5
In the middle of March, Patrick comes home from an estate sale to discover that Nathaniel finally got the back room cleared out.
Susan’s in the back of the shop, curled up in an armchair she dragged in from the street, Eleanor in her lap.
They all take a moment to stare at what Nathaniel’s uncovered.
“That’s a kitchen,” Susan says, pointing out the obvious. “Or at least it was forty years ago.”
Sure enough, there’s a sink, an enormous white and green oven, and an ancient icebox made of dark wood with blackened iron hinges.
“It doesn’t plug in,” Susan says, peering behind the icebox.
Nathaniel starts laughing. It’s not the first time Patrick’s heard him laugh, but it’s rare enough that Patrick has to stop what he’s doing and just…take it in. “You put ice inside,” Nathaniel says, “and it keeps your food cold.”
“Ask Mrs. Kaplan when she comes back,” Patrick says when Susan’s still peering skeptically at it.
“Are you sure?” Susan asks. “But where did the ice come from?”
“The iceman,” Patrick says—because, seriously, they had icemen when he and Susan were kids.
“The iceman,” Nathaniel agrees.
Susan looks back and forth between them like she thinks they’re both pulling her leg.
“This room is bigger than I thought it would be,” Patrick says before they can get into a fight about ice, even though a quarrelsome Susan is a normal Susan, and therefore a relief.
“Imagine,” Susan says. “A room seems bigger when you take out four hundred boxes of books.”
“Don’t worry,” Nathaniel says. “I put the book boxes upstairs, where all the other book boxes will keep them company.” There’s a bit of acid in his tone and a glint in his eye.
“It wasn’t only books,” Patrick grumbles, playing along.
“True. There were invoices from 1928, a file folder of recipes cut out of magazines, and a pipe. A chest of drawers that’s now in my bedroom, a highchair—”
“I want that.”
“It’s already in your apartment,” Nathaniel says.
“You gave him a key?” Patrick whispers when Nathaniel is up front, talking to a customer.
“You live with him. So does Eleanor, half the time. Are you telling me now that you don’t trust him?”
“That isn’t it.” Patrick doesn’t know how to explain that it’s one thing for him to give someone a key to his home, the shirt off his back, the money from his wallet, but he doesn’t expect anyone else to act that way. “I’m glad you like him.”
“I do like him. He’s mean.”
“Must be nice to have something in common.”
“Where are you from?” Susan asks Nathaniel that night. They’re all in Susan’s apartment, finishing up Chinese food. Nathaniel ate his with chopsticks in one hand and Eleanor asleep against his shoulder.
“Boston,” Nathaniel says.
Patrick looks up from his lo mein. Most people would say “I grew up in Boston,” or “I came here from Santa Fe.”
Patrick’s bullshit detection has always been reliable.
He’d been twelve when his parents died, and the sheer volume of lies people told him in the ensuing weeks, ranging from “they didn’t feel a thing” to “everything happens for a reason” to “we’d be happy to have you boys come live with us” must have been enough for his internal bullshit detector to calibrate itself pretty accurately.
Wherever Nathaniel’s from, it probably isn’t Boston.
“What do you do?” Susan asks.
Nathaniel gives her an arch look. “Well, Susan, I’m so glad you asked. I work in this bookshop you may have heard of—”
“Before,” she says. Patrick sighs. Michael always said Susan would have been a terrific FBI investigator; Michael, of course, meant it as a compliment.
“If I start in on my sad stories, we’ll all get indigestion,” Nathaniel says.
Patrick gives Susan a look that says drop it .
Susan gives him a look that says she’s never done anything wrong in her life.
“Let him be mysterious,” he tells Susan, because so what if Nathaniel is keeping secrets.
You don’t wind up at rock bottom without some things you want to keep to yourself.
Patrick would be a hypocrite if he argued otherwise.
“It’s unfair, because you know my sad story,” Susan tells Nathaniel.
“What’s unfair is that your hellion daughter has decided to attach herself to me like a barnacle.”
“I can take her,” Patrick offers.
“That’s quite all right,” Nathaniel says, waspish, and shifts the baby higher on his shoulder.
Patrick leans back in his chair, reaching for the record player to put the volume up, hoping to distract Susan from her interrogation.
Yesterday, a dozen boxes arrived from San Francisco.
Three of them were labeled RECORDS in a stranger’s handwriting—presumably Susan’s manager or former landlord.
