19
“It’s a yes or no question,” Susan says, and Nathaniel realizes he’s been staring at the kitchen cabinets for long enough that Susan’s finished washing the bottles. Nathaniel picks up a bottle and starts to dry it. “Do you want to play a few songs at the Gaslight next week or not?”
“Are you sure you need me?”
“I’d lose at least half the spookiness without the violin.” She pulls the plug from the sink and the suds swirl down the drain. “Also, you wrote some of those songs.”
“It’s more like I was in the room while you wrote them.” Nathaniel has a realistic view of their relative contributions. He’s helped, but mainly he does what Susan tells him.
Susan snorts. “I’ve written plenty of songs in the same room as useless people and that wasn’t what we were doing. What if I made a record? What if we made a record? Would you want to do that?”
“Yes,” Nathaniel says, surprised by how easily that answer came. Being a folk musician—or whatever it is Susan and he are doing—isn’t exactly his life’s ambition. But it’s not like his ambitions have done him any good. Doing this, he’s useful to Susan and he’s having fun.
She puts away the bottles that Nathaniel dried. “Then play a few songs with me at the Gaslight as a dry run. You can lurk in the shadows if you’re feeling shy.”
“I’m not shy ,” Nathaniel says, and flicks her with the wet dish towel.
“Prove it.”
When Nathaniel got off the train in the wretched new Penn Station last December, he’d meant to get a hotel room, take some flowers to the graveyard, and then—there’s where things got hazy.
Maybe he’d jump out the hotel window. Maybe he’d swallow some pills.
Maybe there was some other way to take his leave from the mess he made of his life without causing too much inconvenience for the hotel maids.
He hadn’t even gotten as far as booking the hotel room.
He couldn’t leave the train station without the sudden, visceral conviction that he was going to be snatched off the street and sent to a secret prison in Panama.
Addled, he walked in the wrong direction and in short order got mugged by a couple of teenagers by the piers.
In his confused state, he’d thought they were agents sent to take him away.
When they left with only his luggage, wallet, and overcoat, he was only more befuddled.
They hadn’t even taken the file, rolled up and tucked inside his suit jacket.
Cold and frightened, he headed away from the water.
When it started to rain, he stepped into a shop that seemed safely empty.
It was a bookshop, and behind the counter was an elderly lady.
When she asked him if he needed help, Nathaniel said that of course he didn’t need help, and somehow within fifteen minutes was being bundled into Mrs. Kaplan’s station wagon and whisked off to a warm house in Queens.
His suit was ruined, but the files barely got wet.
Now he’s trying to figure out whether agreeing to perform on stage with Susan Larkin, using his own first name, is the bloodless form of suicide he was looking for all those months ago. Is he daring the agency to come and get him?
But even in his more paranoid moments, Nathaniel has to admit this makes no sense.
The CIA can’t assassinate, imprison, or otherwise neutralize every disgruntled former employee—and Nathaniel can’t be the only disgruntled former employee.
By the time he left, nearly all the analysts he knew thought the U.S.
had to get out of Vietnam—or at least would point to the intelligence and say that the war was unwinnable, which amounts to the same thing.
He knows this, just like he knows the break-in was nothing but garden variety robbery, not spies trying to get his files. Even the least competent CIA operative would have picked the lock of Patrick’s safe, but Nathaniel’s files are still there, safely tucked away behind the deed to the building.
His mind has been playing the same trick on him since December, taking his looming sense of peril and ascribing it to the likeliest villain: if Nathaniel feels hunted, and he has a file proving exactly how unscrupulous the CIA can be, then it’s only Occam’s razor to connect those two dots.
But there’s another explanation, one that’s been creeping up on him all spring and summer.
Maybe what happened to him this winter was the culmination of too many secrets, an ever widening gap between the truth and his actions, between the feelings that lurked beneath the surface and what he allowed himself to feel, between what he knew and what he wanted to believe.
Maybe reality started to feel less real because he’d lost touch with it years ago.
“So?” Susan asks. “What’s the answer?”
