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Last annotated on January 22, 2014
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.
Jason had a theory that
girls who offer to pay on dates suffer from low self-esteem. They don’t feel
they deserve to be paid for; it’s a sign there’s something wrong with the girl.
Nate realized he was
having a conversation with Hannah—that is, he wasn’t going through the motions
of having a conversation with her while privately articulating her tics and
mental limitations. When it came to dating, his intelligence often seemed like
an awkward appendage that failed for the most part to provide him with whatever
precisely was wanted—dry, cynical humor; gallantry; an appreciation for certain
trendy novelists—but nonetheless made a nuisance of itself by reminding him
when he was bored. He wasn’t bored now.
just hate the way so many
men treat ‘dating’ as if it’s a frivolous subject. It’s boneheaded.” She smiled
frostily and tilted her head in his direction, lest there be any uncertainty
about who exactly she was calling boneheaded. “Dating is probably the most
fraught human interaction there is. You’re sizing people up to see if they’re
worth your time and attention, and they’re doing the same to you. It’s
meritocracy applied to personal life, but there’s no accountability. We submit
ourselves to these intimate inspections and simultaneously inflict them on
others and try to keep our psyches intact—to keep from becoming cold and
callous—and we hope that at the end of it we wind up happier than our
grandparents, who didn’t spend this vast period of their lives, these prime
years, so thoroughly alone, coldly and explicitly anatomized again and again.
But who cares, right? It’s just girl stuff.”
Was this so wrong? Why do
women get away with pathologizing men for not wanting girlfriends? There are
entire Web sites written by supposedly smart, “independent” women who make no
bones about calling such men immature at best, assholes at worst. Nate wanted
to argue, if only he had someone to argue with, that women want to be in
relationships because on a gut level they don’t
like being alone. They aren’t noble, high-minded individuals, concerned about
the well-being of the nation or the continuity of the species. They simply
swoon at images of cooking dinner together, of some loving boyfriend playfully
swatting their ass with a dishtowel while the two of them chop vegetables and
sip wine and listen to NPR (preferably in a jointly owned prewar apartment with
an updated kitchen). And that’s their prerogative. But what right do they have
to demonize a counterpreference? If Nate’s idea of a nice dinner involved
hunching over his kitchen table with a Celeste Pizza for One and a copy of
Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, who is to say that his ideal is worse?
Nate had once suggested
to Jason that there was something prurient in the intensity of his interest in
other people’s lives. In response, Jason had paraphrased Bellow paraphrasing
Allan Bloom: “When I do it, it’s not gossip. It’s social history.”
What began, after a few
more minutes, to irritate him was that she didn’t even
attempt to be engaging—made no effort toward wit or color in her replies. Only
an attractive young woman would take for granted a stranger’s interest in the
minutiae of her life.
He thought there was
something grating about upper-middle-class New Yorkers’ love of high culture in
city parks. It was so full of self-congratulation, as if a few lousy
performances made up for systemic economic inequality. “Uh huh,” Hannah had
said. “You know you sound like one of those, uhm, philistines who doesn’t see
the use in art, right?”
Suddenly, Nate felt a bit
sorry for her. She was pretty, self-possessed, and intelligent enough, but she
was fresh out of school and repeating opinions that were no doubt fashionable
there. In time, she would catch the tone of New York. Her schoolmarmishness was
provincial. Here it was all about the counterintuitive. She’d learn. Besides,
being pretty, self-possessed, and intelligent enough would go a long way, and
if she wasn’t well connected before she started dating Mark, she would be now.
When you’re single, your weekend days are wide-open vistas that
extend in every direction; in a relationship, they’re like the sky over
Manhattan: punctured, hemmed in, compressed.
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.
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.
As if she had done
anything that would have entitled him to be mad at her. Why the fuck did women,
no matter how smart, how independent, inevitably revert to this state of willed
imbecility? It wasn’t as if he had the emotional register of a binary system,
as if his only states of being were “happy” and “mad at her.”
Nate realized he was
having a good time. It occurred to him that he had more fun at parties when he
had a girlfriend than when he didn’t. Being in a relationship spared him from
having to hit on girls, from getting into long, boring or boring-ish
conversations with girls he barely liked in the hopes of getting laid. He was free to talk
to the people he actually wanted to talk to.
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.”
“Men and women on
relationships are like men and women on orgasms, except in
reverse,” Jason continued boisterously. “Women crave relationships the way men
crave orgasm. Their whole being bends to its imperative. Men, in contrast, want
relationships the way women want orgasm: sometimes, under the right
circumstances.”
Documentary filmmakers
were the most pretentious people in the world.
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