The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (6 page)

Nate’s coffee mug contained flat Coke. This was not his top-choice beverage first thing in the morning, but he didn’t have the wherewithal to make coffee, in part because he hadn’t had the wherewithal to make coffee for so many mornings in a row that he was afraid to face the live cultures colonizing his coffeemaker.

After reading Hannah’s e-mail, he set down the mug. Its impact on the desk caused a stack of books to wobble. As he reached out to steady it, the stapler that was perched atop an adjacent
stack fell forward, landing on the back of his outstretched hand. He yelped.

Several minutes passed before he clicked back on Hannah’s message. He frowned as he reread it. Sober, in the daylight, he felt strangely hesitant to pursue the connection. The reason for this was unclear.

On the other hand, he wasn’t awake enough to start writing his commodification-of-conscience essay. And he didn’t have anything else in particular to do. When he’d been working on his book, he’d always had something to work on. Even when he wasn’t up to writing new material, he could always go back and tweak sentences he’d already written. Now that the book was in the hands of his publisher, he missed that.

He hit
REPLY
. “Isn’t it true, though”—his fingers tap-tap-tapped across his keyboard in a pleasing clatter of productivity—“that we are as acquisitive, if not more, than people were back then? We want comfortable lives, and if we don’t have servants, we have laborsaving devices made in China. Only now we want to feel good about it, too. So we make sure the exploitation happens out of sight. China is ideal.”

After he pressed
SEND
, Nate checked for new mail. He was expecting something from Peter, who had recently moved from New Haven to Maine for an academic job. But, no, nothing.

He got up and looked out the window. His street was barren, the trees that lined its sidewalks short and spindly, their leaves sparse even at the height of spring. They had been planted a few years ago as part of an urban revitalization scheme, and they had about them a sad, failed look, as if no one but civil servants had ever cared for them. Maybe they were also the wrong species or simply poor examples of their type. The wealthy residents of, say, Park Slope, one neighborhood over, would have known better than to let the city plant such gnarled, runtish saplings on their streets. The people of Park Slope probably imported their own lush, verdant, perhaps even fruit-bearing trees.

The smell of bacon wafted through the window. Nate wondered if he’d missed anything the last time he’d scrounged around his cupboards for food.

As he walked to the kitchen, his socks stuck on the hardwood floor. Coffee droplets, dating from the days before he’d sworn off the coffeemaker, had congealed, turning his hallway into a strip of flypaper for dust and balled-up receipts and the tiny paper disks spewed by his hole puncher.

He gazed into his refrigerator, looking for he didn’t know what. A ready-made breakfast of eggs Benedict with a strong cup of coffee would have been nice. Alas. Not even a stray carton of rice from his favorite Chinese delivery place, whose motto was
Always YOU Will Find Deliciousness
. He poured the last of the Coke into his mug and threw out the bottle. A rancid odor rose from the trash can. He pressed the lid shut.

From the other room, his computer pinged. Nate hurried back to his desk. “Even so,” Hannah had written, “doesn’t it matter that forms of exploitation that were openly tolerated in the past have been forced under the table? Doesn’t that say something about how our conception of what’s acceptable has changed?”

She had a point. Nate leaned back in his chair. It was not a deal-breaking point, but something he’d have to address in his essay. Perhaps as we become more ethically ambitious, we have more incentive to hide our failings from ourselves? He scrawled “Rawls” on a Post-It note and stuck it to the screen of his laptop.

Then he began to consider more closely the personal implications of these e-mails. Why did he feel so wary?

There was Elisa. He didn’t think getting mixed up with a good friend of hers would go over well, and Hannah had been at her dinner party. Still, it wasn’t clear that they were good friends. He’d never heard Elisa mention her. And Hannah was older than Elisa, at least thirty, closer to his age than Elisa’s. And she seemed, just, different from Elisa, more mature or something. They didn’t seem likely to be bosom buddies.

No, something other than Elisa was holding him back. Nate closed his eyes and pictured Hannah turning around in Elisa’s kitchen doorway. She was nice-looking, sort of striking and appealing at certain moments, when her expression was animated, but there was something about the stark line of her eyebrows and the pointiness of her features that wasn’t exactly pretty. And while she had a nice body, she was on the tall side and had something of the loose-limbed quality of a comic actor, goofy and self-conscious, good-humored but perhaps also a bit asexual.

