The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

by Waldman, Adelle

  Years later, when Nate and his college girlfriend Kristen had come to Maryland to pack up his old bedroom before his parents sold the house, she’d come across Amy Perelman’s scrunchy.

  She held it up. “Why do you have this?”

  A few blonde hairs, which Nate had once been ever so careful not to displace, still clung to the fabric.

  As soon as he realized what it was, Nate snatched the scrunchy from her hand, horrified, afraid that she’d catch something from it, a debilitating skin disease or a whiff of his former self.

  “It must be my mom’s,” he mumbled.

  Nate did have one admirer during high school: frizzy-haired Michelle Goldstein. It wasn’t that Michelle wasn’t pretty—he’d been interested in girls who looked worse—but there was something painfully self-conscious about her. While it should have been refreshing to see someone at their school engrossed in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Michelle’s embrace of culture seemed affected. She had an inexplicable fondness for the phrase pas de deux, which Nate had once, frighteningly enough, overheard her use in reference to her “relationship” with him.

  Still, at moments, he felt real affection for Michelle. One spring night—it must have been after a school play or concert—they sat together for hours on a bench outside the upper school, gazing down a grassy hill toward the dark expanse of the athletic fields. Michelle spoke, intelligently, touchingly, about the music she liked (moody female singer-songwriters with socially progressive lyrics) and of her intention to live in New York one day, to go often to the Strand—“a huge used bookstore downtown.”

  Nate wasn’t sure if he’d even been to a used bookstore. There weren’t any in their suburb, he didn’t think.

  “You should go to New York sometime,” Michelle said.

  “I’ve been. We didn’t go anyplace like that.”

  From his family’s weekend in New York, Nate had photos, taken by his dad, of him and his mother huddled together on the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building. They wore newly purchased ponchos and smiled wanly while a cold drizzle fell on their heads.

  Michelle smiled sympathetically.

  In the light that spilled over from the parking lot, Nate thought Michelle’s freckles and straw-colored hair were cute. He nearly reached out across the bench and touched her—her hand or her thigh.

  It wasn’t even about sex. Nate’s life had been somewhat short on friendship, real friendship, distinct from the sort of conditional alliance he had with Scott and company. There had been Howard from summer camp and Jenny, a tomboyish girl on his street who moved to Michigan when he was in sixth grade and from whom Nate had received the occasional letter for several years after, and Ali, also from his neighborhood, who went to public school. He and Nate had drifted apart after junior high. Sitting on the bench with Michelle, Nate felt as if the two of them shared something, some nebulous, slightly melancholic sensitivity that made them different from their classmates.

  But at school on Monday, Michelle seemed to have reverted back to her other self.

  “I can’t believe you got an A on that test,” she said after calculus. “What a coup d’état.” She gave a little wave as she walked away. “Ciao, chéri.”

  “Coup,” he wanted to shout. “You mean just plain coup.”

  Yet he and Michelle were constantly lumped together and treated as a couple. Scott repeatedly asked him if her cooter smelled like mothballs because of all the vintage clothes she wore. Michelle’s ambiguous social status, neither cool nor uncool, apparently made her his female equivalent. They even went to senior prom together. Nate had been working up the nerve to ask a pretty sophomore, and he felt both resentment and relief when Michelle’s asking him foreclosed that possibility. On prom night, he thought Michelle might have been willing to have sex, but he didn’t really try, although they made out—more than made out, actually: he had a brief opportunity to assess Scott’s hypothesis vis-à-vis the bouquet of her female parts (the word he’d use was musky). Nate didn’t push because at that particular moment in his life, he didn’t want to get entangled with a girl who was slightly repulsive to him. Nor could he imagine sleeping with Michelle and then blowing her off, the way that Todd or Mike might have (although not Scott, who for all his crudity was sensitive and unwavering in his devotion to Amy). There was something that rubbed Nate wrong about Todd and Mike’s attitude toward girls—their implicit belief that whatever befell a foolish or unattractive one was her just deserts. Empathy, they reserved for the best-looking girls. (Amy’s most minor setbacks, a B-plus or mild cold, elicited coos of grave concern.)

