12
By now, Nathaniel recognizes most of Dooryard’s regular customers. A Melville collector in New Haven takes the train down once a month to make a circuit of half a dozen bookstores. A married couple in the neighborhood stops in every few weeks to ask whether there’s any new Longfellow.
And then there’s George, a professor at Columbia, who comes by whenever he’s in the Village to look at any Whittier rare editions that Patrick’s managed to get his hands on.
He’s forty-something and wears wire-rimmed glasses and black turtlenecks.
There isn’t a doubt in Nathaniel’s mind that George is one of Patrick’s conquests, or possibly vice versa.
“Don’t tell Patrick,” George says when Nathaniel’s ringing him up, leaning close to Nathaniel’s ear. They didn’t have any Whittier in stock, but George bought a copy of The Valley of the Dolls . “I need to think about my reputation.”
Nathaniel leans in too, mirroring George’s posture and echoing his tone. “Patrick read this book last month.” That wasn’t particularly funny or insightful, but George laughs anyway. Nathaniel feels impossibly bold.
“Forgive me if I’m making the wrong assumptions, but I’d love to buy you a drink,” George says.
They’ve hardly interacted, which means that George’s attraction to Nathaniel is purely physical. He’s never considered being picked up for his looks. That happens to women.
He thinks he likes it.
“No hard feelings if you’d rather not,” George says, winking, and writing his phone number on the back of his receipt before handing it to Nathaniel.
Nathaniel stares at it for a few seconds before putting it in his pocket.
“Susan says I should take you to a bar,” Patrick says later that day. “Because apparently you’re getting picked up by every eligible queer who walks through the door and she wants to make sure you know you have options.”
Patrick sounds gratifyingly annoyed about all of this, maybe even jealous. “I realize you fuck strangers as a sort of extended handshake, but I’m not—” Nathaniel reaches for something appropriately cutting but what he winds up saying is, “I’m not there yet.”
The yet makes him almost dizzy. He couldn’t possibly explain to Patrick that not only has he never touched another man that way, but until the last few months he’s hardly let himself think about it.
Patrick sticks his hands in his pockets and looks at the ceiling. “You can just go and see what it’s like. Or not. It’s a standing offer.”
“Fine,” Nathaniel says.
“Want to go to Julius?” Patrick asks as they’re closing up.
“It used to be a great bar for closet cases but there was a sort of protest a few years back and it got written up in the Times . Now the closet cases have to find someplace else, I guess. It hasn’t been raided in a while, though, so it’s about as safe as we can get. ”
Nathaniel has no idea if he’s being called a closet case—accurate—or if Patrick’s trying to tell him that this bar is relatively subdued. The idea of a raid—an arrest, the police, being found —makes him want to curl up under the desk and stay there. But what good has playing it safe ever done him?
“Do I look all right?” Nathaniel asks when they’re getting ready to leave. He’s wearing exactly what he had on all day: slacks and a white button-up, nothing special.
“When don’t you?” Patrick grumbles, put-upon. He says it loud enough for Nathaniel to hear, but low enough that Nathaniel can pretend not to have heard.
Nathaniel doesn’t pretend. He flicks a deliberate glance at Patrick’s shoulders, the folded up cuffs of his shirt, the stretch of denim across his thighs.
It’s a warm May night so they sling their jackets over their arms and take their time walking the ten minutes to the bar. “You ever done this?” Patrick asks.
“No,” Nathaniel says, because that’s the answer to any question Patrick could possibly be asking.
“Look, Julius isn’t usually a handjobs in the bathroom sort of bar,” Patrick says right before they go inside, “so if you go back to someone’s apartment, call me when you leave. I’ll pick you up in a cab.”
Patrick is being kind, but Nathaniel thought he had made this clear. “You really have no idea, do you? I’ve only been with women, and I only did that because I was supposed to. I know that sounds tragically repressed—”
“No,” Patrick says, and you really have to be one of the world’s worst liars to give yourself away with a single syllable.
“Of course it’s tragically repressed! But I’m not going to achieve complete sexual liberation on your timeline. Or, possibly, any timeline.”
