“Of course!” Nate said.
He remembered something he wanted to ask Mark. He flicked Jason’s upper arm. “Is Mark coming today, do you know?”
Jason shook his head. “Dunno … I haven’t seen him for a while. You know he started dating someone, right? The hot little ticket from that reading? Carrie? Cara?” He whistled. “Cute girl. Hey, wait. Didn’t you talk to her first?”
“Maybe,” Nate said, tugging a blade of grass from the ground. “Yeah. I guess I did.”
“And you didn’t … ? Oh, that’s right.” Jason smirked. “Hannah.”
Before Nate could respond, a woman he had dated briefly years ago came up and said hello. She was now married with a small child, which she had brought along with her. When they dated, Nate had thought that she was a little too maternal for his taste. The well-being she projected now, as she held up the little blond thing for him to admire, seemed to confirm his intuition. When she put the child down, it lurched toward a squirrel. Laughing, she tottered off after it. “Good to see you!” she called behind her.
Nate accepted some carrots and hummus from a plate being passed around.
“Did I tell you Maggie started dating someone?” Jason asked.
Maggie was a girl Jason worked with. He had made out with her once the year before and talked about it frequently.
“The guy sounds like a real douche,” Jason continued. “Some kind of freelance Web site designer or something that basically anyone could do in their spare time.”
The sun had emerged from behind a cloud. Nate lifted a hand to shield his eyes. “Not that you care, right?”
“I care about Maggie a lot,” Jason said, swatting one hand against his arm. “Fucking mosquito. Maggie’s happiness is extremely important to me.”
“Right …”
Nate’s cell phone rang from inside his jeans pocket.
“The girlfriend?” Jason asked as Nate fished for the phone.
Nate hit the DECLINE button to make Hannah’s name disappear from the screen. “You know, Jase,” he said. “I was trying to remember. When actually was the last time you got laid? Who was president? Did you have dial-up or broadband?”
Jason stared at him for a moment. Then he smiled broadly. His distended lips reminded Nate of the bellies of starving children. “I can’t help it if I have high standards,” he said.
The group was called to attention to toast the couple.
Afterward, Jason turned to him. “I get the feeling you think I don’t like your new girlfriend.”
“I didn’t—” Instinctively, Nate started to deny that he’d given the subject any thought whatsoever, but Jason continued over him.
“That’s not true. I might have thought she was a little mousy at first, but I was wrong. I think she’s a cool girl.”
Nate was surprised to hear this—also surprised, and a little embarrassed, by just how glad he was to hear it. He nodded with studied casualness. “She is cool.”
“I was surprised, at first, only because I didn’t think she was your type.”
This was clearly a provocation. Nate knew he should ignore it. “What do you mean, not my type?” he asked.
“You know …” Jason said. “You usually go for—I don’t know how to put this—sort of girly, high-maintenance women. You know, like Elisa.”
“That’s ridic—!” On the other side of the picnic blanket, Aurit, in conversation with someone Nate didn’t know, glanced up at him. Nate lowered his voice. “—ulous. Don’t you think I liked Elisa in spite of her being, as you put it—so generously, I might add—‘girly and high-maintenance,’ and not because of it?”
“Well, I’m sure you think so—”
“There were a lot of reasons I liked her. Not one of them had to do with her being high-maintenance. That did have something to do with why I broke up with her.”
“Calm down,” Jason said. “All I’m saying is that we’re hardwired to respond to certain things—I know I am—and not all of them are what I’d call good.”
“Kristen wasn’t girly or high-maintenance.”
“No, she wasn’t,” Jason agreed. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. If you’re happy, that’s great. As I said, I think Hannah’s a cool girl.” Without giving Nate a chance to respond, Jason turned away. “Hey, Aurit, can you pass some of those vegetables?”
“Speaking of Elisa,” Jason said a moment later, “what’d she say when you told her you were doing her friend?”
