Page 64 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
He knows this, just like he knows the break-in was nothing but garden variety robbery, not spies trying to get his files. Even the least competent CIA operative would have picked the lock of Patrick’s safe, but Nathaniel’s files are still there, safely tucked away behind the deed to the building.
His mind has been playing the same trick on him since December, taking his looming sense of peril and ascribing it to the likeliest villain: if Nathaniel feels hunted, and he has a file proving exactly how unscrupulous the CIA can be, then it’s only Occam’s razor to connect those two dots.
But there’s another explanation, one that’s been creeping up on him all spring and summer. Maybe what happened to him this winter was the culmination of too many secrets, an ever widening gap between the truth and his actions, between the feelings that lurked beneath the surface and what he allowed himself to feel, between what he knew and what he wanted to believe. Maybe reality started to feel less real because he’d lost touch with it years ago.
“So?” Susan asks. “What’s the answer?”
Nathaniel dries the last of the bottles. Maybe there’s only one way for him to sort out what, exactly, he has to be afraid of. He’s always needed evidence.
“All right,” he says. “Let’s do it.”
* * *
Patrick takes him to bed—and that’s the correct phrasing, as they’re both perfectly aware who’s doing the taking and why he’s doing it—every night for a solid week. After a trip to the laundromat, Nathaniel folds the sheets for his own bed and puts them in the bottom drawer of the dresser in his apparently former bedroom.
“That way they don’t get dusty,” Nathaniel explains, feeling like god’s greatest idiot. Patrick likes having Nathaniel in his bed: he paws at Nathaniel for half the night, then wakes up and smiles like a dope. Even the CIA could make sense of this fact pattern.
“Sensible,” Patrick agrees, looking far too amused, damn him. Then he backs Nathaniel into a wall and drops to his knees. The practiced efficiency with which he accomplishes this and the extent to which he obviously loves it are tangled up with Nathaniel’s pleasure, as much a part of it as the feel of Patrick’s mouth, the sight of him.
Nathaniel spent half his life fighting his body on this one basic matter and the experience ofnotfighting it is a dizzying rush—it’s releasing the brakes at the top of a hill, letting gravity and momentum and the inexorable forces of nature do their job. It’seasy.
This is why he never used to let himself think about it, why he never let himself imagine the scratch of a man’s beard on the inside of his thigh, the heat of a man throbbing in his hand: he knew he was susceptible. He was right. He could have measured the path of the last six months in the ever-collapsing distance between plain imagination and sweaty desperation.
“Sleeping in your bed,” Nathaniel says, managing, with some effort, to sound passably sane, “would make it easier for you to fuck me.”
Patrick sits back on his heels and Nathaniel wants to beg him not to stop, but he has an agenda here.
“You’d want that?” Patrick asks, sounding more suspicious than intrigued. And then, after studying Nathaniel’s face and whatever he sees there, “You want that.”
“Jerome seems to think you’re good at it.”
Patrick gets to his feet but he keeps his hand in Nathaniel’s jeans. “Jerome wouldn’t know.”
Nathaniel swallows. “He had all kinds of flattering things to say.”
“I mean, sure, but he likes to be on top, so.”
The image that flashes in front of Nathaniel’s eyes makes him feel like he might black out. What if Jerome was wearing false eyelashes? Lipstick? A dress? Nathaniel might not survive. “I see,” he says.
Patrick looks like he’s on the verge of laughing but he doesn’t stop stroking Nathaniel. “We can do it either way. Or neither way.”
Nathaniel doesn’t have any answer to that, but Patrick must not expect one, because he pushes Nathaniel onto the bare mattress—he should never have put the sheets away, more fool him—and pulls his clothes off.
They don’t do anything they haven’t done before, not really, but Patrick’s hands linger in new places, and he says things like “Can I” and “Will you let me,” hushed and wondering, like he’s waiting for an answer.
* * *
The night before the gig, Nathaniel wakes up at three in the morning, the building silent around him except for the muted ticking of Patrick’s alarm clock. He can’t remember the last time he slept through the night, but he must have been a child, because the pattern of repeatedly waking, ruminating, andeither falling back asleep or staring into the darkness is the only way he knows to pass a night.
He sleeps just as terribly in Patrick’s bed, but now when he wakes he has a momentary thrum of contentment to know that Patrick is there, inches away, warm and real. And then, guilt: at this point, not telling Patrick is the same as deceiving him, but Nathaniel can’t bring himself to do it.
He slips out of bed and goes down to the shop. Out of habit, he starts tidying up the receipts and stray bits of paper near the cash register. It’s mostly a collection of notes from Iris to Patrick and back again: we’re out of stamps, Jerome is coming tomorrow at three, I found the gas bill.
Iris doodles on the edges of her notes, distinctive floral swirls that Nathaniel also finds strewn across her math homework, a stroke of whimsy that some bitter and rotten part of Nathaniel wants to tell her to crush underfoot.You aren’t a man and you aren’t white, he imagines telling her.You need to make sure you fit the mold in every other way.But he doesn’t need to tell her that. Not because it isn’t true—it’s sickeningly true, even in 1968—but because Iris already knows. She can make her own choices. He puts the notes in a neat stack on Patrick’s desk.
Upstairs in the safe, the photocopied files are still hidden in the back. If something happens to him, Patrick will eventually find them, but that could be years from now, and he wouldn’t even necessarily connect those pages with Nathaniel. Why would he? He wouldn’t know what to do with them.
But Nathaniel doesn’t know what to do with them either. When he was making those copies—half past five, telling his secretary she might as well go home, he could manage the Xerox machine on his own, thanks—he was only thinking that he needed proof. But he hadn’t thought about who, exactly, he’d be proving it to, or even what he’d be proving.
