The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (7 page)

While getting dressed, he glanced at his laptop. He still hadn’t decided how to respond to Hannah. As he pulled on a pair of brown socks, he noticed that one had a dime-sized hole near the seam. He rotated the fabric so the hole wouldn’t catch his toe as he walked. Then it occurred to him: he was a man with a book deal. Recently, on the strength of that book deal, he’d even hired an accountant, a singular development in the life of a person who had for years come close to qualifying for the earned income tax credit. Other people, people like Jason and Peter, took for granted a much more exalted sense of what they deserved. Jason prized his well-being too highly to consign his foot to a hole-ridden sock. And Peter, struggling academic though he was, probably wore hand-sewn silk socks he special ordered from an aged Italian sock maker. Weren’t Nate’s feet entitled to the same consideration? Nate cast off the brown socks. He found another pair in his drawer.

Before leaving, he checked his e-mail one more time. Just mass mailings from various news outlets. Annoyed, he hid the mail program. In its place appeared the last Web site he had visited. A naked woman stood with her breasts pressed against a brick wall, her ass jutting out behind her as she tottered on tiptoes.

It had been a long time—nearly two months—since he’d slept with anyone. At a party the weekend before, he probably could have slept with, or at least fooled around with, a young editorial assistant, yet he’d decided at the last minute to cut out of there, to go home, by himself. Recently he had been undone by the mere dread of tears, female tears, theoretical future female tears that might never even come to pass. (Not every woman he hooked up with liked him!) In the midst of hooking up, all he needed was a moment’s fleeting sobriety for his mind to conjure up the fraught, awkward scene that might ensue after one night or two or three, when he tried to skip out of her apartment without committing himself to seeing her again, not meeting her eyes because he knew
she knew what he was doing. And then the call a few days later, when, in a studiously cheerful voice, willing herself to be optimistic, she’d casually suggest that they make plans to do something. Holding the phone next to his ear, Nate would feel not only bad but culpable. Had he led her on, acted just a tad more interested than he was out of some perverse combination of tact and strategy and unwillingness, for both their sakes, to ruin the moment? Once this happened—once his mind stepped out of the drunken, groping present to contemplate this bathetic, déjà vu–inducing future—the whole thing might just become … undoable.
Unbelievable
. This was Nate, whose unflagging hard-ons had formerly caused him to worry that he was a latent sex addict, liable to wind up arrested for masturbating in a Florida porn theater. But, instead of setting his mind at ease, his new sexual temperance filled him with another kind of anxiety. It made him feel like a wuss.

Fuck it, he thought as he grabbed his wallet and keys off the dresser. Maybe he should go ahead and fuck Hannah, as well as every other willing girl from Red Hook to Williamsburg. Maybe he’d start at the coffee shop, with Beth, the cute girl who worked behind the counter.

The light was dim and reddish at the bar Hannah chose on Myrtle (once known as Murder) Avenue. The music, an early 1990s alternative album distantly familiar to Nate, wasn’t too loud. A large exposed pipe ran along the ceiling. Tables were topped with old-fashioned desk lamps, an upscale touch in a place that was on the whole studiously dingy, a dark, heavily curtained wannabe dive. As Jason said, you can tell a real dive by its bathrooms. If they don’t reek, it’s no dive, no matter how much graffiti is on the walls.

Hannah arrived a few minutes after eight, apologizing for being late. “I have no excuse,” she said as she slid onto the bar stool. “I live just down the street.”

Nate caught a whiff of coconut shampoo.

While Hannah deliberated between a Chianti and a Malbec, with her head tilted away from his and her lips slightly puckered, Nate noticed that she looked a lot like a girl he knew in high school. Emily Kovans had been in the tenth grade when he was a senior. He could still picture Emily sitting outside on the strip of grass between the upper school building and the cafeteria. Her long, dirty blonde hair, shiny like Hannah’s, but lighter and less auburn, had a bit of string braided into it, and she wore bunches of silver bracelets and rings with colorful stones. Her sandals sat
beside her; her small feet poked out from under a long, flowery skirt. Nate hadn’t generally been drawn to hippie chicks, but for months he nursed a tender longing for little Emily Kovans. Even the memory filled him with a strange, airy feeling.

Hannah murmured thanks as the bartender set down her glass. Nate asked her about the neighborhood.

