The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (8 page)

Jason would never go out with Hannah anyway. He was only interested in women who were very conventionally attractive, a preference he had once defended on the grounds of social justice: “If smart people only mated with smart people, class structures would ossify. There’d be a permanent underclass of stupid people. But when smart men mate with beautiful women, smart or not, you undermine that kind of rigid caste system. Dumb rich kids do everyone a favor by eroding any justification for birth-based privilege.” Jason was a jackass. Still, the thought of his friend’s appraisal—Jason would probably call Hannah a seven (“coworker material”)—bothered Nate. He didn’t like the idea of dating girls Jason wouldn’t. That seemed wrong, since Nate was clearly the better person—more successful as well as more deserving.

This was not a helpful line of thinking. “What’s your book proposal about?” he asked Hannah.

“What? Oh …
that
.” She began to adjust the folds of her cardigan. “Class and college in America,” she said finally. “It’s kind of a history and analysis of a national obsession. The Ivy League as our own version of aristocracy.” She nodded at him. “Nice shirt, by the way.”

Nate looked down. He’d unbuttoned the top buttons of his Oxford. Underneath, he was wearing an old T-shirt. Just visible were the crimson-colored letters
A
-
R
-
V
. He laughed.

Fuck Jason. Nate was having a good time.

“When does your proposal go out?” he asked.

Hannah touched a hand to one of her earrings, a silver dangling thing. “I’m not finished yet,” she said. “It’s taking longer than I hoped.”

Nate nodded. “It’s a lot of work. You want to make it as strong as possible.”

A moment later, he made a throwaway comment about how it’s sad that so few people read these days. “It’s hard not to feel irrelevant in a world where a book that does really well sells maybe a hundred thousand copies. Even the lamest television show about time travel or killer pets would be canceled instantly if it did that badly.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Hannah said, turning to face him on the bar stool. “I think it’s vanity to want it both ways. You know, to want to write books because that’s your thing but also to want to be treated like a rock star.”

She held her wine glass rather elegantly if precariously by its stem, at nearly chin level. There was about her manner now a certain devil-may-care majesty not quite of a piece with her earlier timidity.

“Are you really so indifferent to the fate of books?” Nate asked. “You said the other night you love Nabokov. Wouldn’t it be a bad thing if people stopped reading
Lolita
?”

“I think people who are likely to appreciate
Lolita
will read
Lolita
,” she said, her expression challenging—flirtatious. “I don’t care about the rest. I mean, I don’t care what they do for fun.”

It flashed through Nate’s mind that Hannah’s position wasn’t very feminine. She sounded more like an aesthete than an educator, and women, in his experience, tended by disposition to be educators. He felt intuitively that she was paraphrasing someone else (a professor? Nabokov’s
Lectures on Literature
?) and that the someone was a man.

“You’re saying most people are philistines and no amount of education or cultural outreach will change that?” he asked.

She raised an eyebrow. “Not exactly. I mean, who even says ‘philistine’ anymore?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t think they are worse people because they don’t like novels, if that’s what you mean.”

“You don’t?”

“They could be, I don’t know, scientific geniuses or Christians who devote their lives to charity. I don’t see why being a person who reads novels makes me or anyone else superior.”

“Do you really mean that? Or are you just paying lip service to the idea because it’s politically correct?”

Hannah laughed and her cardigan fell open, revealing the contours of her breasts through her T-shirt.

“I mostly mean it,” she said. “I try to mean it.”

Nate realized he was having a conversation with Hannah—that is, he wasn’t going through the motions of having a conversation with her while privately articulating her tics and mental limitations. When it came to dating, his intelligence often seemed like an awkward appendage that failed for the most part to provide him with whatever precisely was wanted—dry, cynical humor; gallantry; an appreciation for certain trendy novelists—but nonetheless made a nuisance of itself by reminding him when he was bored. He wasn’t bored now.

“Is it snobbery to think that
Lolita
is better than a television show about pets?” he persisted.

“It’s snobbery to think you’re a better person than someone else just because they don’t happen to get off on the world’s most elegant account of child molestation.”

Her eyes flashed in the light cast by the disco ball.