Nathaniel carried those three boxes up to Susan’s apartment, Patrick stacked everything else on the second floor.
Nathaniel spent the rest of the day calling the second floor a shocking disgrace, a veritable pigsty, and a stain on his personal honor.
Before dinner, Patrick put on the new Byrds record, which came out too recently for it to have sad associations for anyone at the table. He can’t tell if he dislikes the album or if he just isn’t in a mood to enjoy new things.
“Put on Jefferson Airplane,” Susan says, even though Patrick knows for a fact that Michael loved that band.
“Why don’t you ask him what his deal is?” she asks Patrick later, when the two of them are alone in Susan’s apartment and Nathaniel is across the hall watching Batman with the Valdezes. Eleanor’s asleep in her crib and Grace Slick is on the record player.
“What do you mean, his deal?” He’s sprawled in Susan’s armchair. Susan’s lying on the sofa, a joint dangling from her fingertips.
“You know perfectly well what I mean. What’s he been doing for the past twenty years? He doesn’t look like he’s had a hard life.”
“You can’t always tell.”
“His teeth are perfect.”
“What a fucked-up thing to notice.” Patrick noticed the exact same thing.
“He’s obviously been through something awful. Why don’t you just ask him? He talks like a banker, plays the violin like a professional, can’t go outside without having a fit, and refuses to say a single thing about his past. I don’t know why you don’t care. Everybody loves a mystery.”
“He’s a person, not a mystery,” Patrick says.
She groans and holds out the joint. “Obviously. Don’t be sanctimonious, Patrick, you’re better than that.”
Patrick takes the world’s tiniest drag and Susan lets out a breath of a laugh. He grins back at her, because they both know what a lightweight he is. This is the first time in over a month he’s been anything other than sober. He’s going in at the shallow end.
“I think he’d tell you whatever you want to know,” Susan says, reaching to take the joint back.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He’s your little shadow.”
That’s true, but only because Nathaniel’s badly shaken up and Patrick is big and safe. It isn’t personal.
“I’ve met a few of the men you’ve gone around with,” Susan adds, handing him back the joint.
Patrick is kind of touched by gone around with .
Ten years ago, that’s how he would have described the boys who took Susan to the movies and brought her home from school on the handlebars of their bicycles.
The distance between this apartment and Susan’s pink-painted bedroom is in danger of collapsing, and any minute now Michael will walk in and demand that someone explain quadratic equations.
He takes another drag and holds the joint out for Susan. “And?”
“And Nathaniel fits the profile. Older, smart, waspish.”
Patrick considers explaining that his tastes aren’t even close to that narrow, and that the men she’s met are the men he’s allowed her to meet.
And those are the men he thinks will amuse her.
That profile has more to do with the type of person Susan likes than the type of person Patrick likes.
Still, though, she’s right—those are the men Patrick likes best, too.
“There’s no reason to think he’s into men,” Patrick says.
“You’re complicating this,” she says. “Just ask Nathaniel for his life story, and when you do it make sure you’re doing pushups or something.”
Susan’s been here for six weeks, and this is the first conversation they’ve managed that doesn’t revolve around the baby. Instead, it’s about whether Patrick can seduce secrets from his employee.
“I love that you think I’m some kind of gay mata hari,” he says.
“Nobody thinks that about you, Patrick.” Susan starts laughing, and it’s such a good sound. He’s missed it so much, even if he can hear the sadness threaded through the laughter like a strange new instrument added to an old song.
* * *
It turns out that the only thing more annoying than a crying baby waking you up every hour is a crying baby not waking you up.
Eleanor’s too big to sleep in the drawer, so now she spends every night upstairs with Susan in a real crib.
Patrick apparently forgot how to sleep for more than two hours at a go.
He gives up and goes out to the living room, thinking he’ll put the television on and let the static hypnotize him into something resembling sleep. But he finds the tiny sofa already occupied by Nathaniel, a book in his lap and a flashlight in one hand.
“You can turn on the lamp, you know,” Patrick says.
“I didn’t want to wake you.” Nathaniel swings his feet off the couch to make room.
Patrick sits. “Can’t sleep? Or is the book just that good?”
“It’s not the book.” Nathaniel points the flashlight at the book’s cover for Patrick to read. Bleak House . It’s Patrick’s own copy, a dog-eared and faded paperback he’d bought from one of those used book tables near Washington Square Park, nowhere near good enough to sell in the shop.
“Not my favorite,” Patrick admits.