16 #3
“For the past ten years, maybe fifteen years, at least,” Patrick says. “When I was in high school, there was an article in the paper about how this area was filled with undesirables, and I knew what that meant”—he points both thumbs at himself—“so I got on the train as soon as school let out.”
“Didn’t waste any time.”
“It said something about how ‘experts’ agree that homosexuality has increased in the area, and I wasn’t going to argue with experts.”
“You’re a reasonable man,” Nathaniel agrees.
“The article went on and on about men in tight pants and makeup and I swear to god no travel agency has ever done a better job of selling a place. They practically gave the exact address—which entrance to which subway stop—where you could find the highest concentration of undesirables. It was like a treasure map.”
Nathaniel laughs, bright and easy. After this morning it feels like a miracle. “What happened?”
“There must have been ten other men who read the same article. It was like the gay Bat Signal. We were all looking at one another and trying to find some degeneracy and I wound up getting picked up by one of the other tourists.” It’s a wonder nobody got arrested.
The whole neighborhood must have been swarming with cops.
The man who picked him up told him about a bar on Charles Street.
A few weeks later, Patrick got back on the train after finishing his homework on a Friday afternoon.
He went to that bar, got arrested in a raid, was handcuffed and booked, and when he called his aunt and uncle to bail him out, they said he’d made his bed and could sleep in it.
He’d just turned eighteen. He’s about to tell some version of that story to Nathaniel, but Nathaniel speaks first.
“It’s like what Viv was saying about Whitman,” Nathaniel says. “He was searching for other queer men. It’s all over his poems. What’s the line—I wonder if other men have these feelings?”
Patrick stares at him. The line is something like I am ashamed—but it is useless—I am what I am . And then Hours of my torment—I wonder if other men ever have the like, out of the like feelings. It’s a poem about heartbreak, but specifically and recognizably queer heartbreak.
“He thought Shakespeare was queer,” Nathaniel goes on. “And he wanted people to look back and remember that he loved men. It’s all the same thing. He was always looking, just like you were looking.”
Nobody falls in love in a diner, accompanied by the smell of fake maple syrup and the chatter of tired prostitutes. And maybe Patrick hasn’t, either. Maybe it happened weeks ago, and he’s only noticing now. There’s nothing new in his heart, but now it has a name.
“What,” Nathaniel says, when a minute passes and Patrick hasn’t said anything, “I do pay attention when you talk. And I read the things you leave around the shop.”
“I know,” Patrick says. “I just wasn’t expecting you to draw a straight line from Shakespeare to me getting blown in the pizzeria across the street.”
Nathaniel looks over his shoulder, like he needs to catch a glimpse of this pizzeria, this landmark of queer existence. Patrick starts to laugh. He muffles it in his paper napkin.
“It isn’t there anymore,” Patrick manages.
“They should put up a plaque,” Nathaniel says, and that sets them both off.
“Come on,” Patrick says after they’ve gotten themselves together and Nathaniel tosses a five-dollar bill on the table. “There’s something else I want to show you.”
Around the corner is a sort of five-and-dime, only it sells dirty magazines and has condoms that aren’t even behind the counter. There are also racks and racks of pulp paperbacks.
“In the back,” Patrick says, leading the way.
“Ha. I knew it.” There’s a spinner rack of gay pulp fiction.
One’s called Gay Cruise , the cover featuring an uncharacteristic number of fully clothed men.
Gay Whore has significantly less clothing on the cover.
There are several others, all obviously gay and obviously pornographic.
“I can’t believe these exist,” Nathaniel breathes, almost starry-eyed at the sight of so much lurid gay smut. It’s two of his favorite things: paperback novels and—Patrick’s starting to realize—a touch of seediness. More than a touch, in this instance.
“You can get them at a couple drugstores in our neighborhood,” Patrick says, preening a little that he got this right, that Nathaniel likes this as much as Patrick thought he would. “But here—”
“You can’t beat the ambiance,” Nathaniel agrees.
“Exactly. They’re not my cup of tea—some are violent, and you can’t tell from the cover what you’re going to get—but I’m going to buy some for Luke.
He loves them.” Realizing that it might sound strange to send pornography across the country to his ex-boyfriend, he adds, “I don’t know if he can get the same books in California. ”
They both yawn all the way home, and yawn some more as Patrick lets them into the building.
“What if I don’t brush my teeth?” Patrick asks, stumbling toward his bedroom.
