Page 50 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
“I think the usual word is distinguished,” Patrick says.
“For pity’s sake, you can call me distinguished when I turn forty, which isn’t for another two months, thank you very much.” Nathaniel gets to his feet, pays the barber, dusts some hair off his trousers, and heads out to the street.
“The other word is pretty,” Patrick says, once the barber shop door is shut behind them. He nearly said handsome, which would have been accurate, but less precise, and a lot less loaded.
“I think that expired ten years ago,” Nathaniel says.
“No, I don’t think it did.”
Nathaniel runs a hand through his hair. “It’s still longer than I used to keep it.”
“We just need to get you some beads and a scarf to tie around your head and you’ll be a regular hippie.”
Patrick didn’t have any particular destination in mind, but now he’s thinking of strands of beads and scarves with psychedelic prints. “Let’s go to St. Marks Place.” The other day, Susan and Nathaniel went to the Museum of Modern Art.This, Patrick figures, will be a nice counterbalance, culturally speaking.
To get there, they walk past Washington Square Park, which is somewhat depopulated now that the college kids are home for the summer. There are still grass smoking hippies and folk singers, but an equal number of old men playing chess, children balancing on the edge of the fountain, and middle-aged couples walking their dogs.
“The old store was a few blocks up from here,” Patrick says once they’ve reached Astor Place.
“Show me.”
There used to be dozens of secondhand bookstores up and down Fourth Avenue between Union Square and Astor Place. Squinting, Patrick can only make out a few that have held on.
Now an art gallery is on the ground floor of the old building, and in an upstairs window is a sign for an employment agency. Next door, the windows are soaped up.
“I swear it never got above sixty degrees all winter, and Mrs. Kaplan used to keep the upstairs lights off unless a customer wanted to go up there. The new place is a stately pleasure dome.”
There’s nothing to look at, but Patrick doesn’t move. This old shop is the first place Patrick felt safe. They’d moved everything that mattered to Jones Street, but when he looks inside the shop window, he can imagine that he’s seeing the three-legged stool where he sat while Mrs. Kaplan stitched him up like there was nothing unusual about it. He’d been nearly delirious with hunger and beside himself with shame. The future that had once been laid out neatly in front of him was nothing but a gaping pit, and Mrs. Kaplan chattered about the best deli for corned beef and asked him what he liked to read. All he could think was that this must be what it was like to have a grandmother.
They head back toward St. Marks, and it’s like they’ve stepped into another dimension. Gathered on stoops and inclusters on the sidewalk are some of the same people you see in Washington Square Park: men with long hair, women in long skirts, a feeling that maybe everyone could do with a shower and a trip to the laundromat. But there’s a harder edge here, a sense that the squalor is intentional and cultivated, that it’s something more pointed than an aesthetic designed to trouble people over thirty-five. Washington Square is filled with hippies. These people are radicals.
Patrick glances over at Nathaniel, who isn’t looking around but is taking it in anyway; he isn’t a man who needs to stare in order to get the lay of the land.
“Want an egg cream?” Patrick asks. His first apartment was an illegal loft conversion nearby on Astor Place. There was a dive bar on St. Marks that wasn’t exactly a gay bar but was still gay enough that cruising was a sure thing. One night, he and the man who’d picked him up went to get an egg cream at Gem Spa. Patrick had the sense that everyone in the place had either just committed some kind of misdemeanor or was on the way to do one. But when he’d come back during the day, school kids and old ladies sat at the soda fountain, innocently drinking milkshakes out of straws.
“I have no idea what that is,” Nathaniel says, probably because they don’t have egg creams anywhere other than soda fountains in New York.
“It’s like a milkshake but without milk or ice cream, and its carbonated.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Deadly.”
Near the cash register, there’s a rack of mimeographed pamphlets for sale. While they’re waiting for their egg creams, Nathaniel begins picking up the pamphlets and examining them. Over his shoulder, Patrick sees that they aren’t pamphlets, but underground newspapers and zines that range from anti-warmanifestos to collections of poetry. Susan once mailed him a zine put out by San Francisco hustlers and transsexuals. Patrick was sure they’d both get arrested for breaking federal obscenity laws, but he’d read that thing from cover to cover and then over again before passing it on to Jerome.
Nathaniel slides a few coins across the counter and chooses a few zines apparently at random, then tucks them under his arm while he bemusedly sips his egg cream.
It isn’t a date—Patrick doesn’t know how it could be, when they do this kind of thing all the time. It had been like this during the baseball game, too, like there’s something bubbling between them. He feels like that all the time, but maybe bringing that sensation outside and into the light of day reveals it as something worth noticing, something that adds up to more than a few kisses.
They take their time walking home. It’s midsummer, and the sun’s still out. Their hands brush with every stride.
* * *
Before this year, Patrick would wake up early nearly every Saturday morning to scour estate sales. He checked the classifieds in theTimesand some of the downstate newspapers, then borrowed Mrs. Kaplan’s station wagon in case he found more books than he could carry home. If he played his cards right, he could return her car and be back in the city to open the shop by noon.
Now that they’re settling into something like a rhythm, Patrick’s started going to sales again. This morning he drove up to an estate sale in Dutchess County and took his time driving home, stopping at junk shops and church sales. It’s nearly three in the afternoon when he parks the car on Jones Street.
As soon as he gets out of the car, he can hear the music. They must have left the door open to take advantage of the weather. He opens the trunk and lifts out the milk crate of books he bought that morning, trying to place the song that’s coming from the shop.
