The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (2 page)

He said he was glad to hear it. There was a long pause. Nate knew he should say something chatty and diverting. He opened his mouth to speak. But a panicky premonition came over him: this phone call would lead to an endless string of others, the day at Juliet’s apartment to a regular movie date, all tinged with a sense of obligation and an almost creepy quasi flirtation.

“I’ve got to run,” he said. “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

“Oh.” Juliet drew in her breath. “Okay … Bye, then.”

He probably should have followed up after that. As he turned the corner onto Elisa’s street, Nate conceded that he should have called or e-mailed a few weeks later. But, at the time, he hadn’t known if a call from him would have been welcome. It might have been a painful reminder of something she would rather put behind her. Nor did he know what he would have said. And he’d gotten distracted, caught up in other things—in life. She could have called him.

He’d done more than many guys would have. Was it his fault if he just didn’t feel that way about her?
Could have at least what?

The front door of Elisa’s building was propped open with a large rock. Light from the hallway made a yellow arc on the concrete stoop. Nate paused before entering, taking a breath and running a hand through his hair. Inside, the stairs sagged and groaned
under his feet. Elisa’s landing smelled of sautéed onions. After a moment, the door swung open.

“Natty!” she cried, throwing her arms around him.

Though he and Elisa had broken up more than a year ago, her apartment, on the top floor of a row house in gentrifying Greenpoint, still felt almost as familiar to Nate as his own.

Before she moved in, its brick walls had been plastered over and covered with floral wallpaper. The thick, irregular beams of the wood floor were hidden under carpet. Elisa’s landlord, Joe Jr., once showed Nate and Elisa photos. After more than twenty years, its elderly Polish occupant had left to live with a daughter in New Jersey. Joe Jr. had torn up the carpet and ripped the plaster off the exterior walls. His father, who had bought the house in the 1940s and had since moved to Florida, said he was crazy. Joe Sr. thought adding a dishwasher or replacing the old bathtub would have been a better investment. “But I told him that that wasn’t the way to attract high-class tenants,” Joe Jr. explained to Nate and Elisa one afternoon, while he repaired some tiles in the bathroom. “I told him the kind of people who pay the big bucks go wild for clawfoot tubs. It’s a matter of taste, I told him.” Joe Jr. turned to face them, a jar of spackle dangling from his fleshy fingers. “And was I right or was I right?” he asked jovially, a big grin lighting up his face. Nate and Elisa, holding hands, nodded uneasily, unsure of the appropriate response to being so openly—and aptly—characterized as a certain kind of dupe.

Nate had helped Elisa paint the two nonbrick walls a beige that contrasted with the dark brick and the cream-colored rug under her couch. The dining room table they had purchased together at Ikea, but the chairs and a long cabinet by the door had belonged to her grandparents. (Or was it her great-grandparents?) Her bookcases reached nearly to the ceiling.

The apartment’s familiarity now felt to him like a reproach.
Elisa had insisted on his presence tonight. “If we really are friends, why can’t I have you over for dinner with a few people?” she’d asked. What could he say?

On the couch, Nate’s friend Jason, a magazine editor who, to Nate’s alternating irritation and amusement, had long wanted to get into Elisa’s pants, leaned back regally, cradling the back of his head in his palms. Jason’s knees were stretched absurdly far apart, as if he were trying to bore the largest possible impression of himself into Elisa’s furniture. Next to Jason sat Aurit, another good friend of Nate’s, who had recently returned from a research trip to Europe. Aurit was talking to a girl named Hannah, whom Nate had met before here and there—a thin, pert-breasted writer, pleasant-looking in spite of rather angular features. She was almost universally regarded as nice and smart, or smart and nice. Seated on the loveseat was a woman Elisa knew from college. Nate couldn’t remember her name and had met her too many times to ask. He knew she was a lawyer. The weak-chinned suit with his arm draped over her shoulder was, presumably, the banker she was hot to marry.

“We’ve been wondering when you were going to grace us with your company,” Jason said as soon as Nate had both feet in the door.

Nate set his messenger bag on the floor. “I ran into some trouble on the way.”

“The G?” Aurit asked sympathetically.

There followed murmurs of agreement that the G, among all the New York subway lines, was especially unreliable.

