The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (3 page)

Aurit frowned. “Who’s this essay for, Nate?”

“I don’t know yet,” Nate said. “I want to write it before I start worrying about whether it will advance my career.”

Aurit scrutinized him the way a doctor studies a protuberance he suspects is malignant. “Also, don’t people shop at Whole Foods because the food is healthier?”

The wine bottle whooshed as Hannah removed the cork.

“
I
think your idea sounds interesting,” Elisa said.

Elisa, Nate thought, was being extremely, even uncharacteristically, nice to him. Maybe they really were, as she had said, turning a corner?

“I think it sounds interesting as well,” said the guy half of the couple, whose name, Kevin or Devon, Nate had by now also forgotten but who had, Nate noticed, found his voice as the wine began
flowing more freely. “I haven’t heard anyone call an idea Marxist and mean it as a good thing in a long time,” he said as Elisa “refreshed” his glass. “Not since college.”

Nate nudged his own glass into Elisa’s line of sight.

While she poured, chair legs scraped the floorboards, ice cubes cracked between molars, and silverware clattered against plates. Nate scanned the books on Elisa’s shelf. Her collection was impressive, suggestive of seriousness and good taste. The chick lit and the women’s magazines, she kept in the bedroom.

“So, what
is
the difference between racialism and racism?” Kevin/Devon’s girlfriend finally asked.

“Racialism,” Aurit began enthusiastically, “is not so much dislike or prejudice against a group but the—”

“Hey, guess who I heard got a four-hundred-thousand-dollar book advance?” Jason interrupted. Out of courtesy to Aurit, no one responded.

“—attribution of personal qualities or”—Aurit looked pointedly at Jason—“
beliefs
to a person’s membership in—”

“Greer Cohen,” Jason finished.

“—a racial group.” Aurit’s words were orphans. She grimaced when she heard Greer’s name. Even Hannah, who had indeed struck Nate this evening as nice as well as smart, raised her eyebrows.

“Good for Greer,” Elisa said, like some kind of Stepford hostess whose good manners extend even to those who aren’t present.

“Who’s Greer Cohen?”

“A writer. Of sorts,” Aurit said to Kevin/Devon and his lawyer girlfriend.

Nate’s friends then began offering up various, mostly uncharitable assessments of Greer’s talent and speculating about whom she’d slept with and whom she’d merely flirted with.

“I do think she’s a good writer,” Hannah conceded.

“It’s not so much her writing I object to,” Aurit said. “It’s her willingness to trade on her sexuality and call it feminism.”

Nate leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs under the
table. He felt no inclination to join in. He, too, had recently received a sizable book advance (though nowhere near four hundred thousand dollars). He could afford to be magnanimous.

His glass was empty again. The open wine bottle was on the far side of a vast, primitive-looking wooden salad bowl. He pivoted to reach for it, and as he turned, his torso momentarily blocked out everyone but him and Elisa. She met his eye and gave him one of her sultry looks, tilting her face bashfully downward and smiling a little lopsided smile that was peculiarly suggestive, the shy but flirtatious look a woman might wear when she confessed to some slightly offbeat sexual fantasy.

Nate’s body tensed. He became panicky and hyperalert. He felt, he imagined, like a soldier who had been having a rollicking time on guard duty until he heard the crackle of approaching gunfire. Previous reports of improving conditions had proved false. Situation on the front was actually bad, very bad.

The wine made glugging sounds as it hurried out of the bottle and splashed against the fishbowl contours of his glass.

“Careful, buddy,” Jason said and laughed. Nate ignored him. He needed fortification for later, when, he was now certain, Elisa would keep him back after the others left, insisting they needed to “talk.” Ill-conceived advances would lead to a reprise of old accusations. The night would end as their nights so often had, in tears.

He exhaled loudly. An ex-girlfriend—not Elisa—once told him he was a histrionic breather.

When he looked toward the cabinet near the door to make sure there was another bottle of wine on reserve, he thought he felt something brush his leg, near his kneecap. He made the mistake of turning to investigate.

Elisa coyly withdrew her fingertips.

Nate bolted out of his chair and, as if overcome by a sudden and maniacal desire to study its contents more minutely, made for the bookcase. Borges, Boswell, Bulgakov. He ran a finger along their
spines, most marked with yellow “used” stickers from the Brown bookstore.

