The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (30 page)

“Greer’s really smart,” he said as they approached their destination. He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth.

“I don’t doubt it,” Aurit said. She pulled open the restaurant’s glass door. “I mean, she’s been so successful in her career. Remind me, how much did she get for her sex book?”

Then they were enveloped in the restaurant’s warm air, rife with the scent of maple syrup. A hostess with an Australian accent directed them through a narrow aisle to a table in the back. By the time they sat down, that particular strand of conversation was lost. After Aurit’s long trip, there was much to be discussed. Hans was finally going to move to New York.

“That’s fantastic,” Nate said.

Aurit told him how this had come to pass, the conversations she and Hans had had, the plans they’d made.

Later, she asked if he’d spoken to Hannah.

“You haven’t talked to her?” Nate asked.

“I asked you first.”

Nate poured sugar into his coffee. “Don’t be like that.”

“Fine,” Aurit said. “She and I have e-mailed. Briefly. She didn’t say much.”

“Well … ,” Nate said. “I think she may be a bit nuts.”

The table wobbled when Aurit set her mug down. “Don’t go there, Nate. It’s ugly. Especially because
she
was so classy about it. She didn’t say anything bad about you.” She looked at him pointedly, jutting her chin out. “What happened?”

“She basically told me I’m the biggest jerk who ever lived.” Nate ran a hand through his hair. He tried for a casual “What can you do?” smile. In fact, the way things with Hannah had so quickly devolved made him intensely uncomfortable.

Aurit cocked her head. “What’d you do, Nate?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t be an unreliable narrator. What’d you do to piss her off?”

“Literally, I did nothing. That was the problem.”

“Uh huh …”

“I didn’t respond to an e-mail she wrote.”

“Did you apologize?”

“You didn’t see the e-mail she wrote me in response to my nonresponse. I think we’ve gone past the point of apologies.”

Aurit shook her head. “Nice.”

Nate considered making a joke about how lying in wait for him on the streets of New York was an army of hostile women, with Juliet at its head. Even Elisa, who pretended to be his friend, was half in the enemy camp. Now Hannah, too, had joined its ranks. Meanwhile, on the other side, there was still only one Nate. He didn’t make the joke, though. He did not in fact feel jokey about
it. He felt bad. When he thought about it. He tried not to think about it.

“In her e-mail, Hannah tried to be low-key,” Aurit said. “But I got the feeling she was pretty upset. Honestly, I’m surprised you’re so cavalier about it.” She studied Nate with curiosity. “You guys were together for, what, five, almost six, months?”

“Five,” Nate mumbled.

“And you seemed to really like her. Like, a lot.”

Nate looked at the place on the table where his plate had been. “It probably won’t last long with Greer,” he said suddenly, surprising himself. “It’s probably just a short-term thing.”

He and Greer had slept together on their first date. Because Greer had been extremely flirtatious the whole night, this hadn’t surprised Nate. What had surprised him was that she burst into tears immediately after. He’d felt confused and concerned and also, strangely, fascinated—by her mutability, the way she moved seamlessly and unselfconsciously from a sort of tarty affect to that of a naïf. It had been like watching a reptile shed its skin; it held him transfixed. The night had an otherworldly quality, veering back and forth from one mood to another. When Nate left in the morning, he felt as if he’d lived through a whole lifetime.

When he came to pick her up for their third date—Greer inspired in him old-fashioned gestures of chivalry, which was odd because in another sense he felt as if he were coming almost entirely because he wanted to sleep with her again—he found her not yet dressed to go out. Her hair was askew. She’d been crying again. The combined force of a comment from her editor, an incident on the bus in which an overweight woman had accused Greer of shoving her, and a conversation with her sister had “annihilated” her.

For an instant, Nate was uncomfortably reminded of Elisa—that never-ending river of tears. He felt an impulse to flee. He didn’t flee. He didn’t even really want to. His most vivid impression
of that night was from much later, well after Greer had been consoled: the glint of her belly-button ring in the moonlit bedroom as her body rose and fell on top of his.

The fling stretched into a longer and longer fling.