Nathaniel redirects him toward the bathroom. “Don’t get cavities.”
“Hey, Patrick,” Nathaniel says when he’s done brushing his own teeth, “Thanks. That was fun.”
“And educational?”
“Of course.” His gaze drops to Patrick’s mouth, and Patrick catches his breath, suddenly wide awake.
He’s been waiting for the next time, letting the anticipation simmer every time Nathaniel brushes his shoulder or holds eye contact.
But, not wanting to push, he’s been waiting for Nathaniel take the lead.
They’re standing awfully close, close enough that you start to notice all the places your hands aren’t.
You spend the vast majority of your life with no doubts as to where your hands belong, but put someone less than a foot away from you and the fact that at least one of your hands isn’t on that person’s body becomes a glaring omission.
At least that’s how it feels for Patrick.
And for Nathaniel, too, apparently, because he puts a hand on Patrick’s hip. It’s feather light, not reeling him in, not doing much of anything except resting there. That’s as much of a green light as Patrick needs.
Their lips meet in the cautious way that Patrick’s been expecting, but before now Nathaniel has kept his hands to the same places he might touch Patrick even if they weren’t kissing: his arms, his shoulders, maybe his back.
Now, his fingertips are on Patrick’s jaw, his cheek; he’s feeling Patrick’s beard.
Patrick lets his own hands land on Nathaniel’s waist. His fingers brush the bare skin between the hem of his t-shirt and the waist of his pajama pants.
When Nathaniel draws in a breath, Patrick feels it on his own lips.
This time, Nathaniel kisses back. He kisses the way he does everything else: thorough and precise. It feels like he’s inventing the concept of kissing from scratch.
Patrick tries remind himself that Nathaniel is figuring things out. Patrick happens to be the person who’s around to figure things out with. But then he remembers the way Nathaniel had held on to him that morning after the break-in, the way he’d kissed Patrick’s knuckles.
The kiss is soft and slow, worryingly tender, a kiss under a yellow porch light at the end of a date. It’s a kiss by the luggage carousel, after someone’s finally come back. It’s the sort of kiss Patrick has always known is for other people.
* * *
Mrs. Kaplan comes back a few days later to inspect the work the glazier did on the front window and the glass case.
“Good as new,” she says as she surveys the shop: books back where they belong, window repaired, new typewriter on Patrick’s desk.
“Oh, isn’t this nice.” She picks up the new Rolodex.
The old one was cracked beyond repair when the cash register landed on it.
Susan bought a new one, made of sturdy metal, and transferred all Patrick’s addresses, rewriting the cards that were torn or crumpled.
That morning he’d looked up the address of a Thomas Wolfe collector to send them a quote on a fine first of Look Homeward, Angel , only to find their address written out in Susan’s handwriting.
It’ll be strange, months from now, years from now, to come across her loopy scrawl, unchanged since the seventh grade.
Everyone who’s worked in the shop has left their trace.
On the flyleaf of some of the older stock, the price is written in an unfamiliar hand that must have belonged to Mr. Kaplan.
It was Gary, the book scout, who decided fiction had to be organized by period, and now Patrick wouldn’t be able to find anything if they adopted a more sensible strategy.
Laura, a girl who stayed with Mrs. Kaplan for a few weeks in 1965, used random pieces of paper to level all the bookcases so they’d stop wobbling on the uneven floors; sometimes he’ll come across some playing cards or a folded envelope and think of her as he shoves it back into place.
People come; people go. Patrick knows this.
He doesn’t like to think of a time when Susan’s handwriting will be her only presence in the shop.
When Nathaniel goes, there won’t be a single corner of the shop that Patrick can stand to look at.
Mrs. Kaplan stays long enough to have Chinese takeout with them for dinner. It’s the third time that week they’ve had Chinese food. Patrick is starting to worry that someone in this household will have to learn to cook.
It’s dark, so Patrick drives Mrs. Kaplan back home. “You haven’t sent me anyone in a while.” He doesn’t mean to sound so petulant.
“I think you have your hands full,” Mrs. Kaplan says. “Nathaniel’s settling in well?” She asked him the same question months ago.
“He’s great.” It’s the same answer he gave the last time she asked.
She’s quiet for a moment, the only sound the echoey thrum of traffic in the Queens Midtown Tunnel. He knows it’s a tactic but he falls for it every time.
“I don’t know what we’d have done without him. He’s good with Eleanor,” Patrick goes on. “And Susan.”
