The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (24 page)

Nate heard the key turning in the lock, then Hannah’s footsteps, quick and determined, as she moved through the apartment. He waited for her to come to the bedroom, intending to make up for his churlishness earlier.

After a minute, she pushed open the bedroom door. “Your bagel is on the table.”

Before Nate could respond, she threw a clump of bills and coins at him. Then she turned around and slammed the door behind her.

As he collected his change from her sheets, Nate wondered if Hannah had intentionally echoed a john throwing money at a prostitute. He hoped so. It would reflect a certain malicious imagination that he couldn’t help but admire, aesthetically.

He pulled on his undershirt and stepped tentatively out of the bedroom. On the table, he saw a white paper bag, bearing the words
La Bagel-Telle
. Hannah was nowhere in sight; after a moment, he heard the shower running in the bathroom. He sat down to eat his bagel. The irony was he really would have preferred eggs.

Elisa wanted his advice about an upcoming job interview, for a position at a weekly newsmagazine. When they met up, Nate wondered if excitement about the job was the whole difference. Because something was different.

“You seem good,” he said. “Happy.”

“Thanks.”

Her face was tilted over her wine glass, and she looked up at him from the top of her eyes. Nate remembered her looking at him in just that way when she went down on him. He felt a fluttering belowdecks and automatically shifted in his seat.

As soon as he realized this, he blinked and rubbed his forehead. It had been a long time since he had reacted this way to Elisa.

She set her wine glass down and cocked her head. “How’s Hannah?”

Nate shrugged as he took a sip of his whiskey. “Fine.” He paused, sucking on an ice cube. “Actually, things haven’t been so great with us lately.”

“I’m sorry,” Elisa said. But the crooked way she smiled suggested that this was just what she had hoped to hear. “Poor Hannah.”

In spite of the bad character on display, Nate felt unusually fond of Elisa right then, protective and affectionate, feelings born of long familiarity. He leaned his elbow on the bar and smiled at her, resignedly as if to say, “What can you do?” Meanwhile, in the virtual reality chamber of his mind, he began to replay various scenes of fucking her. He had a large cache of raw material from which to draw.

They hung out for quite a while, until nearly midnight—bent over the bar, laughing a lot, gossiping about Elisa’s coworkers and
other mutual acquaintances, pulling apart not just their writing but their disordered personal lives, irritating habits, and personal unattractiveness. Nate allowed himself to slip out from Hannah’s influence, the moral quality that would have made him ashamed to be this catty, this cruel in her presence. Her fairness, her lack of pettiness were things he liked about Hannah generally—he certainly respected her more than he respected Elisa—but the fun he was having felt deserved in light of the strain he’d been under in his relationship.

When he and Elisa said goodnight at the subway entrance, Nate felt a touch of wistfulness. He gave her a quick peck on the cheek.

“Good luck with the interview, E,” he said. “You deserve it.”

The following day he met up with Hannah.

“Did you have fun last night?” she asked as they walked to a bar. “You were with Elisa, right?”

She didn’t sound jealous. Nate instinctively attributed that to savvy, not to an absence of jealousy. Immediately, he felt defensive—also a little annoyed to be put on the defensive when, thoughts aside, he had done nothing wrong.

“Yeah,” he said, daring her with his tone to complain. “I did.”

“Good,” she said, just as coldly.

They were on their way to meet some of her friends from journalism school. At the bar, Nate’s mood improved. Hannah’s friends were by and large down-to-earth, hard-drinking reporters who spent a lot of time at City Hall or on the police beat or hanging out with Wall Street types. He soon lost sight of Hannah, but it was okay—they were a fun crowd. After a while, though, he got what Hannah had meant, back when they’d first started dating, when she’d said that she had felt a little bit isolated intellectually. He could see that there were aspects of her personality that she wouldn’t be able to express with these friends. The thought made him feel tender toward her.

He spotted her talking to two women by a Ms. Pac-Man machine. He made his way to her and placed his hand on her hip. “Hi.”

“Hey.”

Her tone was clipped, almost hostile. After a moment, he realized she was drunk.