Nate suggested they order another round.

As the bartender brought their drinks, he remembered something. “I didn’t know you and Elisa were friends,” he said.

Hannah looked at the black Formica bar. With her fingertips,
she pushed her wine glass along its surface, guiding the glass like a hockey puck on ice.

“We’re not really,” she said. “To be honest, I was surprised when she invited me to her dinner party.” She looked up. “Pleasantly surprised, I should say.”

This made perfect sense. Elisa wasn’t great at maintaining friendships with women. She often pursued new female friends eagerly, but from year to year there was high turnover. Nate didn’t think it a coincidence that half the guests at her dinner party had been his friends rather than her own.

“What about you?” Hannah asked. “You and Elisa … ?”

“We used to date,” Nate said quickly.

Hannah nodded. Nate nodded back. He suspected that Hannah already knew about him and Elisa. For a moment, they continued to nod at each other.

“It’s great you’re still friends,” she said.

She suggested they go outside for a cigarette. Nate was glad for the chance to stand up.

It had been a chilly June; the outside air was cool. He and Hannah stood with their backs to the bar. Across the street, in a brightly lit new bodega, a table was piled high with pineapples and bananas. Its back wall was lined with stacks of Nature’s Harvest toilet paper wrapped in bucolic green cellophane. Next to the bodega stood a shabby, glass-fronted insurance office.

Hannah sifted through her purse and passed Nate a pack of cigarettes. He held the yellow box at a distance from his body, like a teetotaler forced to handle a martini glass.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” he said.

She continued to dig through her bag. “Only when I’m drinking,” she said. Her voice had become a bit singsong. She’d kept up with him drink for drink. That had surprised him.

The traffic light turned green. Two yellow cabs with their empty lights on shot past, hightailing it back to Manhattan. Hannah
retrieved a plastic lighter. Nate watched as she put a cigarette in her mouth, cupping it with one hand and lighting it with the other. When she inhaled, her mouth formed a small O. Her eyelids drooped languidly. Pleasure seemed to ripple through her.

“You’re like a junkie.”

Without meeting his eye, she gave him the finger. The gesture surprised Nate into laughter.

“I just get so sick of the antismoking thing,” she said. “It’s so totalitarian.”

Before he knew what he was doing, Nate leaned in and kissed her. He descended upon her so swiftly that she made some sort of girlish, giggling noise of surprise-cum-accommodation before she began kissing him back. He felt the cigarette fall to the ground.

Her mouth tasted mildly of ashtray. It didn’t bother him. He liked that she found the antismoking thing “totalitarian.”

He began walking her backward until her upper back touched the brick front of an adjacent building. He leaned into her, one hand on the wall above her head for support, as his other moved down to the curve of her hip. Then, abruptly, he felt a tightening in his chest, as his body reacted to a thought before it had fully formed in his mind. Without at all wanting to, he had begun to wonder whether this was a good idea, if the spontaneous affection he felt for Hannah weren’t a signal that this was the last thing he ought to be doing.

No.
The hand on the wall balled into a fist, scratching against the brick; the other found its way to where the small of Hannah’s back dimpled and flared into her ass, which was indeed nice,
very nice
. Through his shirt, he felt her hand climbing up his back. He told himself to shut the fuck up and enjoy the moment.

Nate held his coffeepot up to the light. Its bottom half was a mash-up of pale brown stains with dark outlines, a fossil record of every pot of coffee he’d made since the last time he cleaned the thing. He began scrubbing the inside with a warm sponge.

After a little while, his thoughts turned to Hannah. He’d had fun with her the other night. That wasn’t so unusual. He generally liked first dates. What was unusual was the impression of her he had taken away, one of both reasonableness and intellectual depth. Although it wasn’t something he’d admit aloud, he often thought women were either deep or reasonable, but rarely both. Aurit, for example, was deep but not reasonable. Kristen was reasonable but not deep.

Sometimes he wondered whether he was a bit misogynistic. Over the years, various women had complained that almost all the writers he admired were not only dead and white but male. Although this was pointed out to him with prosecutorial glee, Nate didn’t think it meant all that much. Women had faced systemic barriers to education and opportunity for most of history. They hadn’t written as much.