If Hannah had been more obviously hot, he was pretty sure that he would have given her more thought before the other night, when she had been the only woman present who was at all a viable candidate for his interest. That had to mean something, although Nate wasn’t sure what exactly. When he was younger, he had imagined that as he grew up, he would become progressively less shallow and women’s looks wouldn’t matter as much. Now that he was, more or less, grown up, he realized it wasn’t going to happen. He wasn’t even particularly shallow. Many of his friends were far colder and more connoisseur-like in their attitudes toward women’s appearances, as if the tenderer feelings that had animated the crushes of their younger years had been spent. What emerged in their place was the cool eye of the seasoned appraiser, who above all knows how to calculate the market rate.

Physical attraction had driven him straight into the beds of Elisa and Juliet. This was not exactly a proof of its wisdom. With Kristen, on the other hand, there had been a brief window, before they’d spoken, when he thought she was a bit plain, slightly rabbity and prudish-looking. Later, when Kristen was achingly beautiful to him, his harsh initial assessment became hard for him to believe.

The problem, he realized, wasn’t Hannah’s looks.

Nate wandered back to the window, pulling up blinds all the way and squinting at the milky white sky. The problem was that
he was not particularly interested in the kind of relationship he’d had with Kristen.

He thought of Juliet, the look on her face the other day right before she turned away from him. Then, later, Elisa.
Jesus.
When the others had left, she’d tried to kiss him. “I don’t think it’s a good idea, for either of us,” he’d said, disentangling himself. She was upset, whether embarrassed or angry, he didn’t know. He was both. He couldn’t believe she was going to put them through this
again
. While she cried and dredged up old grievances Nate thought had been put to rest, he downed the rest of the wine and then started in on a bottle of vodka he’d bought her ages ago and found still lying on its side in the back of her freezer. An hour later, she was still going. He was by then so angry he was tempted to fuck her—just to shut her up. But he didn’t. He had done his share to create this situation, and he knew it. After a while, they both calmed down, and he coaxed her into her bed. “Just so you know, it wasn’t about sex,” she said from under the covers. He was leaning on her bedroom door, about to slip out. “I just wanted to be held,” she said. “I wanted, for a little while, not to feel alone. You know?” “I know,” he said. As he picked up his messenger bag and closed the door to her apartment, he too wanted to cry.

Contrary to what these women seemed to think, he was not indifferent to their unhappiness. And yet he seemed, in spite of himself, to provoke it.

When he was twenty-five, everywhere he turned he saw a woman who already had, or else didn’t want, a boyfriend. Some were taking breaks from men to give women or celibacy a try. Others were busy applying to grad school, or planning yearlong trips to Indian ashrams, or touring the country with their all-girl rock bands. The ones who had boyfriends were careless about the relationships and seemed to cheat frequently (which occasionally worked in his favor). But in his thirties everything was different. The world seemed populated, to an alarming degree, by women whose careers, whether soaring or sputtering along, no longer pre-occupied
them. No matter what they claimed, they seemed, in practice, to care about little except relationships.

The sun had come out from behind the clouds. A bead of sweat rolled down Nate’s neck and was absorbed into the limp fabric of his undershirt. As he pulled off the T-shirt and tossed it to the ground, it occurred to him that maybe Hannah just wanted to be friends. Maybe he was being presumptuous?

He returned to his computer and tapped on the spacebar. When the screen came to life, he skimmed Hannah’s e-mails again. Dickens this, child labor that. Even if she weren’t offering outright to suck his cock, she was, in a sense, doing just that. It was in her careful, deliberate friendliness even as she disagreed, in the sheer length of her initial note. These e-mails were invitations for him to ask her out. If he went along, sooner or later his dick would wind up in her mouth.

To Nate’s surprise, the thought of Hannah going down on him caused a slight flutter in his crotch. Interesting. Wearing only gray boxer briefs, he swiveled his chair away from his desk so he could stretch his legs and contemplate a blow job from her—for research purposes, to ascertain his level of interest.