Nate started to react to that last bit but checked himself. “I haven’t told her yet,” he said. “I’m going to.”
Jason was nibbling on a broccoli floret with a delicacy that was almost effete, especially in contrast with the leer that took shape on his lips. “Tell her if she needs a shoulder to cry on, she can call me,” he said. “I’ve always got time for her tight little ass and big blue eyes.”
“For fuck’s sake.”
Nate did meet up with Elisa several days later. He’d been putting it off, and indeed he should have done it sooner. She had already heard about Hannah from someone. To Nate’s surprise, she was mad not at him but at Hannah.
“I thought she was my friend,” Elisa said.
“She feels bad,” Nate said. “She really likes you. She assumed it was cool since you and I are friends.”
“I’m sure she feels awful. A person who dates her friend’s ex, who she met at her friend’s own house—at her friend’s dinner party … I’m sure she feels terrible.”
Nate studied the grain of the wood on the bar. They were at a steak place, in midtown, near Elisa’s office. He was beginning to wonder whether this get-together was a good idea. Making such a big to-do about him and Hannah seemed to confer undue legitimacy to Elisa’s anger.
Elisa was aggressively stirring her martini. “What a bitch.”
“That’s not fa—”
But as Elisa turned her eyes from the smoky mirror behind the bar to meet his, Nate let the words trail off. Sometimes, it hit him all over again, the rawness of Elisa’s unhappiness. For all her beauty, she looked—around her eyes—haggard, stricken.
“I’m sorry, E,” he said softly. “I really am. I didn’t think you guys were close. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Elisa’s lower lip protruded sulkily. She didn’t so much shrug as raise a thin shoulder, causing her collarbone to jut out above the wide neckline of her blouse. Apart from her eyes, she looked as pretty and fashionable as ever, with her blonde hair swept up in a loose bun. She was wearing a long, loose white shirt and tight-fitting black pants.
“You’ll meet someone,” Nate said.
Elisa looked at him, her perfect features perfectly still. As one beat passed and then another, her expression seemed to deepen until her face projected a profound weariness.
“Maybe,” she said finally.
Nate braced himself for her to start in on familiar accusations. He had poisoned her future relationships. She could no longer trust that a guy who claimed to love her wouldn’t change his mind at any moment. He had made her feel that she wasn’t smart enough or good enough. How was she supposed to recover from that?
But she must have sensed that for now she already had Nate’s sympathy. There was nothing to gain by taking that tack.
“By the way,” she said. “I’m sorry about last time. My dinner party, I mean. And afterward. I had too much to drink. I shouldn’t have put you in that position. It’s just … I don’t know, things have kind of sucked lately. I’ve been feeling really down.”
Nate shifted his weight on the well-padded bar stool. In his chest, various emotions—guilt and pity and simple sadness—swelled miserably. He almost preferred when she berated him.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’m sorry you haven’t been happy.”
Elisa shrugged again as she scrutinized one of her hands and began repositioning a ring that had slid off-center.
Nate sought something diverting to say. “What’s the boss up to these days?”
Elisa worked for a Very Important Magazine. Nate, as she well knew, liked hearing about the goings-on there. She told him about a well-known writer who’d pissed off her boss, the editor in chief, by withdrawing a piece rather than submitting to his editorial suggestions. The writer had then published the piece in a competing publication, incorporating many of those suggestions.
“He’s never writing for us again,” she said.
“No, I would think not.”
Elisa looked deliberately at him. “What about you? It’s only about, what, six months until your book comes out? You must”—her eyes twitched—“you must be really excited.”
Nate stared at the row of single-malt scotches lined up on the shelf behind the bar. He had written much of his book while he had been with Elisa. In a way, she had been essential to his writing it. Although she had sometimes complained about the time he took away from her to work on it, she had always believed in the book and in his ability to pull it off. During periods when the writing wasn’t going well, when he had seriously doubted it ever would, her faith had mattered a lot, had maybe been crucial. Then, before the book was finished and sold, he’d broken up with her.