Nate had been wrong about the nature of Greer’s interest in him. She hadn’t been drawn to his “intellectual cachet.” She had, she told him, felt some kind of powerful, “almost kinetic,” physical attraction to him. Nate, unaccustomed to seeing himself as an object of erotic fascination, was incredibly turned on by this. He was also inclined to believe her. A memoirist, Greer was a skilled narrator of her own emotions. And what she said dovetailed so neatly with what he’d felt, the attraction to her he’d nursed for quite a while, before they got together.

Long ago, he had placed Greer into the category of people who had gleaned amazingly little actual knowledge in four years at Sarah Lawrence or Vassar or Gallatin or whichever fancy progressive school they’d attended, where that much-heralded goal of modern pedagogy, to teach students “how to think,” was considered better achieved without the interference of actual facts. Her ignorance of things that had happened—certain illustrious sackings, schisms, famines, et cetera—was almost touching. She was equally unfamiliar with many books and ideas widely deemed to be of world-historical import. But Greer had ideas of her own, all sorts of them. They just weren’t rooted in any context beyond that of pop culture and a certain strand of women’s literature. She had also perfected an imperturbable irreverence, an earnest and sincere belief in her superiority over stuffed shirts. Like Nate. Greer was no phony. Unlike Elisa, she didn’t pretend. Greer stared you in the face and said, “Really? You’re asking if I’ve read
War and Peace
? Do you really not know the answer?”

As he had told Aurit, Greer was smart. Like a finely honed sports car, her mind wasn’t weighted down with unnecessary encumbrances, but she was naturally gifted in the dialectical mode of argument, quick to point out the holes in your logic and
to come back with counterarguments. When dialectic failed her, she had at her disposal another powerful tool: tears. This rhetorical device she considered perfectly legitimate: tears fell under the rubric of sincerity.

If Greer wasn’t rigorous or self-critical, she was impassioned and empathetic, with great reservoirs of feeling about the issues she cared about. Her personality, like her writing, was lilting and engaging. And what Nate had once taken to be a certain artificiality on her part, he came to see as theatricality, which was different and was part of what made being with her so vivid. He soon found himself charmed by her quirky interests—her unpredictable enthusiasms for, say, piñatas this week, or tiny little postcards that fit only one sentence the next. He noticed, too, how other people responded to her. She had a way about her—a charisma, a storytelling verve, an effortless cool in dress that was as fashionable as Elisa’s chic but far less fussy, an instinctive social ease that she used benevolently, lavishing attention upon the shyest and most awkward members of a group. One night she played the guitar for him. Her hair was in a messy ponytail; a thin strap of her tank top had fallen on her upper arm. She was, as she sang a Liz Phair song—her voice small, unschooled, but achingly pretty—about the sexiest, most touching thing he’d ever seen. Sweet and tough and sad and hot all at once.

Not only was she unimpressed by it, Greer was inclined to think Nate’s “intellectual whatever” was kind of a bore, a sort of masturbatory exercise that she tolerated with pretty much the same condescension that he tolerated what he was apt to describe, in his mind, as the “puerile, self-indulgent navel-gazing” that characterized her work. Every once in a while these attitudes toward each other’s writing slipped out in stray remarks, usually during fights, which they began to have nearly as soon as they grew more serious.

Although she prided herself on being honest, Greer wasn’t always, strictly speaking, truthful. She didn’t invent wholesale so
much as scramble and rearrange to suit her current purpose, facts reconfiguring themselves like marbles in a tipped bowl. She was hardly aware she was doing it. In the moment, she believed what she was saying wholeheartedly. For her, that was enough. She also slid easily into manipulation when backed into a corner. She felt no qualms about that either. So it was that a minor argument about his being late or failing to do some small thing she thought he ought to—say, pick up his cell phone when she called—would escalate. She’d make all sorts of outlandish claims; he’d become so enraged at her “dishonesty” or “manipulation” or simply her “triviality,” that he felt entirely justified dispensing with tact. All sorts of pent-up criticisms came pouring out, many of which had nothing to do with the ostensible subject of the fight. Once he uttered aloud the phrase
puerile, self-indulgent navel-gazing
. It bothered her more than the words
stupid
and
cunt
, both of which had also found their way out of his mouth. (For Nate, those moments had been, frankly, thrilling, the words accompanied by a frisson of illicit pleasure. It was liberating, the idea that you could talk to a woman this way and nothing worse would happen than that she’d yell back that you were a “fucking piece of shit asshole.”)