He was distracted by an ominous crack in his wall, inching downward from the molding above his bed. Arrow-shaped, it seemed to point accusingly at the squalor below. Parts of his black futon mattress were exposed because the ugly black-and-white sheets, purchased at one of those “department stores” that sell irregular goods in not-quite-gentrified urban neighborhoods, were too small for the mattress and nightly slipped from its corners, tangling themselves like nooses around his ankles. His green comforter spilled over onto the floor, a corner dangling into an abandoned mug.

Because his apartment had no living room, his bedroom was his main living space. Someone had once told him that not having a couch was an effective way to get girls into bed, though that presumed bringing a girl here wouldn’t immediately repel her. At
the moment, his apartment was like an ungroomed human body, with fetid odors seeping out from dark crevices and unruly patches of overgrowth sprouting up here and there. Nate wasn’t big on cleaning or on having someone else in to do it. It wasn’t even that he didn’t want to shell out the sixty or seventy dollars every couple months. It tormented his conscience to see a stooped Hispanic lady scrubbing his toilet; he held out until the level of filth was unbearable. When finally she came, Consuela or Imelda or Pilar looked at him with big frightened eyes, as if a person who lived this way was most probably dangerous. He didn’t blame her. Casting about in his own detritus, Nate often felt ashamed. When there was an unexpected knock at his door, he felt as panicky as if he had to hurriedly pull up his pants, untie the pantyhose from around his neck, and hide the inflatable woman doll in his closet.

After a moment, Nate gave up on his “investigation.” He climbed back into bed—to gather strength.

Jason would say to fuck Hannah if he wanted. But Jason—with his finger, Nate made a circle the size of a dinner plate in the air above his pillow—wasn’t the right person to consult about this sort of thing. Although he was technically good-looking (and three—three and a half—inches taller than Nate), Jason lacked the good-with-women gene, the thing that Nate had come to realize he had, even back in the days when they mainly wanted to be his friend. For all his gonzo talk, Jason was prissy, almost squeamish when it came to physical contact. He would break off making out with a girl to tell her she should use higher-powered lip balm. “What?” he’d say, genuinely baffled, if you called him on this kind of thing. The belief that he was entitled to only what was most desirable was so deeply ingrained that Jason not only felt disgust at women’s minor flaws but took for granted that his disgust was reasonable. “How could I make out with a girl whose lips were like sandpaper?” he would ask. Okay, Jason, fine. Alienate every single fucking woman who gives you half a chance. Go home by yourself and watch porn.
Again
.

Yet Jason gave Nate advice: “Stop overthinking, dude. You’re acting like a girl.” Nate hated, really hated, being told he thought too much. Jason wasn’t the only one who said it: hippie-dippie types who romanticize the natural and the “intuitive” also prefer feeling to thought. But not thinking was a way of giving oneself license to be a dick. If Nate consulted only his “feelings,” he’d fuck Hannah without regard for anything else.

Nate sniffed the air several times rapidly. Something was rank. It wasn’t the apartment. It was his sweat, musty and animal. He leaped out of bed. For a while now, his stomach had been hissing and yowling like a pair of mating cats. He’d need to go get something to eat soon. Showering was a good idea, forward-thinking.

Afterward, he stood in front of his bathroom sink with a towel wrapped around his waist. In the steamy mirror, his body appeared to be in a state of panic. His nipples were pink Os that the wiry hairs on his chest, pointing every which way, appeared to be riotously fleeing. He had developed a small paunch that protruded sullenly above the white towel. His eyebrows, thick and bushy like the hair on his head, were in need of a trim. Elisa had introduced him to the concept of eyebrow grooming, just as she’d introduced him to many other aesthetic innovations, such as socks that didn’t climb halfway up his calves. “Like tomatoes on a vine,” she’d said, frowning at the ring where his socks ended and his leg hair came bounding out, wild with gesticulative fervor.

In the mirror, Nate tightened his jaw and pressed his lips together. The expression was suggestive of a cable news pundit taking a moment to consider his response to a thorny question: When will Al Qaeda strike next? Does Iran have sufficient quantities of plutonium for a nuclear weapon? Although Nate had never ceased to consider his nose problematic (bulbous and peasantlike, like that of the dissipated monk in a farce), his literary agent, a brash, jolly doyenne of the industry, had told him he had a telegenic face: intelligent without being priggish, attractive but not, she told him cheerfully, so attractive as to undercut his credibility. This last
point Nate heard with slightly less good humor than she had delivered it with.