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 fo
r 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.
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.
{ 4 }
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.”
&
nbsp; 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.”
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Page 5