23
“What do you mean, you didn’t hear about it?
” Susan asks. She arrived home with twice as much luggage as she left with.
Eleanor now has a wardrobe that’ll be the envy of all the other six-month-olds.
“It’s all over the news. You should have heard what my father had to say.
I’m kicking myself for not being there.”
“We didn’t watch much television,” Patrick says. “Or read the paper.” Patrick spent most of the week taking Nathaniel to bed every chance he got, like maybe if he just fucked him well enough, all their troubles would disappear.
Susan looks between them. Patrick’s dealing with the mail he didn’t open for the past few days, and Nathaniel’s holding Eleanor, who reached for him as soon as she saw him and now won’t let him go. “Anyway, the Democratic Convention? To choose a presidential candidate? You’ve heard of this, yes?”
“Yes, oh my god, get on with it.”
“Anti-war protesters had a rally. Tens of thousands of them, including the weirdo wing of the anti-war movement.”
“You’re the weirdo wing of the anti-war movement,” Patrick points out. “I’m the weirdo wing of the anti-war movement.”
“Your point? Anyway, the mayor of Chicago orders the police to enforce a curfew, and thousands of cops show up in riot gear, throwing tear gas into the crowd, chasing protesters with clubs as they run away. And it was all on TV. Television reporters got beaten up. Television reporters!”
“Who was nominated?” Patrick asks.
Susan wrinkles her nose. “Humphrey. Did you two seriously not even turn on the news?” She glances at the pile of newspapers on Patrick’s desk, perfectly folded and blatantly untouched.
Patrick doesn’t look at Nathaniel. Instead, he flips through the newspapers, only reading the headlines.
It’s all unsettling but familiar. Not just the police being violent—Patrick isn’t ever going to be surprised by that.
Last month some cops in Washington Square Park tried to arrest a boy who climbed a tree to get his pet squirrel.
It was a Sunday and the park was crowded, but the police ran into the crowd with clubs, supposedly in order to disperse the people who gathered to defend the kid.
What surprised Patrick was that this all happened over a squirrel, rather than race or the war.
But it didn’t really have anything to do with the squirrel, just like he isn’t sure that what happened in Chicago was entirely because of the war.
The war is the main thing, but the people on the other side aren’t just for the war: they’re against people protesting.
They’re fighting for the status quo, or maybe an imaginary past where nobody complained and people kept to their places.
He can’t imagine Nathaniel having been one of those people.
Nathaniel probably wasn’t, not exactly. It sounds like he tried to disappear into the rules, to use conformity as a kind of camouflage, and got too caught up in his disappearing act to mistrust what was happening around him.
Patrick doubts he would have liked Nathaniel very much if they’d met a few years ago.
Patrick always scorned Michael for being such a rule follower.
The rules were all made for people like Michael; of course he liked them.
Maybe if Patrick’s life had gone a little differently—a little softer, a little smoother—he might have been the same way.
He crosses the street at crosswalks. He’s scrupulous about sales tax.
But he’s spent ten years enthusiastically committing a felony whenever he touches a man.
It’s difficult to retain much respect for the rule of law when he can’t live a fairly sedate life without committing a crime.
This country has made him a criminal; it took his brother’s life and would have taken his own life too.
He has nothing to say to anyone who thinks he should wave the flag anyway.
And yet—Patrick still believes the United States is worth something, despite Hiroshima, despite the Ku Klux Klan, despite this war and despite practically every page of every newspaper on the desk in front of him.
He believes it, not because it’s true, but because he wants it to be true, because he wants to believe the people in the streets and the people in this building will come out on top.
He wants to believe that enough people want to do the right thing.
He doesn’t know if that’s delusional. He doesn’t know if that’s what Nathaniel thought, too.
But he does know you can assume the worst of someone and also help them be better; he’s spent ten years looking after people who might steal his typewriter or pull a knife on him.
That’s basically how he’ll feel going into the voting booth this fall.
Christ. He scrubs a hand over his beard.
“Susan,” he hears Nathaniel say. “I need to tell you something.”
* * *
Patrick stays behind his desk, Eleanor in his lap, while Nathaniel tells Susan the truth, feeling like he’s watching his house burn to the ground. It’s not that he thought Susan would take it well, but as Nathaniel talks, Susan draws away: she straightens her back, takes a step toward the door.
When Nathaniel’s done, Susan turns to Patrick, her face blank. “How long have you known?”
“Since Nathaniel’s birthday.”
“And you’re fine with it,” she says, not a question.
Patrick hesitates, shifting Eleanor in his lap. “I know I will be.”
“Just to be clear,” Susan says, turning her attention back to Nathaniel. “We’re talking about the same CIA that buys foreign elections, organizes coups, and infiltrates American student groups, right?”
“Right.”
“All that was in the news a year before you showed up here. So you didn’t suddenly learn that you were working for the bad guys and hand in your two week notice.”
Nathaniel swallows. “No.”
“So, why did you quit?” she asks.
“I couldn’t ignore it anymore. It wasn’t just things happening in other parts of the agency, it was work they were asking me to do. And I couldn’t.”
“What were they asking you to do?”
“It’s probably classified,” Patrick says.
“Do I look like I care,” Susan says, at the same time Nathaniel says, “I couldn’t care less.” Then they both look embarrassed.
“They’re spying on Americans, on American soil,” Nathaniel says. “That was the last straw.”
“What was the first straw?”
Nathaniel looks surprised, like maybe he hasn’t thought about it before.
“The Bay of Pigs. No, that’s not right. That’s what it should have been.
