Nate was surprised to find himself disappointed. Not that she hadn’t left—he hadn’t really expected her to—but that she seemed normal again. When she’d been acting crazy, he’d had license to give vent to that pent-up tension, and yet to be also beautifully, effortlessly right. Something he’d learned with Elisa: it was not always unpleasant to deal with a hysterical woman. One feels so thoroughly righteous in comparison. Now he felt as if he were deflating. Although he hadn’t been conscious of being turned on before—he’d been fairly disgusted by Hannah’s hair in the sink—he felt his cock slackening, as if without his noticing it, he had been a bit hard.
“It’s no big deal,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I think we should talk about it.”
“Everyone needs to blow off steam sometimes.”
“I mean, the reason why.”
Of course she did.
Nate sank into his desk chair, feeling dispirited, vanquished. He crossed his legs and then immediately uncrossed them.
“I’m sure it seemed to come out of nowhere to you,” Hannah said in a fair and reasonable tone of voice, an aggravatingly fair and reasonable tone of voice. A voice that compelled him to be fair and reasonable too. “I think I reacted the way I did because I felt like you were waiting for me to burst into tears about brunch with Susan. It just seemed narcissistic or something. I don’t know, it just pissed me off.”
In spite of himself, Nate smiled.
She went on. “It’s just that lately I’ve had this sense that something is different. With you, or with us, and I keep waiting for you to say something … I don’t want to be the kind of girlfriend who analyzes every little thing or makes us talk things to death—I really don’t—but if something is up, I wish you’d just tell me. I don’t expect things to be exactly like they were when we first started dating. But don’t oblige me, like you’re the put-upon boyfriend.” Hannah sat up very straight; her tone became more insistent, almost defiant. “If you don’t want this, fine. I’m not some girl who is dying to be in a relationship.”
Nate leaned back in his desk chair so its two front wheels were raised off the ground. Pretty much every relationship conversation he had ever been party to included more or less the same caveats. Apparently, no woman in the early twenty-first century is the kind of woman who (a) wants a boyfriend or (b) wants to talk about her relationship, no matter how much she (a) wants a boyfriend and (b) wants to talk about her relationship.
As he rocked the chair back to face her, Nate cleared this unnice thought from his mind.
“Hannah,” he said gently, “I’m not ‘obliging’ you. I don’t know what gave you that idea.”
She tugged at her ponytail. “It’s just—well, I hope you know that I don’t think we have to spend every second together. I don’t want to. But if you make excuses not to see me, as if you think I’m going to get mad at you, or if you skulk around and act guilty because you don’t want to have brunch with my friend, it makes me feel like it’s a bigger deal, like there’s something else you’re trying to tell me.”
With his foot, Nate traced a circle on the floor. He said, “I thought you might be disappointed, that’s all. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Hannah nodded. “That’s fair,” she said. “I overreacted. I’m sorry.”
She looked the way she sounded—sincere. An uncomfortable feeling had come over Nate. Now that he’d been accorded the full power to forgive, he didn’t feel sure he deserved it. Even when they’d been fighting, he’d had some inkling of the box she’d been referring to. He might have feigned a bit more ignorance than he could honestly claim. But then the whole thing had happened so fast—he had just been defending himself.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, feeling that the least he could do was be gracious. “I’m just glad you’re not mad. And I’m sorry I was mean before. I guess I felt attacked.”
“I can understand that,” Hannah said. “And I’ll drop this, I promise, but just to be clear … I don’t care about Sunday. Susan isn’t a close friend. But”—she paused and looked at him intently, her hazel eyes round and luminous in the light from his lamp—“if you are on some level unhappy, it would be better to say so now, before—”
“Hannah.”
Nate rested a hand on each of her knees. Whatever mild dissatisfaction he had felt recently had been displaced by the fight, by Hannah’s feistiness, by the moment’s intensity.
