21
When Eleanor turns six months old, Susan buys a bottle of champagne and they drink it in front of the television while Eleanor chomps on a teething biscuit.
“This is where my expertise runs dry,” Nathaniel says, trying and failing to pitch his voice to something casual. “It’s all uncharted territory from here on out.”
The temperature seems to drop ten degrees, and the way Patrick and Susan go perfectly still confirms Nathaniel’s suspicion that they both figured it out already.
Sure enough, when Susan says, “Nathaniel,” she doesn’t sound surprised, only terribly gentle.
“I thought I should let you know,” Nathaniel says, eyes on the ceiling so he won’t see it when Patrick and Susan inevitably look at Eleanor and think about how unendurable it would be if something happened to her.
Because it would be unendurable. But what does it mean to endure something?
Life’s worst miseries rarely kill you, but he isn’t sure how much of himself survived past 1961.
This is more than he’s said about Christopher than he has in seven years. A few people at work gave him stoical nods of condolence and his secretary brought him casseroles for a while, but nobody wanted him to talk about it, least of all Nathaniel.
He shouldn’t have said anything tonight.
At the very least he could have waited until they weren’t drinking celebratory champagne.
It’ll only make them sad, and it won’t make Nathaniel feel any different.
A year from now, Nathaniel will be someplace else and having had these few moments of sympathy won’t matter anymore.
Still, though, it has to count for something that Nathaniel can talk about it now—well, more like talk around it, allude to it, encode the entire sad story in an easily cracked cipher and then leave it in plain sight—with only the faintest call of the abyss.
The sofa cushion to his left sinks, and at first he thinks it’s Susan—Patrick will have gathered that Nathaniel’s just trying to hold it together, and affection would ruin everything—but he gets a wet nose to his face.
“You’re the worst,” he tells Walt. “Nobody raised you and it shows.” He threads his fingers into the long, scruffy fur at the base of the dog’s neck.
“Here,” Susan says, and passes him a joint that she hadn’t been smoking two minutes ago. From Susan, this is the equivalent of a black-bordered sympathy card.
“You know,” he says, “when I got here, I thought, well, these two kids have no idea what they’re doing. At least I’m good for something. I thought, it’s a good thing I’m not dead, which was a refreshing change, so thank you for that.”
“You are so emotionally stunted,” Susan says. “I love you from the bottom of my heart, but how come nobody born before 1940 has feelings? Somebody should look into that.”
“She means thank you,” Patrick says.
“Oh, fuck you,” Susan says, “he already knows I’d be in a padded cell without him.”
“No, you’d be drying out someplace scenic,” Nathaniel says, dizzy with the relief of having talked about it without having had to actually talk about it. “ I’d be the one in a padded cell.”
“Where are they buried?” Patrick asks that night when they’re getting ready for bed. Nathaniel’s brushing his teeth and Patrick’s leaning in the door to the bathroom, so Nathaniel doesn’t have to actually look at him or say anything for a moment.
“He,” Nathaniel says. “Christopher.” It was a mistake to say his name, such a mistake.
He focuses on the tube of toothpaste, rolling it up from the bottom.
Patrick squeezes it from the middle like some kind of hooligan.
“Brooklyn,” he says when he can trust himself to speak.
“It happened when his mother was visiting her family for Easter.” He squeezes out a perfect line of toothpaste onto Patrick’s brush and rests it on the edge of the sink. “Flu.”
“If you want to visit, I’d go with you.”
Nathaniel hasn’t been since the funeral. The idea of visiting his infant’s grave with his gay lover feels instantly, egregiously inappropriate for the ten seconds it takes for his brain to stop living in 1961.
One of his goals in coming to New York had been to bring flowers to the grave. It seemed like the bare minimum: drop off some carnations, make sure the place isn’t overrun with weeds.
He shouldn’t let Patrick go with him. The memory of Patrick will get tangled up with the graveside, so that later on Nathaniel won’t even be able to think about Christopher without thinking of Patrick. He shouldn’t be that cruel to himself.
“I’d like that,” Nathaniel says.
The next morning Nathaniel finds the cemetery on the map and looks up what trains will get them there. They leave the shop in Susan’s hands and take the subway to Brooklyn.
There’s a flower shop across from the entrance; no bouquets of red roses for sale here, only tastefully subdued arrangements of lilies and gladiolus.
The funeral parlor had been overrun with white flowers of every variety; he’d forgotten about that.
There’d been a blanketlike arrangement on top of the little casket, purchased, presumably, by his former in-laws.
Nathaniel chooses a bouquet of yellow lilies, then immediately regrets it.
He doesn’t care one way or the other about lilies, and babies are too young to have a favorite flower, and even if he were alive he’d be seven years old and unlikely to give a fig about flowers.
Christopher isn’t even there anyway, so who are the flowers for?
He finds that he’s stuck, unable to cross the street.