She started getting aggressive with him, treating his light remarks as criticisms and responding disproportionately, hitting him “playfully” but actually using a bit too much force. When she said she was going to get a drink, he suggested that maybe she didn’t need another.

“Who are you to tell me what to do?”

He shrugged, and she went to the bar.

At his apartment later, she became downright belligerent, muttering hostile, not-quite-coherent reflections on him almost under her breath, as if to herself as much as to him. Her tone was false, full of a surly and world-weary and utterly put-on cynicism, a strange, unnatural bravado.

“You know that Irina and Jay and Melissa are
nice people
,” she said. She spoke as if these were fighting words. Which, he supposed, they were. “That’s what actually matters,” she continued. “You know that the other stuff is all vanity, right? Writing, I mean.”

She made a sarcastic comment about Nate’s “artfully crafted sentences,” which, she said, mimicked true feeling without knowing what it was. He imitated the stylistic devices of writers he admired without realizing that for those writers these weren’t mere devices but means of expressing something true.

It was brutal stuff. Nate didn’t take offense. She was obviously lashing out at him for the way things were between them. All he felt was mild disgust at her lack of control. Mostly he just wanted to go to sleep.

As they were getting into bed, she told him that he was treated like a big shot because he was a guy and had the arrogant sense of entitlement to ask for and expect to get everything he wanted, to think no honor too big for him. The funny thing was that Nate thought there was a great deal of truth in this. But he thought
she
could stand to ask for more. His main criticism of her, in terms of
writing, was that too often she wasn’t ambitious enough. She should treat each piece as if it mattered, instead of laughing off flaws proactively, defensively, citing a “rushed job” or an “editor who’d mess it up anyway,” or referring to the insignificance of the publication (“How many people even read such-and-such magazine anymore?”). On top of it, she didn’t seem to be writing much at all lately, aside from the routine stuff she did for money. In spite of what she’d said the night she told him she’d been feeling down, she didn’t seem to be making progress on her book proposal. Still, he unreservedly thought she was extremely talented. She deserved more recognition than she’d gotten. It wasn’t fair. He told her so now. Then he leaned over to turn out the light.

“That’s nice of you to say,” she said as the room went dark. “Every time I want to paint you as a total jerk, you go and say something nice. That’s what kills me.”

On the ceiling, dark shadows were indistinguishable from dust. Nate wondered for a moment if he should break up with her. But he liked her. And he didn’t want to hurt her.

He turned onto his side. He was too tired to think about this right now. He’d think about it when his head was clear. Tomorrow. Later.

In early November, Peter came to town from Maine. Nate was sure Peter would like Hannah and looked forward to introducing them.

With women he didn’t know well, Peter affected an exaggerated courtliness that some found off-putting and pretentious (“toolish,” Aurit once said bluntly). But, over a dinner that also included Jason, Peter won Hannah over when he remarked that Flaubert had been responsible for untold numbers of men getting laid. “When Leon overcame Emma’s last qualm with the remark that ‘all the women in Paris do it,’ he nailed it. Forget love, forget morality. Appeal to vanity …” Hannah laughed, delighted by this observation. That, in turn, delighted Peter.

At some point, they got to talking about the name Lindsay and how none of them had known any girls named Lindsay at Harvard or Yale, but apparently, according to one of Peter’s academic friends, NYU was teeming with Lindsays, and could names possibly reflect such minute social distinctions? Nate glanced at Hannah, but she didn’t appear to be outraged by their snobbery. She looked amused. When she spoke, there was just enough irony in her tone to chasten them but not so much as to seem humorless.

They ordered a couple bottles of wine and several rounds of cocktails. By midnight, Hannah was starting to get a little sloppy. Eager to let a good thing be, Nate corralled her into a cab. He was feeling happy and affectionate. As the taxi careened down Ninth Avenue, he leaned close to her and touched one of her eyebrows with his thumb. “You’re so much fun,” he said.

When they got back to her place, she disappeared into the bathroom. Nate got into bed. Several minutes later, she returned, wearing a tank top and high-cut underwear.

Then Nate looked at her face and saw that she’d been crying. She had tried to cover it up. No, that wasn’t quite right. She looked as if she’d made a halfhearted attempt to cover it up but what she really wanted was for him to know that she was upset and ask what was wrong.

