Page 70 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
The temperature seems to drop ten degrees, and the way Patrick and Susan go perfectly still confirms Nathaniel’s suspicion that they both figured it out already.
Sure enough, when Susan says, “Nathaniel,” she doesn’t sound surprised, only terribly gentle.
“I thought I should let you know,” Nathaniel says, eyes on the ceiling so he won’t see it when Patrick and Susan inevitably look at Eleanor and think about how unendurable it would be if something happened to her. Because itwouldbe unendurable. But what does it mean to endure something? Life’s worst miseries rarely kill you, but he isn’t sure how much of himself survived past 1961.
This is more than he’s said about Christopher than he has in seven years. A few people at work gave him stoical nods of condolence and his secretary brought him casseroles for a while, but nobody wanted him to talk about it, least of all Nathaniel.
He shouldn’t have said anything tonight. At the very least he could have waited until they weren’t drinking celebratorychampagne. It’ll only make them sad, and it won’t make Nathaniel feel any different. A year from now, Nathaniel will be someplace else and having had these few moments of sympathy won’t matter anymore.
Still, though, it has to count for something that Nathaniel can talk about it now—well, more like talk around it, allude to it, encode the entire sad story in an easily cracked cipher and then leave it in plain sight—with only the faintest call of the abyss.
The sofa cushion to his left sinks, and at first he thinks it’s Susan—Patrick will have gathered that Nathaniel’s just trying to hold it together, and affection would ruin everything—but he gets a wet nose to his face. “You’re the worst,” he tells Walt. “Nobody raised you and it shows.” He threads his fingers into the long, scruffy fur at the base of the dog’s neck.
“Here,” Susan says, and passes him a joint that she hadn’t been smoking two minutes ago. From Susan, this is the equivalent of a black-bordered sympathy card.
“You know,” he says, “when I got here, I thought, well, these two kids have no idea what they’re doing. At least I’m good for something. I thought, it’s a good thing I’m not dead, which was a refreshing change, so thank you for that.”
“You are so emotionally stunted,” Susan says. “I love you from the bottom of my heart, but how come nobody born before 1940 has feelings? Somebody should look into that.”
“She means thank you,” Patrick says.
“Oh, fuck you,” Susan says, “he already knows I’d be in a padded cell without him.”
“No, you’d be drying out someplace scenic,” Nathaniel says, dizzy with the relief of having talked about it without having had to actually talk about it. “I’dbe the one in a padded cell.”
“Where are they buried?” Patrick asks that night when they’re getting ready for bed. Nathaniel’s brushing his teeth and Patrick’s leaning in the door to the bathroom, so Nathanieldoesn’t have to actually look at him or say anything for a moment.
“He,” Nathaniel says. “Christopher.” It was a mistake to say his name, such a mistake. He focuses on the tube of toothpaste, rolling it up from the bottom. Patrick squeezes it from the middle like some kind of hooligan. “Brooklyn,” he says when he can trust himself to speak. “It happened when his mother was visiting her family for Easter.” He squeezes out a perfect line of toothpaste onto Patrick’s brush and rests it on the edge of the sink. “Flu.”
“If you want to visit, I’d go with you.”
Nathaniel hasn’t been since the funeral. The idea of visiting his infant’s grave with his gay lover feels instantly, egregiously inappropriate for the ten seconds it takes for his brain to stop living in 1961.
One of his goals in coming to New York had been to bring flowers to the grave. It seemed like the bare minimum: drop off some carnations, make sure the place isn’t overrun with weeds.
He shouldn’t let Patrick go with him. The memory of Patrick will get tangled up with the graveside, so that later on Nathaniel won’t even be able to think about Christopher without thinking of Patrick. He shouldn’t be that cruel to himself.
“I’d like that,” Nathaniel says.
The next morning Nathaniel finds the cemetery on the map and looks up what trains will get them there. They leave the shop in Susan’s hands and take the subway to Brooklyn.
There’s a flower shop across from the entrance; no bouquets of red roses for sale here, only tastefully subdued arrangements of lilies and gladiolus. The funeral parlor had been overrun with white flowers of every variety; he’d forgotten about that. There’d been a blanketlike arrangement on top of the little casket, purchased, presumably, by his former in-laws.
Nathaniel chooses a bouquet of yellow lilies, then immediately regrets it. He doesn’t care one way or the other about lilies, and babies are too young to have a favorite flower, and even if he were alive he’d be seven years old and unlikely to give a fig about flowers. Christopher isn’t even there anyway, so who are the flowers for? He finds that he’s stuck, unable to cross the street.
Patrick takes the flowers from his hand and murmurs, “We can turn around,” just like he did those first few months when Nathaniel couldn’t go anywhere. They cross the street.
It takes them twenty minutes to find the grave, because Nathaniel forgot exactly how enormous this place is. He glances at the engraved name only long enough to confirm that he’s found the right headstone.
It’s a grave: gray stone on green grass. He didn’t expect to feel anything about it. Nobody’s here and he wouldn’t want it any other way. But placing the flowers at the foot of the stone feels anticlimactic. Insufficient. Irrelevant to the carefully buried knot of sadness that Nathaniel tries not to think about carrying around with him.
It’s a Tuesday morning, and the graveyard is empty enough that the nearest people are a hundred yards away, but even if someone had been staring directly at them, Nathaniel wouldn’t have shrugged off Patrick’s arm when it wraps around his shoulders.
“Collins?” Patrick asks as they make their way back to the street. That, after all, is the name on the gravestone.
Nathaniel is struck by the sudden absurdity of the fact that the man he’s been living with, the man he’s been sharing a bed with, been falling in love with, hadn’t known his last name. It makes the last six months feel even less substantial.
“Collins,” Nathaniel admits.
