Page 41 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
At first, all he can think of is how to leave. As Susan promised, their seats are off to the side, near an exit. After that, all he can think of is how loud the music is. Then, at about the time the high starts to set in and the opening act has left the stage, he listens to the music.
Iris and Hector have a Jimi Hendrix record they play when their parents aren’t home. Nathaniel’s heard it reverberating through the stairwell. It has nothing in common with the music Susan usually listens to. It has nothing in common with anything Nathaniel’s ever chosen to listen to at any point in his life.
But he does what Susan says: he shuts his eyes and listens. He can feel the bass in his bones, and the drums somewhere even deeper than that. But the guitar—Nathaniel can’t imaginewhat it’s like to be able to take an instrument and do something like that. The feedback and other noises are discordant, even troubling, but it’s like exuberant graffiti or those kids in the park. It’s breaking the pattern.
During a rare quiet moment, Susan leans in close. “If American music is a family tree, can you see how folk music gets you here? Not only folk, not even mainly folk, but can you hear it?”
Nathaniel can’t, not even when Hendrix plays Dylan’s “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” so he squeezes her hand and thinks about how a year ago he would have hated this, how he would have been frightened by the possibility of enjoying it. Maybe he can leave the person he was in the past. Maybe he does have a future in front of him. He lets the music seep into him.
They take a cab home and find the light still on in the shop. Patrick’s waiting up for them, Eleanor asleep against his shoulder.
Nathaniel’s heart does something terrible. Maybe the music has made him susceptible, because he feels like he’s seeing something impossibly lovely, instead of Patrick in an old t-shirt.
Eleanor wakes up, sees Nathaniel, and reaches for him. When he moves to take her, his hands brush Patrick’s. Because of warm weather and Jimi Hendrix and the fact that he smoked most of that joint by himself, he puts a hand on Patrick’s arm and leaves it there, his fingertips resting against the warm skin above Patrick’s elbow, and lets himself believe in something different.
12
By now, Nathaniel recognizes most of Dooryard’s regular customers. A Melville collector in New Haven takes the train down once a month to make a circuit of half a dozen bookstores. A married couple in the neighborhood stops in every few weeks to ask whether there’s any new Longfellow.
And then there’s George, a professor at Columbia, who comes by whenever he’s in the Village to look at any Whittier rare editions that Patrick’s managed to get his hands on. He’s forty-something and wears wire-rimmed glasses and black turtlenecks. There isn’t a doubt in Nathaniel’s mind that George is one of Patrick’s conquests, or possibly vice versa.
“Don’t tell Patrick,” George says when Nathaniel’s ringing him up, leaning close to Nathaniel’s ear. They didn’t have any Whittier in stock, but George bought a copy ofThe Valley of the Dolls. “I need to think about my reputation.”
Nathaniel leans in too, mirroring George’s posture and echoing his tone. “Patrick read this book last month.” That wasn’t particularly funny or insightful, but George laughs anyway. Nathaniel feels impossibly bold.
“Forgive me if I’m making the wrong assumptions, but I’d love to buy you a drink,” George says.
They’ve hardly interacted, which means that George’s attraction to Nathaniel is purely physical. He’s never considered being picked up for his looks. That happens to women.
He thinks he likes it.
“No hard feelings if you’d rather not,” George says, winking, and writing his phone number on the back of his receipt before handing it to Nathaniel.
Nathaniel stares at it for a few seconds before putting it in his pocket.
“Susan says I should take you to a bar,” Patrick says later that day. “Because apparently you’re getting picked up by every eligible queer who walks through the door and she wants to make sure you know you have options.”
Patrick sounds gratifyingly annoyed about all of this, maybe even jealous. “I realize you fuck strangers as a sort of extended handshake, but I’m not—” Nathaniel reaches for something appropriately cutting but what he winds up saying is, “I’m not there yet.”
Theyetmakes him almost dizzy. He couldn’t possibly explain to Patrick that not only has he never touched another man that way, but until the last few months he’s hardly let himself think about it.
Patrick sticks his hands in his pockets and looks at the ceiling. “You can just go and see what it’s like. Or not. It’s a standing offer.”
“Fine,” Nathaniel says.
“Want to go to Julius?” Patrick asks as they’re closing up. “It used to be a great bar for closet cases but there was a sort of protest a few years back and it got written up in theTimes. Now the closet cases have to find someplace else, I guess. It hasn’t been raided in a while, though, so it’s about as safe as we can get.”
Nathaniel has no idea if he’s being called a closet case—accurate—or if Patrick’s trying to tell him that this bar is relatively subdued. The idea of a raid—an arrest, the police,beingfound—makes him want to curl up under the desk and stay there. But what good has playing it safe ever done him?
“Do I look all right?” Nathaniel asks when they’re getting ready to leave. He’s wearing exactly what he had on all day: slacks and a white button-up, nothing special.
“When don’t you?” Patrick grumbles, put-upon. He says it loud enough for Nathaniel to hear, but low enough that Nathaniel can pretend not to have heard.
Nathaniel doesn’t pretend. He flicks a deliberate glance at Patrick’s shoulders, the folded up cuffs of his shirt, the stretch of denim across his thighs.
It’s a warm May night so they sling their jackets over their arms and take their time walking the ten minutes to the bar. “You ever done this?” Patrick asks.
“No,” Nathaniel says, because that’s the answer to any question Patrick could possibly be asking.
