The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

by Waldman, Adelle

  “Go ahead and start,” she said, without making any move to start herself. “The chicken will get cold.”

  While he ate his chicken cacciatore—which, as it happened, was quite good—Nate studied Elisa’s heart-shaped face: those big, limpid eyes and dramatic cheekbones, the pretty, bow-shaped lips and profusion of white teeth. Each time Nate saw her, Elisa’s beauty struck him anew, as if in the interval the memory of what she actually looked like had been distorted by the tortured emotions she elicited since they’d broken up: in his mind, she took on the dimensions of an abject creature. What a shock when she opened the door, bursting with vibrant, almost aggressive good health. The power of her beauty, Nate had once decided, came from its ability to constantly reconfigure itself. When he thought he’d accounted for it, filed it away as a dead fact—pretty girl—she turned her head or bit her lip, and like a children’s toy you shake to reset, her prettiness changed shape, its coordinates altered: now it flashed from the elegant contours of her sloping brow and flaring cheekbone, now from her shyly smiling lips. “Elisa the Beautiful,” Nate had said without thinking when she hugged him at the door. She’d beamed, breezily overlooking his lateness.

  Yet only a short while later, he’d acclimated. Hannah had complimented her apartment. “I hate it,” Elisa responded. “It’s small, and it’s laid out poorly. The fixtures are incredibly cheap.” Then a quick smile: “Thank you, though.”

  The familiar hint of whine in Elisa’s voice brought back to Nate an equally familiar cocktail of guilt and pity and dread. Also sheer annoyance—that spoiled, ill-tempered quality about her. Her prettiness became an irritant, a Calypso-like lure to entrap him, again.

  Besides, as he poked at his chicken with his fork, Nate noticed the pores on Elisa’s nose and a bit of acne atop her forehead, near her hairline, flaws so minor that it would be ungentlemanly to notice them on most women. But on Elisa, whose prettiness seemed to demand that she be judged on some Olympian scale of perfect beauty, these imperfections seemed, irrationally, like failures of will or judgment on her part.

  “What are you working on these days?” she asked him as a bowl of potatoes was passed around for the second time.

  Nate dabbed his mouth with a napkin. “Just an essay.”

  Elisa’s round eyes and cocked head implored him to elaborate.

  “It’s about how one of the privileges of being elite is that we outsource the act of exploitation,” he said, glancing at Jason, seated diagonally from him.

  The idea for this essay was a bit hazy, and Nate dreaded sounding naive, like the person he’d been in his early twenties, before he’d learned that writing ambitiously, about big or serious subjects, was a privilege magazines granted only to people who’d already made it. But he had recently written a book. He had received a significant advance for it, and even though publication was still many months away, the book had already generated quite a bit of publicity. If he hadn’t yet made it, he was getting closer.

  “We get other people to do things that we’re too morally thin-skinned to do ourselves,” Nate said with more conviction. “Conscience is the ultimate luxury.”

  “You mean that it’s almost entirely working-class people who join the army and that sort of thing?” Jason said loudly enough that all other conversation ceased. He reached for a slice of baguette from a butcher block. “Can you pass the butter?” he asked Hannah, before turning back to Nate expectantly.

  Jason’s curls were tamped down with a glistening ointment. He had the aspect of a diabolical cherub.

  “That’s not exactly what I had in mind,” Nate said. “I mean—”

  “I think you’re absolutely right, Nate,” Aurit broke in, wielding her fork like a pointer. “I think Americans in general are too removed from all the ugliness that goes into safeguarding so-called normal life.”

  “That’s the Israeli perspective, of course—” Jason began.

  “That’s offensive, Jason,” Aurit said. “It’s not only reductive but racialist—”

  “It is offensive,” Nate agreed. “But I’m actually not so much interested in security issues as day-to-day life, the ways we protect ourselves from feeling complicit in the economic exploitation that goes on all around us. Take Whole Foods. Half of what you pay for when you shop there is the privilege of feeling ethically pure.” He set his wine glass on the table and began gesturing with his arms. “Or consider the Mexican guy the landlord pays to put the trash in front of our buildings twice a week. We wouldn’t exploit him ourselves, but on some level we know the guy is an illegal immigrant who doesn’t even get minimum wage.”

  “Joe Jr. does the trash himself,” Elisa said. “But he’s really cheap.”

  “Is there a difference between being ‘racialist’ and ‘racist’?” Elisa’s college friend asked.

  “Same with the guys who deliver our pizza and make our sandwiches,” Nate continued. He knew that he was violating an implicit rule of dinner party etiquette. Conversation was supposed to be ornamental, aimed to amuse. One wasn’t supposed to be invested in the content of what was said, only the tone. But for the moment he didn’t care. “We don’t exploit them ourselves,” he said. “No, we hire someone, a middleman, usually a small business owner, to do it, so we don’t have to feel bad. But we still take advantage of their cheap labor, even as we prattle on about our liberalism—how great the New Deal was, the eight-hour workday, the minimum wage. Our only complaint—in theory—is that it didn’t go far enough.”

  “Excuse me, Nate.” Aurit held up an empty wine bottle. “Should we open another?”

  “Joe does hire Mexicans to renovate,” Elisa said in a tipsily thoughtful voice as she walked to the cabinet by the door. Atop it stood several wine bottles whose necks poked out of colorful plastic bags. They had of course been brought by the other guests. Nate recognized the lime-green packaging of the Tangled Vine, his own neighborhood wine store. This seemed to make his failure worse. He had meant to pick up a bottle on the way over.

  Elisa selected a red and returned to her seat. “Can someone open it?” she asked before turning to Nate. “Sorry, Nate. Go on.”

  Nate had lost the thread of his argument.

  Hannah took the bottle from Elisa. “You were saying that we benefit from exploitation but pretend our hands are clean,” she said helpfully as Elisa handed her a tarnished copper corkscrew that looked old enough to have accompanied Lewis and Clark on their westward journey. One of Elisa’s “heirlooms,” no doubt. “I think—” Hannah started to say.

  “Right,” Nate said. “Right.”

  His argument came back to him at once. “You know how you read a Dickens novel where these eight-year-old boys work in factories or beg on the streets? And you wonder why didn’t anyone give a fuck? Well, we aren’t so different. We’ve just gotten better at hiding it—from ourselves most of all. People back then at least justified their behavior by admitting to their contempt for the poor.”

  Jason addressed the banker. “If you haven’t already noticed, young Nate here suffers from a particularly acute case of liberal guilt.”

  Jason was currently working on an article about the obesity epidemic, to be called “Don’t Let Them Eat Cake.”

  Before Nate could respond, Hannah turned to him. She was cradling the wine bottle in one arm and gingerly twisting the ludicrous corkscrew with the other. “When people voluntarily pay more to shop at Whole Foods, aren’t they, by your logic, trying to be responsible?” she asked. “Aren’t they paying more so as not to take advantage of cheap labor?”

  “Absolutely,” Nate said appreciatively. (Someone, it seemed, was actually listening.) “But do those marked-up prices really benefit anyone other than Whole Foods shareholders? All they have to do is put some picture of an earnest lesbian couple on a cereal box and we just assume it comes from some free-love workers’ paradise. It’s in our self-interest to think so because it allows us to buy good conscience, just like we buy everything else.” He paused before concluding. �
��It’s basically a Marxian argument, about the inexorability of exploitation under capitalism.”

  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.

  { 2 }

  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).