3 #2
He wants to ask someone whether this is normal. Mrs. Kaplan would know, but she believes long distance phone calls should last under sixty seconds. This does not feel like an under sixty seconds kind of conversation.
“I keep forgetting he’s dead,” Patrick tells Nathaniel. “I keep thinking, Christ, what would Michael do in this situation?”
Nathaniel pauses, one hand still holding the wadded-up sheet of newsprint he’s using to clean the glass case. “Well, what would Michael do?”
It’s a stupid question, because “what would Michael do about Michael being dead” is pure nonsense. Patrick knows the answer anyway.
Michael, with his boundless faith in experts, his belief that everything would work out just fine so long as you followed the rules, his conviction that the rules were on his side, would call the doctor.
The doctor would do what doctors do, and it would end with Susan in Bellevue—or, more likely, a nicer, private psychiatric hospital upstate.
Maybe that’s the right answer, but Patrick knows a couple people who’ve wound up in that kind of place and come out worse.
Last spring, Mrs. Kaplan took in a girl who’d just gotten out of an institution.
She’d been even paler and warier than Nathaniel, but when she warmed up enough to talk, she told him stories that gave him goosebumps.
As far as he cares, the hospital is a last resort.
“Huh,” he says.
“This is what happens when you don’t have a funeral,” Nathaniel says, his back to Patrick as he wipes a smudge off the glass. “Funerals make it feel real.”
Susan decided to leave the entire business of Michael’s burial to the Army and Patrick can’t blame her. Michael would have loved to do their aunt and uncle out of a chance to play the part of dutiful guardians by showing up at a funeral.
But now he knows something else about Nathaniel: he’s lost someone too.
* * *
At the beginning of March, when the baby’s one month old and the telegram is three weeks old, it starts to snow. It’s nothing special, just the kind of dusting that’ll melt as soon as it hits a subway grate.
Patrick’s trying to type a letter to a collector in Minneapolis who wants to buy an inscribed Melville that Patrick picked up at an estate sale last fall, but he keeps getting distracted, his attention divided between Eleanor asleep in the carriage from Vivian’s stairwell and the snowflakes settling on the car parked across the street.
Susan comes into the shop from the street door, wearing jeans and an old cardigan of Patrick’s.
It turns out her suitcase had nothing in it but diapers and formula and tiny little cotton gowns that Eleanor’s nearly outgrown.
Well, and a few bottles of Valium and more grass than Patrick’s ever seen in one place.
She’s been wearing Patrick’s clothes, hems and sleeves rolled up an improbable number of times.
So has Nathaniel, but with less cuffing and rolling.
Laundry day is starting to feel like a weekly emergency.
“It’s my disguise,” Susan says when Patrick asks whether he’s ever getting his clothing back.
“Anyone who might recognize me won’t expect me to be dressed like an elderly librarian.
” The familiarity of Susan mocking his clothes makes something in Patrick’s chest loosen, like maybe the real Susan is in there, and that one day this will all be over and she’ll come back.
“I do just fine,” Patrick says.
“Not lately,” she says, frowning, and she’s right—he hasn’t gone anywhere more exciting than the bank in weeks. “Sorry about that.” She picks up the dust rag that Nathaniel pointedly left on Patrick’s desk and starts wiping down a shelf.
“Don’t you dare apologize,” Patrick says. “I can screw and get screwed after Eleanor starts sleeping through the night.” He’s trying to make her smile—she’s always been susceptible to anything even slightly risqué—but it doesn’t work.
“Yeah, but—”
A crash comes from the back room.
“You can leave it, you know,” Patrick calls out, for probably the hundredth time.
Nathaniel’s been working on that room for days.
Patrick can’t imagine why. It’s filled with junk.
Upstairs, piled against the walls and wedged between the bookcases, is more junk.
It’s the natural state of Dooryard Books.
You can clear a surface, shut your eyes, and when you open them, a coffee mug, a Hawthorne early edition, and a badly rolled joint will have materialized out of thin air.
From the back of the shop comes the scrape and thud of boxes being dragged around and restacked. Then there’s a dangerous silence, the painstaking hush of a muffled sob coming from Susan’s direction, followed by something he’s never heard in the shop.
“Is that a violin?” Susan asks, the dust rag going still.
“Good god, it’s out of tune,” Nathaniel calls out.
He plays a few notes. “It needs new strings.” A disapproving noise.
“And the bow needs to be rehaired.” There’s a pause as, presumably, he does whatever needs to be done to make violins play in tune.
Then he plays a scale, or maybe an arpeggio, or whatever it’s called.
“Strike that,” he says. “The bow needs to be replaced entirely.”
Susan wipes her eyes on the back of her hand, leaves the dust rag wedged between Meditations in an Emergency and Lunch Poems , then heads toward the back of the shop. “Is my guitar back here?”
Before this month, Patrick hadn’t known Susan could go twenty-four hours without picking up her guitar. It’s a desperately bad sign, maybe even worse than the pills and the booze and the fact that she came here in the first place. She hasn’t even put on a record, and so neither has Patrick.
