20 #2
Maybe there will always be a voice in his head telling him that it’s wrong; maybe there will always be an answering voice that sounds a lot like Patrick saying “you want this.” If those two voices coexist for the rest of his life, that’ll be good enough.
Maybe he doesn’t need to get all the psychic shrapnel out of his mind, just find a way to live with it.
While they’re kissing, Patrick reaches up to the headboard to steady them, and Nathaniel has to stop what he’s doing.
He’s seen Patrick’s arms dozens of times.
He’s had his hands on them; he’s had his mouth on them.
They’re thick and they’re muscled and they feature in most of Nathaniel’s more pornographic imaginings.
He knows every contour of them by heart.
But something about Patrick reaching over his head and holding the rail of the headboard lights a fuse in Nathaniel’s belly.
“Can you do that again?” Nathaniel asks.
Patrick raises his eyebrows, but he wraps his hand around the rail. It just does something to the muscles in his biceps, Nathaniel supposes. Then Patrick does it with his other arm, too. Nathaniel’s face must show exactly what he’s thinking, because Patrick grins and says, “Oh really ?”
Nathaniel’s mouth is dry. “You look good like this.”
“You could tie me up,” Patrick offers, easy as anything. He’s probably done it before. He’s probably done it in this bed. Nathaniel might pass out.
“I don’t want that,” he says. “I just want you to stay like that for a minute.” He touches Patrick’s chest, then trails his hand down Patrick’s stomach, along hair and sweat and warm skin.
When he wraps his hand around Patrick, he keeps an eye on Patrick’s face and his arms and—Christ. He doesn’t know why this image is working for him.
He keeps his grip loose, probably annoyingly so.
Patrick strains a little, his arms flexing, putting on a show: he knows exactly what he’s doing.
Nathaniel knows by now what Patrick looks like when he’s enjoying himself, and right now Patrick is taut with desire.
He bends his head and takes him into his mouth, not something he’s done before.
Patrick makes a noise that he might have muffled in his forearm or the sheets if he could.
The moment feels weighted with everything Nathaniel isn’t supposed to want and isn’t supposed to be.
Somehow, in the syrupy logic that belongs to warm sheets and fading sunlight, that old wrongness doesn’t quite become right, but it finds a home here in the same way that Nathaniel did.
* * *
“I had no idea you could cook,” Nathaniel says. “You’ve been holding out on us.”
“It’s just a stir fry,” Susan says. “It’s tofu and broccoli with some Minute Rice. Calm down. I was going to riot if I had to eat another night of takeout.”
Nathaniel has never had tofu, and had vaguely supposed it to be an ingredient you succumbed to only after prolonged exposure to drugs and radical politics, but what have the last six months of Nathaniel’s life been if not prolonged exposure to drugs and radical politics?
It tastes like meat from the future. He helps himself to seconds.
“The two of you have to start cooking,” Susan says. “Eleanor can’t grow up eating nothing but takeout except for when I cook. Think about it.”
“We have to do it for feminism,” Patrick concedes.
“I clean,” Nathaniel says. “Patrick does the laundry.”
“Put all of us together and we’re one adequate housewife,” Patrick says.
“We just need a dad to mow the lawn,” Susan says.
Nathaniel nearly points out that the courtyard in the back is a true health hazard, but he’s not volunteering to be dad.
The next day, Nathaniel pulls a cookbook off the shelf of books that Patrick always swears he can’t remember buying.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking looks like it’s for people who’ve successfully managed something more involved than toast. The Joy of Cooking isn’t much better.
Finally, he pulls down a spiral bound, cheaply printed affair called Simple Dinners for New Brides .
Each of the recipes calls for fewer than six ingredients and the instructions are written so a not particularly bright eight-year-old could follow them. Perfect.
He goes to the grocery store and buys a chicken, some potatoes, and a bunch of carrots, then has to go back out to a hellish store on Fourteenth Street when it turns out Susan doesn’t have a big enough pan.
He doesn’t especially want to roast a chicken, but he also doesn’t want to scour the bathroom and he does that when the alternative is Eleanor taking a bath in a filthy tub.