  Besides, by prom, Nate had largely begun to pin his erotic hopes on college, where, he imagined, even girls who looked like Amy Perelman would be smart and, more important, mature, a word he had lately begun to interpret as “willing to have sex with him.” If he were to list the biggest disappointments of his life, freshman year of college would be near the top, right behind the realization, much later, that even something as seemingly sublime as a blow job—his penis in a woman’s mouth! his penis in a woman’s mouth!—could be boring, even slightly unpleasant, under the wrong circumstances or performed inexpertly.

  Had he been an urchin rescued from the back alley where he’d foraged for food in dumpsters and solved millennia-old math problems on the inside of torn cereal boxes, he couldn’t have been more naive, more uneducated in the social mores of a place like Harvard. And if he’d been a homeless autodidact, he would at least have reaped the social benefit of being exotic. What had seemed normal back home screamed Mall of America, middle management, and mediocrity on a campus where the tone had been set long ago by Puritans with names like Lowell, Dunster, and Cabot. Todd and Mike and Scott, with their gelled hair fanning up from their foreheads and with their polo shirts and BMWs, shrank in size. The kids who seemed to belong at Harvard—the ones who seemed at ease, chatting breezily in the Yard, greeting old friends and throwing their heads back in laughter—drove beat-up Volvos, ordered clothing from catalogs (an activity Nate had previously associated with isolated prairie farms and early Montgomery Ward circulars), and, in a flat English shorn of all regional accent, reeled off the names of places he had never heard of: “Yeah, I’ve been to Islesboro!” “My uncle has a house there!” “We go to Blue Hill every summer.”

  Before arriving in Cambridge, Nate had mentally prepared for Park Avenue, for country clubs, yachts, caviar, for the heedless extravagance of Tom and Daisy Buchanan, but Maine, Maine caught him by surprise. Nate was used to summer locales that advertised themselves as such in their names: Long Beach Island, Ocean City. His new classmates were not playboys or debutantes. They didn’t wear blazers; the girls weren’t named Muffy or Binky. A fair number had gone to public schools (albeit largely a specific breed of elite public school). They were thin, ponytailed girls who wore no makeup and slouching guys in T-shirts and khaki shorts. They spoke of kayaking and hiking as the ne plus ultra amusements of their young lives. Nate, who had done those things at summer camp, hadn’t accorded them any special significance beyond that of the other required activities, such as singing around the campfire and making finger puppets from strips of felt.

  When Amy Perelman’s family had gone to Vail for spring break, everyone at school knew they stayed at a ski lodge that sounded like some kind of alpine palace staffed by a regiment of liveried bellhops. People at Harvard, on the other hand, referred to their family’s “places” in Vermont or New Hampshire as if these were cabins that their parents or grandparents had personally built, log by log, and they seemed almost to compete about whose had the fewest amenities. (“We never have enough hot water because we rely on our own solar generator, totally off the grid.”) Amy spoke of the five-star steakhouse her family ate at after a long day on the trails; Harvard people talked of standing out in zero-degree weather waiting for their charcoal grills to heat up, as if their families had never bought into the whole indoor-stove fad. Nate, too, had been skiing. With
a group of kids from his synagogue, he spent a weekend on a barren mountain in Pennsylvania that was also home to an abandoned mine. The trip was called a Shabbaton. They stayed at a Holiday Inn and ate at the Denny’s across the parking lot.

  Nate had never thought of himself as disadvantaged. His parents were immigrants, but the kind with good jobs. They worked for defense contractors. He grew up in a detached house with a lawn and a metal swing-set in the back. He attended a private, albeit religious school, where he got an excellent education. His parents had graduate degrees (masters in engineering from Polytechnic University of Bucharest, rather than, say, PhDs in art history from Yale). Growing up, Nate discussed current events at the dinner table; as a family, they watched 60 Minutes and Jeopardy! Apparently, though, some parents read the New York Review of Books and drank martinis. In time, Nate would learn to make finer distinctions between the homes of his most sophisticated classmates—the old-school WASPs versus the academic intellectuals (Jew or gentile)—but in the first weeks of college it seemed to him that all of them, from the children of well-known leftist firebrands to the spawn of union-busting industrial titans, spoke the same language. It seemed that way because they did. (Many of them had gone to the same prep schools.) When it came right down to it, these groups were like the Capulets and the Montagues. Whatever their differences, they were both wealthy Veronese families. Nate’s family was from Romania.

