The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

by Waldman, Adelle

  “Which Em—?” Nate started to ask. But she obviously meant Emily Berg. He closed his eyes for a moment. “I really don’t want to talk about this,” he said when he opened them. “Can we please drop it?”

  He knew that Aurit would interpret his reaction as “defensive.” He was not defensive. He was frustrated by her (unjust) dig at Emily and her facile analysis of his personal life—delivered, naturally, with unwavering certainty of tone.

  “Fine,” Aurit said.

  “Thank you.”

  Nate took a bite of his burger.

  “It’s just that I don’t understand,” Aurit said. “It seems to me that when you do meet someone suitable and you have a nice time with her, you should tread carefully, take it seriously …”

  Nate felt like he was the subject of a highly sophisticated type of torture in which the torturer listens to your objections, even seems sympathetic, and then continues to administer electric shocks.

  Aurit had once espoused a system of categorizing people that he found useful. She said some people were horizontally oriented, while others were vertical. Horizontally oriented people were concerned exclusively with what others think, with fitting in or impressing their peers. Vertically oriented people were obsessed only with some higher “truth,” which they believed in wholeheartedly and wanted to trumpet no matter who was interested. People who are horizontally oriented are phonies and sycophants, while those who are entirely vertically oriented lack all social skill—they’re the ones on the street shouting about the apocalypse. Normal people are in the middle, but veer one way or the other. Nate was tempted to tell Aurit that she had been sliding into tone-deaf vertical territory.

  “Can we please talk about something other than dating?” he said instead. “I mean, there is a lot more in the world than who wants to date whom and ‘Oh my god, have you called her yet?’ We might as well be on fucking Sex and the City.”

  Aurit raised her eyebrows and tossed her head back, chin up in the air, so that, diminutive as she was, she seemed to be looking down at him from some kind of perch. “Oh, I’m sorry, Nate. I forgot how deep you are. Silly me, I can’t believe I bored you with my girlish prattle. Maybe we should talk about nuclear disarmament.”

  How did he come to be in the wrong? Nate didn’t know what happened, but now there was no help for it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just tired.”

  “Whatever.” Aurit shrugged. “It’s fine. I just hate the way so many men treat ‘dating’ as if it’s a frivolous subject. It’s boneheaded.” She smiled frostily and tilted her head in his direction, lest there be any uncertainty about who exactly she was calling boneheaded. “Dating is probably the most fraught human interaction there is. You’re sizing people up to see if they’re worth your time and attention, and they’re doing the same to you. It’s meritocracy applied to personal life, but there’s no accountability. We submit ourselves to these intimate inspections and simultaneously inflict them on others and try to keep our psyches intact—to keep from becoming cold and callous—and we hope that at the end of it we wind up happier than our grandparents, who didn’t spend this vast period of their lives, these prime years, so thoroughly alone, coldly and explicitly anatomized again and again. But who cares, right? It’s just girl stuff.”

  Classic Aurit. Take whatever she was personally interested in and apply all her ingenuity to turning it into Something Important. It never occurred to her that there was anything more worth caring about or thinking about than upper-middle-class women’s search for happiness, in the cozily coupled, fatally bourgeois sense of the word. She thought if she could just convey how much this meant to women—articulate it once and for all—the world would come around. Never did she realize how limited her perspective was, how insensible she was to all that fell outside the sphere of her own preoccupations.

  “I don’t know,” Nate said in a tone intended to be placating even though he was about to disagree. “It’s easy to overstate the importance of whatever you’re personally affected by. It’s like mothers whose kids don’t test well think standardized tests are the worst thing in the world. I just don’t think dating is quite the scourge of modern life you’re making it out to be. I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. It’s just one aspect of life and certainly not the most important one.”