“I love it,” she said. “Of course, the last time my parents visited they saw a drug deal go down in front of my building.” She smiled as she combed a hand through a smooth curtain of hair. “They’re not so keen on it.”

Nate continued to study her face for hints of Emily. The resemblance came and went, depending on the angle. After a moment, Hannah’s smile began to falter. Nate realized it was his turn to say something.

“Mine dislike all of Brooklyn,” he said.

Hannah cocked her head. “How come?”

With his thumb and forefinger, Nate rotated his glass on the bar. “Even the son of my mother’s chiropractor lives in Manhattan,” he said. He lifted his gaze to meet Hannah’s. “And he, as my mother likes to point out, didn’t go to Harvard.”

Hannah tittered. “Nice.”

“They get that I moved here when I was broke,” Nate continued. “They can’t figure out why I stay. I told them I like it. That all my friends live here. I told them that the whole publishing industry lives in Brooklyn.”

Hannah was still smiling. “And?”

“And I fell into a trap. My dad says, ‘See? It’s just like I always told you—no one makes money writing. Except for Stephen King. And as far as I know he doesn’t live in Brooklyn.’ ”

With a jaunty little toss of her chin, Hannah flipped the hair off her face.

Nate was back in high school. History class, Mrs. Davidoff’s gravelly voice describing FDR’s battles with the judiciary (Scott, covering his mouth with his hands and forming the words
Learned
Hand
every time she mentioned the courts) as Nate gazed out the window at Emily.

He couldn’t remember when he’d last thought of Emily Kovans. In this dark bar, where the smell of cigarettes wafted from people’s clothes and a pink neon martini glass glowed sullenly on the wall, he remembered not only Emily but what the world had felt like to him then. He could see what he hadn’t seen at the time: how much his thrilling and uniquely angst-free crush had been bound up with youth, with the particular headiness of a Harvard-bound senior in the months of April and May—college and adulthood glimmering before him like rewards for good behavior. (How naively he had believed what his teachers and school counselors told him about the joys of college.) He didn’t know then that the ability to feel the kind of sincere and unqualified longing he felt for Emily would pass from him, fall away like outgrown skin. His current self was considerably more louche—buffeted by short-lived, largely prurient desires, whose gratification he no longer believed would make him happy, at least not for long.

“I used to love this song.”

Hannah’s voice brought him back to the present. Nate listened.
Those sheets are dirty and so are you
, a vocalist intoned to cheerful, California-surfer pop accompaniment. It was from a different album than the one that had been playing before. He didn’t recognize it.

“I listened to it all the time when I was in high school,” Hannah said. “Freshman year of college, too.”

She told him that she’d grown up in Ohio and had gone to a big public school, the kind where cheerleading was taken seriously.

She took a sip of wine. “You can imagine why punk seemed really cool.”

“Ohio, huh?”

“Yup.”

She ran a finger along the seam of a cocktail napkin she’d folded into a triangle. “Most of my friends from home are still in Cleveland. Maybe Chicago, if they were ambitious.”

She said she’d gone to Barnard on a whim and wound up staying in the city for journalism school. “Nobody I know from home writes or does anything close,” she said. “They have regular jobs, at banks and insurance companies. Things like that.”

She rested her chin on her palm. A thin silver bracelet slid down her arm and disappeared into the sleeve of her sweater. “What about you?” she asked. “Did you feel remote from this world before you got here? Or is your family … ?”

Nate knew what she meant. “Did I tell you what my dad thinks of writing as a profession?”

Hannah had a warm, throaty laugh.

Nate was charmed by something he couldn’t quite identify, a tone perhaps, a sort of pervading archness. Now that he was alone with her, he found Hannah to be a little different than he’d expected. He’d formed an impression of her as the kind of cheerful, competent person one likes to have on hand at dinner parties or on camping trips, but she struck him as more interesting than that.

“I definitely didn’t grow up in a fancy intellectual environment,” he told her. “But I was determined not to stay in Baltimore. I interned in D.C. one year, and I met kids whose parents were politicians and
Washington Post
columnists. I knew I wanted that, what their parents had. I felt like if they had it, there was no reason I couldn’t.”

Hannah leaned in, poised to be amused. “What was it you wanted exactly?”