Nathaniel dries the last of the bottles. Maybe there’s only one way for him to sort out what, exactly, he has to be afraid of. He’s always needed evidence.
“All right,” he says. “Let’s do it.”
* * *
Patrick takes him to bed—and that’s the correct phrasing, as they’re both perfectly aware who’s doing the taking and why he’s doing it—every night for a solid week.
After a trip to the laundromat, Nathaniel folds the sheets for his own bed and puts them in the bottom drawer of the dresser in his apparently former bedroom.
“That way they don’t get dusty,” Nathaniel explains, feeling like god’s greatest idiot. Patrick likes having Nathaniel in his bed: he paws at Nathaniel for half the night, then wakes up and smiles like a dope. Even the CIA could make sense of this fact pattern.
“Sensible,” Patrick agrees, looking far too amused, damn him.
Then he backs Nathaniel into a wall and drops to his knees.
The practiced efficiency with which he accomplishes this and the extent to which he obviously loves it are tangled up with Nathaniel’s pleasure, as much a part of it as the feel of Patrick’s mouth, the sight of him.
Nathaniel spent half his life fighting his body on this one basic matter and the experience of not fighting it is a dizzying rush—it’s releasing the brakes at the top of a hill, letting gravity and momentum and the inexorable forces of nature do their job. It’s easy .
This is why he never used to let himself think about it, why he never let himself imagine the scratch of a man’s beard on the inside of his thigh, the heat of a man throbbing in his hand: he knew he was susceptible.
He was right. He could have measured the path of the last six months in the ever-collapsing distance between plain imagination and sweaty desperation.
“Sleeping in your bed,” Nathaniel says, managing, with some effort, to sound passably sane, “would make it easier for you to fuck me.”
Patrick sits back on his heels and Nathaniel wants to beg him not to stop, but he has an agenda here.
“You’d want that?” Patrick asks, sounding more suspicious than intrigued. And then, after studying Nathaniel’s face and whatever he sees there, “You want that.”
“Jerome seems to think you’re good at it.”
Patrick gets to his feet but he keeps his hand in Nathaniel’s jeans. “Jerome wouldn’t know.”
Nathaniel swallows. “He had all kinds of flattering things to say.”
“I mean, sure, but he likes to be on top, so.”
The image that flashes in front of Nathaniel’s eyes makes him feel like he might black out. What if Jerome was wearing false eyelashes? Lipstick? A dress? Nathaniel might not survive. “I see,” he says.
Patrick looks like he’s on the verge of laughing but he doesn’t stop stroking Nathaniel. “We can do it either way. Or neither way.”
Nathaniel doesn’t have any answer to that, but Patrick must not expect one, because he pushes Nathaniel onto the bare mattress—he should never have put the sheets away, more fool him—and pulls his clothes off.
They don’t do anything they haven’t done before, not really, but Patrick’s hands linger in new places, and he says things like “Can I” and “Will you let me,” hushed and wondering, like he’s waiting for an answer.
* * *
The night before the gig, Nathaniel wakes up at three in the morning, the building silent around him except for the muted ticking of Patrick’s alarm clock.
He can’t remember the last time he slept through the night, but he must have been a child, because the pattern of repeatedly waking, ruminating, and either falling back asleep or staring into the darkness is the only way he knows to pass a night.
He sleeps just as terribly in Patrick’s bed, but now when he wakes he has a momentary thrum of contentment to know that Patrick is there, inches away, warm and real. And then, guilt: at this point, not telling Patrick is the same as deceiving him, but Nathaniel can’t bring himself to do it.
He slips out of bed and goes down to the shop. Out of habit, he starts tidying up the receipts and stray bits of paper near the cash register. It’s mostly a collection of notes from Iris to Patrick and back again: we’re out of stamps, Jerome is coming tomorrow at three, I found the gas bill.
Iris doodles on the edges of her notes, distinctive floral swirls that Nathaniel also finds strewn across her math homework, a stroke of whimsy that some bitter and rotten part of Nathaniel wants to tell her to crush underfoot.