What he didn’t say—why aid the prosecution’s case?—was that the kind of writing he preferred seemed inherently masculine.
The writers who impressed him most weren’t animated by a sense of personal grievance. (They were unlikely to, say, write poems called “Mommy.”) Of course that wasn’t an accurate characterization of all, or most, writing by women. Still, the fact was that when he read something he admired, something written today—fiction, nonfiction, didn’t matter—there was about an 80 percent chance that a guy wrote it.

He thought women were every bit as intelligent as men, every bit as capable of figuring out how long it would take for train A to crash into train B if the two were moving toward each other at an average speed of C. They were as capable of rational thought; they just didn’t appear to be as interested in it. They were happy to apply rational argument to defend what they already believed but unlikely to be swayed by it, not if it conflicted with inclination or, worse, intuition, not if it undercut a cherished opinion or nettled their self-esteem. So many times, when Nate had been arguing with a woman, a point was reached when it became clear that no argument would alter her thinking. Her position was one she “felt” to be true; it was, as a result, impermeable.

Even self-consciously intellectual women seemed to be primarily interested in advocacy, using intellect to serve a cause like feminism or the environment or the welfare of children, or in the interpretation of their own experience. Take Aurit. She was one of the smartest women—people—Nate knew. She was clear-sighted and original, and not, like a certain type of woman, intellectually timorous; she was comfortable challenging conventional wisdom. But her subjects—Zionism, Judaism, patriarchy—stemmed from her life. When she tried to do more abstract writing, the result was comparatively thin. She wasn’t interested in international relations or Middle Eastern politics; she was interested in growing up in a crazy, conflicted Israeli family that functioned like a two-headed monster, liberal socialism and primitive tribalism everywhere bumping up against each other. In other words, she was interested in being Aurit. And that was fine. But it was a difference.

Of course, if you pointed this out to Aurit, she’d be furious. And for Aurit, the fact that something made her feel bad was reason enough to reject it. She didn’t even like it when Nate mentioned things outside her ken. If he got to talking about philosophers she hadn’t read—which is to say, most of them—her face would grow taut, tight-lipped, with a pulsing around the temples, as if Nate, in talking about Nietzsche, were in actuality whipping out his cock and beating her with it. Even Jason—and Aurit was surely a better person than
Jason
—was far more fair, intellectually.

And that was Aurit, who was brilliant. If Nate was honest, he also thought that women as a general category seemed less capable of (or interested in) the disinterested aesthetic appraisal of literature or art: they were more likely to base judgments on a thing’s message, whether or not it was one they approved of, whether it was something that “needed saying.”

By now, the coffeepot was reasonably transparent.

Nate set it aside and inspected the coffeemaker itself, examining the caked-up grounds that clung to it. When he turned the lightweight plastic apparatus upside down, compartments came flapping open, swinging wildly on plastic hinges. The machine began to slide from his hands. Crouching quickly, he caught it, hugging it against his stomach. He set it in the sink and began jabbing at it with the limp sponge.

When he finished, he left the coffeemaker to dry on the counter next to the carafe. As he walked to his bedroom, he took off his damp T-shirt. The air in the bedroom was thick with a restless gloom as wan late afternoon sunlight mostly failed to pierce a thick blanket of clouds. A light layer of condensation dotted the windowpane and gave the room a sealed, hermetic feel.

He felt a wave of affection for his little garret. Its particular brand of squalor appealed to him on a basic level. Real squalor was not this but the barren utilitarianism of his parents’ suburban condo, where various unseen appliances hummed monotonously like hospital monitors. Or it was the plasticky faux-elegance of
the ranch house they’d lived in when he was growing up, an immigrant’s version of the American home, culled from TV shows of a generation earlier, with artificial flowers and a living room that was rarely used. Even the tasteful, high-end prewar co-ops that some of his friends had purchased in recent years, with their baby gates and wine refrigerators (wine refrigerators!), were to Nate more squalid than his little apartment, which was, in contrast, the home of a person who lived for things other than the sort of domestic and domesticating coziness that almost everybody seemed to go in for.