The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

by Waldman, Adelle

  Nate marveled at this encounter most of the way home. He never thought there would come a day when Amy Perelman, whose yellow-and-white scrunchy might very well still be sitting in a box in his parents’ condo, would be so unattractive to him. What made it even more striking was that not long ago, he’d happened to run into another girl from his high school. He was at a reading near Columbia when he saw Michelle Goldstein, the frizzy-haired, theater-loving girl he’d rolled his eyes at back then, Michelle Goldstein, of pas de deux and coup d’état.

  At his apartment, as he flipped through his mail, he laughed. Not at Michelle’s expense, but at the general idiocy and affectation of youth. Because Michelle, all these years later, had been really nice. She was a labor lawyer. She seemed very earnest and left-wing, like an old-school Upper West Sider. Which is where she lived, with her husband and son. The husband, she told him, was an actor. (“Not quite aspiring—he’s very talented and does a lot of really wonderful off- and off-off-Broadway work—but let’s just say, we don’t need a full-time nanny. Which is good, because we can’t afford one.”) They lived in an old rent-stabilized place on 104th and Riverside that her husband had been in for years, previously with roommates. She complained about how “rich” the neighborhood had gotten. Michelle’s hair, casually pulled back, was still a little bit frizzy, and her jeans were kind of mommish, but she was appealing, far more appealing than Amy Perelman.

  Nate was still thinking about this when he walked to his computer and scanned his in-box. There was a message from Hannah. Without pausing to think about what it might contain, he clicked on it. A new window appeared. He sat down.

  Dear Nate,

  At the park the other day, I told you I wasn’t mad. I don’t think I was lying. I think I was numb.

  Later I got mad. The first thing that pissed me off was the way, when I said this isn’t working, you nodded. What the fuck? What did it mean to you a few weeks ago when I told you that the only way I wanted to stay with you is if you promised you were in this too? I for one meant that I didn’t want to be in a relationship with someone who was going to fucking nod when I proposed breaking up with him. (I also get angry when I think of that night at my apartment. Why did you persuade me to stay with you if you didn’t really want it? Were you playing some kind of game?)

  So, yeah, I’ve been angry. At you—but also at myself. Because I never thought I’d let myself be treated this way. I know I deserve a lot better and frankly I’ve gotten a lot better from other guys.

  I didn’t expect to feel this way about you. Before we got together, I’d heard things about the way you treat women. And at first, I thought you were really full of yourself. I thought you took for granted that I was dying to go out with you because you think you’re such hot shit. I hated that.

  I bring this up because later, when things started to suck, I kept thinking about that time, before I’d fallen for you too hard to get out so easily. It was as if I hoped the fact that I hadn’t put myself totally in your power from day one might somehow protect me from getting hurt later. It didn’t, obviously. Eventually I let go. I trusted you. The way I feel right now, I wish I hadn’t.

  I don’t mean to be melodramatic. I know that relationships often don’t work out. But I remember how things were, not that long ago. They were pretty great. At least, I thought so. I felt like there was something real between us—like I really knew you and got you. Is that really stupid of me? I can’t help wondering, did I do something wrong? Was I too difficult? Not difficult enough? Should I have called you out on it as soon as I felt like you were, I don’t know … changing—instead of taking you at your word when you said everything was fine? I can’t stop wondering, and yet I know it’s messed up that I’m thinking this way, as if it were my job to make it work, as if I was supposed to figure out what you wanted and adjust accordingly.

  The only thing I know is that when I tried to talk about what was going on with us, it felt like you always wanted to shoot it down. I began to get nervous about irritating you—I felt you pulling away and I didn’t want to alienate you even more, so I didn’t push us to talk more. In retrospect I regret that. It was obvious something was wrong for a while. Looking back, it seems stupid that most of the time we just ignored the elephant in the room.

