The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P

Something he’d learned with Elisa: it was not always unpleasant to deal with a hysterical woman. One feels so thoroughly righteous in comparison.

The story that followed dated back to childhood. Aurit’s mother, in this telling, had long nursed an idea of herself as very sensible and self-sacrificing and unfrivolous. She propped up her self-image by constantly invoking a comparison between herself and these other women, “who’ve never had a job, who never, ever cook—they hire caterers whenever more than two people come over—who shop all the time, who resent their daughters’ youth, who never read. As a kid, I bought the whole thing. It’s only over time that I started to wonder where all these vapid, lazy, superficial women are. I’ve never encountered anyone quite so bad, let alone an army of such women, except maybe on Dallas. Then I realized the only place they exist is in her head, where they play a very important role. She can justify almost anything she does because she truly, deep-down believes she’s more than entitled to have her ‘modest’ wishes granted, given the extreme and almost unparalleled excellence of her character, relative to other women.”

anything to avoid the truth: that over time he had come to see her as overprivileged and underinteresting.

When a friendship ceases to grow, it immediately begins to decline,” said the amoral Madame Merle

Nate wished, for her sake, that she’d relax about it, realize it was okay not to be some kind of highbrow intellectual. She’d surely be happier at a different type of magazine, a less stuffy one, perhaps one of those Web sites for smart, independent women, where she wouldn’t have to disguise her tastes and where, freed from the need to posture, her verbal cleverness, her knack for snappy aperçus, would come into play. (She was always criticizing him in the most clever and imaginative terms.) But, no, the high opinion of people like her father and her boss meant too much to her. She had to do something they valued, not something that she valued. Nate felt tenderness toward her when he saw her situation in those terms. Elisa was a beautiful, intelligent woman trying desperately to make herself into a slightly different kind of intelligent woman.

Nate leaned back in his chair, experiencing the pleasant sensation of being outside time and normal life. It was officially the first day of summer, and for a change his mood was in sync with the calendar. He felt free and heady, the way he had when he was young, when summer was a long possibility, a state of mind, not a period when work was slow because editors were on vacation.

Nate felt not only glad but vindicated, as if a long-running argument had finally been settled in his favor. His unpopularity, though persistent, had never seemed quite right.

At home, he’d read Kristen bits from Proust, and she’d get this pinched look on her face, as if the sheer extravagance of Proust’s prose was morally objectionable, as if there were children in Africa who could have better used those excess words.

“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.”

“It’s about how one of the privileges of being elite is that we outsource the act of exploitation,”