Patrick takes the flowers from his hand and murmurs, “We can turn around,” just like he did those first few months when Nathaniel couldn’t go anywhere. They cross the street.
It takes them twenty minutes to find the grave, because Nathaniel forgot exactly how enormous this place is. He glances at the engraved name only long enough to confirm that he’s found the right headstone.
It’s a grave: gray stone on green grass.
He didn’t expect to feel anything about it.
Nobody’s here and he wouldn’t want it any other way.
But placing the flowers at the foot of the stone feels anticlimactic.
Insufficient. Irrelevant to the carefully buried knot of sadness that Nathaniel tries not to think about carrying around with him.
It’s a Tuesday morning, and the graveyard is empty enough that the nearest people are a hundred yards away, but even if someone had been staring directly at them, Nathaniel wouldn’t have shrugged off Patrick’s arm when it wraps around his shoulders.
“Collins?” Patrick asks as they make their way back to the street. That, after all, is the name on the gravestone.
Nathaniel is struck by the sudden absurdity of the fact that the man he’s been living with, the man he’s been sharing a bed with, been falling in love with, hadn’t known his last name. It makes the last six months feel even less substantial.
“Collins,” Nathaniel admits.
“I never thought it was Smith.”
Of course he hadn’t. Of course Patrick took for granted that the man he was feeding and housing and taking care of was using an alias for perfectly good reasons. He remembers that man downtown, how Patrick hadn’t cared in the least that he’d had a knife.
“I thought I was lying low when I came here.”
“Is Nathaniel your real first name?” Patrick asks, instead of asking who Nathaniel thought he was hiding from.
“Yes.”
“You did a shitty job of lying low,” Patrick says.
They manage to get lost on the way back to the subway station. “We should have brought the map,” Nathaniel says.
“We should have brought the map,” Patrick agrees.
They pass an old stone church they definitely didn’t see on the way to the cemetery.
Churches are scattered all over the city, most of them wedged unceremoniously between other buildings, across the street from dry cleaners and barber shops, or attached to the side of a school.
This one’s all by itself, severe and monumental, two stories high with a white bell tower that doubles its height.
In the back there’s a cemetery with sunken, crooked gravestones.
Nathaniel isn’t sure which one of them slowed down first, but now they’re standing still on the cracked sidewalk, the church looming over them.
“Never really went in for that,” Patrick says easily, like he’s talking about California wine or bowling leagues, something morally neutral, something optional.
Nathaniel did go in for it, or at least he tried—or at least he knew he was supposed to.
He can’t untangle those threads anymore, can’t pull free the thread of truth from the entire skein of pretense, denial, and wishful thinking.
But when he looks at the church, it feels like it’s looking back in disapproval, which has to mean some part of him thinks it’s real.
Or maybe that’s just more mental shrapnel.
They finally find the subway station, but it isn’t rush hour, and this is a local stop, so they have to wait a while for a train.
They sit on an uncomfortable wooden bench, no closer than two men ordinarily would.
The station is hot and muggy, the only breeze coming from the occasional express train barreling through the station.
“You said you got divorced in 1962,” Patrick says, evidently having noticed the date on the gravestone.
“We split up in ‘61,” Nathaniel says. “A few days after the funeral, there was an emergency at work and I didn’t come home for a while.” It had been the lead-up to the Bay of Pigs.
“Helen was justifiably unimpressed. The widower next door was very comforting and the rest is history. They’re married now, with two children.
” This fact always makes him feel marginally less guilty about having married her in the first place.
When she announced she was leaving him for another man, he’d been relieved.
Marriage transformed Helen from a friend into a round-the-clock audience for his deception.
He’d been suffocated. She’d been miserable.
“It was wrong of me to marry her.” Nathaniel stares straight ahead across the tracks at the ads on the far wall.
“I knew—I should have known—” He nearly laughs, because how many of his sins can be covered by I should have known ?
“I almost took this away from her.” He gestures between himself and Patrick, but they’re close enough that his hand lands on Patrick’s arm.
He doesn’t even know exactly what this means.
Wanting someone and being wanted back? Falling in love?
“I was thirty. People were going to start to wonder.” Laying his reasoning out like that makes it sound exactly as bad as it should.
“That happens to a lot of us.”
“It didn’t happen to me at all. It was a choice.”
“Still.”
What might be worse than Patrick learning about Nathaniel’s career and kicking him out might be Patrick learning about Nathaniel’s career and making excuses for him.
Nathaniel didn’t know any better, Nathaniel was doing the best he could, Nathaniel couldn’t possibly have known what he was aiding and abetting due to an excess of patriotism and the fact that his father never loved him.
Nathaniel doesn’t think he could stand to hear it.
The truth is, he’d do the exact same thing for Patrick, if Patrick had any skeletons in his closet, and he doesn’t know if that’s yet another character flaw or something even more dangerous.