The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

by Waldman, Adelle

  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.

  He’d done some cleaning. That helped. Nate’s day-to-day life was characterized by bursts of productivity punctuated by downward slides into lethargy, loneliness, filth, and gloom. His bad moods had a self-perpetuating quality. He hadn’t a job or consistent routine to stop the slough, and his general recourse—drink—tended to be helpful only in the short-term. Still, Nate had never really been incapacitated by his moods, not for more than a day or two, and ever since his book had sold, his low bouts had been both less frequent and less severe. If his relative success hadn’t exactly made him happy, it had, on average, made him less unhappy. Today the approach of a deadline had spurred him out of inactivity. He had a book review to write, and write fast. In preparation, he’d launched into hyperproductive mode. In the past several hours, he had gone for a run (five miles in forty-one minutes and thirty-eight seconds), mailed an overdue RSVP card to a friend’s wedding, dropped off his laundry, and ventured to the grocery store, where he’d bought beer, milk, three Celeste Pizzas for One (on special), and an ample supply of Total Raisin Bran and Lucky Charms (his breakfast of choice was a bowl of Raisin Bran followed by a “dessert” of Lucky Charms).

  Feeling entitled to a moment of repose, Nate pulled his bedroom window open and leaned outside, breathing in mouthfuls of moist air. His apartment’s two windows—one in the bedroom and one in the kitchen—were the only features that a yuppie might covet. South-facing, they let in lots of sunlight, and from the sixth floor, the view was decent—if you looked above the roofs of the neighboring buildings and into the skyline rather than at the street below. But his block was more dear to him for its ugliness. Its proximity to fashion—appealing bars and restaurants, coffee shops, his friends—was convenient, but its unfashionableness was what he loved. At the corner, a tire repair shop’s yellow awning read, “Open 7 a.m. to - -” On Sunday mornings, the storefront church across the street drew a crowd of black women whose calf-length skirts clung to their legs in the breeze.

  Such vestiges of the neighborhood that this had once been were especially touching now. In his own building, people who had lived for many years in dark, mildewy apartments with cracked linoleum tiles watched from their doorways as surrounding units were gutted, then redone with gleaming new windows, hardwood floors, and stainless steel appliances—and a different type of tenant, the kind who paid several times the unrenovated rent. Nate had moved in a few years before the current wave of ubergentrification; that his own apartment had hardly been improved was a source of pride.

  Still, like the newer arrivals, he only superficially lived among the poor. They walked the same streets and rode the same subways (the buses, however, were largely ceded to the underclass), but the two groups might have existed on different layers of the earth’s atmosphere that only from a distance appear to be on the same plane. A store called National Wines & Liquors, Inc., where both liquor and cashier were enclosed behind bulletproof glass, was not actually a competitor to the much newer Tangled Vine, which specialized in organic and local wines and exhibited the work of area artists at its Thursday-evening tastings. Even at the bodegas, where all paths in fact converged, the different strata of residents rarely handled the same merchandise. Nate reached for the New York Times (which they had only begun to stock relatively recently—when he first moved to the neighborhood, he had to walk to Park Slope to get it), while the cabbies and construction workers grabbed the Post. He bought six-packs of beer to take home rather than single-serving forty-ounce cans. Only the cash that passed back and forth across the counter touched all hands.

  From the street, Nate heard the guttural throb of an unmuffled engine, followed by the screech of brakes. Nate could hear shouting but not the words as a pair of young women crossed the street in front of a stopped car.

  He thought again of Hannah. After they’d kissed the other night, they’d gone back inside the bar and finished their drinks. He walked her home, and they made out a little more in front of her building. Even in retrospect, he found her—her easy willingness to contradict him, her unfeminine but not at all unflattering outfit—strongly sexy.

  But he should cool it. He had a bad habit of initially zeroing in on one or two things he liked about every new girl he found himself interested in, as if to justify his attraction. This one (Emily Chiu) was not just beautiful in a petite and delicate way he found particularly compelling, but he and she had also had, on first meeting, an intense and bonding conversation about being children of immigrants. That one (Emily Berg) was funny. A third was dazzlingly impressive in a certain sane and competent and businesslike way. (Yes, early on, he’d thought maybe he would fall for Juliet.) But early impressions were unreliable. Juliet, for example. She prided herself on being a person who had the courage to speak her mind, who called things as she saw them, but after a few dates, Nate had felt aggressive was perhaps a more fitting description. She was a repository of truths both obvious and rude: a friend should go on a diet, a struggling coworker should accept his limitations and stop trying to be “some hotshot reporter he’s not cut out to be.” She rarely asked Nate questions about himself except to wonder if he’d been to such-and-such restaurant and to marvel when the answer was no. They couldn’t seem to hit on many topics of mutual interest; Nate spent much of their time together affecting interest in subjects that held only moderate appeal for him: personnel issues at the Wall Street Journal, the vast number of business reporters who lacked a solid understanding of business, the relative merits o
f whole grains versus refined ones. Also, the high percentage of New York men who were, according to Juliet, intimidated by successful women.