  “No, you wouldn’t think it was that big a deal, would you?” Aurit mused. Her voice was no longer pissy but thoughtful, as if she were a naturalist classifying a homely new species. “Next time you feel lonely, my guess is that you’ll think it’s a pretty big deal. But as long as you’re feeling calm and collected and you’re able to focus on your book and your highly intellectual, oh-so-important book reviews and whatever else, I can see why it reinforces your sense of self to act as if you’re too deep to care much.”

  Nate was amused. “I’m boneheaded is what you’re saying.”

  Before Aurit could respond, the waitress approached. “You done?”

  “Uh, no,” said Aurit, who was poised to bite into a forkful of pizza.

  The waitress scowled and walked away. Aurit’s nostrils flared. Bad service was a source of great frustration for her, an irritant that might at any moment set her off, like science was for the medieval church.

  “When she comes back, I’m going to tell her there was too much arugula on my pizza.”

  “Hi guys.”

  Both Nate and Aurit looked up. Standing beside their booth was Greer Cohen—Greer Cohen whose book advance had aroused such animosity at Elisa’s dinner party. Greer was smiling gaily, as if running into them was the best thing that had happened to her in weeks.

  Seeing Greer wasn’t such a surprise, really. In Brooklyn, everyone turned up everywhere. Though the parts of Brooklyn congenial to people in their demographic had expanded dramatically in a widening web of faux-dives and mysteriously hip restaurants, to Nate the place seemed never to have been smaller, so dense was it with people he knew.

  “I thought it was you guys,” Greer said, in her girlish, vowel-elongating lilt.

  Greer’s manner of speaking was not merely flirty but flirty like a teenage girl with bubblegum in her mouth and a tennis skirt and tanned thighs.

  “We heard about your book,” Aurit said. “Congratulations. That’s a great opportunity.”

  Greer smiled and shrugged a little bit, as if to say “Who me?” As though the book deal had simply fallen into her path, and she’d barely taken the time to notice it. Now, Greer was a horizontally oriented person. Even her sexiness had something artificial in it. Some people reeked of sex; Greer, in spite of a tomboyish style of dress, reeked of a manufactured sexiness more tartish than slutty, like a pinup girl from the 1940s.

  The last time Nate had seen her, at a party, they had gotten into a long and tiresome argument. Nate had said that in a certain sense, and only in a certain sense, it’s harder for men to say no to sex than it is for women. When a woman says no, nobody’s feelings are hurt. Men expect to be shot down. But when a man says no, the woman feels as if he’s just said she’s fat and undesirable. That makes him feel like a jerk. Greer thought he was being a sexist asshole who didn’t think women should hit on men and refused to grasp the seriousness of sexual harassment and rape. Nate thought she was strident and unsubtle, either deliberately misunderstanding him for effect or simply unable to grasp the distinction he was making.

  Now, however, as Greer described her book to Aurit (“it’s partly a memoir about my teenaged misadventures but also sort of an art book with photos and drawings and song lyrics”), he was entranced by her cleavage. She began nodding vigorously at something Aurit said. Greer’s breasts, snug in an olive-green tank top, were his favorite size, just big enough to fill a wine glass (a red one). When he tried to meet her eye, they were squarely in his line of vision.

  “It was good to see you guys,” she said finally. “I’ll see you later.”

  Nate watched Greer’s heart-shaped ass bounce in tandem with her jaunty little str
ide as she turned the corner into the bar area.

  “Did I tell you Hans is coming to town in a couple weeks?” Aurit asked.

  Aurit’s boyfriend Hans was an affable German journalist who wore circle-rim glasses and sometimes struck Nate as more of a prop of Aurit’s than a figure in his own right. His existence in her life, however semimaterial given the long-distance nature of their relationship, gave her authority to lecture others about their romantic lives.

  Nate was still contemplating Greer’s ass. “That’s nice.”

  Sunlight sloped through the windows of “Recess, open 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.” (no ungrammatical dashes there), and collected in glittering eddies of dust underneath chairs and behind display counters laden with coffee beans.