Nate took the only available seat, next to Elisa’s college friend. “It’s good to see you,” he said, with as much warmth as he could conjure. “It’s been a while.”

She looked at him levelly. “You and Elisa were still going out.”

Nate thought he detected an accusation in her voice—as in “it was before you trampled all over her self-esteem and ruined her happiness.”

He forced himself to hold his smile. “In any case, it’s been too long.”

Nate introduced himself to her banker boyfriend and tried to get the guy talking. If he’d just refer to her by name, Nate would at least be relieved of one anxiety. But the ex-frat boy mostly let her answer for him (equity research, Bank of America, former Merrill Lynch, transition stressful). His preferred means of communication appeared to be nonverbal: a fixed smile and benign, fatherly nods of his head.

Soon—though not necessarily soon enough—Elisa beckoned them to a table crowded with platters and bowls.

“Everything looks delicious,” someone said, as they circled the table, smiling beatifically at the spread and at each other. Elisa returned from the other side of the room, carrying a butter dish. Frowning, she scanned the room one last time. A self-satisfied sigh escaped her mouth as she sank gracefully into her seat, the billowy yellow fabric of her skirt fluttering on her descent.

“Go ahead and start,” she said, without making any move to start herself. “The chicken will get cold.”

While he ate his chicken cacciatore—which, as it happened, was quite good—Nate studied Elisa’s heart-shaped face: those big, limpid eyes and dramatic cheekbones, the pretty, bow-shaped lips and profusion of white teeth. Each time Nate saw her, Elisa’s beauty struck him anew, as if in the interval the memory of what she actually looked like had been distorted by the tortured emotions she elicited since they’d broken up: in his mind, she took on the dimensions of an abject creature. What a shock when she opened the door, bursting with vibrant, almost aggressive good health. The power of her beauty, Nate had once decided, came from its ability to constantly reconfigure itself. When he thought he’d accounted for it, filed it away as a dead fact—
pretty girl
—she turned her head or bit her lip, and like a children’s toy you shake to reset, her prettiness changed shape, its coordinates altered: now it flashed from the elegant contours of her sloping brow and flaring cheekbone, now from her shyly smiling lips. “Elisa the Beautiful,” Nate had said without thinking when she
hugged him at the door. She’d beamed, breezily overlooking his lateness.

Yet only a short while later, he’d acclimated. Hannah had complimented her apartment. “I hate it,” Elisa responded. “It’s small, and it’s laid out poorly. The fixtures are
incredibly
cheap.” Then a quick smile: “Thank you, though.”

The familiar hint of whine in Elisa’s voice brought back to Nate an equally familiar cocktail of guilt and pity and dread. Also sheer annoyance—that spoiled, ill-tempered quality about her. Her prettiness became an irritant, a Calypso-like lure to entrap him,
again
.

Besides, as he poked at his chicken with his fork, Nate noticed the pores on Elisa’s nose and a bit of acne atop her forehead, near her hairline, flaws so minor that it would be ungentlemanly to notice them on most women. But on Elisa, whose prettiness seemed to demand that she be judged on some Olympian scale of perfect beauty, these imperfections seemed, irrationally, like failures of will or judgment on her part.

“What are you working on these days?” she asked him as a bowl of potatoes was passed around for the second time.

Nate dabbed his mouth with a napkin. “Just an essay.”

Elisa’s round eyes and cocked head implored him to elaborate.

“It’s about how one of the privileges of being elite is that we outsource the act of exploitation,” he said, glancing at Jason, seated diagonally from him.

The idea for this essay was a bit hazy, and Nate dreaded sounding naive, like the person he’d been in his early twenties, before he’d learned that writing ambitiously, about big or serious subjects, was a privilege magazines granted only to people who’d already made it. But he had recently written a book. He had received a significant advance for it, and even though publication was still many months away, the book had already generated quite a bit of publicity. If he hadn’t yet made it, he was getting closer.

“We get other people to do things that we’re too morally thin-skinned
to do ourselves,” Nate said with more conviction. “Conscience is the ultimate luxury.”

“You mean that it’s almost entirely working-class people who join the army and that sort of thing?” Jason said loudly enough that all other conversation ceased. He reached for a slice of baguette from a butcher block. “Can you pass the butter?” he asked Hannah, before turning back to Nate expectantly.

