20
At the sound of his name, Nathaniel pries open his eyes, expecting to find Patrick on the other side of the bed. But when he reaches out, Patrick’s side of the bed is empty, the sheets cold.
“Sorry to wake you up,” Patrick says from the doorway, “but Maud Dempsey died. I need to go to uptown.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Nathaniel says, trying to remember if he’s supposed to know who Maud Dempsey is. He sits up, and Patrick hands him a cup of coffee.
“I never met her. She was a Whitman collector. She’s been collecting since Whitman was alive. Her lawyer just called. I want to see if it’s worth making an offer for the lot. I could use a second set of hands, if you’re interested.”
Nathaniel could not be less interested in Whitman collections, but Patrick looks like he’s about to vibrate out of his skin. “Of course.”
“Wear professional drag.”
Nathaniel finally notices what Patrick’s wearing: a shirt, a tie, and pants that aren’t jeans. He does a double take. Patrick doesn’t even wear a tie to book auctions.
“Where are we going?” Nathaniel asks.
“Sutton Place. 56th Street, maybe 60th—something like that—all the way on the East Side.”
Nathaniel sighs. Manhattan has such a nice, sensible grid system with predictable numbering, but at the edges it all unravels and you never know where you are. The entire Village is an exercise in frustration. Jones Street is a single block long, which should be illegal.
“I can open the store at ten,” Susan says when they run into her on the stairs. Patrick thanks her, then goes back up a few steps to kiss Eleanor. Nathaniel catches Susan’s eye and doesn’t even care that she can tell how smitten he is.
“Look,” Patrick says when they’re on the subway.
“I wasn’t looking forward to her death or anything, but I’ve definitely been looking forward to getting a look at her books, and so have a whole lot of other booksellers and collectors.
” And the lawyer thought to call him first, is what Patrick isn’t saying.
He wipes his hands on his trousers, clearly nervous.
In the lobby of the apartment building, Nathaniel sticks close to Patrick in a way he hasn’t done in a while, like maybe proximity will soothe Patrick’s nerves as well as it soothes Nathaniel’s.
“Ten full stories of millionaires,” Patrick mutters. It’s the sort of building where the lobby has a golden chandelier and marble floors, and things seem to sparkle without any clear light source. The elevator operator has gold braid epaulets.
When Patrick introduces himself to the woman who answers the door—presumably someone from the lawyer’s office—she flicks a skeptical glance over both of them, finishing up with the most infinitesimal of raised eyebrows at Patrick.
She’s about forty, wearing a black dress, three strands of pearls, and a little hat.
Nathaniel, in his thrift store clothes, feels like a peasant.
He’s met hundreds of women of this mold and even more of her male counterpart. A year ago he was her male counterpart.
“She thinks I’m your kept man,” Nathaniel whispers when they’re alone in the library, a high-ceilinged room with a rolling ladder.
Patrick coughs to cover up his laugh. “I think it’s the other way around. The real substance of the insult was something along the lines of ‘you both seem pretty homosexual to me.’”
“How does she know?” Nathaniel, at this point, knows that he can seem gay when he lets it happen. But that’s an affect he can put on and off as he pleases, like Jerome swipes on his lipstick and wipes it off.
“I, well.” Patrick adopts his most innocent expression.
“Oh for heaven’s sake, who did you fuck this time?”
Patrick attempts again to cover a laugh with a cough. “I spent a weekend with Maud Dempsey’s grandson on Fire Island in 1965 after he stopped by the store to buy a present for his grandmother.”
“You fucked the next of kin,” Nathaniel says. “Naturally.” He’s pleased to note that Patrick seems much less nervous now than he had in the elevator.
“Here, look at this,” Patrick says a few minutes later, holding a leather-bound Leaves of Grass .
Nathaniel is underwhelmed. At any given moment, there are never any fewer than a dozen copies of Leaves of Grass in stock.
But sometimes a collector will write in, asking for a particular volume—a certain year, a specific binding—and Patrick will sell it to them for a sum so staggering that it keeps the shop in the black for a month or more, so Nathaniel is well aware that these volumes are precious to the right people, however unremarkable they seem to him.
“Is it a first edition?”
“First of all, it’s enormously sweet that you think I’d be let within five city blocks of an actual 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass.
” By now, Nathaniel knows this was barely more than a pamphlet of twelve poems, typeset by Whitman himself.
Whitman added to the collection throughout his life.
Patrick points at the flyleaf. “It’s a first edition of the 1881 edition.
