4 #3
A man once told him that at AA meetings, you introduce yourself as an alcoholic because it’s a reminder of the problem you all have in common.
Patrick figures anyone who winds up needing his help might want to know that he’s been there, that he’s part of the fellowship of people who could not possibly have gotten their shit together without some help.
Sometimes, knowing about Patrick’s crummy past gives a person permission to accept half a sandwich or a five dollar bill or a bus ticket home.
“And so that’s why you gave me your coat,” Nathaniel says, the edge still in his voice. “And why you’re taking me to get violin strings? Because Mrs. Kaplan helped you?”
That was the answer at first, sure. That was why Patrick bought Nathaniel’s groceries and lent him some clothes and a spare bed.
But now, for some reason, he says, “I gave you my coat because I have a lot more meat on my bones than you do.” He’s only been to the gym a handful of times since Susan moved in, but for the ten years before that, lifting weights was his only actual hobby.
Pick the right gym at the right hour, and there’s even odds you’ll go home with someone.
Nathaniel’s gaze drops to Patrick’s shoulders, his chest, and it doesn’t mean anything because when you’re dumb enough to talk about the meat on your bones—Jesus Christ, Patrick, of all the things to say—people look at your body.
It’s inevitable. But Patrick, because he’s truly on a roll, notices how long Nathaniel’s eyelashes are, how his eyes are more amber than brown.
How long it takes for his gaze to get back to Patrick’s face.
“I’ve been brushing my teeth next to you for a month and—” It shouldn’t be embarrassing to say that he thinks they’re friends, or something like that. “We’re friends,” Patrick says firmly, pretending his face isn’t hot. His beard hides the worst of the damage. It’s fine.
Nathaniel looks—the fucker looks smug, like he was baiting Patrick into admitting it. “Quite,” Nathaniel agrees, before Patrick can get mad about it. “How’d you get hurt?” Nathaniel asks, looking at the scar on Patrick’s forehead.
“Cops. All right, let’s head out.”
Over at the cash register, Susan is trying to look like she isn’t listening.
She’s heard all this before, but to her it isn’t the story of Patrick getting taken in by a lady who used her sewing kit to fix his face; it’s the story of Patrick running away without telling her or Michael.
Just because now she knows the whole story doesn’t change what it must have felt like to them back then.
“All right,” Nathaniel says, squaring his shoulders and holding on tight to the battered violin case. “Let’s go.”
* * *
It’s a five minute walk to MacDougal. Patrick takes the quieter way, turning onto a stretch of West Fourth that’s only a few blocks long and which hardly gets any traffic.
It’s almost pretty, with the first March leaves appearing on some of the spindly trees that line the street, but Patrick can sense Nathaniel’s attention drawn to every piece of gum ground into the sidewalk, every nasty smell that wafts out of the gutter.
When they turn onto Sixth Avenue at a messy intersection of three streets, Nathaniel tenses beside him.
He stops walking, so Patrick stops too. Sometimes Nathaniel seems to disappear to someplace else—someplace not particularly pleasant, by the looks of it.
He goes perfectly still and rigid, like he’s relying on the same prey animal instinct that makes deer freeze in the face of oncoming headlights.
Right now, they’re blocking the sidewalk. Patrick takes Nathaniel by the arm and steers him off to the side, so they’re standing against the plate glass window of a shoe repair place.
“You’re all right,” Patrick says.
“Lies,” Nathaniel says, with a valiant but failed attempt at bitchiness.
“Want to turn around?”
“Of course I want to turn around,” Nathaniel snaps. “But I won’t.”
“There’s no shame in going easy on yourself.”
Nathaniel looks like he wants to argue, but instead he rolls his eyes, like Patrick’s being very silly about all this. “I need to try.”
“All right.”
“Just—don’t leave me.”
“I wasn’t planning to,” Patrick says.
Nathaniel’s face reddens. “I mean, stay next to me.”
“Sure,” Patrick says, more surprised that Nathaniel made himself ask than by the actual request. He wouldn’t be the first person to treat Patrick like a cross between a bodyguard and a Saint Bernard. The girl Mrs. Kaplan took in last year had practically glued herself to him.
“We’ll cross at the corner,” he says when they start walking again. “Nothing to worry about. Okay, let’s go, the sign changed to Walk.” Nathaniel keeps so close that their arms touch.
Patrick can practically feel the nervousness rolling off Nathaniel, but Nathaniel doesn’t say anything, so neither does Patrick. By the time they get to the guitar shop, Nathaniel is out of breath and noticeably pale.
