11
Nathaniel shuts the algebra textbook with an air of finality. “If you don’t both get an A on your final exam, I’ll burn down your school.” From the front of the shop, he can hear Patrick snort.
“It’s the Regents we have to worry about,” Iris says.
“You don’t have to worry about anything.
” Nathaniel taps the book. “You know all of this. This summer we can do trigonometry, if you like.” His theory is that if he can teach Iris and Hector a year’s worth of math over the summer, the school might let them go directly into calculus, and then they’ll be on track to do advanced math in college.
“Could we really?” Iris asks.
“I’d rather die, no offense,” Hector says.
“Fair. Can you get your hands on the textbook they use?” Nathaniel asks Iris. “Maybe get a calculus textbook too, just in case.”
“We aren’t supposed to take books home over the summer,” Iris says, but she says it like the infraction is an enticement, not a deterrent.
“Then it’s a plan.”
Nathaniel gets to his feet and leaves the twins to study for another class. As he works on the inventory, he hears them gossip about their cousin, debate whether a boy named Raul has a crush on Iris, and complain that peace talks are meaningless if people are still dying.
Iris, in particular, reminds Nathaniel of people he used to work with. She’s just starting to figure out that she’s smarter than practically everybody she knows. The best he can hope for is that she finds a good use for that mind. She’s planning to go to college, thank god.
He’s embarrassed by how much he envies them—envies all the time they have, the chance to do things right. He’ll be forty this summer; he’s crossed the likely halfway point of his life. And what does he have to show for it? Practically nothing. Less than nothing.
“How many pages is that?” Patrick asks, glancing warily at the composition notebook containing the inventory.
“You don’t want to know.”
“Oh, don’t I?” Patrick asks, standing a little too close. Nathaniel feels his pulse pick up at the proximity, and at the flirtatious edge to Patrick’s words.
“Nuh-uh,” Nathaniel says, shaking his head, not breaking eye contact.
There’s something crackling and hot between them. Nathaniel’s instincts all tell him to walk away, to put some space between them. Instead he leans in a little closer, egregiously close now. “Twenty-six pages,” he says. “One for each letter of the alphabet.”
It isn’t that funny, but when Patrick laughs, Nathaniel can feel it, hot on his cheek.
* * *
“I’m starved,” Jerome says. He’s on his second cup of coffee, lounging on a diseased-looking armchair Susan rescued from the trash collectors and dragged to the back of the shop.
It’s Nathaniel’s day off, but Susan banished him from her apartment so she can call her manager.
He’s spent the morning drinking coffee with Jerome.
Patrick looks incredulously at both of them every time he walks past, which only encourages Nathaniel to stay put.
“We only have teething biscuits and creamed corn,” Nathaniel says.
“Or we could go out to lunch.”
An excuse is on the tip of Nathaniel’s tongue, but what the hell. Jerome spent the last hour regaling him with stories of backstage drag show drama. He won’t be shocked by anything Nathaniel says.
“Sometimes I get nuts when I go outside,” Nathaniel says.
“What kind of nuts?” Jerome asks, leaning forward, intrigued.
“Frightened.”
Jerome shrugs, clearly unimpressed, and gets to his feet. “What do you need when you go nuts?”
“Stick close to me.”
“Not a hardship,” Jerome says with a showy little leer. “Let’s go.”
On the way out, they run into one of the regular customers.
Beverly is a reporter at the Times . She wears a trench coat, big orange-tinted sunglasses, and Coco Chanel.
Nathaniel would have thought she covered fashion or style, looking like that, but he’s seen her byline on national news.
She must live in the neighborhood, because she often comes in with a net grocery bag over one arm.
“I need something for a flight,” she says today. “Quick.”
“ One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ,” Nathaniel suggests, because he just finished it and knows it’s still next to the cash register where he left it.
“Already read it,” Beverly says.
“ Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes ,” Patrick says. “Loved it, by the way,” he tells Jerome.
“I told you,” Jerome says. “But are we letting straight people read it?”
“Oh for f—pete’s sake, go have lunch and stop cluttering up my shop.”
Outside, the vertigo hits Nathaniel before they’re at the end of the street, but it isn’t bad enough that he needs to stop walking. The restaurant is only ten minutes away, on the corner of Greenwich and Charles, and Jerome chatters the entire time.
As soon as they’re seated, Jerome leans forward. “Are you and Patrick—” He tips his head to the side and lets his silence finish the question.
“Ah, no.”
