Page 73 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
“I mean, I could be,” Patrick says with a glance at Nathaniel’s mouth, a leer he might have been able to pull off if he didn’t look so shifty. “But you seem unhappy, like maybe you don’t want to talk about whatever this is.”
Patrick knows that he isn’t going to like whatever Nathaniel has to say. This might be the first time Nathaniel’s ever seen Patrick do something selfish. “All right,” Nathaniel says. “Tomorrow, then.”
When Patrick’s hand slides up Nathaniel’s thigh in a blatant attempt to change the topic, Nathaniel goes along with it. More than goes along with it, because he, too, wants this more than he wants that terrible conversation. If he gets one more night of being able to pretend, then he’ll take it.
* * *
At nine o’clock in the morning, Susan calls to wish Nathaniel a happy birthday.
“The phone is right next to Patrick’s bed,” she says. “It sure didn’t take long for him to hand it to you.”
“My god,” Nathaniel says, still mostly asleep, “you’re a regular detective.” It’s a terrible connection, like she’s calling from much further away than Long Island. “What’s the matter with your phone?”
“It’s on your end. I just got off the phone with my manager and the connection was fine.” He can barely hear her, what with all the static and clicking.
“How’s Eleanor?” Nathaniel asks.
“Spoiled rotten,” Susan says, as if the three of them don’t spoil that child at every opportunity.
It’s just a bad connection. But there’s a voice at the back of Nathaniel’s head insisting that it’s a wiretap. Nathaniel doesn’t even know what a wiretap sounds like. He knows his thoughtsare driven by paranoia, not evidence. It’s the same as when he thought the burglary was suspicious.
Will it always be like this? Will he always be afraid that every bump in the night is his past catching up with him, his guilty secrets threatening to come out?
“Where do you want to go for dinner?” Patrick asks when Nathaniel reaches over him to put the receiver back in its cradle. “It’s your birthday, you can pick.”
The sheet slipped to their waists, but it’s already warm enough that Nathaniel doesn’t bother pulling it up. This conversation will contaminate the bed, but there isn’t anyplace it won’t contaminate, and Nathaniel doesn’t think he can stand another minute.
He rolls over to face Patrick, not wanting to take the coward’s way out by addressing his words to the ceiling. “I need to talk to you about what I used to do.”
“If you want,” Patrick says. He rolls onto his back.
“I worked for the CIA.”
Nathaniel makes himself watch as Patrick flinches. “Were you a spy?” Patrick asks after a minute.
“Not in the sense you mean. I had a desk job.” He wants to say that he had nothing to do with Vietnam, nothing to do with Southeast Asia in general, but he promised himself he wouldn’t say anything that’s even in the neighborhood of an excuse. “I worked in signals intelligence,” he says, “specifically traffic analysis.”
Patrick furrows his brow, because of course none of those words mean the same thing to him as they do to Nathaniel. “Traffic?”
“Looking for patterns in how and when communications are being made. You can learn something even if the communications are encrypted. Helen’s a cryptanalyst,” headds, even though that fact can’t possibly interest Patrick. “That’s how we met.”
“I thought you did math.”
“I did, sometimes.” Never as much as he thought he’d be doing. “Mostly I wrote reports about Eastern Europe.”
“Why did you quit?”
“It turns out,” Nathaniel says, “that the agency cares nearly as little for Americans as it does for Vietnamese and Hungarians and Cubans. Evidently I can excuse a lot of evil, but I draw the line close to home. Or, I used to.”
“Some people are true believers,” Patrick says.
Nathaniel winces at hearing his own words echoed back at him. “I was. But that’s no excuse. Listen, Patrick, I’ll leave if you want me to.”
“I’m not kicking you out.”
“You wouldn’t be. I’m offering. I saved nearly all the money I made this year.”
“And you have that pension,” Patrick says. “Probably other money, too.”