The guy behind the counter has blond hair down past his shoulders, a Santana t-shirt, and a joint that he hastily hides under the counter when the shop door opens. He fusses over Nathaniel’s violin like it’s a newborn baby.
Nathaniel winds up buying a set of strings, a new bow, some resin, a new case, and some odds and ends that Patrick can’t identify.
“Susan Larkin told me to say hello,” Nathaniel says over his shoulder on the way out.
“Susan— Suzie Larkin ? Jeez, man, you could have told me up front. Is she back in town? Wait.” The man’s eyes narrow. “I read that the band broke up. Are you playing with her now?”
“No,” Patrick cuts in before this guy tells all his customers and his dope dealer, and Susan winds up reading about her alleged new act in the Village Voice . That’s the last thing she needs.
“Okay, man,” the guy behind the counter says, taking a step back, his hands up in surrender.
“Do you want to go straight home or stop for lunch?” Patrick asks when they’re out on the sidewalk.
Nathaniel sticks his hands in his pockets and looks up at the sky. “I’m still coherent, so let’s press our luck a bit.”
They stop at the kind of place that has a jukebox and a liquor license, cigarette butts on the floor and waitresses who act like they’re doing you a favor. Patrick orders a burger and beer. After a perfunctory glance at the menu, Nathaniel says he’ll have the same.
While they’re waiting for their food, Susan’s single from last August plays on the jukebox.
It’s full of hand claps and tambourines.
It’s catchy. Patrick likes it. “This is Susan,” Patrick says.
“She hates it. The record company overdubbed drums and extra vocals. Last summer, radio stations would not stop playing it.”
Nathaniel listens to the rest of the song in silence, his face gradually arranging itself into something tight-lipped and pensive. “Joan Baez but you can dance to it,” he says eventually.
Patrick laughs, pleased by the bitchiness and surprised that Nathaniel apparently knows who Joan Baez is. Patrick’s secret opinion is that it sounds like the Lovin’ Spoonful, only prettier, but Susan would have to torture that information out of him.
“That’s what Iris and Hector say,” Nathaniel explains. “I don’t think it’s a compliment.”
“No, it wouldn’t be.” Patrick digs in his pocket for change. “Hold on, okay?” He goes to the jukebox, drops his dime in the slot, makes his selection.
“This is one of Susan’s first songs,” Patrick says when his song comes on.
It’s “A Sailor’s Life,” a traditional ballad that Susan adapted pretty freely.
He remembers her listening to a grainy recording on the three-album folk music anthology she bought with the money she got for her fifteenth birthday.
He sat on the floor of her bedroom, doing his geometry homework while she was in her own world, strumming a few bars, scribbling something in her notebook, putting the needle back down at the beginning of the track, and then doing it all over again.
Sometimes people act like Susan simply finds an old song and sings it, easy as that, but she labors over those songs just as much as the songs she writes from scratch.
“Oh,” Nathaniel says after a minute. “It’s lovely.”
When Patrick pressed that button on the jukebox, he hadn’t remembered that “A Sailor’s Life” is about a woman whose husband dies at sea. He’d only been thinking of fifteen-year-old Susan, her hair in her face, her guitar in her lap.
Now he’s thinking of Susan nearly thirteen years later.
He’s thinking about Michael. He’s held it together for a month and he isn’t going to get shaken up by a song on a jukebox, a song he’s heard a thousand times.
He takes a deep breath and finishes his beer.
He’s aware of Nathaniel—not watching him, but carefully not watching him, giving him space to be a basket case in private.
“What kind of beer is this?” Nathaniel asks when Patrick has a hold of himself. It’s the most neutral question in the world and Patrick could hug him.
“It’s just Schlitz,” Patrick says, and Nathaniel takes a thoughtful sip like he’s never had a Schlitz in his life.
They eat their lunch to the accompaniment of the random assortment of music that other patrons have selected on the jukebox—some old standards, some Motown, a lot of Top Forty.
With each song, Patrick tells Nathaniel about the band or artist, and whether—according to Susan—they’re drug fiends, philanderers, or sex pests.
Nathaniel listens, amused by Patrick’s gossip, but also intrigued by the music, not at all like a man who thinks everything recorded after 1955 sounds like noise.
When they get back to the shop, Patrick hauls the record player down from his bedroom and plugs it in at the back of the shop. Then he fills a milk crate with records and carries that down too.
“Have at it,” he tells Nathaniel.
Susan raises her eyebrows, but she comes to sit next to Nathaniel on the floor, the baby on her belly next to them, gnawing on the edge of a Rolling Stones album.