From other tables, laughter, strands of animated conversation curled through the air. Nate felt sweaty, conspicuous, as if Hannah were making a scene, even though she wasn’t speaking loudly. There was an intensity that marked out their conversation from the others. Which of these pairs of diners enjoying high-end hipster comfort food doesn’t fit in?
“So now I’m stuck,” Hannah was saying. “If I complain, I look ridiculous, but if I ignore it, am I really then supposed to sit here and act like I’m all gooey-eyed and happy for you because you are just so successful and your book is so exciting? That kind of makes me feel ridiculous, too. Either way, I’m screwed.”
“Jesus! I—I—can we please just eat our food?”
“I have an idea,” Hannah said. “I can play the game you’re playing. See that guy over there?” She gestured toward a man in a leather jacket sipping coffee on a stool at the bar. “Isn’t he good-looking? He’s so tall. I think I’m going to chat him up.”
Nate met her eye. “Go right ahead.”
Hannah winced and then shook her head. They eyed each other for a long, languorous moment, reveling in the cool pleasure of open hostility. Then Hannah leaned her face down into her hands, covering her eyes with the tips of her long, tapered, cellist fingers. Her hair fell forward on her cheeks. When she looked up, Nate sensed her anger was spent. This frightened him.
“Never mind,” she said. “I can’t do this. I don’t want to.”
With his fork, Nate moved some egg around his plate.
“I’ve tried playing that game,” Hannah continued. “Pretending I don’t care. And you know what? It worked. You always responded to it.”
Nate willed himself not to move a muscle in his face, not to let on that he had a pretty good idea as to what she was talking about. To admit it seemed intolerably humiliating, a too-open acknowledgment of the dinky little rinse-and-repeat melodrama their relationship had devolved into.
“But I don’t want to do it anymore,” she said. “You’ll always win this game because I’m only playing at it, and you—well, you …” She dropped her knife and fork, which apparently she’d been holding for quite some time like some kind of ritualistic accoutrements. They clattered as they landed on her plate. “Well, I don’t know what you’re doing.”
Her eyes shone.
Nate realized, with some surprise, that he’d never actually seen Hannah cry, not in all these months. The closest had been the time when he could tell she’d been crying.
“And by the way,” she said, no longer on the verge of tears but with feeling. “I think it’s stupid. The whole thing is stupid. It doesn’t reflect well on you.”
Nate had lost the will to fight. “No, certainly not,” he said quietly. “Listen, why don’t we get out of here?”
A few minutes later, they set out for the park in the center of Hannah’s neighborhood. Without touching each other as they walked down the street—their hands were buried deep in the pockets of their jackets—they spoke pleasantly, about topics of no consequence.
Hannah nodded toward a kitchen store on the other side of the street. “That’s new.”
“It’s convenient,” Nate said. “Next time you need a frying pan or something.”
He looked away when they passed the bar they had gone to on their first date.
The park felt barren, the grass a dull green and the trees skeletal, their leaves long since shed. He and Hannah walked to a bench on the crest of a hill. For a while, they were silent.
“I guess we both know this isn’t working,” Hannah said finally.
Her hands were still in her pockets, but her arms were extended on her lap, so her jacket was pulled forward and made a sort of tent in front of her. Nate nodded slowly, careful not to show too much eager assent.
“I don’t know why,” she said. “I’ve tried and tried to figure it out, but after a while, I guess the only thing we can say for sure is that it isn’t working.”
Her voice was even, unemotional, but her eyes, when she turned to face him, were so imploring that Nate had to look away. He felt sure that she wanted him to contradict her, as he had that night in her apartment. But he couldn’t do it again. The intensity of feeling he’d experienced that night hadn’t lasted. The facts had become too obvious. Relationships shouldn’t be this hard. Nobody thought so. He’d have to be crazy. And the simple fact was he no longer wanted this.