Jason’s curls were tamped down with a glistening ointment. He had the aspect of a diabolical cherub.

“That’s not exactly what I had in mind,” Nate said. “I mean—”

“I think you’re absolutely right, Nate,” Aurit broke in, wielding her fork like a pointer. “I think Americans in general are too removed from all the ugliness that goes into safeguarding so-called normal life.”

“That’s the Israeli perspective, of course—” Jason began.

“That’s offensive, Jason,” Aurit said. “It’s not only reductive but racialist—”

“It
is
offensive,” Nate agreed. “But I’m actually not so much interested in security issues as day-to-day life, the ways we protect ourselves from feeling complicit in the economic exploitation that goes on all around us. Take Whole Foods. Half of what you pay for when you shop there is the privilege of feeling ethically pure.” He set his wine glass on the table and began gesturing with his arms. “Or consider the Mexican guy the landlord pays to put the trash in front of our buildings twice a week. We wouldn’t exploit him ourselves, but on some level we know the guy is an illegal immigrant who doesn’t even get minimum wage.”

“Joe Jr. does the trash himself,” Elisa said. “But he’s really cheap.”

“Is there a difference between being ‘racialist’ and ‘racist’?” Elisa’s college friend asked.

“Same with the guys who deliver our pizza and make our sandwiches,” Nate continued. He knew that he was violating an implicit rule of dinner party etiquette. Conversation was supposed to be ornamental, aimed to amuse. One wasn’t supposed to be invested
in the content of what was said, only the tone. But for the moment he didn’t care. “We don’t exploit them ourselves,” he said. “No, we hire someone, a middleman, usually a small business owner, to do it, so we don’t have to feel bad. But we still take advantage of their cheap labor, even as we prattle on about our liberalism—how great the New Deal was, the eight-hour workday, the minimum wage. Our only complaint—in theory—is that it didn’t go far enough.”

“Excuse me, Nate.” Aurit held up an empty wine bottle. “Should we open another?”

“Joe does hire Mexicans to renovate,” Elisa said in a tipsily thoughtful voice as she walked to the cabinet by the door. Atop it stood several wine bottles whose necks poked out of colorful plastic bags. They had of course been brought by the other guests. Nate recognized the lime-green packaging of the Tangled Vine, his own neighborhood wine store. This seemed to make his failure worse. He had meant to pick up a bottle on the way over.

Elisa selected a red and returned to her seat. “Can someone open it?” she asked before turning to Nate. “Sorry, Nate. Go on.”

Nate had lost the thread of his argument.

Hannah took the bottle from Elisa. “You were saying that we benefit from exploitation but pretend our hands are clean,” she said helpfully as Elisa handed her a tarnished copper corkscrew that looked old enough to have accompanied Lewis and Clark on their westward journey. One of Elisa’s “heirlooms,” no doubt. “I think—” Hannah started to say.

“Right,” Nate said. “
Right
.”

His argument came back to him at once. “You know how you read a Dickens novel where these eight-year-old boys work in factories or beg on the streets? And you wonder why didn’t anyone give a fuck? Well, we aren’t so different. We’ve just gotten better at hiding it—from ourselves most of all. People back then at least justified their behavior by admitting to their contempt for the poor.”

Jason addressed the banker. “If you haven’t already noticed,
young Nate here suffers from a particularly acute case of liberal guilt.”

Jason was currently working on an article about the obesity epidemic, to be called “Don’t Let Them Eat Cake.”

Before Nate could respond, Hannah turned to him. She was cradling the wine bottle in one arm and gingerly twisting the ludicrous corkscrew with the other. “When people voluntarily pay more to shop at Whole Foods, aren’t they, by your logic, trying to be responsible?” she asked. “Aren’t they paying more so as
not
to take advantage of cheap labor?”

“Absolutely,” Nate said appreciatively. (Someone, it seemed, was actually listening.) “But do those marked-up prices really benefit anyone other than Whole Foods shareholders? All they have to do is put some picture of an earnest lesbian couple on a cereal box and we just assume it comes from some free-love workers’ paradise. It’s in our self-interest to think so because it allows us to buy good conscience, just like we buy everything else.” He paused before concluding. “It’s basically a Marxian argument, about the inexorability of exploitation under capitalism.”