The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Waldman Adelle

Author:Waldman, Adelle [Waldman, Adelle]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-07-31T23:00:00+00:00

{ 10 }

That night, Hannah asked what the deal was with him and Elisa. They were sitting in the chairs by her window. Nate paused before answering.

He had met Elisa three years ago at a publishing party. She had arrived with the editor in chief of the Very Important Magazine. Nate asked his friend Andrew about her. Andrew said she was the editor in chief’s new assistant.

When her boss left, Elisa remained. Nate downed two or three thimble-sized glasses of wine. She was standing next to the food table, in front of a small mountain of fruit.

“Hi, I’m Nate.”

She popped a red grape into her mouth. “Elisa,” she said, almost drowsily.

For the next few minutes, she answered his questions, but she seemed slightly put out by the obligation he had imposed on her. Eventually, she asked what he did.

He said he was the book critic for an online magazine. She asked which one. He told her.

She eyed him. Nate tugged at the collar of his blue Oxford shirt. He noticed that one of his shoes was not merely untied but radically untied, as if he had only just now wrested his foot from a steel trap. Its gaping, brown tongue hung crookedly, crisscrossed with faint indentations where the laces should have been. He stepped on that foot with the other, swaying slightly, like a top-heavy kebab.

She told him that she’d recently finished a master’s degree in comp lit from the Sorbonne. Before that she’d been at Brown. This was her first job in publishing. She wanted to write. She’d love to get coffee with Nate sometime. She would? Yeah, she’d love to talk about publishing.

Coffee turned into dinner and, a few days later, a sunset run over the Brooklyn Bridge and then a party at a Harvard friend/hedge fund guy’s Upper West Side triplex and a Saturday night at the Brooklyn Museum. Nate was terrifically impressed by her. She dropped casual references to the work of aging intellectuals who contributed to the New York Review of Books. The polysyllabic names of avant-garde eastern European filmmakers rolled effortlessly from her tongue. Her father was a well-known professor whose books Nate knew by reputation. By that point in his life, Nate had dated any number of editorial types. Elisa seemed different, unusually serious and well informed, especially for someone so young. And so attractive.

Even Nate, who had had to be told by Jason not to wear pants with pleats, could tell somehow that among all the well-dressed young women of Brooklyn, Elisa looked especially nice. She knew where to buy anything, which stores were not so much expensive as tasteful, and also what was okay to buy at Target (from what Nate gleaned, things that started with the letter T: Tupperware, tights, toothpaste). In theory, Nate disdained “bourgeois status signifiers,” but in practice he took pride in Elisa’s whiff of smart chic. She radiated the effortless worldly ease of the popular girl. She was clearly first-rate, top-shelf, the publishing world equivalent of

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