  I wonder—had we talked, really talked, would things have been better? Sometimes I think of things that are so obvious to me, and I hate that they aren’t, or weren’t, obvious to you. Such as, why do you think it was that we had a good time when we hung out with Jason and Peter? It was because they were nice to me—they acted like they actually wanted to hear what I had to say, which you barely did at that point. (Thank you for that, by the way—for the way you’ve treated me lately.)

  But then I think of how sad you looked at the park when you said that you worry you no longer have the ability to be in a relationship. And it makes me wonder if you are as upset and confused about this as I am. If so, maybe we should talk now, try and figure what happened. Maybe it’s not too late to deal with this honestly and openly.

  Part of me thinks I shouldn’t send this, that I’ve already been burned enough. But I’d rather not become that scared of being honest.

  H

  There were a number of things Nate felt like doing when he finished reading this e-mail. One was slamming the metallic top of his computer shut and throwing the thing against the wall. Another was running hard for about ten miles, uphill. A third was reading some very bracing, very austere, very masculine philosopher. Say Schopenhauer. One thing it decidedly did not make him want to do was get back together with Hannah.

  Nate hadn’t been attentive to every sentence; he wasn’t able to be. Reading the e-mail was so unpleasant that he found himself skimming. He felt as if doing so were a courtesy to her, as if he had caught her in an embarrassing posture and were politely averting his eyes. (The part where she mentioned other guys? He shuddered for her—it sounded so … desperate.) But he’d read enough, more than enough. He got it. The letter—its conclusion, the thing about “talking more,” “dealing with this honestly and openly”—struck him as willfully deceived. Anyone could see that they’d given their relationship any number of chances and that their conversation at the park had been decisive. The e-mail was confused, disordered, veering back and forth between anger and a wild, almost desperate compulsion to pull the arm of the slot machine yet again and hope for a different outcome, based on what? Because he’d said he worried he might be incapable of being in a relationship? When he told her that, he’d been speaking truthfully, but, come on, it was a fear that seized him every once in a while and then passed almost entirely from his mind. It wasn’t worrying him at all right now. And it certainly didn’t make him want to keep at a relationship that was so clearly dead.

  Besides, the e-mail was a visceral reminder, as if he needed one, of the reasons he didn’t want to be with her. Hannah’s letter brought back all the feelings of guilt and dread and discomfort he’d come to associate with her.

  But the letter conferred an obligation. She was clearly upset. He owed it to her to do something. In the next several days, Nate debated writing back, but he saw almost immediately there was no way he could produce an e-mail of equal length, and a few lines of text from him, with her message hanging below, in its grand textual abundance, would look so paltry, so meager, an insulting little pellet atop her voluminousness. It wasn’t only that he didn’t have the patience to write at anywhere close to equal length. The truth—and this scared him a little—was that he didn’t know what he would say. There was a certain moral vanity in her implicit assumption that everyone could sit down and whip out something like her letter, as if everyone’s feelings were so known and upstanding. He couldn’t have produced such a letter no matter how hard he tried. Even after all the hours he’d spent pacing his apartment the other day, he didn’t really know what he thought or felt, and what he did know was confused and, frankly, somewhat upsetting. What he had learned, in the subsequent few days,
was that his unhappiness was eminently containable, if managed correctly. That meant not dwelling. It meant moving forward.

  Since writing was out, Nate figured he should call her. On a number of occasions, he was about to do it. But he kept putting it off. He couldn’t decide if they should have it out on the phone or if he should propose coffee. Probably the latter, but then a part of him wondered if maybe that wasn’t a good idea. Coffee would run longer than a phone call. She’d want him to say a lot of things he didn’t much want to say. Not just for his own sake. He didn’t want to be forced to say things that would hurt her feelings. The only really honest thing that he had any desire to tell her was, he suspected, the last thing she wanted to hear. He wanted to say that he was sorry for not having broken up with her sooner, for not having seen sooner that it wasn’t working and wasn’t going to work. He shouldn’t have nodded at the park. She was right about that. He shouldn’t have been with her at all at that point. In retrospect, he felt he’d had a failure of nerve that night at her apartment; they should have broken up then. But he didn’t think she’d appreciate hearing this. And other than that, he didn’t know what he’d say. Besides, the endless stream of postbreakup conversations he’d had with Elisa was an object lesson in the way these things could backfire. He didn’t want to get into another drawn-out and in the end unhealthy dialogue. And Hannah wasn’t Elisa. She was more mature, one expected more of her.