Patrick touches Nathaniel’s elbow. “Hey. There isn’t a timeline. If you don’t want to—”
“Wanting to isn’t the problem.” He feels like they’re speaking completely different languages.
He’s twelve or so years older than Patrick, but right now they’re from different planets.
The generation gap evidently fissured at some point between 1928 and 1940.
But even that isn’t accurate: the professor who tried to pick him up that morning is older than Nathaniel.
Viv is older than Nathaniel. There are plenty of homosexuals older than Nathaniel.
Patrick’s generation didn’t invent the concept.
But they may have invented the idea of not hating yourself for it. Nathaniel doesn’t know. He deliberately doesn’t know; he made sure never to look around or pay attention.
“We can go home,” Patrick says. “I shouldn’t have pushed you.”
“Well, now I need a drink,” Nathaniel says. He pulls open the door to the bar.
It’s hot and stuffy, loud with conversation and music. It’s a bar, nothing special about it; it’s almost pointedly nondescript.
A few weeks ago, Jerome told him that during the day, Julius attracts middle-aged writers from established New York periodicals, and that at night it’s filled with gainfully employed queer white men.
Jerome meant it as a caution—don’t go there, darling, you’ll be bored out of your mind.
Right away, Nathaniel can see what Jerome meant.
The prevailing aesthetic is so neatly combed and tidy, so very middle class, that Nathaniel wouldn’t have stood out here a year ago.
Now, with his hair two inches longer, his clothing casual and a bit rumpled, he still fits in.
There are a few men wearing suits that Nathaniel might once have owned.
A few patrons are young enough to be college students, but he isn’t by any means the oldest person here.
“Do you need me next to you?” Patrick asks.
Nathaniel would like to know exactly how Patrick thought any of this would work if Nathaniel still needed him in arm’s reach at all times. “Go make friends,” Nathaniel tells him. Patrick fades into the background.
Nathaniel finds an empty stool, orders a drink, and checks the clock over the bar.
It takes two minutes before someone slides onto the seat next to his and offers to buy him another.
Nathaniel glances over long enough to see that the man is about his own age, blond, and wearing a shirt with the first two buttons undone, tie loosened around his neck.
“I’m waiting for someone,” Nathaniel says. The man goes away.
Another five minutes pass, during which Nathaniel nurses his drink and watches the bartender mix and pour and stir.
The man is in his early twenties, and handsome enough that Nathaniel has to wonder if it’s a job requirement.
He helps himself to a cigarette from a pack someone left on the bar.
At some point during the time he’d been losing his mind, he accidentally quit the habit and now the smoke in his lungs is simultaneously foreign and a sudden relief.
Finally, Patrick slides onto the empty stool and waves the bartender over. “What are you drinking?” he asks Nathaniel.
“An old fashioned.”
“Two old fashioneds,” Patrick tells the bartender and slides three dollar bills across the bar.
Nathaniel thinks he understands why Patrick picked this place.
He wanted Nathaniel to know that he could walk into a bar full of gay men and blend in, and that the crowd of people is the same as he’d expect at a nice restaurant or an art museum.
These aren’t Patrick’s people or Jerome’s people.
He’s letting Nathaniel know that he can have this, that he can be this.
He’s also, apparently, letting Nathaniel know that all he has to do is sit on a stool and someone will effectively offer to have sex with him.
Honestly, Nathaniel hadn’t thought it would be that easy.
It gives him that same feeling he’d had when George asked him for drinks, the sense that he’s something of an object.
It makes him hot with embarrassment, and then even more embarrassed that he likes it.
“I can’t believe people bother with these when there isn’t even any grass in them,” Nathaniel says, stubbing out the cigarette and pushing the ashtray away. “You’ve made me into a radical dope fiend, Patrick, and I’m looking at all these nice, clean-cut young people like they’re cops.”
Patrick gives him an odd look, like he’s waiting for the punch line.