  Whatever his feelings about gentrification, Nate appreciated the abundance of coffee shops that had lately appeared in his neighborhood. It was hard to believe that, once upon a time, the pale, bleary-eyed freelancers and grad students who gathered daily at places like Recess would have typed away all by themselves, grimly holed up in rooms of their own. “Sometimes you just want to see another human being, you know?” Nate had tried to explain to his dad, who clucked about the waste of money and extolled the virtues of the home espresso machine. Nate didn’t tell his father that working at Recess prevented him from looking at porn, easily boosting his productivity enough to earn back what he spent on coffee.

  Nate had chosen Recess on the dual bases of proximity (a block and a half from his apartment) and Beth, who worked behind the counter. He met Beth’s eye now. She smiled and looked questioningly at his computer. He shrugged and made a face, as if he were trying to work without success. In fact, he’d been scanning an e-mail from a national office supply retailer. It seemed there had never been a better time to buy a home copy machine.

  In truth, he was having a hard time focusing. His mind kept drifting. Personal stuff. Hannah.

  He had not called her the day after his dinner with Aurit. He had waited until the day after. The extra day was sort of a fuck you to Aurit. She had been a real pain in the ass that night. But … calling Hannah seemed like a good idea. It was the right thing. He had spent the night with her. She’d made him breakfast. On the phone, Hannah’s voice, contra Aurit’s dire prognostications, had not been full of tearful reproach, even though he had taken—gasp—six days to get in touch with her. She sounded a bit sleepy at first, her consonants not quite distinct. After a pause just long enough to alarm him, she said, “Sure, let’s do something.”

  Since then, Nate had been busy making revisions to his review of the Israel book and filling out a long, detailed questionnaire from his publisher’s marketing department. The fact that in February his book was going to be in stores across America was beginning to feel more real. When he thought about seeing Hannah, he felt a mild sense of anticipation. Not only did he like her, but they’d be on good behavior with each other, not touchy and peevish the way he and Aurit had been the other night, but the new-person versions of themselves: attentive, polite, and good-humored. This iteration felt to Nate like not just his better self but his real self, except that, like a skittish housecat, this magnanimous and engaged person materialized only occasionally, under very particular circumstances. New people brought him out. So did the receipt of good news. Nate had never been more tolerant of other people than in the weeks following the sale of his book.

  But he and Hannah were soon going to move past new-person territory. That whole bit about not wanting to sleep with him, about not knowing him well enough, made clear that she wasn’t looking for something casual. He had tacitly agreed to her terms when he asked her out again. (This was the real reason he’d hesitated about calling her, which he would have told Aurit if she hadn’t immediately begun haranguing him.) After the other night, it would be harder, more awkward, for him to tell Hannah he wasn’t looking for anything serious. Also something had stopped him from delivering such a line either time they’d gone out. He had sensed it would be, for Hannah, a deal breaker—that she wouldn’t bat her eyelashes and say, “I’m not looking for anything serious either” the way a lot of girls did, as if this were part of the challenge of dating. Each time he’d been out with Hannah, he had found himself reluctant to say anything that would throw water on their fun, flirty dynamic. No doubt he’d feel the same hesitation tonight.

  Outside, the brakes of a bus squealed. Nate set his elbows on the table and rubbed his temples with the heels of his palms. Aurit wouldn’t have been any help anyway. She didn’t understand (she willfully refused to understand) that in the little mental space where she stored fond images of cuddling, Nate saw himself struggling to read in bed while some alien presence breathed moistly at his side and asked if he would be ready to turn off the light soon. He imagined gazing in farewell at his apartment as he closed the door and left for some girlfriend’s place “because it is more comfortable, isn’t it?” He saw touchy-feely sex and dutifully concealed porn and movie nights—well-reviewed indie comedies on Netflix, or maybe, if they were feeling especially ambitious, a documentary.