  Maybe a phone conversation, short and sweet, was better?

  Each time he made up his mind to do one or the other, phone call or coffee date, he couldn’t quite bring himself to pull the trigger, and he told himself he’d decide for sure later; he’d do it—one or the other—later.

  A week after Hannah sent the e-mail, he came strolling back from Greer’s on a lovely, sunny Friday morning. He was in a good mood—it had been a good night, a very good night. He saw another e-mail from Hannah. He knew immediately he’d fucked up. He should have done something. The subject line was blank. Nate clicked on the message.

  God, I can’t believe I am such a moron. I can’t believe I wrote you that e-mail in some moment of god knows what. I just wanted to say I take it back. You’re a bigger asshole than I ever imagined. I can’t believe you couldn’t even be bothered to respond. Anyway, there’s just one other thing I wanted to tell you. You’re really bad in bed.

  { 17 }

  So you’re dating Greer now?”

  Nate and Aurit were walking along Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, their scarves flapping in the wind as they squinted against the midday sun. Aurit had just gotten back from her trip, a week in Israel and two in Germany.

  It wasn’t just disapproval Nate picked up in her voice. He knew she’d disapprove of Greer. She thought Greer was shallow and twitty. So had he, before. What bothered him more was something withering in the way she pronounced the word you, as in “so you’re dating Greer now.”

  “Greer’s really smart,” he said as they approached their destination. He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth.

  “I don’t doubt it,” Aurit said. She pulled open the restaurant’s glass door. “I mean, she’s been so successful in her career. Remind me, how much did she get for her sex book?”

  Then they were enveloped in the restaurant’s warm air, rife with the scent of maple syrup. A hostess with an Australian accent directed them through a narrow aisle to a table in the back. By the time they sat down, that particular strand of conversation was lost. After Aurit’s long trip, there was much to be discussed. Hans was finally going to move to New York.

  “That’s fantastic,” Nate said.

  Aurit told him how this had come to pass, the conversations she and Hans had had, the plans they’d made.

  Later, she asked if he’d spoken to Hannah.

  “You haven’t talked to her?” Nate asked.

  “I asked you first.”

  Nate poured sugar into his coffee. “Don’t be like that.”

  “Fine,” Aurit said. “She and I have e-mailed. Briefly. She didn’t say much.”

  “Well … ,” Nate said. “I think she may be a bit nuts.”

  The table wobbled when Aurit set her mug down. “Don’t go there, Nate. It’s ugly. Especially because she was so classy about it. She didn’t say anything bad about you.” She looked at him pointedly, jutting her chin out. “What happened?”

  “She basically told me I’m the biggest jerk who ever lived.” Nate ran a hand through his hair. He tried for a casual “What can you do?” smile. In fact, the way things with Hannah had so quickly devolved made him intensely uncomfortable.

  Aurit cocked her head. “What’d you do, Nate?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t be an unreliable narrator. What’d you do to piss her off?”

  “Literally, I did nothing. That was the problem.”

  “Uh huh …”

  “I didn’t respond to an e-mail she wrote.”

  “Did you apologize?”

  “You didn’t see the e-mail she wrote me in response to my nonresponse. I think we’ve gone past the point of apologies.”

  Aurit shook her head. “Nice.”