Greer popped into his mind: the way she’d smiled at him at Recess, the way he’d felt when she smiled at him. That had to mean something—that real, spontaneous longing. The card with her number on it was sitting on his dresser. “Global brand management?” Hannah had remarked dryly, when she’d noticed it there, amid the bitten-up pens and the torn-off dry-cleaning tags. “Thinking about a career change?”
The thought of Greer made him feel guilty. Why should it, though? It wasn’t as if he’d called her. Yet it did. As much as he was beginning to feel relieved—and indeed he felt an easing of a deep, almost muscular tension that he hadn’t even known was there—he simultaneously began to feel, as if in exact counterreaction, both sad and ashamed.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He made out a faint and fleeting bit of condensation in his breath.
“I guess I haven’t been exactly perfect either,” Hannah said. She took her hands out of her pockets and hugged her body with her arms. “I’m not mad at you. I’ve been mad at you, but I don’t think I am anymore. I don’t see the point.”
Nate shifted his position on the bench, feeling uncomfortably as if she did have reason to be mad at him, though he couldn’t say what it was precisely. He knew he’d hurt her, yet he felt bound by twenty-first-century chivalry to pretend he didn’t know it, lest he seem presumptuous or arrogant.
“You know I think you’re great,” he said.
She merely raised her eyebrows. He felt the triteness of his words.
“The thing that bothers me,” she said after a moment, “is that in the beginning, my god, you couldn’t have been more into it. But since then …” She turned to face him. “Why? Why did you start this if you didn’t care enough to try and make it work?”
Nate tried not to sigh. Start this? Obviously, they’d both had a hand in starting it.
“I did try.”
“Really? Did you ever spend three seconds thinking about what the problem was and whether there was anything you could do to make it better? It was like you had nothing at stake, like you were a passive bystander.”
Nate wished he didn’t have to have to listen to this. He felt he’d heard it, or some variant of it, a billion times.
“And you always had your book,” Hannah continued. “Whatever happened between us was not going to affect you much one way or the other because the most important thing for you is that your book is coming out. It’s hard to compete.”
“Are you saying that’s a bad thing? Caring about my book?”
“I—no! Of course not. There was a power imbalance, that’s all I meant. It wasn’t fun being on the wrong side of that.”
Nate wondered if it would be patronizing to suggest that she might be better off if she cared about her book more. It could be difficult to stay motivated sometimes—he knew that—especially when you were unhappy. But he also knew that you had to push through. He had. He had written his book even on days when it was the last thing he felt like doing.
He decided it would be better not to say this.
He stared through the bald trees to the stalls of the farmer’s market that assembled at the park each week. On this gray day, it looked like the threadbare marketplace of some bleak eastern European village. He could smell the diesel from the row of idling trucks that transported produce and workers from upstate. It reminded him of dreary Sunday afternoons as a child, driving back with his parents from visits to his cousins in New Jersey or to the houses of his parents’ Romanian friends in the D.C. suburbs, of looking out the car window at drab, shabby landscapes and being crushed by a sadness caused at once by e
verything and nothing—a general sense of life as a bleak, lonely, rather hopeless affair.
He thought of his immediate future, of being single. He remembered the night he and Mark had hit on Cara, the feeling of dullness that had come over him when he had contemplated his single life, the incessant, relentless flirting, its underside of loneliness and cynicism.
“Sometimes I think I’ve lost something,” he said to Hannah. “Some capacity to be with another person, something I used to have.” He laughed mirthlessly. “I feel pretty fucked, to tell the truth.”
Hannah looked incredulous. “I don’t know what to say to that. What am I supposed to say?”
Nate was stung by her tone. “Never mind,” he said. “I’m feeling sorry for myself. It’s stupid.”
Hannah shut her eyes. When she opened them, she spoke slowly. “I feel like you want to think what you’re feeling is really deep, like some seriously profound existential shit. But to me, it looks like the most tired, the most average thing in the world, the guy who is all interested in a woman until the very moment when it dawns on him that he has her. Wanting only what you can’t have. The affliction of shallow morons everywhere.”
