15
“Well, that’s almost a set,” Susan says. “Ten songs.”
Nathaniel looks up from where he’s tuning his violin. “A set?”
“We could play somewhere. A coffeehouse, or that place we went to the other night.”
When Susan takes Nathaniel out to listen to music, she wears what she calls librarian drag—one of Patrick’s cardigans and her hair in a bun, as if she seriously thinks people won’t notice Suzie Larkin in the audience of a venue where she herself played only a few years earlier.
Patrick usually stays home with Eleanor, waiting up for them on the new sofa that’s in the back of the shop next to the ratty armchair.
Susan says she found the sofa on Christopher Street, but he thinks that might only be true in the sense that she found it in a store located on Christopher Street.
It doesn’t smell like furniture you find on the street.
Sometimes, though, they pay Hector and Iris to babysit and Patrick lets himself get coaxed into coming along.
He doesn’t really care about the music, but there’s something quaint about Nathaniel holding the door for Susan, and Susan letting Nathaniel order her drinks.
That’s the real drag they’re doing, this playacting at courtship.
There’s a healthy coating of irony, even camp, over the whole performance.
Susan tolerated none of this from any of the men she dated, including Michael, but with Nathaniel they both know it’s make-believe.
“Do I want to play music in a coffeehouse,” Nathaniel repeats now, sounding baffled. Patrick had wondered if there was a goal to Susan’s songwriting this spring, or if she was whiling away the time.
“It wouldn’t have to be a big production,” Susan says. “I could call the owner and ask if they’d let us play a few songs. No big deal, but you can say no.”
“Let me think about it.”
“It might not be safe,” Patrick says. “You don’t have papers,” he tells Nathaniel.
“Doesn’t he need a cabaret card?” he asks Susan.
He remembers this being a giant pain in the ass for Susan and a lot of other musicians; the city fingerprints performers and might not issue a card to anyone with a record.
There’s also a slate of unevenly enforced rules about whether dancing is allowed at places with liquor licenses.
The point, according to Susan, is to make it difficult for jazz musicians—specifically Black jazz musicians—to make a living.
“The law changed last year,” she says. “Nathaniel won’t need a card. Venues still need a permit, but performers don’t.”
Later, Patrick finds Susan while Nathaniel is at the grocery store getting a box of macaroni and cheese for dinner.
“Are we sure it’s safe for Nathaniel to do a show with you?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Because he’s hiding, right? He still asks me to make his checks out to cash.”
“Not everybody has a bank account.”
“Do you really think Nathaniel doesn’t have a bank account?” Patrick asks. “He wears penny loafers and told me to pick up a bottle of chianti the next time I pass a wine shop.” Patrick can come up with ways someone like that might fall on hard times, but not for them to stay there.
“What would he be hiding from?”
The problem is, Patrick doesn’t know.
* * *
When school gets out for the summer, Patrick starts paying Iris to work the cash register from six to closing three nights a week. Patrick swears he used to run the place single-handed, but now he’s barely getting by.
Somehow, word got out that Suzie Larkin is sometimes behind the cash register or playing the guitar in the back of the shop.
It was only a matter of time: she’s been on Ed Sullivan and her face is on the covers of record albums owned by a hell of a lot of people.
But the people who stop by to gawk at her don’t usually buy anything, so that doesn’t explain why the shop is bringing in twenty percent more this year than it did last summer.
Maybe it’s the free coffee. Maybe it’s the dog.
Maybe it’s just that Nathaniel’s better at talking to customers than Patrick ever was.
“She’s robbing you blind,” Mrs. Valdez says one night after Iris helps close the shop. “Tell me you aren’t paying that child two dollars an hour.”
“After taxes, she’s only collecting something like minimum wage.” He’s kind of proud of himself for having figured out payroll tax.
Mrs. Valdez frowns at him for a long moment. “I think you really do believe that’s how minimum wage works,” she finally says. “All right, let my daughter shake you down. It’s no skin off my back.”
Patrick isn’t letting a high school student—however responsible—run the shop alone, not in a city where businesses get held up at gunpoint practically every day of the week.
But if Susan’s in the shop, and one of Iris’s parents is upstairs, Patrick thinks it’s all right to step out for an hour or two.
“Want to go for a walk?” he asks Nathaniel.
“Only if we can stop at the barbershop.” He runs a hand through his hair. “I can’t take it anymore.” Nathaniel’s hair is long enough now to be nearly at his chin, and he fidgets with it constantly.
Patrick takes him to his own barber, who wastes no time telling Patrick he’s the one who needs a haircut. “Not today, Bill,” he says.
“You looks respectable,” Patrick says fifteen minutes later, when half of Nathaniel’s hair is all over the barbershop floor.
“That doesn’t sound like a compliment.” Nathaniel’s gaze is fixed on his reflection, as he turns his head this way and that.
He has a neat side part, honey-brown hair sweeping over his forehead and just barely reaching his collar.
Sometimes Patrick looks at Nathaniel and sees the ghost of whoever he used to be.
“I think the usual word is distinguished,” Patrick says.
“For pity’s sake, you can call me distinguished when I turn forty, which isn’t for another two months, thank you very much.” Nathaniel gets to his feet, pays the barber, dusts some hair off his trousers, and heads out to the street.
“The other word is pretty,” Patrick says, once the barber shop door is shut behind them. He nearly said handsome, which would have been accurate, but less precise, and a lot less loaded.
“I think that expired ten years ago,” Nathaniel says.
“No, I don’t think it did.”
Nathaniel runs a hand through his hair. “It’s still longer than I used to keep it.”
“We just need to get you some beads and a scarf to tie around your head and you’ll be a regular hippie.”
Patrick didn’t have any particular destination in mind, but now he’s thinking of strands of beads and scarves with psychedelic prints.