“Take Me Home,” Susan’s song from last summer, comes on the jukebox. Nathaniel and Patrick exchange a glance that’s half wince, half amusement, and Nathaniel feels like they’re alone here, like everyone else in this bar, in this city, on this planet is far away.
“What are we drinking to?” Nathaniel asks when the bartender puts two old fashioneds in front of them.
“Courage,” Patrick says.
Nathaniel lifts his glass. “Drink on, drinkers.” After a few months at Dooryard Books, you start quoting Whitman, apparently.
Patrick grins, sudden and surprised. “That poem was about a gay bar. Kind of.”
They leave once they finish their drinks, taking the long way home.
“I had a good time,” Patrick says when he’s unlocking the door. It’s dark enough in the shop that Nathaniel would be afraid of tripping if he couldn’t navigate this place blindfolded by now.
“You don’t need to sound so surprised,” Nathaniel says. “I know I’m not the most thrilling company, but we make do.”
“Who’s surprised? I always like being with you,” Patrick says, simply enough that Nathaniel couldn’t doubt it if he tried. “But I don’t think you had a good time.” He holds out his hand for Nathaniel’s jacket, then hangs it up on a hook by the door next to Patrick’s own jacket.
“I always like being with you,” Nathaniel says, and it shouldn’t feel like such an admission, not after Patrick said it first. The light switch is right beside the coat hooks but neither of them reach for it.
Instead Nathaniel heads toward the back of the shop and puts on the kettle.
As Patrick reaches for the box of tea bags, his hand lands on Nathaniel’s hip, just a careless motion to steady himself.
But Nathaniel’s spent weeks paying attention to the way Patrick touches him and he thinks all these little gestures are questions, all easily ignored if Nathaniel didn’t want to be asked, didn’t want to answer.
Nathaniel puts his hand over Patrick’s, keeping it there on his hip. The abyss—the fucking abyss—of course he couldn’t do this without feeling like he’s plunging into shark infested waters. The fact that he wants it is, naturally, irrelevant.
He interlaces their fingers, probably gripping too tightly, erring on the side of seeming decisive.
Patrick puts the box of tea on the counter and steps closer, close enough that Nathaniel can feel the heat of him along his back, solid and safe and familiar.
To hell with shark infested waters. The only people in this kitchen are him and Patrick. No sharks here.
He lets go of Patrick’s hand and turns, and now Patrick has a hand on both Nathaniel’s hips. They’re close enough that Nathaniel has to look up to meet Patrick’s eye. He watches as Patrick’s gaze drops to his mouth.
Nathaniel could lean in, close the gap. But he wants Patrick to do it. He wants to be the one who’s kissed. There isn’t much he’s sure of, but he knows that much.
“I want you to kiss me,” Nathaniel says.
Shaping his mouth around the words feels like swimming upstream, like each sound costs something.
“Just a kiss,” he adds, more for his own benefit than Patrick’s, a reminder that the line he’s crossing isn’t even a terribly significant one, or at least it doesn’t have to be.
Patrick lets out a breath and nods his head—once, quick, message received.
Slow, he lifts a hand and pushes a strand of hair off Nathaniel’s face.
Nathaniel had been thinking that a kiss was the smallest denomination of affection, that he could start with a kiss and build up his tolerance.
But that touch already overwhelms him, those few fingertips lighting up his nerves and sending his thoughts careening.
“Okay?” Patrick murmurs. His hand is on Nathaniel’s shoulder, heavy and warm through the thin layer of cotton.
“Okay,” Nathaniel says. Patrick leans in. His lips are soft and his beard is scratchy. He tastes like whiskey and bitters. They’re barely touching. It’s the first kiss Nathaniel’s ever wanted, and they both know it.
Patrick pulls away, but keeps his hand on Nathaniel’s shoulder, his thumb moving back and forth, soothing.
“Thank you,” Nathaniel says.
Patrick snorts, and whatever tension was snapping between them breaks. “Any time, happy to help.”
They get ready for bed the same way they have for the past three months, as if the kiss hadn’t happened, as if it didn’t matter, except when Patrick says good night, he reaches for Nathaniel’s hand and gives it a squeeze.