  Before he arrived at Harvard, Nate had read War and Peace and Ulysses for his own edification, but more important he had shown up without ever having heard of J. Press—so he couldn’t mock it. (Eventually, he gleaned that it was a clothing store.) He had only a distant familiarity with the New Yorker and no idea how easily an apple could be converted into a device for smoking pot. Nate had been captain of his high school trivia team. He knew many things—for example, the capital of every African country as well as each nation’s colonial name, which he could reel off alphabetically—but he did not know the kinds of things that made a person knowing at Harvard in the fall of 1995.

  He was, as a result, more than happy to be led about by his suitemate Will McDormand. Will’s great-grandfather had been a railroad executive prominent enough to have been personally despised by Eugene Debs. After long days straining to make conversation at orientation activities, Nate gaped at the parade of “dudes” who came to drink with Will. Even chugging cans of Miller Lite and ribbing one another about the pimply girl who had been free with her favors at boarding school, they were clearly the kind of young men who shook hands firmly, made old ladies blush and giggle, and uttered the appropriate condolences at funerals (before escaping to the deserted part of the cemetery to smoke a little weed). They wore expressions of light irony, and their conversation dexterously dodged all serious, intellectual, or sentimental subject matter. When Nate brought up a course he was looking forward to, an embarrassed silence fell over the room.

  Nate believed passionately in the equality of man, disdained inherited privilege, and bemoaned on ideological grounds the failures of the French and Russian Revolutions; just the same, during those first few days at Harvard, every time there was a knock at the door, he popped up from the sofa with eager anticipation. He was trying to make out which new arrival was a nephew of a cabinet member and which was a grandson of the Nobel Prize–winning economist, details Will tossed off with a nonchalance that Nate tried to mimic in his replies. (The ransom a kidnapper could have collected if he’d snagged the roomful of guys watching the Red Sox with the sound turned off while the Smashing Pumpkins played on Will’s stereo!) Will singled Nate out from their other two suitemates—Sanjay (“Jay”) Bannerjee, an affable but slightly stiff kid from Kansas City, who tried and failed to conceal nervousness about the beer drinking, and Justin Castlemeyer, a Young Republican from a small town in North Carolina—both of whom Will treated with a noblesse oblige that, as the semester progressed, grew increasingly smirking. But Will thought Nate was “hysterical.” He liked when Nate said “smart things” while pounding shots of vodka, tequila, Jägermeister, peach schnapps, or whatever happened to be on hand. Will particularly liked hearing Nate recite the African countries’ colonial names. “You’re like a wind-up toy!” he cried. “Again! Again!”

  It took Nate a long time to realize that “thank you” was not the only possible response to Will’s offer of friendship. For most of his freshman year, he found himself among Will’s friends, lusting after surprisingly vacuous girls, who, though they had energy sufficient for sailing expeditions and weekends in the country and though they got into Harvard, shrank not only from abstract conversation but from any form of culture unrelated to drinking or the outdoors (including movies with subtitles and anything that fell under the umbrella of “performance”). Every once in a while, in private, to Nate only, one of these tanned, healthy girls made whispery reference to a middlebrow novel that she had once read at her summer house after a wayward guest left it behind. So clearly they could read. Nate was aware that there were other kinds of girls on campus, but these girls, the ones Will hung around with, many of them boarding school classmates or daughters of family friends or girls whose families had summered near his for so long that they were “like cousins”—these girls seemed like “the best,” the ones who really belonged here.

