The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Read Free

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 shehugged 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-skinnedto 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