It doesn’t taste bad. It doesn’t taste good, either, but Nathaniel thinks he can improve on it with some effort. Patrick and Susan seem impressed, at least.
A few days later, Nathaniel opens the same cookbooks and uses index cards to mark a few promising recipes that he thinks even Patrick can’t mangle. He finds Susan at the cash register reading a magazine.
“Where’s Patrick?”
She turns a page and doesn’t look up. “Oh, it’s a warm day, so I guess he’s out buying ice cream cones for hobos.”
“You’re a terrible person,” Nathaniel says, but he’s laughing.
“Come on, you know he’s done it at least once.” Her eyes are lit up with trouble. “Bet you five dollars.”
“I don’t think we’re supposed to say hobo.”
“Please. Anyway, Patrick took Eleanor to the doctor.”
Nathaniel feels like something icy is dripping down his spine. “Is she all right?”
“What? Of course. She needs to get measured and weighed and all that.”
“And you sent her with Patrick.”
She crosses her arms over her chest. “Are you saying I should have taken her myself?”
“No, settle down. It’s good, that’s all.”
“It’s good,” she repeats.
It’s none of Nathaniel’s business to ask whether she and Patrick have had any kind of conversation about what their future will look like.
But he doesn’t see anybody else around here who’s about to broach the topic, so it’s up to him.
“Her first day of kindergarten, he’ll need to be there, you understand that, right?
” He thinks of all the milestones parents line up in their minds, stretching forwards: the moments they think will go in the photo album.
“Her first date and her college graduation. He’ll need to walk her down the aisle.
I don’t give a damn if there’s a stepfather in the picture, Susan. ”
Her jaw is set and she looks mutinous. “I know that.”
“Does Patrick know that you know that?”
“I can’t very well go up to him and say, hey, Patrick, you know how you’ve taken care of us for the past six months? Well, you’re emotionally on the hook for the next eighteen years and more, thanks in advance.”
“Be serious. Patrick wants nothing more than to be on the hook.”
The door opens and Patrick comes through, tugging the carriage behind him, Eleanor asleep against his shoulder. “Did I interrupt another fight about mandolins?”
“Yes,” Susan and Nathaniel say together.
Patrick narrows his eyes. “Okay, fine, lie to me.”
“Meatloaf, pork chops, or pot roast?” Nathaniel asks, holding up the cookbook.
Patrick raises his eyebrows at the cover. “Which of us is the new bride?”
“New bride is a euphemism for helpless idiot. I’m afraid we’re both very much new brides.”
The meatloaf is serviceable. Nathaniel figures if they each make dinner once a week, they can have leftovers or takeout the other nights and not worry about Eleanor growing up with either a nutritional deficiency or insufficient feminism.
Whenever he catches himself thinking like that, he tries to stop.
He isn’t going to be a permanent part of the cooking rotation or anything else.
They’ll want him gone when they find out who he is and what he’s done.
But it’s hard to remember that he won’t be a part of this forever.
He isn’t a part of this. He happened to be there when Susan and Patrick needed help, and so they folded him into their fractured little family.
None of that is permanent. Susan and Patrick treat him like it is, but that’s likely because they haven’t thought that far ahead, and also because at this point it’s too late to draw a line between family and not family.
The time would have been in February, and none of them were thinking straight back then.
If he were braver, he’d tell them now, but he wants to keep every minute of this that he’s allowed. He pages through the cookbook, trying to decide what he’ll make the next time it’s his turn to cook dinner. The pot roast looks manageable, so he dog-ears the page.
* * *
It’s slow in the shop, a rainy July weekday, so Nathaniel doesn’t have much to do during his shift. The store is clean, the inventory is updated, and he’s about to find something to read when the shop bells chime.
He’s hoping it’s Iris, arriving early for their daily trigonometry session, but he has to suppress a groan when he sees who it is. “Patrick isn’t here,” he tells John.
“Oh,” John says. “When will he be back?”
He’ll be back any minute now, since he only went to the bank to make a deposit. “Who knows?” Nathaniel says.
John begins fiddling with a few books on a shelf near the cash register.
That shelf has held the same three Whitman biographies since February, if not longer.
Nathaniel stopped paying any attention to them.