You aren’t a man and you aren’t white , he imagines telling her.
You need to make sure you fit the mold in every other way.
But he doesn’t need to tell her that. Not because it isn’t true—it’s sickeningly true, even in 1968—but because Iris already knows.
She can make her own choices. He puts the notes in a neat stack on Patrick’s desk.
Upstairs in the safe, the photocopied files are still hidden in the back. If something happens to him, Patrick will eventually find them, but that could be years from now, and he wouldn’t even necessarily connect those pages with Nathaniel. Why would he? He wouldn’t know what to do with them.
But Nathaniel doesn’t know what to do with them either.
When he was making those copies—half past five, telling his secretary she might as well go home, he could manage the Xerox machine on his own, thanks—he was only thinking that he needed proof.
But he hadn’t thought about who, exactly, he’d be proving it to, or even what he’d be proving.
He loads a clean sheet of letter paper into the typewriter and types out everything he knows about the CIA’s surveillance program and everything else he suspected.
The typewriter is loud in the nighttime hush, and part of him wishes that Patrick would wake up and ask him what he was doing.
But Patrick, who’s as miserable a sleeper as Nathaniel, chooses tonight to sleep like the dead.
Written out, it’s as much an indictment of Nathaniel as it is of the CIA: three pages of facts that Nathaniel could have inferred years earlier if he’d paid attention, if he’d been willing to see the organization for what it was.
It was his job to analyze facts, and if he’d treated what he knew about his employer as carefully as he treated intelligence about foreign enemies, he’d have known which way the wind blew as early as the Bay of Pigs.
Back upstairs, he spins the lock on the safe in the combination Patrick never bothered trying to conceal from him. He slides the typed pages into the manila envelope and puts it back into its hiding place.
Then, feeling like a burglar, he lets himself into the apartment and climbs into bed. Patrick reaches out, the way he often does in the middle of the night when Nathaniel is lying there, restless. His fingers slide under the hem of Nathaniel’s shirt, hot against his skin.
“I’m awake,” Nathaniel whispers. Patrick takes this as the invitation it unfortunately is.
* * *
“Settle down,” Susan tells Patrick on the day of the gig, when Patrick can’t stop pacing the shop. “I’ve done this hundreds of times. It’s a coffeehouse. Not Shea Stadium. Not even the Fillmore East. We’re just dropping by to play a few songs. Stop being sweaty.”
“I can stay home with Eleanor,” Patrick offers.
“Iris is babysitting,” Susan says, after she finishes rolling her eyes. “She’s thrilled to have my telephone to herself for a few hours.”
Susan wears jeans and a white oxford straight out of Nathaniel’s closet. Nathaniel, at her direction, wears jeans and a t-shirt. “It’s a small venue,” she says. “Bigger venue, bigger outfit.”
The Gaslight is a filthy, smoky basement with no ventilation and no liquor license. The walls are rough brick and the ceilings are so low Patrick nearly walks into a light. Every seat in the place is occupied, and there are people standing around the edges of the cramped room.
As soon as Susan sits on the stool at the front of the room—there’s no actual stage—you could hear a pin drop. They open with the murder ballad that they turned into a protest song. It’s catchy, and it’s angry, and the crowd eats it up.
Between songs, Susan leans toward the microphone and chats with the audience as she tunes her guitar. “This winter,” she says, “my husband died in Nha Trang. He really liked this song.” The crowd is quieter than Nathaniel would have thought possible. They launch into “Take Me Home.”
After, they’re both a little giddy. Susan goes off to talk to a couple of men who Nathaniel is sure he ought to recognize. Nathaniel makes a beeline for Patrick.
“There’s a bar upstairs, isn’t there?” Nathaniel asks.
“There sure is.”
Maybe spending the past half hour playing music that’s a giant middle finger to everything Nathaniel used to stand for has made him brave.
He straightens Patrick’s collar, letting his knuckles brush against Patrick’s neck.
He leaves his hands there, resting on Patrick’s shoulders for a moment. “How about you buy me a drink.”