The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (28 page)

“Tell me how you are,” she said when she got back on the line.

Nate stood by the window, drawing circles in the condensation. Outside, twilight was descending on the angular, postindustrial Brooklyn landscape—a choppy sea of billboards and cranes and squat, gray tenements.

“I’ve been better.”

He told Kristen he’d broken up with yet another nice girl. “Really nice. Nicer than most actually.”

But it just stopped working. He had felt—it was hard to explain. Things had gotten “heavy.” He’d been conscious of not living up to some expectation. Not being into it enough, into her enough, he supposed. He’d felt, after a while, as if he were constantly letting
her down, as if she were always mad at him. It was no fun. By the end, the relationship had been suffocating. That had to mean something, right?

“Nate!” Kristen said. “Of course it means something. Suffocating is not good.”

“Right!”

“I’m sure there was a reason you didn’t want to move forward with this, uhm, Hannah, even if it’s not clear to you now what it was.”

Something in Kristen’s pinched tone—he could picture her nose slightly wrinkled—told Nate that she assumed Hannah was, well, sort of awful in some way that would be obvious to anyone but him.

But what if—and he couldn’t say this, not to
Kristen
—there was nothing wrong with Hannah? What if the problem was just that she didn’t do it for him anymore, at least not enough? Perhaps the reason his relationship with Hannah had dragged on as long as it had, so much longer than his other recent attachments, was that usually his attraction waned in tandem with his interest in the girl herself. Women usually began to grate on him at around the same time he found himself losing interest in sleeping with them. This confluence had filled him with a pleasing sense of his own lack of shallowness. The problem with Hannah, he now felt, was that the drop-off in his attraction, in his excitement about her, had not corresponded to his feelings about her as a person. It had showed him up, to himself.

To Kristen, he just said, “What if the reason I felt so conflicted is because I’m, I don’t know, just messed up somehow?”

“You’re not messed up, Nate.”

Right.
Nate had forgotten that in Kristen’s world, being messed up meant you were a six-year-old kid with a tumor the size of a grapefruit. And when he realized this, he once again (this always happened at some point when he spoke to Kristen) couldn’t get past the knowledge that to her, his problems were that of a decadent New Yorker who whiles away his time on self-indulgent personal drama. He felt he could hear the way Kristen would summarize this
conversation to David when they sat down for their candle-lit dinner. Good old Nate, single New York guy, can’t seem to settle down. Smart, right? David might ask. Yes. But very, well, you know, neurotic, self-involved. Nate would be cast as an amusing counterpoint to their virtuous, community-oriented lifestyle, his problems, his unhappiness, reaffirming the rightness of their way of life.

This was not helpful. Nate turned so he was leaning with his back against the window.

“I also feel kind of guilty,” he said, the glass cool through his T-shirt. “I couldn’t make up my mind.” He thought of the night he and Hannah stayed up drinking bourbon at her apartment. “Or rather I kept changing my mind. I think I was kind of a jerk.”

“Isn’t that what dating is?” Kristen asked. “Trying to make up your mind?”

“I guess.”

“Nate,” Kristen said emphatically. “You dated her for, what, four months? Five? You get a pass for being unsure about the person for the first few months. Be more careful next time. But give yourself a break. It’s not as if you led her on for years and now she’s too old to have children.”

“Yeah.”

Kristen, Nate realized, didn’t have much sympathy for the romantic travails of women. Although she was good, so very good, the sphere of her sympathy was a bit circumscribed. She had always lacked a certain kind of imagination. She was so sensible and self-disciplined; the only indulgence she allowed herself was contempt for those who didn’t manage their lives as competently—or as shrewdly—as she managed hers. (He thought of her string of boyfriends, each lined up almost before the old one was cut loose, a trend that continued right up to David.)

Having to her satisfaction dispatched with the subject of Hannah, Kristen began describing Corky’s latest shenanigans, which involved a garden hose and a neighbor’s gargoyle. (A
gargoyle
? Where the hell did they live, anyway?) As he half-listened,
Nate supposed he, too, was not sympathetic to Hannah’s plight in theory. It was just that, theory aside, he actually
felt
bad.