When he dared to look up, careful to avoid the part of the room containing Elisa, he saw Hannah silhouetted in the kitchen doorway. She was wearing a blue top and narrow skirt. She really did have a nice, slim figure. She was carrying a stack of dishes and had turned partly back to respond to something someone said. She laughed, a real laugh, hearty and open-mouthed.

As it subsided, Hannah’s eyes met his. She smiled. It was a friendly smile, a sane smile, perhaps the last he’d see tonight. He wondered if she was dating anyone.

Nate had not always been the kind of guy women call an asshole. Only recently had he been popular enough to inspire such ill will.

Growing up, he had been considered “nice.” He was also a wunderkind of Advanced Placement classes, star debater, and fledgling songwriter whose extracredit homage to Madonna for Math Appreciation Week—“Like a Cosine (Solved for the Very First Time)”—had, unfortunately, been broadcast to the entire upper school. Despite playing on the varsity soccer and baseball teams since tenth grade (granted, his was a Jewish day school), he never quite achieved the reputation of an athlete. He didn’t repel girls, exactly. They sought him out for help with bio or calculus, even for advice about their personal problems. They flirted with him when they wanted an ego boost and then they told him about their crushes on Todd or Mike or Scott.

He wasn’t much to look at back then. Dark-haired and skinny, he had a pale, sunken chest that he felt made him look cowardly, as if he were perpetually shrinking back. Though he wasn’t painfully short, he wasn’t tall either. His hands, eyebrows, nose, and Adam’s apple appeared to have been intended for a much larger person. This caused him to hold out hope, even as high school progressed, that he might spring up another couple inches, into
the five-foot double digits. In the meantime these attributes didn’t add much to his existing stock of personal charms.

Todd and Mike and Scott were his soccer and baseball teammates. Scott was the most popular guy in their class. He was tall and broad-shouldered and had that combination of crudeness and confidence that rendered intelligence not only irrelevant but slightly ridiculous, a peculiar if not entirely unamusing talent, like the ability to ride a unicycle. Todd and Mike and Scott were not exactly Nate’s friends—at least not in terms of equality—but they thought he was funny. They also relied on him for help with calculus. (Todd and Mike did anyway; Scott never made it past trigonometry.) Nate went to their parties. Nate got drunk. Jokes were made about how funny it was that Nate, bard of the math department, with the 4.0 GPA, was drunk.

Nate pined for girls like Amy Perelman, the stacked blonde siren of their class, whose bashfully averted eyes and modest smile were nicely offset by her clingy sweaters and ass-hugging jeans. Naturally, Amy went out with Scott, although one day she confided to Nate that she was worried about their future: “I mean, what will become of him? Like, if his dad’s stores”—liquidated designer goods—“don’t keep doing well? My dad says that they are, like, overleveraged. But Scott can barely read—I mean, he can read. Just not, like, whole books. But I can’t see him doing well in college and getting a regular job. It just wouldn’t be him, you know?”

In retrospect, it wasn’t surprising that Amy Perelman, who was not actually stupid but only affected stupidity in her speech because that was the fashion, eventually ditched Scott and got an MBA from Wharton. At the time, however, Nate had, somewhat to his surprise, come to Scott’s defense.

“He’s a good guy, though. And he really likes you.”

Amy looked thoughtful but not quite convinced. “I guess.”

In those years, nice-guy Nate, friend to girls in need, devoted copious intellectual resources to such questions as the verisimilitude of various household items to female genitalia. After school,
while his parents were still at work, he roamed the eerily quiet ranch house in search of erotic inspiration, leaving the lights off as darkness began to swirl through its corridors. Slinking like a burglar from room to room, he sized up fleece-lined mittens, condiments, even his mother’s pantyhose for possible requisition. One day, in his parents’ bedroom, he discovered a surprisingly racy book by a woman named Nancy Friday, and for a time, his equipage also included a “scrunchy” that Amy Perelman had used for her ponytail and which she had left behind in physics lab one day. During lonely afternoons of television and self-ministration, Nate, buoyed by Friday’s assurances that women too have dirty thoughts, sniffed the yellow-and-white cloth until the smell of Amy’s blonde waves had finally been depleted. Whether he’d literally inhaled it all or whether overexposure had desensitized him, he didn’t know. Hoping a hiatus from daily use would restore the hair band to its former glory, he hid it in the back of his bottom desk drawer, behind an old graphing calculator and some tins of colorful, animal-shaped erasers he’d collected in elementary school. Before the experiment could be concluded, he’d forgotten about it—baseball practice had begun, cutting into his autoerotic afternoons. Still, he must have reeked of self-love because around that time Scott branded him “Learned Hand” (a surprising indication that Scott had paid attention in social studies class at least once).