“I like you. I want to be with you. The only thing I’m trying to tell you is that I don’t want to have brunch with your friend Susan on Sunday. I hate to say it, but you didn’t really make her sound all that appealing.” He cocked his head. “You might want to work on your sales pitch next time.”
“It’s just that lately you sometimes seem a little—”
“I’ve been a little stressed,” he cut in. “I thought by now I’d be well into another book, but I’m not. All I’ve got is an idea, and even that’s vague. I feel as if I ought to be working night and day until I figure that out. I don’t have a regular gig the way you do with the health news.”
Hannah hugged her knees to her chest. “You want to do the health news?” she said. “Be my guest.”
Nate sat down beside her on the bed. When she stretched, he could make out her nipples through the thin fabric of her T-shirt. “You know what I mean,” he said.
The issue seemed, to him, to have been resolved, but they continued to talk for a while longer. This didn’t really surprise him. In his experience, women, once they got started, exhibited a rather insatiable desire to confess, elaborate, iron out, reveal, and so on and so forth. Nate exerted himself to be patient. Hannah was generally an extremely easygoing girlfriend, more easygoing than anyone he’d dated since Kristen. He didn’t begrudge her a little girlishness. They went to bed on good terms.
But she brought it up again the next time he saw her. They were on the subway, coming back from Manhattan.
“I feel kind of ridiculous about the other night,” she said. “Getting so mad and then making us talk and talk. I hope you don’t think I’m really … I don’t know …”
The words trailed off, and she smiled helplessly as she waited for him to rescue her from her own sentence.
Nate’s thoughts had been far removed from relationship issues, and he didn’t feel like getting drawn into another of those conversations. He also didn’t like being pressured to provide reassurances on demand, being made to perform his affection at someone else’s bidding, like a trained seal. Besides, it seemed that in soliciting assurance—after everything that had been said the other night—Hannah was allowing herself to give in to a neurotic compulsion. That wasn’t something he wanted to reward.
“It’s fine,” he said in the kind of cold, flat voice that only someone with serious Asperger’s would take at face value.
Hannah’s expression indicated to Nate that she did not suffer from Asperger’s syndrome.
Nate looked away, a little repelled by the near panic he’d seen on her face. He was also afraid that if he looked at her, he’d feel bad and apologize, and he didn’t want to feel bad or apologize. He didn’t want to feel like the big bad wolf just because he wouldn’t play this particular feminine parlor game.
He stared across the aisle at a little boy who slept with his head on his mother’s shoulder. The boy’s small calves were visible between the bottom of his pants and his socks.
After a minute, Nate’s irritation faded, dissolving almost as quickly as it had come on. She’d been a little insecure; it wasn’t the worst thing.
“Sorry,” he said, turning to her. “I didn’t mean to snap at you.”
The panic had been wiped clean from her face. Her expression was blank, hard. As she considered his apology, she seemed to relax.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It’s not a big deal.”
Nothing more was said, and for the rest of the evening, they were resolutely light and cheerful.
{ 13
}
Nate held his cordless phone to his ear with one hand as he halfheartedly sponged his kitchen counter with the other. He found his parents easier to talk to if he engaged simultaneously in other tasks.
He spoke first to his father, who was not actually that hard to deal with. All Nate had to do was be polite and impersonally pleasant, the way he would if he were talking to a well-meaning but nosy stranger, someone he met, say, in the line at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
“Did you get the next payment from your publisher yet?” his father asked. “You know that every day they hold on to that money, it’s accruing interest that is rightfully yours.”
“They made the payment, right on schedule,” Nate assured him. “My agent has the money. She’ll write me a check.”
“Minus fifteen percent,” his father said in a tone that suggested that this was a “Gotcha!” moment.
“Yes, dad. Minus fifteen percent.”
“You know, Nathaniel … ,” his father began. No argument could convince him that, as an aeronautical engineer, he might not have sufficient knowledge of the publishing industry to determine that the services of a literary agent were unnecessary.