  There was nothing wrong with Juliet—Nate had no doubt that many other men found her desirable—but it had been obvious that he and she weren’t right for each other. Still, when he realized that he had been mistaken in his initial impression—of Juliet or of any of the women he dated—he invariably felt like a jerk for having seemed, initially, more enthusiastic than he would turn out to be.

  Of course, these women ought to have listened when he told them he wasn’t looking for anything serious. But on a certain level, it didn’t really matter if it was stupid of them. Ethical people don’t take advantage of other people’s weakness; that’s like being a slumlord or a price gouger. And treading on weakness is exactly what dating felt like, with so many of these women—with their wide-open hopefulness, their hunger for connection and blithe assumption that men wanted it just as badly.

  Based on what? On whom?

  The outside air began to chill his bare chest. Nate edged back inside, ready now to begin. The book he was reviewing was written by a left-leaning Israeli novelist. In the past few weeks, he had read all of the author’s earlier works and other related books but not, until today, the book he was actually reviewing. He quickly grew absorbed in the text, rarely looking up as the sun sank behind a jagged gray horizon of six- and seven-story buildings. He was already growing disenchanted with the text—it was rife with sentimentality, its politics were pat and self-congratulatory—when he realized he was squinting to read in near darkness; he switched on his desk lamp. He finished the book around midnight and began making notes. Several hours later, he turned out the lamp to take a short nap. He was back at his desk, bent over his laptop, when the first hint of salmony orange began tingeing the darkness outside. He walked to the window. Even the storefront church looked austere and dignified in the dawn mist. The city doth now, like a garment, wear / the beauty of the morning, silent, bare … He vowed to pay attention to the sunrise more often, when he hadn’t been up all night. Which is what he always said when he’d been up all night.

  By midmorning, the sun was brilliant, hard and glinting. What clouds remained were reduced to stringy tendrils kicked around by the breeze. Nate shut his blinds to block out the glare. By then, he was laying out the heart of his argument. While he shared the author’s outrage at certain developments in contemporary Israel, there is, he wrote, an inevitability about the country’s rightward shift. When a nation claiming allegiance to liberal-democratic principles is founded on explicitly nationalistic grounds, the contradiction is bound to come back to haunt it, even if nationalism is dressed up as Zionism. Because Israel was from its birth riddled with evasion—like the United States, in terms of slavery—there isn’t firm ground on which to argue with the growing number of Israelis, particularly Orthodox Jews and Russian immigrants, who dismiss liberal principle as mere weakness. Eventually, a true reckoning, not a mere hand-wringing, will be necessary. (Aurit, Nate realized, was going to hate the piece.)

  Every once in a while, as he considered a phrase or conceived a counterargument, he stood up to pace, clasping his hands together behind his head as he roamed his apartment’s small perimeter. In the late afternoon, he opened his blinds and looked outside. Cloud shadows passed so quickly over the tops of buildings that he had the sensation of being himself in motion.

  It was early evening when he sent off the completed review. He felt like he’d emerged from some dark, intimate chamber. He showered and then left a trail of wet footprints as he walked back to the bedroom with his towel around his waist, his cheeks tender and pink from the razor. He resisted the urge to e-mail his editor with a few minor corrections that had come to him as he shaved. Instead, he picked up three cereal bowls, two mugs, an empty can of Bud Light, an orange ceramic plate full of pizza crusts, and several greasy paper towels. It didn’t seem like much detritus for twenty-four hours of pretty much straight work.

  Sitting at a nearby sports bar an hour or so later—his hunger sated, and his interest in the Yankees game on the flat-screen TV waning as their lead over the Orioles grew larger—he felt a yearning to see Hannah. He wanted to talk to her about his review, which he was largely happy with. He’d made a glancing reference to Nabokov that he thought she would appreciate.

  He toyed with the idea of calling her to see if she wanted to join him. But that was ridiculous. He was practically falling asleep on the bar stool and felt drunk after a single beer. There was also the fact that he was wary of starting something.

