The questions
that come to mind when reading The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. are, is every
man like this? Is he an asshole or the combination of his circumstances and his
high self-regard? Who was right in his relationship with Hannah, and who was
wrong? And, most importantly, am I like this?
How much can
we forgive ourselves for?
Certainly our
worst impulses tend toward the Nathaniel, and our best impulses tend toward
imagining that everyone else doesn’t feel this way about other people, that it
is us, we are wrong and sociopathic and shouldn’t evaluate our previous
partners on their style of dress, or the way they kissed, or their cringing
attitude whenever we met their parents.
I came across
Marina Keegan’s short story “Cold Pastoral” today, and it reminded me of
Nathaniel P.; in the story, Claire is in college and her not-quite-boyfriend,
Brian, dies in a car accident. At the behest of his previous girlfriend, she
recovers his diary and then (unadvisedly) reads it. Its excerpts sounded much
like Nathaniel: he wonders whether he is still in love with his previous
girlfriend, whether he really likes Claire, how things went wrong before and
how they might be made right, who was hotter and who was better in bed, and
whether the grass is always greener in the past. Claire gets over her
discoveries (and Marina Keegan was herself killed in a car accident shortly
after writing the story, making me want to write solely about centenarians who
are still in love with their grad school sweethearts after all these years…), but
we can say the same of Hannah. Hannah moves on. Hannah herself is not blameless
in her breakup with Nathaniel; she sends him a terrible, maudlin email, and
then another scathing email after he doesn’t respond to the first. But Hannah
forgives herself, and we can quickly forgive her, too; she is upset and tends
toward over-expressing her emotions.
Nathaniel
tends toward discounting his emotions, undermining them and second-guessing
them. His admiration for his quirky Israeli best friend is at times the best
thing about him (he thinks) and then a second later shallow (she expresses her
opinions about iced coffee as vehemently and eloquently as her opinions about
love and relationships) or misguided (he watches her interactions with a waiter
and her habit of brining the conversation back to the same points over and over
again, and begins to hate her). It is this duplicity that we hate in ourselves
and find hard to forgive in Nate’s character. We don’t want our friends to
think these things behind our backs, even though undoubtedly they do. We don’t
want our partners to think that we look worse than a passing stranger; we don’t
even want our partners to notice the passing stranger, even if we are being
less than perfectly engaging. Admitting what we actually think about other
people, especially those closest to us, is unthinkable.
It seems clear
that Nate doesn’t want a relationship with any of the women he meets, but also
doesn’t have the willpower to say no. His friendship with Aurit is rare, and
the fact of it is still surprising to him. Most of the women he meets who want
to date him aren’t trying to be his friend first, and the only way he can get
to know them better is to date them. Maturation through this process is a
series of trials by fire. Nate hardly knows how to argue with his friends, how
to express his disapproval of their behavior or even how to tell them he
disagrees (a friend of his asks him to save a seat at a lecture, for example;
from the beginning Nate thinks this is silly and knows he won’t do it, but goes
along and even pretends to apologize to the friend when he doesn’t save the seat.)
He is learning how to disagree with someone he cares for through the process of
upsetting and losing everyone he is supposed to care for the most. His parents
have their own particular and peculiar ways of interacting with him, which
haven’t prepared him well for communicating with a girlfriend; his father is
mostly oblivious to the realities of Nate’s life and Nate’s nuanced
ambivalences about his choices, while his mother implicitly demands to be
treated as the most important person in his life while not allowing him to
criticize her or even change the subject.
As a result of
never being allowed to be honest with his parents, Nate abstracts them. He
loves the idea of their struggles and production of him as a successful person,
and he is ashamed of their shortcomings and obliviousness. By never airing his
frustrations with them and never seeing them change, Nate comes to think of his
girlfriends in the same way: people he has to put up with entirely as they are,
people he can evaluate in secret but never be comfortable around, people who
will never truly know him but who he cannot influence in any substantive way.
He can’t bring up the way Hannah’s drinking unsettles him, or the way her style
of communication feels oppressive to him. He notes it, and it adds to the gap
between them, a gap that Hannah feels but one that is never explained to her.
Nate struggles with his own feelings and thoughts, ultimately absolving him of
his guilt about them, but he never confesses them. And of course we forgive
ourselves for much less than others will—self-absorption magnifies every sin—but
Nate is still far from sharing his thoughts, as was Brian, and though they keep
these thoughts to themselves to avoid causing discomfort, Claire and Hannah and
those who come after will still be hurt by everything that was left unsaid.
Discussed herein: Cold Pastoral (Marina Keegan)