“Jesus! If you’re going to—”
“I’m sorry,” Hannah said. “I’m being harsh, but give me a break. If what you say is true, if you just have some ‘problem,’ it kind of sucks for me, too. I can’t sit here and try to make you feel better. It’s like the robber asking his victim to sympathize with his uncontrollable compulsion to rob people.” She squinted up into the pale sky. “Give me a few years, until you’re on your deathbed or something.”
Nate made a chortling sound. So did Hannah. Their eyes met. Her smile was strangely companionable, as if they were old war buddies.
He knew with near-perfect certainty that there would come a time when he would be feeling down and lonely and crave more than anything Hannah’s company, her warmth, her intelligence, her humor, her ability to understand him. On that night, as he returned home to his empty apartment, he’d regret this day. But he also knew that on all the other nights—the, say, forty-nine out of fifty nights when he wasn’t unhappy in that particular way—he’d be glad to be free of this, of the heavy, unfun yoke of it. This thought made him feel bad all over again.
“I’m sure a lot of it is my fault,” he said. He smiled ruefully. “And by a lot, I mean all.”
“Ah, the self-deprecating dude routine,” Hannah said. “ ‘What a lovable fuck-up I am.’ The annoying thing is that it makes you look good, but it doesn’t get me anything.”
The return of bitterness in her voice took Nate by surprise. Each time he thought they’d moved beyond reproaches, she turned angry again. He foresaw a potentially endless loop. He was also getting hungry—he hadn’t eaten much at breakfast—and it was growing chillier outside.
“I guess we should get going,” he said.
Hannah turned her face away from his. A wall of straight reddish brown hair moved up and down as she nodded slowly. “Yeah.”
He pretended not to notice as she wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. The truth was he felt a flash of resentment. It seemed manipulative.
{ 16 }
Nate had a long and intimate relationship with guilt.
He felt guilty when he passed by the neighborhood homeless guy, a bespectacled, middle-aged man with a salt-and-pepper Afro whose lilting refrain—“Can you spare a dollar, bro?”—echoed as you walked away, like an effect on a dance remix. He felt guilty when, in a Manhattan office building, he saw an elderly janitor stooped over a mop, joints creaking, jowls hanging over his collar. He felt guilty when a blank-faced Hispanic or Asian man refilled his water glass at a restaurant. He thought of ten- and twelve-hour shifts, of returning to squalid apartments shared with a dozen others. He felt guilty on the subway, when, as the train moved deeper into Brooklyn, more and more white people got off. Eventually almost everyone who remained was black—and tired. Overworked, underpaid. He felt guilty when circumstances forced him to get up early on a frigid winter morning, and, hurrying along windswept streets, he saw Southeast Asian vendors blowing on their hands as they set up their coffee carts. What had he done to deserve his easier—his easy—fate?
His intelligence was just something he’d been born with. Luck of the draw, like being beautiful. It was a rationalization to say that he’d worked hard. It was like being given a fine knife and taking the trouble to polish and sharpen it: it’s great that you make the effort, but someone had to give you the knife. And it wasn’t just intelligence. Nate felt guilty when he thought about his grandparents and great-grandparents in eastern Europe—shtetls and pogroms and worse.
In such a context, the small-scale romantic disappointments of privileged single women in New York City did not even remotely make the cut. Yet the day after he and Hannah broke up, Nate was riled by a strong sense of guilt.
At the park, he’d been so—well, he hadn’t been able to see beyond a great cloud of irritation, which had seemed not only to justify his actual behavior but much worse behavior as well. He’d felt that he behaved remarkably well, that, in an effort to extricate himself from such a subtle and uncomfortable snare, he could have been much meaner. There had been times with Hannah, in the past month or two, when he had found himself feeling so harassed that it had seemed an act of heroism that he hadn’t told her exactly what he was thinking in the bluntest possible terms. And yesterday, at brunch and after, he’d been at moments so aggravated that his endurance of the whole breakup scene had seemed, on the whole, a display of magnanimity. He hadn’t said “enough” and taken off, as many guys would have. Many guys would have told her she needed to chill out—implied she was obsessive, fucked-up.