Nate caught a glimpse of cleavage beneath the neckline of her loose-fitting V-neck T-shirt.

He toyed with a whiskey-coated ice cube inside his mouth, pressing it against his cheek. He didn’t have a game plan for the evening. He hadn’t even made a conscious decision to ask her out. The day after he’d gotten her e-mail, he’d simply been restless. In the same spirit that he flipped through stacks of takeout menus, he scrolled through the names on his phone, reaching the
end—Eugene Wu—without seeing one that appealed to him. Everyone’s shtick felt tired, overly familiar. Hannah offered, if nothing else, novelty. He wrote back to her suggesting they continue the conversation in person.

“What did I want?” he repeated. “You really want to know?”

“I really want to know.”

He toyed with a whiskey-coated ice cube inside his mouth, pressing it against his cheek. He recalled old daydreams: a generically handsome, professorial man with a strong jaw sitting in a wood-paneled office, a line of students waiting out front and a beautiful wife on the phone. Sometimes, the office wasn’t wood-paneled but chrome and glass, with a secretary who patched his calls through and a wall of windows opening onto the skyscrapers of New York. There was also a little hut in Africa where he’d dispense antibiotics and teach the villagers to love Shakespeare.

“On the one hand, to do something interesting,” he said. “And on the other, to be admired for it.”

Nate remembered something else: the belief that success was something that just happened to you, that you just did your thing, and if you were deserving, it was bestowed by the same invisible hand that ensured that the deli would have milk to drink and sandwiches to buy. Wouldn’t that be nice? Nate sometimes envied people less clear-sighted, people so seduced by success itself that their enthusiasm for successful people was wholly genuine. Nate knew perfectly well when he was currying favor—or trying to—and he was more than capable of feeling dirty about it.

“I used to think—” he started to say. But he didn’t know how to finish. He began fiddling with one of the buttons on his shirt. “It’s more complicated than I thought, the whole thing—ambition and writing,” he said finally. “More sordid.”

Hannah laughed. “Sold your soul lately?”

“Only in bits and pieces.”

“Lucky you,” she said. “I’ve tried. No takers.”

Like him, Hannah was a freelance writer, but Nate was pretty sure she wasn’t as far along yet. He remembered that she was trying to get a book contract. “They’ll come,” he assured her.

When Hannah got up to use the bathroom, she walked with her shoulders hunched and her head tilted slightly down, as if she were accustomed to rooms designed for shorter people. She was wearing a cardigan sweater over her T-shirt and jeans tucked into boots, a style that had reminded Nate of Wonder Woman when girls started adopting it en masse a year or two earlier. Her outfit seemed almost deliberately unsexy. But she had what seemed like a nervous habit of pulling the two sides of her sweater more tightly closed, which had the effect of making her (not insubstantial) breasts more prominent. As she walked away, the long sweater prevented him from getting a fresh read on her ass.

“Want another?”

Nate swiveled his head. The bartender, a young woman, was staring at the place where Nate’s face would have been if he hadn’t been watching Hannah walk away. She wasn’t so much pretty as stylish, with a slightly beakish nose and pouty lips. Her dark hair was separated into two long ponytails that hung on either side of her face.

“Yeah, thanks,” he said. He nodded at Hannah’s empty glass. “And another Chianti for her.”

“She was drinking Malbec.”

“Malbec then.”

She leaned over the bar to scoop up Hannah’s crumpled cocktail napkin.
Her
cleavage was frank and undisguised. The top few buttons of her plaid shirt were undone, and even though she had on a tank top underneath, it too was low cut.

She glided off to the other end of the bar. While he and Hannah had been talking, more people had filtered in; the room swam with their long, swaying shadows. A disco ball cast roving splotches of red and blue on the walls of the long, narrow space.

When Hannah returned, she glanced at her wine glass. “Thanks. Next round is on me.”

Jason had a theory that girls who offer to pay on dates suffer from low self-esteem. They don’t feel they deserve to be paid for; it’s a sign there’s something wrong with the girl. Nate wasn’t sure he agreed. Sometimes, it was just nice, only fair—especially if you weren’t Jason, who had never been short on cash because he was, Nate was sure, on the receiving end of significant income supplements from his parents or grandparents. Not that he and Jason discussed such things openly. No one in their circle did.