Page 35 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
“Or we could walk,” Patrick says. “It’s only twenty minutes.”
They walk down Hudson Street. It’s not a particularly scenic part of the city, mostly filled with warehouses and former factories, with a few gritty-looking garages scattered around. Painted on the sides of brick buildings, faded advertisements promote stores that probably went out of business a decade ago. Every block seems to have a diner or lunch counter, and only half are still open.
“I wonder what this neighborhood is called,” Patrick says when they cross Spring Street. “It’s too far west to be SoHo. I’m not sure I’ve ever been over here.”
“Really? Well, I’m glad I get to see it with you,” Nathaniel says, dreadfully earnest. Good god. Patrick doesn’t say anything, but he bumps their shoulders together.
Dooryard Books is in a part of the city that’s busy and prosperous. It’s filled with restaurants and little shops. But Nathaniel knows—from alarming personal experience—that a few blocks to the west, things get seedy.
This part of the city is seedy in a different way. It feels half abandoned, faintly apocalyptic. This is a place where things used to be.
“Artists will move in here, like they did in SoHo,” Patrick says, like he’s reading Nathaniel’s mind. “If they haven’t already started. Jerome lives in a loft with some artists on Chrystie Street and they have to take the subway just to get groceries. You can’t buy so much as a loaf of bread anywhere nearby.”
Nathaniel imagines these abandoned factories and warehouses filling up with drag queens and artists and is surprised to realize that the idea pleases him. He likes things neat and tidy, new and fresh and clean. His house in Virginia—he presses his arm briefly against Patrick’s, keeping the abyss from getting too close—was always orderly. His desk at the agency was so pristine that it was a standing joke that he must never do any work. He spent his childhood obeying the logic of sheet music before realizing numbers could be made to follow the same rules.
Order and symmetry and rules have always made him feel peaceful; they were his allies, trustworthy and reliable. The fact that he can walk down this street—an old warehouse with broken windows on one side of the street, a boarded up bar on the other, a car with missing hubcaps slumped against the curb—and feel like he belongs here can only be a sign that something is wrong with him. But there is something wrong with him; he already knew that. Some fundamental part of himself got left behind in Langley, or in the cold winter streets, or maybe he lost it years ago at a graveside. Maybe that loss isn’t gaping emptiness, but space; maybe there’s room in him for something else. Maybe there’s room for him to be something else.
The store, when they reach it, looks like someone took the contents of another, larger electronics store, tipped it on its side, and dumped it into this place.
“Bet you feel right at home,” Nathaniel murmurs, and watches the corner of Patrick’s mouth tick up.
Patrick starts combing through the store for the parts Hector wants, but Nathaniel goes up to the shopkeeper and hands him the sketch Hector made. The shopkeeper frowns, tilts his head, frowns some more, then disappears. He comes back ten minutes later with half a dozen mysterious objects. Nathaniel could not, if his life depended on it, identify a single one of them. He takes out his wallet.
“I’ve got it,” Patrick says, reaching for his own wallet.
“No you don’t.” Nathaniel puts his hand on Patrick’s wrist. Giddy sparks shoot up his arm. “You’re always buying everything. Meals, drinks, snacks.”
“That’s our deal. You’re paying for room and board. We shook on it.”
“You get pizza for the kids, you picked up new violin strings for me when you were out last week, and I think you’ve been buying Susan’s groceries since February. Let me get something for once. You’re overpaying me—”
“I am not,” Patrick says. He’s a terrible liar.
“—and charging me next to nothing for rent. I can afford a couple antennas.”
“Is that what they are,” Patrick says, marveling at the weird coils of metal.
“Frankly, I have no idea.”
“Three dollars and forty-eight cents,” the shopkeeper says. Nathaniel lets go of Patrick’s wrist and produces a five-dollar bill. Patrick puts his wallet away.
The shopkeeper wraps everything up in newsprint and puts it in a paper bag that Nathaniel insists on carrying.
“Susan chips in for groceries,” Patrick says when they’re on the sidewalk. “Neither of us are keeping track right now of who owes who, but I don’t have less money than I did when she moved in. And I haven’t been paying her when she covers the cash register at the store. Maybe I should.”
“She’d laugh in your face,” Nathaniel says.
From the electronics store, the bookstore should only have been a ten-minute walk, but they get completely turned around.
“Stop complaining,” Nathaniel says after Patrick’s spent five minutes bitching about all the construction making it impossible to know where anything is. “It’s a nice day. We’re getting fresh air.”
“Sure, except for the car exhaust. We’ll both get miners’ lung.”
Nathaniel tugs Patrick’s sleeve. “Come on.”
When they reach the bookstore, Patrick finds what he declares are a decent Lowell and an excellent Dickinson, while Nathaniel amasses a stack of paperback Gothic romances.
“If I want serious literature, I can find it in the store I basically live inside,” Nathaniel explains after Patrick’s laughed at him. “But if I want Gothic mansions and the dastardly cads who own them, I have to look elsewhere.”