  Nate considered making a joke about how lying in wait for him on the streets of New York was an army of hostile women, with Juliet at its head. Even Elisa, who pretended to be his friend, was half in the enemy camp. Now Hannah, too, had joined its ranks. Meanwhile, on the other side, there was still only one Nate. He didn’t make the joke, though. He did not in fact feel jokey about it. He felt bad. When he thought about it. He tried not to think about it.

  “In her e-mail, Hannah tried to be low-key,” Aurit said. “But I got the feeling she was pretty upset. Honestly, I’m surprised you’re so cavalier about it.” She studied Nate with curiosity. “You guys were together for, what, five, almost six, months?”

  “Five,” Nate mumbled.

  “And you seemed to really like her. Like, a lot.”

  Nate looked at the place on the table where his plate had been. “It probably won’t last long with Greer,” he said suddenly, surprising himself. “It’s probably just a short-term thing.”

  He and Greer had slept together on their first date. Because Greer had been extremely flirtatious the whole night, this hadn’t surprised Nate. What had surprised him was that she burst into tears immediately after. He’d felt confused and concerned and also, strangely, fascinated—by her mutability, the way she moved seamlessly and unselfconsciously from a sort of tarty affect to that of a naïf. It had been like watching a reptile shed its skin; it held him transfixed. The night had an otherworldly quality, veering back and forth from one mood to another. When Nate left in the morning, he felt as if he’d lived through a whole lifetime.

  When he came to pick her up for their third date—Greer inspired in him old-fashioned gestures of chivalry, which was odd because in another sense he felt as if he were coming almost entirely because he wanted to sleep with her again—he found her not yet dressed to go out. Her hair was askew. She’d been crying again. The combined force of a comment from her editor, an incident on the bus in which an overweight woman had accused Greer of shoving her, and a conversation with her sister had “annihilated” her.

  For an instant, Nate was uncomfortably reminded of Elisa—that never-ending river of tears. He felt an impulse to flee. He didn’t flee. He didn’t even really want to. His most vivid impression of that night was from much later, well after Greer had been consoled: the glint of her belly-button ring in the moonlit bedroom as her body rose and fell on top of his.

  The fling stretched into a longer and longer fling.

  Nate had been wrong about the nature of Greer’s interest in him. She hadn’t been drawn to his “intellectual cachet.” She had, she told him, felt some kind of powerful, “almost kinetic,” physical attraction to him. Nate, unaccustomed to seeing himself as an object of erotic fascination, was incredibly turned on by this. He was also inclined to believe her. A memoirist, Greer was a skilled narrator
of her own emotions. And what she said dovetailed so neatly with what he’d felt, the attraction to her he’d nursed for quite a while, before they got together.

  Long ago, he had placed Greer into the category of people who had gleaned amazingly little actual knowledge in four years at Sarah Lawrence or Vassar or Gallatin or whichever fancy progressive school they’d attended, where that much-heralded goal of modern pedagogy, to teach students “how to think,” was considered better achieved without the interference of actual facts. Her ignorance of things that had happened—certain illustrious sackings, schisms, famines, et cetera—was almost touching. She was equally unfamiliar with many books and ideas widely deemed to be of world-historical import. But Greer had ideas of her own, all sorts of them. They just weren’t rooted in any context beyond that of pop culture and a certain strand of women’s literature. She had also perfected an imperturbable irreverence, an earnest and sincere belief in her superiority over stuffed shirts. Like Nate. Greer was no phony. Unlike Elisa, she didn’t pretend. Greer stared you in the face and said, “Really? You’re asking if I’ve read War and Peace? Do you really not know the answer?”

  As he had told Aurit, Greer was smart. Like a finely honed sports car, her mind wasn’t weighted down with unnecessary encumbrances, but she was naturally gifted in the dialectical mode of argument, quick to point out the holes in your logic and to come back with counterarguments. When dialectic failed her, she had at her disposal another powerful tool: tears. This rhetorical device she considered perfectly legitimate: tears fell under the rubric of sincerity.