He holds his breath. It’s just a few strings being plucked, two instruments being tuned.
He should type his letter, ignore it in case paying attention makes them stop, but he’s spent half his life listening to Susan play the guitar and he’s spent the past three weeks worried out of his mind.
He wants to take this shred of normality and put it somewhere safe.
He gets up and goes to the back of the shop, wheeling Eleanor’s carriage along with him.
Susan’s in one of the metal folding chairs by the table, the guitar on her lap.
Nathaniel’s leaning against the wall, the violin tucked under his chin.
They’re both pale and thin with dark hair, a matched set.
When customers see Patrick holding Eleanor, with her tuft of straw-colored hair and cloudy blue eyes, they assume she’s Patrick’s. It makes his stomach drop every time.
“What do you play?” Susan asks.
“Absolutely nothing,” Nathaniel says. “Not since college.”
Patrick thinks he recognizes the violin as a relic from the old shop, one of the many non-book secondhand items that used to find their way into bookshops back in the old Book Row days.
Mrs. Kaplan would tell customers that the violin was part of a lot that came from the estate of a man Walt Whitman corresponded with, the implication being that the violin might once have been in the same room as Whitman.
At the new location, Patrick put his foot down: there’s just no room for musical instruments, hat stands, or cigarette cases of dubious provenance.
But sometimes he misses the feeling of working inside a cabinet of curiosities.
Nathaniel starts playing something Patrick dimly recognizes as Christmas music, maybe.
“Is that ‘Greensleeves’?” Susan strums along, picking up the harmony.
Patrick wonders if Nathaniel chose this song on purpose as something Susan might like; he can’t have spent three weeks in the shop without figuring out that Susan is Suzie Larkin, and Suzie Larkin in synonymous with a certain kind of folk music.
A kind of folk music, she keeps saying, that got worn out by 1965.
After a moment, Susan starts singing. Every now and then one of them makes a change Patrick can just barely perceive, and the other shifts whatever they’re doing. After a few minutes, they’re playing something completely different than what they started with.
“What next?” Susan asks.
“I don’t know anything new,” Nathaniel says, “but I’m not bad at picking things up by ear. Or, well, I used to be able to.”
Susan raises her eyebrows. “Can you really? How about—what’s something everybody knows? Patrick, help me out.”
The obvious choice would be the Beatles, one of those songs whose chords every teenager with a guitar knows by heart.
But if the memory of Michael sitting cross-legged on the floor of Susan’s old MacDougal Street apartment, playing Revolver from beginning to end, again and again until Susan and Patrick were both ready to shake him—if that memory makes Patrick want to lock himself in the bathroom and punch the wall, then he doesn’t even want to think about what it would do to Susan.
“‘Love Is All Around,’” Patrick says. “There’s a violin part in that.” Well, he thinks there is. It might be a cello.
“I don’t know that song,” Nathaniel says.
“They played it everywhere for a few months last year. You couldn’t get away from it,” Susan says. “You know, it’s this one.” She plays a few bars and sings a few lines, enough that Patrick is going to have it stuck in his head for the rest of the day, but Nathaniel shakes his head.
“Susan,” Nathaniel says, amused, “I’m nearly forty years old.”
“What, did your ears stop working? How about ‘Light My Fire’?” Susan strums a few bars.
“I think my line is that all music recorded after 1955 sounds like noise.”
Susan narrows her eyes. “I don’t buy it.”
Nathaniel makes an aggrieved sound and starts to play something classical.
“Oh wow, Patrick, he’s playing Bach. We have a serious musician on the premises.” Susan’s voice drips with sarcasm.
The sight of Nathaniel playing classical violin sets off an alarm bell for Patrick.
It isn’t even the first one that Patrick’s had since Nathaniel arrived.
He doesn’t fit the pattern of the other strays.
No track marks, no dog tags, no unsavory friends calling in at the shop.
Patrick would swear on a bible that the man hasn’t touched any kind of drug since moving into this building.
He hasn’t even helped himself to the beer in Patrick’s refrigerator.
It’s only a matter of time before he dusts himself off and goes back to whatever life he left behind. It’s a good reminder that Nathaniel is as temporary as anyone else. So is Susan, for that matter—she’ll get back on her feet and buy a ticket to San Francisco, taking Eleanor with her.
Nathaniel segues from Bach to “Love Is All Around,” the same exact notes Susan played a few minutes earlier, and Susan laughs. It’s a sound he hasn’t heard since she came here. She joins in.
Something warps and twists in the music. Susan says, “Okay, okay, I see where you’re going” and the sugary pop ballad transforms into something moody and strange, like it’s been filtered through Bob Dylan by way of a haunted house.
Through the back window, the snow dusts the branches of the dead tree in the yard, before settling on the ground in wet clumps.
The song twists and shifts again until it’s something almost cheerful.
The radiator clangs in a messy counterpoint.
The baby stirs, and when her eyes open, she gazes at Patrick.