6 #2
“You doing all right?” Patrick asks a few minutes later.
“In terms of sanity?” He wouldn’t have used that word if Nathaniel hadn’t done so first, but it feels rude.
He remembers Nathaniel stumbling over homosexual .
There’s no way to talk about being queer or having a fucked up brain without being rude about it, because you aren’t supposed to talk about those things in the first place. You aren’t supposed to be those things.
“Its limits have not yet been breached,” Nathaniel says, eyes still on the book. He sighs and closes it, his finger marking the page. “I hate this, but it serves me right.”
“No,” Patrick says, a little too loud. Nathaniel startles, and Patrick lowers his voice. “You don’t deserve to feel trapped.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nathaniel says, and returns his attention to the book.
The door opens and a woman comes in, wrestling a wicker hamper. Patrick gets up to hold the door.
“Oh, Patrick,” she says. “I hardly recognize you out of the shop. And Nathaniel!”
It’s Vivian. It’s always odd to run into a customer. Some of the regulars occupy that murky space between acquaintance and friend. After so many visits to the shop, Viv might be closer to the friend end of the spectrum.
Vivian’s obviously never been to a laundromat in her life, because she has no change and only the vaguest sense of how to separate laundry. “Maryanne used to do it. I’ve been sending the laundry out, but it’s ruinously expensive,” she explains.
Maryanne, Patrick assumes, is the fedora-wearing woman who used to come in with Vivian. Patrick doesn’t ask exactly how she left the picture. All that matters, really, is that Vivian doesn’t sound pleased about it, and also that she needs help with laundry, so Patrick walks her through it.
“Is the baby sleeping through the night?” she asks when her clothes are loaded in the washer.
“When the planets are aligned,” Patrick says.
“You need the book by that man—Spock. Dr. Spock.”
“Excuse me, what?” Patrick is aware of one Spock, and he’s on the bridge of the Enterprise .
“My sister had his book. I can’t remember the title. You probably have one in stock.”
“It’s called Baby and Child Care ,” Nathaniel says, not looking up from his book.
“That’s it!” Vivian agrees. “I see you’ve fallen prey to Patrick’s influence. Whitman’s completely out of my period but Patrick got me anyway.”
“He’s a dangerous man,” Nathaniel agrees.
“Now all I can see is the longing. Not only for companionship,” she says, in a way that makes it clear companionship is standing in for sex or romance, “but for community. He’s looking for people like him.
” She pauses with a glance at the empty wicker hamper.
“It’s very touching, and very familiar, isn’t it? ”
Patrick realizes that Vivian thinks he and Nathaniel are involved.
They’re doing laundry together, which isn’t something she’d expect Patrick to do with an employee.
He can see the moment Nathaniel realizes the same thing—his eyes open a little wider, and it looks like he’s about to say something, but when he opens his mouth, all he says is, “Quite,” and then he and Vivian start talking about the Democratic primary.
They both like Robert Kennedy, which isn’t any kind of surprise when it comes to Vivian, but he’d been worried that Nathaniel might be a Republican.
“Call me Viv,” Vivian tells Nathaniel. “Everybody does.”
Nathaniel’s been around for more than ten of Viv’s visits to the shop—no, more than that, because she sometimes stops by on the weekend.
Viv is only five or ten years older than Nathaniel.
If, for Patrick, Viv is in the space between friend and acquaintance, for Nathaniel she may already be a friend.
“Call me if you decide to go see it,” Viv says as Patrick and Nathaniel leave, talking about some or another movie they’d read about.
When they get home, Nathaniel corners Patrick in the back room. “Can I paint the kitchen?”
It takes Patrick a moment to realize that Nathaniel is referring to the back room. “Why?”
“The walls are stained. It’s ugly. They sell paint at the hardware store, you know.”
Patrick does, in fact, know, but it has never once occurred to him that he might want to put that knowledge to practical use.
Still, Nathaniel needs some kind of job to do.
The store is getting aggressively clean and Nathaniel has taken to wiping down surfaces while Patrick is still using them.
His inventory of the downstairs books is well underway, and if Patrick doesn’t play his cards right, it’s only a matter of time before Nathaniel starts bugging him about unpacking the boxes upstairs.
“Sure,” Patrick says. “Take the money out of petty cash.”