“I try not to obsess about it,” he said.
Elisa pushed her empty glass to the back of the bar. It was immediately whisked away by a bow-tied attendant. Nate began to call him back to ask for the check.
“Why are you in such a hurry?” Elisa asked.
Something familiar snapped back into place as her resigned tone gave way to one of complaint.
Nate held up his hands. “I’m not.”
“Is Hannah expecting you?”
“No! I just—oh, never mind. Let’s get another.”
“Not if you don’t want to.”
“I want to!” he insisted. “I do.”
It was after ten when he walked Elisa to her subway station. As she disappeared down the steps, Nate felt the kind of relief that has a physical component, like the release after a long run. On his way to his own subway station, several blocks west, he sent Hannah a text. Is it weird that I miss you? They’d seen each other only that morning.
Her reply came a moment later. Yes, it’s weird. Seconds after, another arrived: (but I kinda, sorta miss you too).
After the evening with Elisa, Nate wanted nothing so much as to rebuild his mood in a different key. The light, easy banter he and Hannah tended toward—the implicit reassurance of her presence that he wasn’t a heartless ingrate—was particularly appealing.
Before he got on the train, he wrote back. I can be there in 45.
{ 10 }
That night, Hannah asked what the deal was with him and Elisa. They were sitting in the chairs by her window. Nate paused before answering.
He had met Elisa three years ago at a publishing party. She had arrived with the editor in chief of the Very Important Magazine. Nate asked his friend Andrew about her. Andrew said she was the editor in chief’s new assistant.
When her boss left, Elisa remained. Nate downed two or three thimble-sized glasses of wine. She was standing next to the food table, in front of a small mountain of fruit.
“Hi, I’m Nate.”
She popped a red grape into her mouth. “Elisa,” she said, almost drowsily.
For the next few minutes, she answered his questions, but she seemed slightly put out by the obligation he had imposed on her. Eventually, she asked what he did.
He said he was the book critic for an online magazine. She asked which one. He told her.
She eyed him. Nate tugged at the collar of his blue Oxford shirt. He noticed that one of his shoes was not merely untied but radically untied, as if he had only just now wrested his foot from a steel trap. Its gaping, brown tongue hung crookedly, crisscrossed with faint indentations where the laces should have been. He stepped on that foot with the other, swaying slightly, like a top-heavy kebab.
She told him that she’d recently finished a master’s degree in comp lit from the Sorbonne. Before that she’d been at Brown. This was her first job in publishing. She wanted to write. She’d love to get coffee with Nate sometime. She would? Yeah, she’d love to talk about publishing.
Coffee turned into dinner and, a few days later, a sunset run over the Brooklyn Bridge and then a party at a Harvard friend/hedge fund guy’s Upper West Side triplex and a Saturday night at the Brooklyn Museum. Nate was terrifically impressed by her. She dropped casual references to the work of aging intellectuals who contributed to the New York Review of Books. The polysyllabic names of avant-garde eastern European filmmakers rolled effortlessly from her tongue. Her father was a well-known professor whose books Nate knew by reputation. By that point in his life, Nate had dated any number of editorial types. Elisa seemed different, unusually serious and well informed, especially for someone so young. And so attractive.
Even Nate, who had had to be told by Jason not to wear pants with pleats, could tell somehow that among all the well-dressed young women of Brooklyn, Elisa looked especially nice. She knew where to buy anything, which stores were not so much expensive as tasteful, and also what was okay to buy at Target (from what Nate gleaned, things that started with the letter T: Tupperware, tights, toothpaste). In theory, Nate disdained “bourgeois status signifiers,” but in practice he took pride in Elisa’s whiff of smart chic. She radiated the effortless worldly ease of the popular girl. She was clearly first-rate, top-shelf, the publishing world equivalent of Amy Perelman in high school and Will McDormand’s best-looking gal pals at Harvard: she was the thing that was clearly, indisputably desirable.