Somewhat to his surprise he and Greer came out of these fights scarred but also purged. In between exaggerating her flaws, accusing her of a much greater degree of dishonesty et al. than she was in fact guilty of, things slipped out. He told her, for example, that it was the most annoying thing in the fucking world when she asked,
in that voice
, “Are you mad at me?” In turn, Greer told him about fifty other, much worse things that he did. Apparently, he was a real asshole. He had innumerable ways of belittling her and women in general. He bullied her when they argued, which is why she sometimes started to cry. She was not, she explained, trying to evade the issue. She was merely frustrated, and if her tears made him stop bullying, made him
stop and listen to himself
, so much the better. It wasn’t so much that she convinced him—Greer’s
feminism often struck him as conveniently self-justifying and inconsistently applied (that is, reliably applied in instances where it bolstered her position and otherwise ignored)—but the fear of setting her off did exert a strong pull on him to modify his behavior. Invariably, their fights ended, for Nate, in relief at realizing that Greer was not in fact nearly as unscrupulous or unintelligent as in anger he had painted her. Also, predictably enough, hot sex. Not even make-up sex so much as making up by way of sex. A moment would come when Nate would simply realize the absurdity of what they were fighting about; his anger would just
turn
. By that point, Greer—perhaps because she too was tired of fighting, or perhaps because she was turned on by how hot he had become for her—could usually be brought around pretty quickly.

Greer was needy—that is, she needed an audience—but it was not always clear to Nate why she needed him in particular. Sometimes, he’d glance at her, see anew how sexy, how charming she was. Anxiety would creep over him. Wouldn’t she rather be with a guy who was better looking and more fun, someone less ponderous and academic? After a couple months, he asked her, why him? Yes, he remembered what she’d said about attraction, but why—why was she attracted to
him
instead of someone else? She picked up one of his hands in hers and ran a finger along his palm and up and down his fingers. She told him that his helplessness and incompetence in maneuvering objects in the physical world were endearing. “Sometimes, I look at your big, clumsy hands—these fingers …” She smiled and kissed the tip of his index finger. “Your hands remind me of bear paws … I watch you chop vegetables or button your shirt, and, I don’t know, I’m just filled with affection.” What she said was sweet, but Nate was still partly unsatisfied. It felt exogenous to him, to the real him.

But he knew what she meant about being touched by vulnerability. Greer’s littleness appealed to him. He enjoyed beyond
reason being able to encircle her so thoroughly in his arms. He felt protective, especially in her darker moods, when she cried after sex or was rendered helpless by some minor setback. In these moments, the world ceased to be filled with innocent amusements (teeny tiny postcards! piñatas!) and became a sinister X-rated carnival of rapacious, leering men vying constantly to fuck her: “It makes me sick!” And they’d sit on the floor, her knees pulled into her chest, as Nate held her, stroking her small, hunched-over back with his big hands.

In February, his book was published. Although Nate had privately nursed fantasies of being single when this happened, it turned out to be better to have a girlfriend for that. At the parties on his (brief) book tour, he tried to remember the names of people he hadn’t seen for years or had just met a few minutes before. He felt inadequate when he couldn’t or when he wasn’t enthusiastic enough in his chatter. The whole process was exhausting and unnerving—he often felt embarrassed or ridiculous—and he was glad to have someone to call afterward, or better yet to curl up with at the hotel with a movie on. He felt closer to Greer, even grateful to her, after being together through this.

A certain twee quality to her mental landscape, a histrionic, self-dramatizing tendency that occasionally grated, the god-damned manipulative tears—all these bothered him at times. But Greer was nice, sweet-natured, especially when all was going well, when she felt liked, not just by Nate but in general. She was as sensitive as an exotic plant transported from its natural ecosystem, but when she got what she needed, she was radiant. Day-today, they were happy. Nate was rarely bored. With Greer, there was always some distraction, a crisis or a fight or some fantastic scheme of hers. Such as wanting him to watch her fuck a woman.