“Why not?”
Nathaniel truly does not know how to answer that, so he just stares.
“I mean, you should, if you swing that way,” Jerome says, then waves at someone across the room and blows them a kiss. “I’d be first in line if I were still in the market for moody white boys.”
This is where a person should say that he isn’t like that. Nathaniel says, “The chicken sandwich looks good. Moody?”
“Get the ribs. He has a chip on his shoulder.” Jerome touches his temple, the place where Patrick has a scar. “He tell you about that?”
“Yes,” Nathaniel says. He knows that Mrs. Kaplan gave Patrick stitches after he had a run-in of some sort with the police.
“Plenty of folks who get arrested get fucked up about it and stay fucked up about it. They print your name in the paper when you get caught in a raid, you know. You take a kid like Patrick—nice, middle class, probably got straight As—and throw him in the Tombs? His aunt and uncle can suck my dick, pardon my French, oh hello , Richie!” He waggles his fingers at someone passing by.
“Right,” Nathaniel says, trying to make sense of what Jerome is telling him and square it with what he already knows.
He spent his career assembling facts into coherent explanations and this set of facts isn’t particularly difficult.
Patrick got arrested in a raid and beaten up, his aunt and uncle kicked him out, and then somehow he came to Mrs. Kaplan.
Nathaniel doesn’t know the details, doesn’t know why Susan and Patrick maintain a silence around this topic as sharp and as deep as the silence around Michael.
“And he was so young,” Nathaniel says, a little guilty about fishing for information.
“Still in the twelfth grade. Anyway, he keeps everything locked up tight. He’s always ready for people to sail right out of his life.
To leave him on the curb like an old mattress.
The only people he even halfway believes in are that old lady and his brother.
And, well. I guess that only leaves the old lady.
Anyway, can’t blame him, but a girl likes to be trusted.
Two orders of the ribs,” Jerome tells the waitress.
“Extra coleslaw. Amazing lay,” he tells Nathaniel. “In case I didn’t make myself clear.”
“Good to know.”
“Isn’t it just .”
The ribs are, indeed, delicious, and so is the coleslaw.
So is the company. It reminds Nathaniel, in a bizarre, fun-house-mirror kind of way, of long lunches with colleagues, the kind where you order a second drink and cheerfully complain about everyone else you’ve ever worked with.
Except it’s extremely unlikely that the person across from him at this chipped formica table will be even slightly responsible for toppling any Latin American democracies.
Jerome walks him home. Nathaniel tries to thank him but Jerome waves it away. “I’m not having you lose your marbles on my watch. Kiss kiss!”
Patrick’s at the cash register exactly where Nathaniel left him.
Does he keep it all locked up tight, as Jerome said?
Is he untrusting? Maybe Nathaniel can’t see it because he, himself, isn’t particularly open or trusting.
He remembers Patrick, at the grocery store, fretting about Susan leaving.
Maybe it isn’t that he doesn’t trust people, but that he doesn’t trust them to stay.
“Have a good time?” Patrick asks.
“We talked about you the whole time.”
Patrick sighs. “Where did you go?”
“Some place called Mama’s.”
“Jesus Christ, that place is about as gay as a bathhouse.”
“I did notice that.”
Patrick laughs, warm and bright and louder than usual, and the sound fills the entire shop.
* * *
“Let’s go out,” Susan says, walking into the shop, the chimes ringing as the door swings shut behind her.
“It’s only six,” Patrick says.
“I’m talking to Nathaniel,” Susan says. “His shift was over an hour ago. I hope he’s paying you overtime,” she says, directing her attention to where Nathaniel is sitting with his feet on Patrick’s desk, reading a book about a governess falling in love with her Byronic, mysterious, widowed employer.
You could stock a modestly sized bookstore with novels that are effectively Bronte retellings and Nathaniel would read every last one of them.
“What’s the going rate for reading paperbacks and drinking coffee?” Patrick asks.
“You can’t afford me, darling,” Nathaniel says. “This is pro bono.” He turns to Susan. “Where do you want to go?”
She’s dragged him out a few times to listen to music.
Once, they went to a coffeehouse a few blocks away where they listened to some friends of hers play some music with entirely too much banjo.
Another time, they went to a jazz club uptown.
They’d taken a cab there, but on the subway home Nathaniel was braced for disaster; instead he was charmed by a rat eating a donut, a busking saxophonist playing songs that were popular twenty years ago, and a few teenage girls jumping the turnstile.