Page 89 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
“Point taken.” Nathaniel nudges the dog with his toe. Walt, who’s been napping in the middle of the hallway since that afternoon, doesn’t even twitch. “Ourdog might be in a coma.”
“I made some room in the closet for your tuxedo,” Patrick says. “Definitely not our tuxedo.”
Nathaniel turns away to hang up the towel he was using on his hair, but Patrick still catches the twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Susan wants to go to the opera!”
Patrick doesn’t bother arguing, but he does corner Nathaniel against the wall. Patrick only means for it to be a kiss—upstairs, Nathaniel was yawning, and there are shadows under his eyes. But Nathaniel kisses back, then mouths his way down Patrick’s neck, pulling aside the collar of his shirt. He makes a dissatisfied sound. Before leaving, he’d kissed a bruise into the place where Patrick’s shoulder meets his neck, and it’s gone now.
“You’ll just have to give me another one,” Patrick says, and feels the shudder go through Nathaniel. “Yeah?” he asks, like he doesn’t already know. Nathaniel’s only answer is to bite Patrick’s lower lip, not particularly gently.
Patrick gets a hand on the back of Nathaniel’s neck, feeling the damp strands of hair and the tension of the muscles beneath. Nathaniel tips his head back against the wall and lets himself be kissed.
It feels like it’s been longer than a week, and not just because they’d spent weeks before that taking one another to bed at every opportunity. Patrick is hungry for the familiarity, for the way his hands and his mouth know Nathaniel’s body as surely as he knows how Nathaniel takes his tea. He hadn’t known it was possible to miss someone in a way that feels like continuously reaching out toward empty space. He hadn’t known that there could be a pleasure in missing someone, when you know they’re coming back.
They make their way to bed, eventually, and Nathaniel pushes Patrick so he’s on his back, Nathaniel’s damp hair in his face, Nathaniel’s thigh between his legs. He lets himself get pinned in place. This isn’t the way Nathaniel usually likes it, and Patrick has the sense that he’s being indulged. He lets Nathaniel indulge him.
Through the open window comes the sound of “Little Green Apples” playing on somebody’s radio, along with a breeze that cools the sweat on their skin. Everything is lush and slow; they’re spending time like it isn’t something that ever runs out. And maybe it won’t. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe they get to have this for as long as anyone gets to have anything.
Epilogue: Journeywork
Beverly gives Nathaniel a twenty-four-hour heads up before the first article goes to print, and so of course he doesn’t get a wink of sleep that night. But in the morning, the world is precisely as it was the day before, with the addition of one front page article. He reads it at the newsstand on a chilly December morning, the dog tugging impatiently at his leash, then goes home with the paper tucked under his arm and gives it to Patrick in exchange for a cup of coffee.
“There are other sources,” Patrick says a few minutes later. “And the byline is Beverly but also some man I’ve never heard of.”
Nathaniel had given Beverly the names of some of his former colleagues who seemed unhappy and frustrated. He wonders which of them talked. He wonders if his ex-wife was one of them.
He doesn’t know if this will change anything. Even if the CIA stops its surveillance program, the FBI and the even spookier agencies will still be up to their usual tricks. Will the idea of being spied on make people trust the government less about things that matter even more, or will they assume that anyone being snooped on must deserve it? Or maybe people will decide that privacy isn’t worth it, not in the face of whatever dangers are hiding out there. Nathaniel may have only made things worse.
He wants to believe that he’s done something good. It isn’t that he thinks one good deed will balance his scales, but hewants his career to have been worth something. He wants this path he took—this flawed and fraught path—to have led to something worthwhile.
Nathaniel spent most of October in the recording studio with Susan. He hasn’t heard the finished album, but he keeps repeating to himself what Susan told him: you’ve made something beautiful. That’s something, isn’t it? If he’s going to take responsibility for the bad things, he has to take responsibility for the good things.
“There’s more in here than you ever told me,” Patrick says, still looking at the newspaper.
“There’s more in there than I ever knew.”
“So, this article might not point directly to you,” Patrick says, looking hopeful.
“Maybe not.” He lets himself smile, a tiny, hopeful thing. On good days, he thinks this will end with some legal threats, maybe some agency goons paying him a visit.