After they got off the phone, Nate continued to wander through the gloom of his darkening apartment, choosing not to turn on the overhead lights, as if to keep his external reality in tune with his internal one. He remembered the first night Hannah had come here. They’d stayed up late, talking. They’d fucked. More than once. The second time, it must have been three or four in the morning, and they’d been talking for hours. He’d started kissing her, and then he was on top of her. He couldn’t believe he initiated sex. He was exhausted. His cock had spoken against the judgment of his brain, which was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to do it or that it would feel like work. But it didn’t. It was good—really good, actually.

In the kitchen, he opened his refrigerator, then stared into it, listening to its hiss.

On one of the metal racks, there was a bunch of limp celery Hannah had bought for him. She thought he might like it as a snack with peanut—no, almond—butter. She didn’t realize that when he was hungry he didn’t have the patience even to clean and cut celery. But he liked the almond butter. It
was
better than peanut butter. He shut the refrigerator door.

It wasn’t all guilt, what he was feeling.

“I always thought she was … well, kind of …”

Nate leaned in. “Yeah?”

“Well …”

“What?”

“Weird.”

“
Weird
?”

Jason’s forehead was scrunched up in thought. When, finally, he spoke, his voice had a strained quality, as if he were trying to distill very complicated, highly abstract ideas into mere words.

“Don’t get me wrong. I like Hannah. But I just didn’t see you with
her. You guys seemed on edge together. Like, her voice would get sort of squeaky when she was talking to you. Sometimes, she seemed nervous around you. I don’t know. It just struck me as weird. I didn’t see you two being happy together. You didn’t really
seem
happy.”

Nate and Jason were sitting in a windowed alcove at a bar near Jason’s apartment.

“But maybe it’s me?” Nate said.

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe it’s my fault I wasn’t happy. Maybe I—I don’t know—stopped trying.”

Jason sat back in his chair and rubbed the side of his head, rumpling a section of his hair so it stood up like bristling fur. “Say you did ‘stop trying,’ ” he said. “It was probably
because
you weren’t happy. Right? It’s not as if you’re a masochist.” He kneaded his hands together. “Trust me, you’re not a masochist. You’re pretty good at looking out for your interests.”

Nate began picking at some masking tape that had been applied to the armrest of his chair. He listened to the pelt of rain on the windowpane. He felt defensive on Hannah’s behalf, as if Jason were letting her down. (
Weird?
Nate had thought Jason liked her—genuinely liked her.) He remembered how Jason had said long ago that he didn’t think Hannah was his type. What was it Jason had said? That he tended to like girls who were “girly and high-maintenance.” The recollection sparked a sour suspicion that Jason was pleased to have his prediction bear out.

Nate would have preferred to talk to Aurit, but she was in Germany. After getting off the phone with Kristen, he’d also considered calling Peter in Maine, but there seemed to be something kind of girly about calling everyone he knew to discuss his breakup. Also, he would have had a hard time talking to Peter about this. Peter, in the arid expanse of his own romantic life, came at these things with different assumptions. Peter took for granted that if a woman was cool and attractive and liked you, you’d want to be in a relationship with her. So had he, once.

What Nate wanted now was to change the subject. Which was easy enough. Soon Jason was outlining his next essay. A hit piece—on meritocracy.

Nate pressed his palms against the tabletop. “You aren’t arguing that the problem is that we don’t really have one—but that meritocracy itself is bad?”

Jason nodded enthusiastically. “Fairness in a meritocracy is just homage to exceptional talent. For the unexceptional—by definition, the bulk of people—meritocracy is a crueler system than what it replaced—”

“Than slavery? Feudalism?”

“For every Jude the Obscure,” Jason continued over him, “prevented by a hereditary class system from going to Oxford, there are a thousand other stonemasons who lack Jude’s intelligence. Meritocracy is great for guys like Jude, who had talent. For the others, it’s bad news.”

“Wait,” Nate said. “How are the other masons injured if Jude gets to go to Oxford? Is this like how straight marriage is injured by allowing gay marriage? Because I don’t get that either.”