Her demeanor was smooth and preoccupied, even slightly sullen, and she spoke at times with an unnerving, almost anhedonic lack of affect. She often seemed bored. This edge of perpetual dissatisfaction made it all the more thrilling for Nate when he cajoled her into laughter and good humor: to impress her, one felt—he felt—was really something.
Back then he didn’t have a book deal. His book-reviewing gig ensured a regular paycheck, but to call it modest, relative to the cost of living in New York, was an overstatement bordering on a lie. To get by, he needed to hustle for all the additional assignments he could get, both proofreading and writing. He worked alone, in his dirty apartment. Some days, he didn’t bother to shower. He blew his nose with toilet paper. Cheap toilet paper. (Once when he was visiting from New Haven, Nate’s college friend Peter had surreptitiously nabbed a few squares from the roll and folded them into the breast pocket of his shirt. He waited until their friends were assembled at a bar to pass them around. “Just feel it. Can you believe that this—the world’s most diaphanous sandpaper—is what our Nate uses to wipe his ass? Talk about self-loathing.”)
Nate had no health insurance, hadn’t had it for years. After a while, he’d come to take for granted that he was the kind of scruffy, marginal person whose well-being was not deemed important by society. Elisa’s well-being, on the other hand, was incontrovertibly important—to her, to her parents, to the magazine that lavished her with extensive dental, optical, and mental-health benefits. The universe itself seemed bent on accommodating her, with free drinks from bartenders, gentle treatment from otherwise gruff cab drivers, and kindly offers of advice from avuncular grandees of magazine publishing who never returned Nate’s e-mails.
Nate was usually still sleeping each day when Elisa, lovely and carefully groomed, sailed past the guards in the lobby of that midtown Manhattan skyscraper, zoomed up to the zillionth floor in the express elevator, and took her seat at a desk with her nameplate above it. There, she answered phones, calmly assuring nervous writers that her boss would get back to them. She escorted various Important People into the big corner office. She sat in on certain editorial meetings and even, when asked, offered ideas about the magazine’s content. For the most p
art, though, her work was administrative. It was, nonetheless, the start of a career. She was taking great care not to become someone fringy like Nate, at home in his underwear, sweating up his sheets, pondering such questions as whether he should take the earned income tax credit if he qualified, or if that would be wrong, since it was clearly intended for real poor people, not Harvard grads who eschewed regular jobs to pursue their idiosyncratic intellectual ambitions.
When he met up with Elisa at the end of a workday, he felt like he’d clawed his way out of a Morlockean underworld. With her, he was treated differently at restaurants. Other men sized him up with their eyes. Waiters and maître d’s were more deferential. Even among his circle of friends and acquaintances, his stock rose subtly.
So it hardly seemed to matter that she was not a particularly nice girlfriend. Unless they coincided with hers, Elisa treated his desires as perverse whims, wholly negligible. An expensive restaurant she liked was a healthy indulgence; his craving for barbecue was “disgusting.” A somewhat down-market local barbecue chain he especially liked? “Out of the question.” After social engagements, she enjoyed regaling him with a list of criticisms of his behavior. She seemed to think that everything he did was first and foremost a reflection on her. When, at a dinner party, he made a bad joke, Elisa was mad at him for embarrassing her. “What made you think that would have been funny?” she demanded as soon as they’d rounded the corner from the Park Slope brownstone where they’d spent the evening. Nate was forced to admit he had absolutely no idea why he had thought that responding to someone’s comment that we are living in an age of anxiety by saying that he thought it was the Age of Aquarius would be funny. As soon as the words had escaped from his mouth, he was humiliated by their lameness. This provoked no sympathy from Elisa. She thought he owed it to her to be someone she could respect. That meant not making bad jokes. It also meant being affectionate but not too affectionate, complimentary but not too complimentary, smart but not pedantically so, and a host of other things.
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Page 13