, just how
happy
he’d been that night.

He decided to call Kristen. If a person as upstanding as Kristen, a person who also happened to be a very strong and intelligent woman—
a pediatric oncologist
—a woman who had lived with him on intimate terms for more than three years, thought highly of him, he couldn’t be quite so awful a person as he felt like now.

Kristen picked up on the second ring. Her voice was warm and
rich—and deeply familiar, still. It moved him even after all this time. “Nate!” she said. “It’s nice to hear from you.”

One of her dogs barked in the background. “Corky—our newest,” she told him. “He’s only a year—German shepherd mix. A real handful.”

Kristen lived in Boulder with her husband, an MD/PhD who did something very laudable and impressive, Nate forgot exactly what, at the medical school. (Ran some kind of innovative and also highly compassionate clinic?)

Kristen said she and David were fine. Great, in fact. The new house was also great, although they’d barely unpacked. “No time.”

But she found time to rescue and care for three dogs?

“I guess,” she admitted.

“And run?”

“I did the Denver marathon in September,” she said, a little sheepishly.

Nate laughed fondly. “You don’t change, Kris.”

He heard David calling her name. “Just a sec,” she said to Nate. Away from the mouthpiece, she began talking to David, her voice garbled and indistinct. While he waited, Nate pictured dinner at Kristen and David’s: candles on the table, the dogs sprawled on plaid cushions, boxes piled up on the hardwood floors.