Patrick offers to go to the hardware store himself, but Nathaniel insists that he can do it on his own. In the end, Susan goes with him, claiming that she needs to stretch her legs and that terrible things will happen to Eleanor’s liver if she doesn’t get sunlight.
An hour later, they come back with a gallon of paint in one of the uglier shades of green. It’s the green of mouthwash and hospital linoleum, a green that doesn’t and shouldn’t exist in nature, or in bookstores, or anywhere else.
“It matches the stove,” Nathaniel explains, visibly pleased with himself. Patrick doesn’t have the heart to say that the stove is ugly too. He just opens all the windows so they don’t asphyxiate.
When Hector and Iris come by after school, Hector crosses himself and Iris says “very bold” and then they change into old clothes and help paint the trim and cabinets white.
That night, while the paint dries, Nathaniel takes Patrick’s coffee maker from upstairs and places it on the butcher block next to the sink. Next to it, he arranges Patrick’s kettle and hotplate. Five coffee mugs that Patrick’s never seen before hang from hooks under the upper cabinet.
“This way we don’t have to run upstairs every time we want a drink,” Nathaniel says. “And any customers who want some coffee or tea can help themselves.”
“Any customers who want a drink can leave and go somewhere that serves drinks,” Patrick says.
Something shutters in Nathaniel’s expression and Patrick feels like an asshole, but seriously, this is a bookstore. The idea of people coming in and drinking his coffee and leaving mugs around his books makes him feel faintly ill.
“You like your customers,” Nathaniel says.
“You pretend not to, but I see the way you light up when one of your favorites comes in. I’m not saying you have to give refreshments to anyone who wanders in off the street, but this store is effectively your living room.
When Jerome comes in, it wouldn’t kill you to give him a drink and a place to sit.
Viv would love an excuse to stay. The other day, Gary looked like he was about to collapse. You do less for strangers.”
Patrick wonders how much this has to do with the fact that Nathaniel likes the regulars.
He can barely stand to leave the shop, so customers and scouts are the only new people he can talk to.
He’d seen the look on Nathaniel’s face when Viv suggested they see a movie: he’d wanted to go, but was afraid he couldn’t.
He’s effectively trapped in this store unless Patrick or Susan go with him.
But Nathaniel seems to believe what he’s saying. He looks almost uncomfortably earnest; there isn’t the faintest whiff of bullshit in anything he said.
“Most of the business is rare books,” Patrick says.
“We don’t really depend on foot traffic.
I’ve gotten into the habit of thinking of customers as a distraction.
But,” he says, with the feeling of edging out onto thinner ice, “of the two of us, you’re the one who really likes the customers.
” And it’s true. Nathaniel chatters with customers so well and so naturally that Patrick leaves the cash register entirely to him when he’s working.
“And I think you’re lonely here. Most people would be,” he hurries to add when Nathaniel looks insulted.
Nathaniel goes to the sink to fill the kettle with water. When he speaks it’s with his back to Patrick. “I always worked in a busy office. The same people, year after year.”
“You miss it,” Patrick says. It sounds like Patrick’s idea of hell.
Nathaniel looks like he’s about to have one of his spells so Patrick grabs the kettle and plugs it in.
It occurs to Patrick that Nathaniel waited until the shop was closed and they were alone to instigate this conversation, presumably to spare Patrick’s feelings, only to have the tables turned on him. Patrick squeezes Nathaniel’s arm.
“I do miss it,” Nathaniel says. “God, what is wrong with me?” He draws in a breath. “In any event, it isn’t safe to have the coffee maker balanced on a stack of books and plugged into the same extension cord as the refrigerator and hotplate, so the coffee maker needs to be moved down here anyway.”
“It’s a good idea. I might as well bring down my refrigerator too, or we won’t have any milk for our coffee.” It’s only a little refrigerator, the kind that comes up to his knee, and it’s no trouble for Patrick to carry it down the stairs himself.
“Thank you,” Nathaniel says when Patrick’s finished plugging in the refrigerator and Nathaniel has poured them both cups of this revolting chamomile tea that Susan likes.
“Any time,” Patrick says, and he means it.
* * *
“You are still here,” says a voice that’s all too familiar.
Patrick turns from where he’s shelving some books. “Hi, Luke.”
“You never write, you never call.”
“How’s California?” Patrick asks.
“It’s great! I’m here for a week. You look good.”