“Let’s go to St. Marks Place.” The other day, Susan and Nathaniel went to the Museum of Modern Art.
This, Patrick figures, will be a nice counterbalance, culturally speaking.
To get there, they walk past Washington Square Park, which is somewhat depopulated now that the college kids are home for the summer.
There are still grass smoking hippies and folk singers, but an equal number of old men playing chess, children balancing on the edge of the fountain, and middle-aged couples walking their dogs.
“The old store was a few blocks up from here,” Patrick says once they’ve reached Astor Place.
“Show me.”
There used to be dozens of secondhand bookstores up and down Fourth Avenue between Union Square and Astor Place. Squinting, Patrick can only make out a few that have held on.
Now an art gallery is on the ground floor of the old building, and in an upstairs window is a sign for an employment agency. Next door, the windows are soaped up.
“I swear it never got above sixty degrees all winter, and Mrs. Kaplan used to keep the upstairs lights off unless a customer wanted to go up there. The new place is a stately pleasure dome.”
There’s nothing to look at, but Patrick doesn’t move.
This old shop is the first place Patrick felt safe.
They’d moved everything that mattered to Jones Street, but when he looks inside the shop window, he can imagine that he’s seeing the three-legged stool where he sat while Mrs. Kaplan stitched him up like there was nothing unusual about it.
He’d been nearly delirious with hunger and beside himself with shame.
The future that had once been laid out neatly in front of him was nothing but a gaping pit, and Mrs. Kaplan chattered about the best deli for corned beef and asked him what he liked to read.
All he could think was that this must be what it was like to have a grandmother.
They head back toward St. Marks, and it’s like they’ve stepped into another dimension.
Gathered on stoops and in clusters on the sidewalk are some of the same people you see in Washington Square Park: men with long hair, women in long skirts, a feeling that maybe everyone could do with a shower and a trip to the laundromat.
But there’s a harder edge here, a sense that the squalor is intentional and cultivated, that it’s something more pointed than an aesthetic designed to trouble people over thirty-five.
Washington Square is filled with hippies. These people are radicals.
Patrick glances over at Nathaniel, who isn’t looking around but is taking it in anyway; he isn’t a man who needs to stare in order to get the lay of the land.
“Want an egg cream?” Patrick asks. His first apartment was an illegal loft conversion nearby on Astor Place.
There was a dive bar on St. Marks that wasn’t exactly a gay bar but was still gay enough that cruising was a sure thing.
One night, he and the man who’d picked him up went to get an egg cream at Gem Spa.
Patrick had the sense that everyone in the place had either just committed some kind of misdemeanor or was on the way to do one.
But when he’d come back during the day, school kids and old ladies sat at the soda fountain, innocently drinking milkshakes out of straws.
“I have no idea what that is,” Nathaniel says, probably because they don’t have egg creams anywhere other than soda fountains in New York.
“It’s like a milkshake but without milk or ice cream, and its carbonated.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Deadly.”
Near the cash register, there’s a rack of mimeographed pamphlets for sale.
While they’re waiting for their egg creams, Nathaniel begins picking up the pamphlets and examining them.
Over his shoulder, Patrick sees that they aren’t pamphlets, but underground newspapers and zines that range from anti-war manifestos to collections of poetry.
Susan once mailed him a zine put out by San Francisco hustlers and transsexuals.
Patrick was sure they’d both get arrested for breaking federal obscenity laws, but he’d read that thing from cover to cover and then over again before passing it on to Jerome.
Nathaniel slides a few coins across the counter and chooses a few zines apparently at random, then tucks them under his arm while he bemusedly sips his egg cream.
It isn’t a date—Patrick doesn’t know how it could be, when they do this kind of thing all the time.
It had been like this during the baseball game, too, like there’s something bubbling between them.
He feels like that all the time, but maybe bringing that sensation outside and into the light of day reveals it as something worth noticing, something that adds up to more than a few kisses.
They take their time walking home. It’s midsummer, and the sun’s still out. Their hands brush with every stride.
* * *
Before this year, Patrick would wake up early nearly every Saturday morning to scour estate sales.
He checked the classifieds in the Times and some of the downstate newspapers, then borrowed Mrs. Kaplan’s station wagon in case he found more books than he could carry home.
If he played his cards right, he could return her car and be back in the city to open the shop by noon.
Now that they’re settling into something like a rhythm, Patrick’s started going to sales again.
This morning he drove up to an estate sale in Dutchess County and took his time driving home, stopping at junk shops and church sales.
It’s nearly three in the afternoon when he parks the car on Jones Street.
As soon as he gets out of the car, he can hear the music. They must have left the door open to take advantage of the weather. He opens the trunk and lifts out the milk crate of books he bought that morning, trying to place the song that’s coming from the shop.
Nathaniel’s sitting at the cash register playing Susan’s old guitar, and Susan’s playing a new guitar on a beanbag chair that absolutely wasn’t there a few days ago. Eleanor’s asleep in the carriage.
When Patrick realizes what they’re playing, he nearly laughs. It’s an appallingly folksy rendition of Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made to Love Her.”
“This is terrible,” Mrs. Valdez says, walking into the shop a few minutes later. She still has on her nurse’s uniform and it looks like she’s coming home from a long shift.
“I’m passing around a petition to make them stop,” Patrick says, heading to the back of the shop to pour her a cup of coffee.
“I’ll sign it,” Mrs. Valdez says.
“So mean,” Nathaniel says, but he and Susan have a wordless conversation and start playing one of the prettier murder ballads. The dog nudges Patrick’s leg until Patrick scratches his head.
He knows it isn’t forever; he knows they’ll leave. But today he isn’t letting that fact stop him from feeling almost unfairly lucky.