Although tears, even off-screen tears, were a new development, this didn’t really surprise him—or rather his surprise was limited to the comparatively minor question of “why now?” when they’d had a really good night, when they might very well continue to have a really good night. As she searched for something in one of her overstuffed drawers, her eyeliner smeared and her lips pursed, Nate felt not pity but exasperation.
You’re hurting your own cause
, he wanted to shout to the crying, not-crying Hannah.
Can’t you fucking see that?

But her droopy vulnerability gave her the moral high ground. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine.”

“Why don’t you come to bed?”

He spoke in the patient, patronizing tone of a person accustomed to dealing with the mentally feeble.

She swallowed and looked down, blinking as if in pain or embarrassment. Then—something happened. An idea or a mood seemed to take hold of her. Her face brightened, and her demeanor became less glum, more definite—animated.

“Come on,” she said, her eyes glittering. “Let’s go in the other room and have a drink.”

Her voice had an inexplicable, almost lunatic pull. As he followed her into the living room Nate’s irritation gave way to curiosity to see what would happen next.

Without turning on the light, she went and got the bourbon from on top of the refrigerator and then the two blue-rimmed glasses. Nate sat down by the window. The only sound in the apartment was the refrigerator’s hum. Hannah returned from the kitchen and sat in the other upholstered chair, tucking her naked legs underneath her. She poured out the bourbon and handed him a glass.

He wasn’t really in the mood to drink, hadn’t been since the moment at the restaurant with Jason and Peter when he realized he needed to keep an eye on her drinking.

Hannah downed nearly half of hers in one gulp. She shuddered.

“It’s so fucked up,” she said. The words were clear and lucid, but her voice had a bitter, reckless quality. “I see it, but I can’t do anything about it.”

“See what, Hannah?”

She looked at the window. Their reflections in the glass were faded and translucent, crisscrossed by the slabs of brick on the apartment building across the street. She turned to face him, the liquid in her glass a luminous amber.

“I don’t even smoke around you anymore. How great is that?”

“Do you want a cigarette? If you want one, go ahead and have one.”

“Shut up! You’re so patronizing. That’s what I thought when I
first met you. I thought you were so smarmy and self-satisfied and not that interes—I remember thinking,
How many times is he going to mention fucking Harvard?
” She laughed. “I never thought I’d—” She shook her head. “Oh, never mind.”

Her voice had become singsong, as if she were speaking to a slightly daft elderly person.

When she spoke again, the pleasant quality was gone. “What was that tonight?” She fixed her eyes on him. “You were
so
affectionate.”

Nate’s grip on his glass tightened. Whatever was coming, he didn’t want.

“Why?” Hannah continued. “Because your friend Peter liked me.”

The pulsing of the blood in his temples felt like an aggressively ticking alarm clock.

“No offense,” Hannah said. “But it kind of made me sick. I mean, what kind of person are you that your friends’ opinions are so fucking important?”

“You’re drunk, Hannah.”

“And who am I that I go along with it? Perform for your friends so you’ll …” She shivered as the words trailed off. “I’m ashamed of myself, too, just so you know.”

Nate looked out the window, at the yellow crescent of light cast by a streetlamp.

“The thing is, the last guy I dated”—Hannah began to speak earnestly, as if they were in the middle of hashing out something important together—“he was a writer. You probably know him—not Steve—this was just someone I went out with a few times. But, see, he had a trust fund and a great apartment, and one day we were there, and he had these Hispanic guys doing some work on his roof deck, and I asked him if he ever felt weird, you know, because he sat around all day and half-worked on his writing while these guys were right outside his sliding glass door, in the heat and everything. And he said, ‘Yeah, all the time,’ but, like,
because that’s what he was supposed to say. Because then he went on and said that writing poetry was hard work, just like being a day laborer is hard work, and the guys on the roof wouldn’t want to trade with him, any more than he’d want to trade with them. And that was it, that was how he talked himself out of feeling uncomfortable about all his advantages. So callow, you know?” She looked at Nate intently. “You’re not like that. No, you’re sort of decen—”