“They’re exposed as lacking. Duh.” Jason shook his head. “If everyone remains in the station he’s born to, there’s no shame in it, but if it’s in one’s power to rise, the failure to do so becomes a personal failure.”

“Oh, I see,” Nate said, relaxing into the pleasant contours of impersonal argument. “It’s better for everyone, but especially for the poor themselves, to know and accept their places. I think I’ve heard this argument before. From all sort of apologists for aristocracy. Queen Victoria, maybe?”

Jason exhaled loudly. “The difference—and this should be obvious—between me and some clenched-ass Tory is that the Tory denies Jude’s existence, refusing to believe that there is any outsize talent in the ‘lower orders.’ Or, if he acknowledges it, is hostile toward that talent. See upper-class anti-Semitism.”

“Still,” Nate said. “You’d keep Jude down—to prevent other
blue-collar workers from feeling bad about themselves. Maybe you should spare the people your lack of hostility.”

Jason shrugged good-naturedly. “We all have our own way of showing love.”

Nate got the next round. This bar had the distinction of being patronized in about equal numbers by both black and white residents of Jason’s neighborhood. Jason came here often, something Nate had been reminded of earlier in the evening when he witnessed the bartender greet him. For a moment, Nate had seen Jason as the bartender must have—as a good-looking, well-dressed, gregarious guy, a well-liked regular.

Nate walked back to their chairs slowly, carefully holding their two full beers.

After a while, the conversation came back around to relationships.

“As a rule, men want a reason to end a relationship, while women want a reason to keep it going,” Jason declared, waving his glass. “That’s why, after the fact, men look to all the things that were wrong with the relationship, to confirm the rightness of ending it. Women, on the other hand, go back and search for what might have been different, what might have made it work.”

Foam was dripping down the side of Jason’s glass. Nate felt a wave of affection for his friend, who without making reference to it was staying out too late, drinking too much, on a work night because Nate needed the company.

“Men and women on relationships are like men and women on orgasms, except in reverse,” Jason continued boisterously. “Women crave relationships the way men crave orgasm. Their whole being bends to its imperative. Men, in contrast, want relationships the way women want orgasm: sometimes, under the right circumstances.”

By the time they left the bar, Nate was in a much better mood.

Walking home in the rain, he thought of what Jason said and remembered a disagreement he and Aurit once had. She was railing about a guy who had broken up with her. She felt he was mistaken
about what he wanted. She said that men and women both need relationships just as badly; men just don’t know it. They misattribute their unhappiness to other causes, which is frustrating for women, who watch men make choices that harm both of them. Nate had argued that the word
need
loses its meaning if you define it that way. If you think you don’t want to be in a relationship, and find happiness in other things like friends or work, how can anyone claim that you’re suffering from a deep-seated longing to be in a relationship?

Nate had arrived at his building. He climbed up the stairs and unlocked his door, fumbling a little with the keys. When the door opened, he felt a wave of fondness for his humble apartment and for the simple pleasure of being in it, alone.

No, he certainly didn’t
need
to be in a relationship.

The next morning he woke up fairly early, paid his electric, cell phone, and Internet bills, and bought his bus ticket to Baltimore for the Christmas holidays. Then he had coffee with the editor of a literary journal who was eager to publish his commodificationof-conscience piece. On the way home, he stopped at the grocery store. When he returned to his apartment, his fingers were red from the twisted straps of the various plastic bags he was carrying (he always forgot to bring a canvas bag—partly on purpose, because it was a little wussy). The day was clear, and his apartment was bathed in a flattering golden light. The shrill voices that had assailed him yesterday had mostly packed up and gone home.

On his computer, he found an e-mail from Aurit, from Hamburg. He’d written to her the day before. “I’m in a hurry,” she wrote, “but wanted to say that I’m really sorry to hear about you & H. Maybe sorrier than you. I wish we’d talked beforehand. I feel as if you might not have spent enough time thinking about what might have caused the ‘bad dynamic’ you described. Is it worth thinking about? Or is it too late? Either way, I hope you don’t mind if I write to her. I feel bad for her. Talk soon, A.”

Sorrier than you? What the hell was that supposed to mean? Goddamn Aurit. He deleted the message, lest it disturb his rapidly improving spirits.