Yet, now, as he wandered around his apartment, shuffling listlessly from room to room, Nate didn’t feel so hot. He felt guilty about various things. Checking out that woman at the restaurant, for one. For the way he’d been in general.
He was also baffled. So many times, as their relationship had begun to deteriorate, he had gone from being irritated by Hannah to feeling remorse once his irritation passed. He’d always thought that in the aftermath, when he felt bad, he was clearheaded, seeing the situation for what it was. Only now it seemed to him that he’d been in some kind of fugue state the whole time, going back and forth from one mood to the other, without ever stopping to consider what was driving the insane back-and-forth. Instead, he’d just avoided her for stretches.
At the park, he had thought Hannah was unreasonable when she accused him of not trying, but now he wondered if he had, at some point, stacked the deck against her—decided he didn’t want her and then set things up so she’d justify his slackening interest. Because he knew—of course he knew, he wasn’t stupid—that his behavior had contributed to, if not entirely caused, her insecurity. And of course her insecurity (Are you mad at me? Can I please, please make you breakfast?) just made her more annoying. But it had felt as if he couldn’t help the way he behaved. When he had behaved badly—snapped at her, checked out that woman, whatever—he had been acting from some overpowering compulsion. And yet he had once liked her quite a bit.
He stopped pacing and stood by the window, blinking at the paper-white sky. The truth was he hadn’t stopped liking her. Even now. That was what had been, what continued to be, so confusing.
The stentorian voice inside his head told him he’d been a jerk. He’d known his behavior had confused her. He’d watched her diminish, grow nervous and sad, become in certain ways someone he didn’t recognize. Whenever he’d felt bad about it, he told himself that he wasn’t forcing her to stay with him. She could break up with him any time she wanted.
But now he thought of something Aurit had said—written, actually, in a truly excellent piece of expository writing. She’d described her parents’ fucked-up dynamic, how her father’s response to any criticism was “if you don’t like it, leave.” Aurit argued that for the person with more power in a relationship to refuse to take seriou
sly the unhappiness of the other, simply because nothing is forcing them to, is the ultimate dick move: “It’s like if the United States in the 1950s said, ‘Sorry, black people in the South, but if you don’t like the way you’re being treated, you can go back to Africa.’ ”
On the other hand, Hannah wasn’t a disenfranchised minority, Nate thought, leaving the window and padding from the bedroom to the kitchen. Why should he have had more power? He didn’t ask for it. When he remembered that, he began to resent her, for her meek willingness to put up with his bad behavior. For her willingness to be his victim. Sure, she’d snapped back, gotten pissy, but these had been empty little torrents, the indignant flailing of a small animal caught in a trap. By and large, she’d put herself at his disposal, made it easy for him to hurt her. And now he had to be his own judge and jury. But he had his own feelings to worry about. It wasn’t fair to make him responsible for both of them.
That made him feel a bit better, for a little while. Then it occurred to him that she’d put up with him because he had wanted her to. Until he didn’t. He had always stopped being a dick to her as soon as he sensed he’d crossed the line and she might actually walk away. She’d allowed him to torment her in this way because she liked him. Maybe she even loved him.
The thought made him wince.
Because, come on, was he ever going to find someone with no annoying tics or physical imperfections? What real criticism did he have of her? That she sometimes drank too much? So did he. That she seemed not serious enough about her writing? The truth was that before their downward-spiraling relationship seemed to consume her, she had struck him as quite serious. That she was sometimes insecure? All women were sometimes insecure. The ones who claimed they weren’t were craziest of all.
He pictured Hannah, at Francesca Whatshername’s rooftop party. He remembered how she’d held her own against Jason. He remembered how, well, just how happy he’d been that night.
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Page 21