  Other classmates were ruined for Nate after Will made fun of them. Girls who liked theater were “thesbos,” activists were “lacktits,” and would-be campus journalists were “muffrakers.” When Nate spent time with other people, Will seemed threatened. At least that’s how pop psychology taught Nate to interpret it. (Years later, Nate would conclude that Will was simply a dick.) “Doing the ugly people thing tonight?” he would ask. “If that’s what floats your boat, fine, but if you get tired of limpydick and the barking dogs, come to Molly’s suite. We’ll be playing quarters—or else tackling the mind-body problem.” As if Nate had come to Harvard to play quarters! Yet, inevitably, he’d wind up slinking out of the dorm room where a group would be watching Mystery Science Theatre 3,000 or a Godard film and head over to Molly’s. Where he would play quarters with drunk girls who called him “cute” and asked, in giggly, slurring voices, whether Will was seeing anyone and if he was really as big a player as they’d heard. (Nate couldn’t tell if the answer they hoped to hear was yes or no.)

  It wasn’t until midway through his sophomore year that Nate grew thoroughly tired of Will’s world. It was too late. He didn’t have much in the way of other friends. He sometimes hung out with his former roommate Jay, but for the most part he’d alienated all the nice, thoughtful people he’d tentatively, kind of, maybe liked freshman year by constantly dropping them for Will. When, through one or another extracurricular activity, he did hang out with other people, other types of people, he couldn’t stop thinking in Will’s terms. Every time he saw a girl in colored tights, no matter how cute or how into poetry, he thought “thesbo” and heard a howling sound in the background. And the nice kids’ outings, to the movies or a lecture on campus and then to a coffeehouse or diner, were depressingly tame, alcohol-free affairs. Many of these fiery debaters and ardent newspaper editors drank a lot of coffee and, in voices that grew squeaky at moments of high tension, discussed the allegorical implications of Seinfeld.

  It was then that Nate began, really, to read. It seemed to him as if all the reading he had done back in high school had been tainted. Some part of him had been aiming to impress, reaching for a sophistication he had thought would serve him—socially—in college. (Ha.) The spring of his sophomore year, he began to read from feverish loneliness, a loneliness he began to fear would be permanent. After all, if he, if someone like him, wasn’t happy in college, where and when would he be happy? His disappointment and isolation made him bitter, and he judged the world around him harshly, with the too-broad strokes of a crank. Except for people like Will, who already had enough privilege that they could afford to take it for granted, his classmates were blindly striving to climb up the meritocratic ladder, as if their liv
es were nothing more than preparation for business or law school—or, if they were “creative,” Hollywood writing jobs. Only when Nate read, and occasionally in class discussions or during professors’ office hours, did he feel any fluttering of hope. Perhaps his personality wasn’t so ill formed if at least he found kinship somewhere, even if it was among the words of men who were long dead. Or in class, which everyone knew was the least important part of college.

  In the middle of junior year, he met Kristen. They were in a political science seminar together. From her comments in class, Nate could tell that she was very smart. She was good-looking, too, with the healthy, athletic look common to Will’s gal pals. She had the kind of quiet confidence that comes from faith in her own sturdy self-discipline and quick good sense. She and Nate often found themselves on the same side in discussions. Soon they exchanged smiles whenever a particularly fatuous classmate spoke. They began to walk from class together and discovered that their upbringings were similarly modest. New England–bred Kristen seemed intrigued by his immigrant parents. She laughed at his jokes. Still, when he finally mustered the courage to ask her out, Nate fully expected that she’d turn him down—whip out the boyfriend in Hanover or Williamstown or her latent lesbianism or a chastity vow effective until the implementation of universal health care. But … Kristen said yes. She’d recently broken up with her boyfriend (Providence).

  Kristen was premed, bighearted, the kind of girl who spent winter break doing Habitat for Humanity projects in the Honduran jungle, but she was also hardheaded and acerbic, prone to a withering disdain for foolishness or absurdity that was both winning and slightly intimidating. People instinctively wanted her approval. Between this authoritative air and her sunny good looks, Kristen was, in the world’s crude judgment, a catch for Nate, several notches above him in the college social hierarchy. Nate wholeheartedly concurred with the world: he felt himself to be extremely lucky. If Kristen didn’t share his love for literature—well, that seemed beside the point, like insisting your girlfriend share your preference for Pepsi over Coke. It wasn’t as if she were willing to date only biology majors.