I don’t know. I don’t actually know.” Now he looks troubled.
“Listen,” he says, “I came here because I was cold and confused. I wasn’t planning on this.
” He lets out a strangled laugh. “How could I have been? I knew it would ruin everything when you found out, but I stayed anyway. I’m sorry for that. ”
“Are you?” Susan asks.
“No. But I know I should be. If you want me to leave, then I’ll go.”
“Oh, no,” Susan says. “You aren’t going to make me be the bad guy. And nobody’s kicking you out. It isn’t like that.”
The door chimes ring, and a customer walks in, a woman and a mutinous-looking teenager. “Are you still open? Oh thank god. Somebody—not mentioning names—was supposed to read The Red Badge of Courage before the first day of school.”
Susan takes Eleanor from Patrick. “I’ll see you later,” she says, maybe to Patrick, maybe to both of them, and leaves through the front door.
“I can mind the shop,” Nathaniel says, then mouths, “Go with her,” to Patrick.
Patrick hesitates, because he doesn’t think Nathaniel should be alone right now. But neither should Susan. Nathaniel makes a shooing motion, and Patrick heads upstairs. He knocks on Susan’s door, stupidly unsure of whether he’s allowed to let himself in.
“I don’t know how you’re fine with this,” Susan says when she opens the door.
“We knew he was keeping secrets. We knew that whatever he used to be, it wasn’t anything he was proud of.”
“I thought he worked for Dow Chemical or some other war profiteer.” She sits in the armchair and Patrick sits on the couch. Nathaniel’s absence feels almost glaring, a gap in a tightly packed bookshelf, the silence when the needle lifts off the record.
“And that would have been better?” Patrick asks. “War profiteering?”
“No. I guess not. I thought I knew him. I wish he’d told us months ago.”
Patrick keeps thinking the same thing. There’s a point at which secrecy becomes dishonesty, but Patrick doesn’t know where to draw that line. “Would it have changed anything?”
“I wouldn’t have gotten so attached. What were we thinking, letting a total stranger into our lives? We didn’t know anything about him. Eleanor loves him. I love him. And now what?”
Patrick can see it all crumbling to pieces. He thought he was ready for this. He knew it wouldn’t last, but knowing it doesn’t make it easier. Now, either Susan will move out or Nathaniel will. Even if, somehow, Patrick gets to keep them both, he won’t get to keep them together.
“You’re in love with him?” Susan asks.
“Yeah.”
“I am happy for you, you know.” There’s the tiniest fragment of a smile on her lips. “It’s nice, isn’t it?”
“It’s nice,” he agrees, charmed, despite everything, by the understatement. How many songs has she written, how many songs has she sung, that try to capture the experience of falling in love? And now she calls it nice. But nice is as good a word as any, when there aren’t any better words.
“I keep imagining him sitting at a long table with a bunch of men in the same suit and they’re all cooking up reasons to go to war,” she says.
“Me too,” Patrick admits. On Susan’s coffee table is a cheap notebook that he recognizes as Nathaniel’s.
He must have forgotten it here before Susan left for her parents’ house.
Patrick opens it to the middle. Nathaniel’s writing in here is so much messier than it is on the notes he leaves for Patrick, some letters more gestures than actual shapes, some words abbreviated in a way that must make sense to Nathaniel.
There are single capital letters that appear on nearly every page—E, S, I, H, M—all easy enough to decipher as the people he talks to every day.
There’s no P, but Patrick doesn’t need to wonder why: some things aren’t safe even when you put them in code.
He squints and tries to decipher as much as he can, rarely making out more than a few words per page. Eleanor’s first tooth. Subway graffiti. Tofu. The slide guitar. Night games.
“Should you be reading that?” Susan asks.
“I don’t know. Susan, he called it a list of his sins, but look at it.” He holds out the notebook. She hesitates, but takes it.
“How are Eleanor’s little shoes one of his sins?” she asks a moment later, and Patrick can see as realization dawns.
He makes sure she has enough food in the kitchen for some kind of dinner, then goes downstairs.
It’s late enough that Nathaniel should have closed up the shop, but their apartment is empty.
“Nathaniel?” he calls. But there’s no answer.
The shop, too, is empty. The lights are off and the door is locked.
There’s no note on his desk, and when he goes back upstairs there’s nothing waiting for him there, either. Nathaniel’s things are still in his room—well, mostly in Patrick’s room, at this point. His violin is on the dresser. He’d come back for his violin, wouldn’t he?
Patrick checks his bedroom again, like maybe Nathaniel will be there this time, but all he sees is a Walt-shaped dent in the mattress.
Where the hell is the dog, anyway? He whistles, but doesn’t hear Walt’s usual put-upon sigh, followed by the scratch of nails on the floor as Walt trudges off to see what Patrick wants now.
Back downstairs, Walt’s leash isn’t on the hook by the door, and only then does Patrick arrive at the conclusion he’d have come to immediately if he’d been thinking clearly: Nathaniel is walking the dog.
He puts on the shop lights and unlocks the door.
Then, for good measure, he props the door open.
He’s sitting at his desk, trying to decide whether a book is worth rebinding, when Nathaniel comes in.
“You’re letting all the cool air out,” Nathaniel says, using his foot to nudge the stack of encyclopedia volumes away from the door. “Go, be free,” he tells Walt, unclipping the leash. The dog scrambles over to Patrick.
“I thought you’d left,” Patrick says, scratching Walt’s head. “I thought you were gone.”
“I would have told you first,” Nathaniel says. Not, I won’t leave .