Nate switched the phone from one ear to the other and rested it between his shoulder and his ear so both his hands were free. He began lifting up the grills of his stove and scrubbing the surfaces underneath with a Brillo pad.
“Have you given any thought to self-publishing the next one?” his father asked. “I’ve read that a number of established authors are starting to do that. Once they have a following, they don’t need the publisher’s name. This way, all the profits come to you. Eh?”
“I’ll look into it.”
Nate walked to the window and pulled up the blinds. Sunlight streamed into the kitchen.
His mother got on the line. She began telling him a story about the people at her work, how they were all moony about some television series “on HBO or Showtime or some such nonsense.”
From a hundred and eighty miles away, Nate could feel her gathering energy, the satisfying torrent of contempt she was whipping herself into.
“They say that it’s as good as a nineteenth-century novel,” she said, her speech growing more rapid. “And these are supposed to be the ‘smart’ young people. They went to Georgetown and Columbia—practically Ivy League schools.”
Through the window, the leaves on the trees’ topmost branches were already beginning to fall off.
“Like Tolstoy!”
“That’s nuts …,” Nate agreed.
But his tone was too mild. He felt rather than heard his mother’s silence.
Unlike his father, his mother required that she and Nate be in vociferous accord. In colorful, overheated language, she framed life as a drama between “we” and the rest of the world, otherwise known as “those idiots.” As a child, Nate had loved being on her side. Not only was she beautiful, with her long, honey-colored hair and tightly belted dresses, not only did her exotic French and Russian novels and aristocratic unhappiness appeal to his imagination, but her side was also so clearly the right one. It was the side of sensible governance: potholes filled in, corruption punished, Democrats elected, Israeli passenger planes and cruise ships not hijacked (the last position reiterated often after sixty-eight-year-old, wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer was pushed overboard from the Achille Lauro when Nate was in the fourth grade). Hers was also the side of intelligence. (She had a moral disdain for stupidity and instinctively regarded Nate’s classmates in the slow reading group with suspicion, as children of dubious character.) She stood for the appreciation of culture, especially literature, theater, and museums. When Nate got older, it was her smugness that bothered him. He was put off by the invocation of this all-thwarting “they,” and the certain knowledge that all problems would be summarily solved if only “we” weren’t obstructed at every turn. But if he questioned this presumption, his mother took it as an attack or clucked that he was too young and naive to understand. Their adult relationship was built on his willingness to humor her. Unless he was able to summon the energy and patience to appear to join her in this cloistered, airless “we,” he—the son for whose sake she had left her home to start over in a new country—was rejecting her. With his dad, all he had to do was not argue.
Blinking into the sun as he gazed out the window, Nate knew he had failed. She’d sensed condescension in his tepid agreement. He went to Harvard, and now he thinks he’s too good for me. She sucked in her breath sharply, as if it were her very soul she’d offered up to him and which she was now withdrawing. As clearly as if she were standing before him, he could see her nostrils flare once or twice.
It was too much, he knew—what his mother wanted of him. It wasn’t fair or reasonable, his friends would tell him. But neither had her life been fair or reasonable. In Romania, she’d been denied all sorts of academic honors because she was Jewish. She wasn’t even permitted to major in literature, as the humanities were almost entirely closed to Jews. She’d slept on a couch in the living room of her parents’ one-bedroom apartment in a concrete tenement until the day she married Nate’s father, whose family was a little better off. Then she’d come here and worked as a computer programmer—so that Nate could attend private school, so that he could go to a good college.
Nate leaned his forehead against the glass windowpane. “How have you been, Mom?”
“Fine.” Her voice was tight and small.
He closed the blinds and shuffled back to the sink, sliding a little on the linoleum in his socks and tightening his grip on the phone. They were the reason he had this stupid cordless phone. His parents had insisted on a landline—“in case of an emergency.” The only people who used it were the two of them and the telemarketers.