It’s Sunday, which means Iris will be in later, and somebody has to get to the record player before she takes it over or it’ll be Big Brother and the Holding Company all day. Patrick gets there first and puts on the White Album, dropping the needle directly onto “Blackbird.” Nine o’clock in the morning is too early for sad songs, but when the album came out a few weeks ago, Susan played both records from beginning to end, called the whole thing a frivolous mess, announced that Michael would have loved it, and then played it over again. Patrick can listen to his sad songs at any time of day he pleases.
Around lunchtime, a woman comes in looking rough enough that Nathaniel imagines secondhand books are the least of her concerns, but who knows. He’d wandered into a bookstore in a similarly bedraggled state. She has on tight jeans, a striped t-shirt, and a jacket that’s next to useless on a day this cold. When she approaches the cash register, he recognizes her fromthe last time he had lunch with Jerome. They’d run into her on the street, and Jerome kissed her on both cheeks and introduced her to Nathaniel as “my friend Luisa, she and I have done shows together,” stepping on Nathaniel’s foot on the wordshein case Nathaniel was too dense to notice the pronoun.
“Luisa is Jerome’s friend,” Nathaniel tells Patrick now.
“Good to meet you. There’s a plate of donuts in the back room,” Patrick says, glancing up from the book he’s repairing. “And some coffee. Help yourself.” He manages to make this sound plain and factual, like this woman has walked into a place where food and drinks are dispensed as a matter of course, rather than a bookstore. That was Nathaniel’s favorite thing about Patrick in those early days, the way he’d looked after Nathaniel with no fanfare, not even any explanations. Some people might want a warmer touch, but Nathaniel doesn’t think he could have endured it.
“You need a place to stay?” Patrick asks a few minutes later.
Luisa shakes her head. “Jerome said you might be hiring.”
“Oh, thank god,” Nathaniel says. “Patrick, I’m giving notice.” Patrick rolls his eyes, because Nathaniel gave notice when he got paid after signing the record contract and it hasn’t stopped him from—in Patrick’s words—cluttering up the shop every chance he gets.
“Well, I guess you’re hired,” Patrick says, and goes back to doing mysterious things to the binding ofAn American Tragedy.
Nathaniel suspects Luisa does need somewhere to sleep, but she has no reason to trust a pair of strangers. They can cross that bridge later. After all, nobody’s using their spare room.
That afternoon, Patrick shows Luisa how to put ads in theAntiquarian Bookman. Eleanor’s a few feet away, trying to figure out how to make a break from her playpen. Walt is fast asleep. From the back of the shop come the sounds of Susan’smandolin being tuned. This might be the calm before the storm or it might be just another day, but either way they get to have it.
The title ofLeaves of Grasscomes from the line “a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.” The first time Nathaniel read that line, back in April or so, he thought it was a lovely if slightly silly way to talk about photosynthesis. “Typical Whitman,” Viv said when Nathaniel asked about it. “Ashes to ashes but in a good way,” was Susan’s interpretation. When he’d asked Iris, she’d gone to the dictionary, the enormous Merriam Webster that isn’t for sale. “Journeywork is the kind of work a tradesman does,” she’d said, shutting the dictionary with a dusty thud. “So that line means the stars made the grass—and the rest of us—the way an electrician puts in a new fuse box. It’s like he’s telling you there isn’t any magic, but then he talks about it like it’s magical anyway.”
When he’d read that line to Patrick, Patrick had frowned. “And a mouse is a miracle,” he said, paraphrasing the end of the stanza. “It has to do with that business about every atom belonging to me as good as belonging to you.” Nathaniel is fairly sure Whitman didn’t mean that the entire universe is entitled to half Patrick’s sandwich, but he’s equally sure that Patrick would disagree.
On Nathaniel’s bedside table is a cheap paperback copy ofLeaves of Grass, the first page of that poem discreetly dog-eared. Maybe there isn’t any difference between magic and starlight; maybe there’s no difference between starlight and doing something good.
Outside these doors is chaos. Appalling men are elected president. Every day’s headlines are worse than the last. All year, it’s been like that, and it isn’t getting better. But it will. Meanwhile, there are donuts and a pot of coffee and work to be done: maybe not enough to tip the scales, but there anyway.Dooryard Books is here anyway. So is Nathaniel. So are all of them.
The End