“And you?” she asks.
He can’t tell whether she means anything by it.
She’s always known about him. It was Mrs. Kaplan who bailed him out of jail.
Another man who’d been caught in the raid had been talking to Patrick in the cell, trying to calm him down.
He’d used his phone call to get in touch with Mrs. Kaplan and asked her to bail Patrick out too.
Last Patrick heard, he was working in a secondhand bookstore in Tucson.
As soon as Patrick started working for Mrs. Kaplan, she started dropping pointed references to “people like that” who she’d known over the years, as if she were giving him her credentials: gay book collectors, lesbian vaudeville stars, her nephew Roger in Wilmington and that nice man he lives with.
Patrick had been—well, mostly he’d been mortified, but he’d appreciated the sentiment.
At a traffic light he slants her a look that he hopes is sufficiently severe, and she beams innocently back at him.
“Where’d you find him?” Patrick asks. At this point, he’s all too aware that no answer she gives will change anything.
“Rude,” she says, with no heat in it. “Like he’s a penny I picked up off the sidewalk.” She turns on the radio and pretends to be fascinated by the Mets game.
“Do you even know his last name?”
“Why, it’s Smith,” she says, not particularly bothering to make it sound like anything other than bullshit. “Does it matter?”
“I don’t even know him. I don’t know anything about him. But I—” He swallows and decides to hell with it . “I’m in pretty deep, I think.”
“I knew Abe for two months before we got married. My parents liked him, he had steady work, and he made me laugh. Did I know him? Maybe not. Did I love him? Who knows. I loved him for the next forty years, though, I can tell you that much.” She shrugs.
“Knowing someone isn’t the same as knowing facts. ”
Patrick can’t imagine what it’s like to meet someone and decide you’re going to trust them for the rest of your life.
“He isn’t being honest,” Patrick says. Dishonesty’s always made his skin crawl, and Mrs. Kaplan knows it.
“You don’t seem to care.”
He groans, because she’s right. That’s the worst part. He’s always relied on that distaste for bullshit to keep him safe from all the frauds; it’s his own personal burglar alarm and for some reason Nathaniel isn’t tripping the wire.
Patrick sees Mrs. Kaplan inside, waves away her offer of money for cab fare home but takes a jar of chicken soup.
He leaves her with three books: a du Maurier that Nathaniel recommended, Patrick’s own copy of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America , and a paperback mystery about a literature professor who solves murders.
“Nathaniel came into the shop after getting mugged,” Mrs. Kaplan says as Patrick’s getting ready to head out the door. “I think you were at an estate sale. End of January.”
When he gets home, it’s late enough that he expects Nathaniel to be asleep, but the apartment’s empty. At Susan’s door, he can hear the muffled sounds of a television. He isn’t sure whether to knock or let himself in, so he knocks lightly before turning his key in the lock.
They’re on the couch, Nathaniel’s head on Susan’s shoulder, his eyes shut and his mouth half open. Eleanor’s on Susan’s lap, also asleep.
“Turn the TV off,” Susan whispers. “I’m trapped.”
Patrick puts the jar of soup into Susan’s refrigerator, then turns the dial until the television clicks off.
“Come here,” she says, patting the sofa cushion. “Closer. Jeez, Patrick, I took a shower and everything, get over here.”
He does as he’s told, until Susan’s arm is around him, pulling him into a one-armed hug, Eleanor between them. “This is platonic cuddling,” she whispers, then tightens her arm when he tries to pull away. “We used to do this.”
They’d stopped, maybe because she’d gotten serious with Michael and it was just too weird, maybe because Patrick got out of the habit of touching anybody except the men he brought home.
Loving Susan is easy and obvious, plain in a way that isn’t covered by friend or family and made sister-in-law feel like an inside joke.
Maybe she got grandfathered in before he forgot how to care about people—not just care for them with bus tickets and sandwiches, but care about them in a way that feels like putting cash on a card table.
“So loud,” Nathaniel mutters from Susan’s other side. “Harridan.” Patrick feels like he’s waiting for the roulette wheel to stop spinning, his heart in his throat, his wallet empty; it isn’t even a new feeling, where Nathaniel is concerned.
“Stop thinking,” Susan says. “You aren’t any good at it.” He kisses the top of her head. She smells like baby formula and incense. So does he, probably. When he slides his arms around her, her chin digs into his shoulder and her hair gets in his mouth, just like it always did.