11 #2
“We’ll sit near the door and hit the bricks if you need to,” Susan says, which isn’t an answer. “I won’t ever be more than a few feet away.”
Nathaniel will never get used to people talking about his weaknesses so openly. “All right, then.”
“I’ll take Eleanor all day tomorrow,” Susan tells Patrick.
Patrick frowns. “You don’t need to do that. I wasn’t going out tonight anyway.”
Nathaniel’s been watching Patrick and Susan dance around this issue for months.
Susan thinks Patrick’s doing her a favor and feels guilty about imposing on him.
Patrick seems to grasp that he isn’t babysitting so much as raising a child, but doesn’t know how to point this out without overstepping.
Nathaniel just hopes that Susan doesn’t decide that the best way to stop imposing on Patrick will be to move away.
“What do I wear?” Nathaniel asks Susan.
After a few thrift store excursions with Susan, Nathaniel now owns three pairs of cotton trousers, three plain white collared shirts, a camel-colored sport coat, a decent belt, and penny loafers.
He also has a pair of jeans that feel much too tight but which Susan says he needs so she can take him places without anyone thinking she’s with a cop or a sugar daddy.
The first time he put on a shirt with a collar after months of wearing Patrick’s t-shirts and too-big sweaters, he’d been delirious with relief.
It probably says something terrible about him, his longing for conformity, his gut instinct to preserve the status quo.
Or maybe he’s just used to the way certain garments feel against his skin.
“Jeans,” she says. Oh well.
The shop door opens before Nathaniel can go upstairs and get changed. It’s Nathaniel’s least favorite customer: square jawed, broad shouldered, clean cut, like somebody ordered him right out of the catalog. The shop always smells like his cologne for a full ten minutes after he leaves.
“Oh, hi, John,” Patrick says.
John scuffs his toe along the carpet, all bashful innocence.
Nathaniel wants to be sick. “I was looking for a Whitman biography,” John says, words calculated to go straight to Patrick’s heart.
For Christ’s sake, the man doesn’t even need a Whitman biography; just get Patrick started and you’ll know all you need to know before the night is through.
“Settle down,” Susan says once she and Nathaniel are on the stairs.
“I don’t like him,” he says.
“No kidding.”
“He’s up to something.”
“He’s working up the courage to hit on Patrick.”
“I know that ,” Nathaniel says. “He’s laying it on too thick. The downcast eyes, the stupid little smile. I was looking for a Whitman biography,” he mimics. “If he knew anyone in common with Patrick, he’d know that Patrick isn’t exactly a challenge.”
“Did you just call Patrick easy?”
“Am I wrong? Anyway, he clearly isn’t part of whatever network of homosexual literati Patrick’s been sleeping his way through, so how did he even find Patrick? How does he know about Whitman?”
“Okay, Miss Marple,” Susan says. “Go take a shower.”
They walk across town to get to Susan’s mysterious destination. It’s warm enough that neither of them need a jacket.
As they’re walking along the south side of Washington Square Park, Susan touches his arm. “If I want to go to the opera, will you let me buy you a suit?”
He thinks about it. He has a closet full of suits at—he can’t really call it home, now, can he? There was a time he’d have been offended and shocked by the idea of a woman—of anyone—buying him clothes. Now, the impropriety might be part of the appeal, like Iris and her stolen math textbook.
“I have a closet full of suits,” Nathaniel admits.
“And where, exactly, is this closet?” Susan asks, just like Nathaniel knew she would.
“Virginia. Outside Washington, D.C.”
Susan’s quiet while they cross the street. “A tuxedo, too?”
“A tuxedo, too,” Nathaniel concedes.
“I’d take a field trip with you, if you wanted to get your things. We could take the train or borrow a car.”
Nathaniel’s stomach swoops in terror, but he isn’t sure at what. The idea of being caught? He doesn’t think so, not anymore. There’s nothing in that house he needs, anyway: some suits hanging in a half empty closet, some books on half empty shelves, and several months of dust.
“It’s ill-gotten gains, I’m afraid,” Nathaniel says, and braces himself for Susan’s next question.
But the question never comes, and when he glances at Susan, her jaw is set.
It’s Friday evening and Washington Square Park is full of boisterous young people.
There’s a woman with a baby carriage and a few old men sitting on benches, but the crowd is mostly the right age to be college students.
Some are singing along while someone else plays the guitar.
They all look dirty and outlandish to Nathaniel’s eye, but he means that in an affectionate sense.
