The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (29 page)

He picked up Ian Zellman’s card from where it was lodged in his sheets. The night before, after he got home from the bar, he’d drunkenly taken it off the dresser and carried it to bed with him, contemplating calling Greer right then and luckily not actually doing it. Now he sat on his bed with his phone in his hand. Rays of sunlight cut stripes through the bedroom air. Greer picked up on the second ring. Her phone voice was girlish and cute, yet somehow sultry, too. Her laughter thrilled him. As they spoke, his chin was pressed bashfully against his shoulder; he ran his hand through his hair and smiled broadly.

A couple days later, in Manhattan for a meeting with his book editor, Nate ran into Amy Perelman, from his high school. He hadn’t seen her for five or six years, since soon after she got her MBA. Now she worked for an investment bank. She told Nate she was in M&A, which seemed “really unsexy a few years ago when everybody was making big money in derivatives and other things that no one understood,” but in retrospect she was glad not to have “gotten into that whole game.” She shook her head sadly as she told him that bonuses were still down. It took Nate a moment to realize that she wasn’t speaking ironically, pretending to be a tone-deaf investment banker.

She said she was engaged. The simpering way she held her hand so he could see her ring struck Nate as uncouth, sort of provincial. He was not in the habit of being offended by flirting, but he couldn’t help but feel that there was something aggressively condescending about the way Amy halfheartedly flirted with him. She behaved not as if she were attracted to him but as if she were still the most popular girl at school and he the adoring acolyte, as if with her every small smile she were throwing pennies that he’d scramble to pick up off the ground. Besides, while she was still
technically quite pretty, she really didn’t do that much for him anymore. With her too-heavy makeup and the artificial tint of her blonde hair, she looked older than many of the artier, noncorporate women Nate knew in Brooklyn who were the same age.

It didn’t help that she failed to pick up on his relative success in life. When he’d seen Amy last, he was a struggling freelance writer who lived in a tiny garret in Brooklyn. “Not much has changed,” he told her now, although, he added quietly, he did have a book coming out shortly. She responded as if she didn’t really get it, a bland “That’s great.” Maybe she thought he was self-publishing or something? So he maneuvered to mention that he’d written something for a particularly prestigious magazine. “That’s cool,” she said, but he could tell it didn’t mean much to her. Nate knew she didn’t intend to be disparaging. (She did say that she’d “heard Brooklyn had gotten really nice.”) The things that made him feel successful in his own circle simply had little resonance outside that circle. It bothered him that Amy’s inability to see him the way he wanted her to—as a success, as her equal—got to him. Why should it matter?

Nate marveled at this encounter most of the way home. He never thought there would come a day when Amy Perelman, whose yellow-and-white scrunchy might very well still be sitting in a box in his parents’ condo, would be so unattractive to him. What made it even more striking was that not long ago, he’d happened to run into another girl from his high school. He was at a reading near Columbia when he saw Michelle Goldstein, the frizzy-haired, theater-loving girl he’d rolled his eyes at back then, Michelle Goldstein, of
pas de deux
and
coup d’état.

At his apartment, as he flipped through his mail, he laughed. Not at Michelle’s expense, but at the general idiocy and affectation of youth. Because Michelle, all these years later, had been really
nice
. She was a labor lawyer. She seemed very earnest and left-wing, like an old-school Upper West Sider. Which is where she lived, with her husband and son. The husband, she told him, was an actor. (“Not quite aspiring—he’s very talented and does a lot of really
wonderful off- and off-off-Broadway work—but let’s just say, we don’t need a full-time nanny. Which is good, because we can’t afford one.”) They lived in an old rent-stabilized place on 104th and Riverside that her husband had been in for years, previously with roommates. She complained about how “rich” the neighborhood had gotten. Michelle’s hair, casually pulled back, was still a little bit frizzy, and her jeans were kind of mommish, but she was appealing, far more appealing than Amy Perelman.

Nate was still thinking about this when he walked to his computer and scanned his in-box. There was a message from Hannah. Without pausing to think about what it might contain, he clicked on it. A new window appeared. He sat down.