  Nate was devoted to humanity in the abstract—to human rights, equal opportunity, the eradication of poverty. He was, in theory, sympathetic to the limitations of others: you had to take into account root causes, the punishing handicaps posed by stupidity, an infantilizing consumer culture, et cetera. But when he trained the microscope more closely, human beings took on, in his view, an increasingly unattractive cast. They appeared greedy, grubby, hypocritical, self-deceiving. Sex, the sexual impulse, was a lure—an illusion engineered by an animal organism that sought only to perpetuate itself. The makeup, the hairstyling, the waxed limbs and gym-toned musculature, the urbane posturing and protective veneers of youth and achievement and even kindliness—weren’t they all merely cover for the pathetic, grasping “I” underneath? It wasn’t misogyny. Men laid similarly bare, stripped of pretensions, would be equally unappealing. But Nate wasn’t both attracted to and repelled by men. Men didn’t force him into contact with their least attractive aspects. The cesspools of need, the pockets of self-pity, the most vain and ugly of the thoughts that roiled Nate’s male friends as they lay awake in the middle of the night remained largely hidden from him, like foul odors sucked into the exhaust fans of modern bathrooms.

  But maybe he was kidding himself. Certainly abstract ideas hadn’t prevented him from enjoying many other things he found philosophically objectionable, such as consumer goods from China, jet travel, Tori Amos. If he wanted to be in a relationship, no argument would change his mind. Perhaps the salient issue was not why but simply that he didn’t want to be in a relationship. His work fulfilled him, and his friends provided all the conversation and companionship he needed.

  Was this so wrong? Why do women get away with pathologizing men for not wanting girlfriends? There are entire Web sites written by supposedly smart, “independent” women who make no bones about calling such men immature at best, assholes at worst. Nate wanted to argue, if only he had someone to argue with, that women want to be in relationships because on a gut level they don’t like being alone. They aren’t noble, high-minded individuals, concerned about the well-being of the nation or the continuity of the species. They simply swoon at images of cooking dinner together, of some loving boyfriend playfully swatting their ass with a dishtowel while the two of them chop vegetables and sip wine and listen to NPR (preferably in a jointly owned prewar apartment with an updated kitchen). And that’s their prerogative. But what right do they have to demonize a counterpreference? If Nate’s idea of a nice dinner involved hunching over his kitchen table with a Celeste Pizza for One and a copy of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, who is to say that his ideal is worse?

  Nate knew what the response would be: maturity, it’s what adults do, et cetera, et cetera. But the same women who are so quick to call men immature when they don’t order their lives around snug domestic relationships would never call a woman immature because she doesn’t want to pop out babies. They resent
the hell out of anyone who implies there’s anything wrong with her choice. No, women only pull out that talk about mature adulthood when it’s convenient, when they want grounds to resent some poor guy who doesn’t want what they want. It isn’t merely inconsistent: it suggests an unwillingness to take seriously other people’s preferences. As such, it’s a tyrannical impulse. And somebody really needs to say so.

  Out the window, sunlight reflected off the windshields of parked cars. Nate finished the last of his coffee and set his mug down.

  The problem was that no matter how unfair they are, no matter how insanely bent on domestication, Nate was unable to entirely discount the claims of women—those he slept with or might sleep with. If only, like those cock-swinging writers of the last century—Mailer, Roth, et al.—he could see the satisfaction of his sexual desire as a triumph of spirit, the vital and needful assertion of a giant, powerful virility whose essence was intellectual as well as erotic. Either Nate was less poetic, unable to rise to such dazzling heights of imaginative fancy, altogether more pedestrian and earthbound—and no doubt he was—or he was less self-dramatizing. He didn’t, couldn’t, adorn his basic desire to get off, to squirt his stuff, with such baroque justification; so it was harder to see why his desire ought to trump everything else, trump women’s post-coital unhappiness. The dreary voice of Kant, insisting on impartiality, and the egalitarianism of the age—every person equal as a claimant to empathy—were, for him, lodged too deep.

  “You okay, Nate?”