There was a time when he would have seen them as a threat; he still sees them as a threat, but he thinks he’d like to be just as much of a threat as they are.
“Susan, my love,” he says. “I don’t want to go back.”
She loops her arm through his and they fall silent for a few paces.
“There was this moment in 1960, ‘61, when it felt like this right here” —she gestures around them at the park and its neighborhood— “was the center of the world. Nearly everyone I knew lived in a ten block radius. If you walked through the park on a Sunday you’d run into someone you knew playing the guitar. We knew what we wanted our music to sound like. We had a vision, and it was—don’t make fun of me—it was beautiful. ”
Nathaniel’s been secretly listening to the music Susan recorded back then, playing the records as quietly as possible when she isn’t around. “It was.”
“Folk music doesn’t really exist anymore.
The definition stretched until it stopped meaning anything.
People moved on. That’s fine—it’s good —but it’s a crazy thing to feel like a has-been when you aren’t even thirty.
There’s no going back, even if you are, actually, back.
I couldn’t make that music now if I tried. ”
He can’t tell if that was an allegory about his not wanting to see his house again, or Susan being confronted with the sight of people ten years younger than her having their own turn at the center of the world. “Forgive me for sounding like an old man, but you have your entire life ahead of you.”
“So do you.”
“Hardly.”
“You have, what, ten years on me? Eleven?”
“Something like that.” It’s twelve.
“Pocket change. You think I wouldn’t move heaven and earth to be twenty again and to have the next few years in front of me? Or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I’ve missed some big cosmic point, but really I just want Michael back, and there’s something you want back, but neither of us are getting it.”
Nathaniel would do practically anything for a few hours in the winter of 1961. But the rest of it—he’d like to seal it off wherever they put nuclear waste.
“You won’t get that, but you’ll get other things,” he tells Susan.
“Will I? And I guess you’ll spend the next fifty years getting the sad, bad things you think you deserve. Good plan!”
It’s some comfort that Susan wouldn’t sound half so smug if she knew precisely what Nathaniel did deserve.
Tonight’s outing turns out to be the polar opposite of opera.
Even as they crossed Third Avenue, Nathaniel had been holding out hope that they’d be going to another jazz club, but Jimi Hendrix is not a jazz musician, and the Fillmore East is certainly not a jazz club.
Susan pulls a joint out of her pocket, in plain view of however many hundreds or thousands of people are in this theater, and lights it.
She takes a drag and passes it to Nathaniel.
“Shut your eyes and listen, and if you need to go, we go.” She holds out her hand and he takes it.
At first, all he can think of is how to leave. As Susan promised, their seats are off to the side, near an exit. After that, all he can think of is how loud the music is. Then, at about the time the high starts to set in and the opening act has left the stage, he listens to the music.
Iris and Hector have a Jimi Hendrix record they play when their parents aren’t home.
Nathaniel’s heard it reverberating through the stairwell.
It has nothing in common with the music Susan usually listens to.
It has nothing in common with anything Nathaniel’s ever chosen to listen to at any point in his life.
But he does what Susan says: he shuts his eyes and listens.
He can feel the bass in his bones, and the drums somewhere even deeper than that.
But the guitar—Nathaniel can’t imagine what it’s like to be able to take an instrument and do something like that.
The feedback and other noises are discordant, even troubling, but it’s like exuberant graffiti or those kids in the park. It’s breaking the pattern.
During a rare quiet moment, Susan leans in close. “If American music is a family tree, can you see how folk music gets you here? Not only folk, not even mainly folk, but can you hear it?”
Nathaniel can’t, not even when Hendrix plays Dylan’s “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” so he squeezes her hand and thinks about how a year ago he would have hated this, how he would have been frightened by the possibility of enjoying it.
Maybe he can leave the person he was in the past. Maybe he does have a future in front of him. He lets the music seep into him.
They take a cab home and find the light still on in the shop. Patrick’s waiting up for them, Eleanor asleep against his shoulder.
Nathaniel’s heart does something terrible. Maybe the music has made him susceptible, because he feels like he’s seeing something impossibly lovely, instead of Patrick in an old t-shirt.
Eleanor wakes up, sees Nathaniel, and reaches for him.
When he moves to take her, his hands brush Patrick’s.
Because of warm weather and Jimi Hendrix and the fact that he smoked most of that joint by himself, he puts a hand on Patrick’s arm and leaves it there, his fingertips resting against the warm skin above Patrick’s elbow, and lets himself believe in something different.