If John decides to buy one in order to impress Patrick, maybe Nathaniel can convince Patrick to put something other than another Whitman biography in its place.
“That’s funny,” John says. “When did you start carrying these?”
If John is confused about why Patrick stocks Whitman biographies, there’s really nothing Nathaniel can do for him.
But then he sees what John is looking at.
They aren’t biographies, or even any kind of book, but more of those pamphlets like the ones Nathaniel bought at the soda fountain earlier that summer. Zines, Patrick had called them.
At first he thinks he must have brought his own copies downstairs and Iris or someone tucked them away in a random place while tidying up.
But, no, this is a different issue of one of the same publications, a cheaply printed black-and-white affair called Louder with a drawing of a dangerous-looking flower on the cover.
He’d enjoyed that one. It was funny. It was also, arguably, seditious, in that it plainly encouraged draft resistance, called for a national strike and refusing to pay income tax to protest the war, and listed the bridges, roads, and buildings that would be effective targets for demonstrators to occupy.
People have been arrested for less. He’d been half impressed, half appalled, by the brazenness of the writers.
“We don’t carry those,” Nathaniel says. “A customer must have left them behind.”
“Six of them?” John flips through a copy, his eyebrows inching higher and higher. “Does Patrick know about this?”
Nathaniel actually laughs at the implication that he’s the one stocking the shop with radical underground newspapers and that Patrick would be shocked by their content. Has this man ever even talked to Patrick?
John narrows his eyes. “The old Jewish lady who owns the place, are these hers?”
Judging by the sheer quantity of old issues of The Daily Worker in boxes upstairs, Mrs. Kaplan wouldn’t even blink at the contents of Louder .
But John doesn’t need to know that, even if he hadn’t phrased that question as offensively as he had.
“Like I said,” Nathaniel says, out of patience and not bothering to hide it, “someone left them here.”
John leaves the zines next to the cash register and leaves.
Alone in the shop, Nathaniel picks one up and opens to the middle.
“Every soldier is a POW” is printed in blocky capitals.
He reads the issue from cover to cover—well, almost from cover to cover, because the back half is a Spanish translation that he can only partly make out.
He flips back to “Every soldier is a POW,” and is still looking at that page when Patrick comes back.
“Where did these come from?” Patrick asks, pointing to the zines.
Nathaniel isn’t surprised that Patrick didn’t notice them. Patrick is disorganized and the shop is too crowded for even Nathaniel to keep track of everything. “They were on the shelf with the Whitman biographies,” Nathaniel says. “Your friend John noticed them, and he was very odd about it.”
“He isn’t my friend,” Patrick says. “You aren’t jealous of John , are you?”
Of course Nathaniel is jealous of John, handsome, twenty-five, and—by the looks of it—gainfully employed. “Don’t be silly,” he says.
“I don’t want John. Do I need to spell this out for you?”
“I can’t imagine what you’re talking about.”
“It was in this very room,” Patrick says, pointing at his desk, “that you lectured me about emotional honesty.”
It wasn’t a lecture, and it wasn’t about emotional honesty—Nathaniel’s not sure he could even say emotional honesty with a straight face—but rather about how repressing grief can make you go crazy, but none of that is important right now.
“You need to read that thing. It’s one of the zines I bought at Gem Spa with you, but I don’t know how six of them got into the shop. ”
Patrick sits at his desk and starts to read. Five minutes later he puts down the folded newsprint and says, “Well. Really decent writing, I’d say.”
That was Nathaniel’s first reaction too, but the quality of the prose isn’t the crucial point here. “When I read it, I thought to myself, these people must want the FBI to start paying attention to them.”
Patrick, who had been examining the art on the zine cover, looks up sharply. “Do you think John is some kind of cop? Creepy. I knew I didn’t like him.”
If that’s how Patrick feels about a cop spending a few minutes in the store, Nathaniel doesn’t want to imagine how he’ll react to finding out who’s been living under his roof.
“It’s easy to imagine that man in a shoulder holster,” Nathaniel says.
“But, no, I don’t think he’s a cop, just a reactionary busybody.
I’d like to know how these got here.” He gets to his feet and puts the six zines back next to the Whitman biographies, assuming that whoever left them there might come back looking for them.