“You think I’m old-fashioned,” his mother said after a moment. “Narrow-minded.”
The sigh that punctuated this remark was a finely honed symphony of self-pity.
“Mom,” Nate said. “I don’t even have a TV. Of course I don’t think you’re narrow-minded.”
She let out a small chuckle. “I guess we’re both a little bit backward.”
“I guess so.”
There was another, less fraught silence.
“How’s Hannah?” she asked finally. Henna was how it sounded from her lips.
Nate squeezed the water from his sponge.
“She’s okay.”
Several evenings later, he was sitting in Hannah’s living room, reading Eugene’s review of the British novelist’s new book.
“Nate?”
The review was good—very good, Nate had to admit. Eugene was good.
“Nate?” Hannah said again.
Reluctantly, Nate laid the article down. Hannah was standing with her hands in her back pockets. “Yes?”
“What do you feel like doing tonight?”
Nate closed his eyes. What did he and Hannah usually do together? For a moment, he couldn’t remember. Then he thought of the long nights of animated conversation they used to have, over the summer—nights when they’d never needed to “do” anything. He wasn’t in the mood for that sort of … communion of togetherness. Certainly not.
He thought maybe he felt like watching baseball. The playoffs were approaching, and there was a game he was mildly interested in for its potential negative impact on the Yankees.
Hannah said sure, they could go to a sports bar.
They went to a place called Outpost, an unfortunate name, in Nate’s opinion, for a newish establishment that appeared to be patronized almost exclusively by the white people who’d begun to move into the historically black neighborhood in which it was located.
The game hadn’t started yet. When they sat down, Hannah told him she’d decided to take on some copyediting work for extra money. She started describing the exacting requirements of the publisher she was doing the work for.
Was this his life now? Nate wondered as she spoke. Sitting across from Hannah at various tables, in various r
estaurants and bars? Ad infinitum. Was this what he’d committed himself to the night they’d had that fight about brunch and he’d reassured her, told her that it was safe—that he was into this?
He tore off the slip of paper that kept his napkin rolled up and began toying with his knife and fork.
He tried to focus on what Hannah was saying—still about the copyediting job—but he found himself wondering how much she needed the money. At the rate she was going, she’d never finish her book proposal. Besides, her father was a corporate lawyer. He didn’t doubt she could get money from him if she needed it. A nice luxury if you had it.
Though it was the last day of September, the evening was warm. Hannah had taken off her jacket. Underneath she was wearing a strappy tank top. It became her. She had nice shoulders. But when she moved her arms in emphasis of some point, Nate noticed that the skin underneath jiggled a little bit, like a much older woman’s. It was odd because she was quite fit. He felt bad for noticing and worse for being a little repelled. And yet he was transfixed. The distaste he felt, in its crystalline purity, was perversely pleasurable. He kept waiting for her to wave her arms again.
When she finished her story, he just nodded.
He was hungry. Where was their food? he wanted to know. “Why do you think it’s taking so long?” he said.
Hannah looked a little surprised by his vehemence. She raised her hands, her palms facing up. “No idea.”
She asked him a few questions about what he’d been up to. His answers were short. He couldn’t rouse himself to match her mood of cheerful pleasantry. If she were a stranger—a mere friend or acquaintance—it would be nothing, nothing at all, to fall into the rhythms of polite if banal conversation. But it was different with Hannah. Being with her had rarely entailed that kind of obligatory social performance; to start treating it that way now seemed like a defeat. Or a capitulation.
Hannah tried to fill the vacuum. As she flitted from topic to topic, Nate began to feel as if he were watching her from a remove, evaluating her. Even though she spoke with a fair amount of wit—she was telling a story about a friend’s “almost aggressive tactfulness; she doesn’t wait until you finish talking to start agreeing with you and supporting you”—something in her tone, an eagerness to please, a quality that was almost pleading, grated on him.
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Page 17