” On the fragile ivory paper, there’s a handwritten label with a man’s name and the words from the author . “I can’t make out the handwriting.”
“Looks like C.F. Blaylock.”
“Thanks. Obviously, someone could have pasted this label on at any time, but—”
“My grandmother said she bought it from a gentleman in New Jersey who used to dine with Whitman,” says the woman who’d let them into the apartment—apparently not from the lawyer’s office, then. “That’s how she got the letters, too.”
“I’d love to see these letters,” Patrick says.
By the time they leave, Patrick’s written a check for an indecent amount of money, but which he says he’ll make back from the sale of that one book alone.
Patrick arranges to have most of the books and letters delivered, but he insists on taking home the inscribed edition himself.
“You’re a little kid carrying her new doll home from the toy store,” Nathaniel tells him in the cab, because apparently this book is too good for subways.
He puts his hand on Patrick’s knee, too low for the cabbie to see in the rearview mirror.
“You’re still smiling. It looks good on you.
” He pulls his hand back, but only after a moment.
Patrick opens the book gingerly. “Look, you can’t tell me that he writes this and every literate gay man in the country doesn’t seek him out,” he says, as if they’re continuing some earlier conversation.
“At that point you effectively have a public homosexual for the first time in American history.”
Nathaniel doesn’t argue. He knows what’s coming next, because he’s heard it all before, but instead of being bored, he’s charmed; it’s an old song, and knowing the tune doesn’t make it any less worth listening to.
“Besides,” Patrick says, turning pages to find the engraving of Whitman that’s in virtually every edition. “I mean, seriously.”
In this engraving, Whitman has on a shirt that’s open at the neck, with what might be a glimpse of chest hair if you really put your imagination to work.
No necktie, no waistcoat, no jacket. One hand is on his hip and the other is jammed in his trouser pocket.
He has a beard and a rakishly tilted hat and an expression that Nathaniel sometimes sees directed at Patrick when they’re walking down Christopher Street.
“Let’s say you’re a queer man in 1855,” Patrick whispers, so the cabbie can’t hear him over the man on the radio who’s shouting about draft dodgers. “And you see this man’s picture in a book of fantastically gay poetry. You’re writing him a letter, right? You’re angling to meet him. You’re—”
“You’re horny for Walt Whitman.”
Patrick sinks lower in the cab seat, like maybe that’ll hide that fact that he’s blushing. “You shouldn’t say things like that.”
“What? You mean facts?”
“He wasn’t perfect,” Patrick says. “I mean, the things he said about—”
Nathaniel leans back against the vinyl seat and lets Patrick’s lecture wash over him.
When they get back to the shop, they find Susan at the cash register and Eleanor in her lap. “Wow,” she says, glancing between them. “Things went well, I’m guessing?”
“He found a book his boyfriend touched ,” Nathaniel says. They both start cackling, and Eleanor joins in. That’s a new trick of hers.
Patrick spends the rest of the day restless, pacing the shop and apparently unable to spend more than two minutes at a time at his desk.
“I will do whatever you want,” Nathaniel tells Susan, his voice low, “if you take over the shop and mind the baby for the next two hours.”
“Sure. Two hours,” Susan says. “Wow, ambitious.”
“What—no, you creep, I was going to take him out for dinner.” But now that he’s thinking about it, they can get dinner later. Susan really is a genius. “Come on,” he tells Patrick, pulling him toward the stairs. “It’s not like you’re getting any work done.”
“Where are we—oh.”
He steers Patrick toward the bedroom, pausing only to switch on the record player—he likes the privacy of an added layer of sound. There’s a Rolling Stones album on the turntable—not what Nathaniel would have chosen, but now is not the time to be picky.
Once Patrick is on the bed, Nathaniel straddles his lap.
Usually, Nathaniel wants the weight of Patrick on top of him, wants the newness of it.
It hasn’t escaped his attention, though, that Patrick likes when Nathaniel pushes him around a little.
And why shouldn’t he—Patrick likes it when Nathaniel pushes him around, figuratively, in every other context.
Nathaniel can take turns; Nathaniel can be generous.
Patrick loosened his tie and undid the top button of his shirt as soon as they left Maud Dempsey’s apartment.
Nathaniel presses his mouth to the exposed V at his collar and breathes in the scent of him, then starts working off Patrick’s clothes.
When he takes his own clothes off, his skin prickles with the awareness of Patrick’s gaze on him. He makes himself slow down.