Dear Nate,

At the park the other day, I told you I wasn’t mad. I don’t think I was lying. I think I was numb.

Later I got mad. The first thing that pissed me off was the way, when I said this isn’t working, you
nodded
. What the fuck? What did it mean to you a few weeks ago when I told you that the only way I wanted to stay with you is if you promised you were in this too? I for one meant that I didn’t want to be in a relationship with someone who was going to fucking nod when I proposed breaking up with him. (I also get angry when I think of that night at my apartment. Why did you persuade me to stay with you if you didn’t really want it? Were you playing some kind of game?)

So, yeah, I’ve been angry. At you—but also at myself. Because I never thought I’d let myself be treated this way. I know I deserve a lot better and frankly I’ve gotten a lot better from other guys.

I didn’t expect to feel this way about you. Before we got together, I’d heard things about the way you treat women. And at first, I thought you were really full of yourself. I thought you took for granted that I was dying to go out with you because you think you’re such hot shit. I hated that.

I bring this up because later, when things started to suck, I kept thinking about that time, before I’d fallen for you too hard to get out so easily. It was as if I hoped the fact that I hadn’t put myself totally in your power from day one might somehow protect me from getting hurt later. It didn’t, obviously. Eventually I let go. I trusted you. The way I feel right now, I wish I hadn’t.

I don’t mean to be melodramatic. I know that relationships often don’t work out. But I remember how things were, not that long ago. They were pretty great. At least, I thought so. I felt like there was something real between us—like I really knew you and got you. Is that really stupid of me? I can’t help wondering, did I do something wrong? Was I too difficult? Not difficult enough? Should I have called you out on it as soon as I felt like you were, I don’t know …
changing
—instead of taking you at your word when you said everything was fine? I can’t stop wondering, and yet I know it’s messed up that I’m thinking this way, as if it were my job to make it work, as if I was supposed to figure out what you wanted and adjust accordingly.

The only thing I know is that when I tried to talk about what was going on with us, it felt like you always wanted to shoot it down. I began to get nervous about irritating you—I felt you pulling away and I didn’t want to alienate you even more, so I didn’t push us to talk more. In retrospect I regret that. It was obvious something was wrong for a while. Looking back, it seems stupid that most of the time we just ignored the elephant in the room.

I wonder—had we talked, really talked, would things have been better? Sometimes I think of things that are so obvious to me, and I hate that they aren’t, or weren’t, obvious to you. Such as, why do you think it was that we had a good time when we hung out with Jason and Peter? It was because they were nice to me—they acted like they actually wanted to hear what I had to say, which you barely did at that point. (Thank you for that, by the way—for the way you’ve treated me lately.)

But then I think of how sad you looked at the park when you said that you worry you no longer have the ability to be in a relationship. And it makes me wonder if you are as upset and confused about this as I am. If so, maybe we should talk now, try and figure what
happened. Maybe it’s not too late to deal with this honestly and openly.

Part of me thinks I shouldn’t send this, that I’ve already been burned enough. But I’d rather not become that scared of being honest.

H

There were a number of things Nate felt like doing when he finished reading this e-mail. One was slamming the metallic top of his computer shut and throwing the thing against the wall. Another was running hard for about ten miles, uphill. A third was reading some very bracing, very austere, very
masculine
philosopher. Say Schopenhauer. One thing it decidedly did
not
make him want to do was get back together with Hannah.

Nate hadn’t been attentive to every sentence; he wasn’t able to be. Reading the e-mail was so unpleasant that he found himself skimming. He felt as if doing so were a courtesy to her, as if he had caught her in an embarrassing posture and were politely averting his eyes. (The part where she mentioned other guys? He shuddered for her—it sounded so …
desperate
.) But he’d read enough, more than enough. He got it. The letter—its conclusion, the thing about “talking more,” “dealing with this honestly and openly”—struck him as willfully deceived. Anyone could see that they’d given their relationship any number of chances and that their conversation at the park had been decisive. The e-mail was confused, disordered, veering back and forth between anger and a wild, almost desperate compulsion to pull the arm of the slot machine yet again and hope for a different outcome, based on what? Because he’d said he worried he might be incapable of being in a relationship? When he told her that, he’d been speaking truthfully, but, come on, it was a fear that seized him every once in a while and then passed almost entirely from his mind. It wasn’t worrying him
at all right now. And it certainly didn’t make him want to keep at a relationship that was so clearly dead.

