Page 40 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
“Am I wrong? Anyway, he clearly isn’t part of whatever network of homosexual literati Patrick’s been sleeping his way through, so how did he even find Patrick? How does he know about Whitman?”
“Okay, Miss Marple,” Susan says. “Go take a shower.”
They walk across town to get to Susan’s mysterious destination. It’s warm enough that neither of them need a jacket.
As they’re walking along the south side of Washington Square Park, Susan touches his arm. “If I want to go to the opera, will you let me buy you a suit?”
He thinks about it. He has a closet full of suits at—he can’t really call it home, now, can he? There was a time he’d have been offended and shocked by the idea of a woman—of anyone—buying him clothes. Now, the impropriety might be part of the appeal, like Iris and her stolen math textbook.
“I have a closet full of suits,” Nathaniel admits.
“And where, exactly, is this closet?” Susan asks, just like Nathaniel knew she would.
“Virginia. Outside Washington, D.C.”
Susan’s quiet while they cross the street. “A tuxedo, too?”
“A tuxedo, too,” Nathaniel concedes.
“I’d take a field trip with you, if you wanted to get your things. We could take the train or borrow a car.”
Nathaniel’s stomach swoops in terror, but he isn’t sure at what. The idea of being caught? He doesn’t think so, not anymore. There’s nothing in that house he needs, anyway: some suits hanging in a half empty closet, some books on half empty shelves, and several months of dust.
“It’s ill-gotten gains, I’m afraid,” Nathaniel says, and braces himself for Susan’s next question.
But the question never comes, and when he glances at Susan, her jaw is set.
It’s Friday evening and Washington Square Park is full of boisterous young people. There’s a woman with a baby carriage and a few old men sitting on benches, but the crowd is mostly the right age to be college students. Some are singing along while someone else plays the guitar. They all look dirty and outlandish to Nathaniel’s eye, but he means that in an affectionate sense.There was a time when he would have seen them as a threat; he still sees them as a threat, but he thinks he’d like to be just as much of a threat as they are.
“Susan, my love,” he says. “I don’t want to go back.”
She loops her arm through his and they fall silent for a few paces. “There was this moment in 1960, ‘61, when it felt like this right here” —she gestures around them at the park and its neighborhood— “was the center of the world. Nearly everyone I knew lived in a ten block radius. If you walked through the park on a Sunday you’d run into someone you knew playing the guitar. We knew what we wanted our music to sound like. We had a vision, and it was—don’t make fun of me—it was beautiful.”
Nathaniel’s been secretly listening to the music Susan recorded back then, playing the records as quietly as possible when she isn’t around. “It was.”
“Folk music doesn’t really exist anymore. The definition stretched until it stopped meaning anything. People moved on. That’s fine—it’sgood—but it’s a crazy thing to feel like a has-been when you aren’t even thirty. There’s no going back, even if you are, actually, back. I couldn’t make that music now if I tried.”
He can’t tell if that was an allegory about his not wanting to see his house again, or Susan being confronted with the sight of people ten years younger than her having their own turn at the center of the world. “Forgive me for sounding like an old man, but you have your entire life ahead of you.”
“So do you.”
“Hardly.”
“You have, what, ten years on me? Eleven?”
“Something like that.” It’s twelve.
“Pocket change. You think I wouldn’t move heaven and earth to be twenty again and to have the next few years in front of me? Or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I’ve missed some big cosmic point,but really I just want Michael back, and there’s something you want back, but neither of us are getting it.”
Nathaniel would do practically anything for a few hours in the winter of 1961. But the rest of it—he’d like to seal it off wherever they put nuclear waste.
“You won’t get that, but you’ll get other things,” he tells Susan.
“Will I? And I guess you’ll spend the next fifty years getting the sad, bad things you think you deserve. Good plan!”
It’s some comfort that Susan wouldn’t sound half so smug if she knew precisely what Nathaniel did deserve.
Tonight’s outing turns out to be the polar opposite of opera. Even as they crossed Third Avenue, Nathaniel had been holding out hope that they’d be going to another jazz club, but Jimi Hendrix is not a jazz musician, and the Fillmore East is certainly not a jazz club. Susan pulls a joint out of her pocket, in plain view of however many hundreds or thousands of people are in this theater, and lights it. She takes a drag and passes it to Nathaniel. “Shut your eyes and listen, and if you need to go, we go.” She holds out her hand and he takes it.