Years later, when Nate and his college girlfriend Kristen had come to Maryland to pack up his old bedroom before his parents sold the house, she’d come across Amy Perelman’s scrunchy.

She held it up. “Why do you have this?”

A few blonde hairs, which Nate had once been ever so careful not to displace, still clung to the fabric.

As soon as he realized what it was, Nate snatched the scrunchy from her hand, horrified, afraid that she’d catch something from it, a debilitating skin disease or a whiff of his former self.

“It must be my mom’s,” he mumbled.

Nate did have one admirer during high school: frizzy-haired
Michelle Goldstein. It wasn’t that Michelle wasn’t pretty—he’d been interested in girls who looked worse—but there was something painfully self-conscious about her. While it should have been refreshing to see
someone
at their school engrossed in Mary Wollstonecraft’s
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
, Michelle’s embrace of culture seemed affected. She had an inexplicable fondness for the phrase
pas de deux
, which Nate had once, frighteningly enough, overheard her use in reference to her “relationship” with him.

Still, at moments, he felt real affection for Michelle. One spring night—it must have been after a school play or concert—they sat together for hours on a bench outside the upper school, gazing down a grassy hill toward the dark expanse of the athletic fields. Michelle spoke, intelligently, touchingly, about the music she liked (moody female singer-songwriters with socially progressive lyrics) and of her intention to live in New York one day, to go often to the Strand—“a huge used bookstore downtown.”

Nate wasn’t sure if he’d even been to a used bookstore. There weren’t any in their suburb, he didn’t think.

“You should go to New York sometime,” Michelle said.

“I’ve been. We didn’t go anyplace like that.”

From his family’s weekend in New York, Nate had photos, taken by his dad, of him and his mother huddled together on the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building. They wore newly purchased ponchos and smiled wanly while a cold drizzle fell on their heads.

Michelle smiled sympathetically.

In the light that spilled over from the parking lot, Nate thought Michelle’s freckles and straw-colored hair were cute. He nearly reached out across the bench and touched her—her hand or her thigh.

It wasn’t even about sex. Nate’s life had been somewhat short on friendship, real friendship, distinct from the sort of conditional alliance he had with Scott and company. There had been Howard
from summer camp and Jenny, a tomboyish girl on his street who moved to Michigan when he was in sixth grade and from whom Nate had received the occasional letter for several years after, and Ali, also from his neighborhood, who went to public school. He and Nate had drifted apart after junior high. Sitting on the bench with Michelle, Nate felt as if the two of them shared something, some nebulous, slightly melancholic sensitivity that made them different from their classmates.

But at school on Monday, Michelle seemed to have reverted back to her other self.

“I can’t believe you got an A on that test,” she said after calculus. “What a coup d’état.” She gave a little wave as she walked away. “Ciao, chéri.”

“Coup,” he wanted to shout. “You mean just plain coup.”

Yet he and Michelle were constantly lumped together and treated as a couple. Scott repeatedly asked him if her cooter smelled like mothballs because of all the vintage clothes she wore. Michelle’s ambiguous social status, neither cool nor uncool, apparently made her his female equivalent. They even went to senior prom together. Nate had been working up the nerve to ask a pretty sophomore, and he felt both resentment and relief when Michelle’s asking him foreclosed that possibility. On prom night, he thought Michelle might have been willing to have sex, but he didn’t really try, although they made out—more than made out, actually: he had a brief opportunity to assess Scott’s hypothesis vis-à-vis the bouquet of her female parts (the word he’d use was
musky
). Nate didn’t push because at that particular moment in his life, he didn’t want to get entangled with a girl who was slightly repulsive to him. Nor could he imagine sleeping with Michelle and then blowing her off, the way that Todd or Mike might have (although not Scott, who for all his crudity was sensitive and unwavering in his devotion to Amy). There was something that rubbed Nate wrong about Todd and Mike’s attitude toward girls—their implicit belief that whatever befell a foolish or unattractive
one was her just deserts. Empathy, they reserved for the best-looking girls. (Amy’s most minor setbacks, a B-plus or mild cold, elicited coos of grave concern.)