Besides, the e-mail was a visceral reminder, as if he needed one, of the reasons he didn’t want to be with her. Hannah’s letter brought back all the feelings of guilt and dread and discomfort he’d come to associate with her.

But the letter conferred an obligation. She was clearly upset. He owed it to her to do something. In the next several days, Nate debated writing back, but he saw almost immediately there was no way he could produce an e-mail of equal length, and a few lines of text from him, with her message hanging below, in its grand textual abundance, would look so paltry, so meager, an insulting little pellet atop her voluminousness. It wasn’t only that he didn’t have the patience to write at anywhere close to equal length. The truth—and this scared him a little—was that he didn’t know what he would say. There was a certain moral vanity in her implicit assumption that everyone could sit down and whip out something like her letter, as if everyone’s feelings were so known and upstanding. He couldn’t have produced such a letter no matter how hard he tried. Even after all the hours he’d spent pacing his apartment the other day, he didn’t really know what he thought or felt, and what he did know was confused and, frankly, somewhat upsetting. What he had learned, in the subsequent few days, was that his unhappiness was eminently containable, if managed correctly. That meant not dwelling. It meant moving forward.

Since writing was out, Nate figured he should call her. On a number of occasions, he was about to do it. But he kept putting it off. He couldn’t decide if they should have it out on the phone or if he should propose coffee. Probably the latter, but then a part of him wondered if maybe that wasn’t a good idea. Coffee would run longer than a phone call. She’d want him to say a lot of things he didn’t much want to say. Not just for his own sake. He didn’t want to be forced to say things that would hurt her feelings. The only
really honest thing that he had any desire to tell her was, he suspected, the last thing she wanted to hear. He wanted to say that he was sorry for not having broken up with her sooner, for not having seen sooner that it wasn’t working and wasn’t going to work. He shouldn’t have nodded at the park. She was right about that. He shouldn’t have been with her at all at that point. In retrospect, he felt he’d had a failure of nerve that night at her apartment; they should have broken up then. But he didn’t think she’d appreciate hearing this. And other than that, he didn’t know what he’d say. Besides, the endless stream of postbreakup conversations he’d had with Elisa was an object lesson in the way these things could backfire. He didn’t want to get into another drawn-out and in the end unhealthy dialogue. And Hannah wasn’t Elisa. She was more mature, one expected more of her.

Maybe a phone conversation, short and sweet, was better?

Each time he made up his mind to do one or the other, phone call or coffee date, he couldn’t quite bring himself to pull the trigger, and he told himself he’d decide for sure later; he’d do it—one or the other—later.

A week after Hannah sent the e-mail, he came strolling back from Greer’s on a lovely, sunny Friday morning. He was in a good mood—it had been a good night, a very good night. He saw another e-mail from Hannah. He knew immediately he’d fucked up. He should have done
something
. The subject line was blank. Nate clicked on the message.

God, I can’t believe I am such a moron. I can’t believe I wrote you that e-mail in some moment of god knows what. I just wanted to say I take it back. You’re a bigger asshole than I ever imagined. I can’t believe you couldn’t even be bothered to respond. Anyway, there’s just one other thing I wanted to tell you. You’re really bad in bed.

So you’re dating Greer now?”

Nate and Aurit were walking along Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, their scarves flapping in the wind as they squinted against the midday sun. Aurit had just gotten back from her trip, a week in Israel and two in Germany.

It wasn’t just disapproval Nate picked up in her voice. He knew she’d disapprove of Greer. She thought Greer was shallow and twitty. So had he, before. What bothered him more was something withering in the way she pronounced the word
you
, as in “so
you
’re dating Greer now.”