  He left a few dollars under his glass and nodded good-bye to the bartender, a gruff, muscular guy about Nate’s age. As he emerged onto the street, a deliveryman on a bicycle whizzed by, causing him to step back. It occurred to him how ridiculous he was being, how neurotic. He was making way too big a deal out of this. He made up his mind to call her the next day.

  The restaurant they met at was one of those bistro-style places, with red leather banquettes and a black-and-white tile floor, a decor inspired by Casablanca and French colonialism. When Nate arrived, Hannah was leaning on the bar with a drink in her hand. A ray of sunlight from the window cut a stripe on her slender back and then, as she turned to face him, across her chest and shoulders.

  She was dressed in a fitted blouse and a narrow skirt that wasn’t exactly a miniskirt but didn’t quite reach her knees. She looked nice. “You look nice,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  Nate tugged at his T-shirt, only to notice that his gut jutted out a bit in the front. He sucked it in and saw that his jeans, fashionable ones that Elisa had picked out for him, sagged from too much time between washings. His pockets, full with wallet and cell phone and keys, bulged unattractively.

  “Expecting rain?” Hannah asked.

  She nodded at the umbrella he was carrying and tilted her head toward the window. Bright blue sky was visible above the rooftops.

  “Maybe I got bad information,” he said.

  He told her he’d been given the umbrella that afternoon by the girl who worked at his regular coffee shop. Someone had left it weeks before.

  “Can’t beat free, right?” he said. Then he squinted at the umbrella. It was oversized, with a purple-and-white canopy. “Well, it is maybe a little conspicuous.”

  When Hannah smiled, the Emily Kovans resemblance struck him again.

  “I hope I’m not turning into my dad,” he said after they’d been seated at a table in the back of the restaurant. “He likes to brag about how he never has to buy dishtowels or washcloths because he just takes the ones they give you to use at the gym.”

  Hannah asked what his parents were like—“when they aren’t stealing household items, I mean.”

  Nate immediately wanted to take back what he’d said. He didn’t like the derision that habitually crept into his voice when he talked about his parents, as it had the last time he’d seen Hannah, when he’d mocked their attitude about Brooklyn. Seeking to entertain, he too often found himself making fun of their middle-class immigrant ways: their un-PC remarks about minorities, their defensive, almost childlike assertions of superiority over Americans and the American culture that they so often misread, their too-naked concern with money and frequent suspicion that people intended to take advantage of them. All of those stories were true, but when Nate trotted them out something didn’t translate. He felt more empathy for his parents than his tone implied, and he suspected that what he was really trying to say was “I’m different—I’m of Harvard, of New York, not of these rubes.” This had been especially bad with Elisa. Perhaps he never forgave her for the remorseless quality of her laughter when he’d told her about how, long ago, they had oohed and aahed at the furniture in the window of a rent-to-own store. They had said the cream-and-gold lacquered coffee table and the bed with the swan-shaped headboard reminded them of Versailles.

  “They’re not so bad,” he said to Hannah as a waiter dropped down menus. “Th
ey’re nice people.”

  She was more forthcoming. Both her parents had grown up on the west side of Cleveland (“the wrong side”). Her father was the brainy son of an autoworker who’d wooed and won a popular girl, Hannah’s mother, when they were students at Kent State. “She literally was homecoming queen,” Hannah said. Her father was a corporate lawyer. She had two older sisters, both well-adjusted and successful, “more midwestern” than she was. They were married; one lived in Chicago and the other in Cleveland. East side.

  When they finished their cocktails, Nate ordered a bottle of wine.

  “What a proper meal this is turning into,” Hannah said. “Very WASPy.”

  She told him that she’d visited a friend’s Cape Cod beach house a couple weekends before. She described the house’s wine cellar and the bedroom she’d stayed in, which opened to a screened-in porch that led to the beach. She said she couldn’t quite believe she was there. Nate remarked that the rich enjoy being hospitable to smart, artsy types. They need an audience of people discerning enough to truly appreciate all they have. It helps them to enjoy it more. Hannah suggested that he was being overcynical. Her friend’s family had money. Why should that make her hospitality more suspect than other people’s? Nate said that he didn’t mean to insult her friend. He was talking on a macro level.

  “Oh, a macro level,” Hannah said. “I see then.”

  Nate was immediately embarrassed. Why had he used that word? He had a bad habit of getting carried away, unwittingly revealing his pedantic precision, the academic cast of his mind. In writing, he could cover this up with deceptively casual language, a hard-won conversational tone that often eluded him—in conversation. In contrast, Hannah had about her, in spite of her slight shyness, an air of cool; it was in her amused, ironic, slouching posture, her default arch tone, even in the careless way she held her drink.