26 #2
A bookstore near Union Square is closing, one of the last holdouts from the Book Row days.
Patrick stops by, ostensibly to offer wholesale prices for any stock he can sell, but mostly to pay his respects.
The books are picked over, but there are two decent shelves left, solid wood infused with fifty years of cigarette smoke and dust. He buys them for eight dollars each, not because he needs them in the shop—he couldn’t fit two more shelves in there if his life depended on it—but because if Susan is staying, she’ll need bookshelves.
The books have started to invade her apartment, piled against the wall and stacked on the coffee table.
On impulse, he offers five dollars for a steel wire paperback spinner rack.
A week after Susan and Nathaniel left, Susan pulls up to the curb in the enormous Cadillac she borrowed from her father.
Patrick stops what he’s doing, takes Eleanor out of her playpen, and goes out to the sidewalk.
When Nathaniel gets out of the passenger side, he’s wearing corduroy pants and an argyle sweater Patrick’s never seen before.
He looks like he’s barely slept the whole week, circles under his eyes and everything strung too tight.
It’s alarmingly similar to the state he was in when he arrived at the shop in February.
“It’s not that bad,” Nathaniel says when Patrick gives him a grim once-over. “I’m mostly rattled by Susan’s driving.”
Susan takes Eleanor from Patrick, then grimaces at him behind Nathaniel’s back.
Patrick unloads the trunk of the car. There are two suitcases in addition to the suitcases they left with.
Patrick grabs one in each hand. Nathaniel reaches for the other two.
“I can get them,” Nathaniel says before Patrick can protest. “I’m not ill .
Susan took care of everything. She spoke to the lawyer and the Black Panthers and the bank and got everything straightened out. ”
“The Black Panthers,” Patrick repeats, not sure he heard right.
“They’re getting half the proceeds from the sale of the house and everything in it. Susan said Michael listed the Black Panthers as the beneficiary of his army life insurance and it seemed like as good an idea as any.”
“He did?” Patrick feels a laugh—half hysterical, half plain amused—bubble up inside him. “Oh my god.” The image of Michael writing in the Black Panthers on official army paperwork is something he’ll cherish always.
Nathaniel’s mouth ticks up at the side. “Right? She insisted that I keep some of the money to pay for a lawyer, if I need one.”
“Are the two of you going to stand out here forever?” Susan says from the shop door. Patrick shuts the trunk and follows Nathaniel inside.
“What’s in these things?” Patrick asks. One of the suitcases is heavy enough that it might be filled with bricks.
“You should open it,” Nathaniel says. He’s sitting in Patrick’s desk chair.
Patrick puts the suitcase on the desk and opens the clasps.
It’s filled with neatly stacked books. The first one he sees is East of Eden .
He picks it up carefully, opens it and sees that it’s a first edition.
The next book is The Old Man and the Sea , from the same year, also a first edition. Both are in fine condition.
“Are they all firsts?” Patrick asks.
“Yes, I checked. I didn’t collect them, but I bought them when they came out. I thought—you know how you hang on to a few first editions of Howl and On the Road because the value keeps increasing? I thought you might like these.”
“You thought I might like them.”
“A present.”
This, from a man who apparently walked away from all his belongings with nothing but two suitcases and enough to pay a defense attorney—and one of the suitcases is for Patrick.
“If you’d rather not have any part of it, I’d understand.”
“Thank you. Nathaniel, thank you. They’re going in the safe. What’s in the other suitcase?”
“A tuxedo,” Susan says. “And a few sweaters.”
“That way I don’t have to keep borrowing yours,” Nathaniel says.
“You can always borrow my sweaters,” Patrick says. “Always.”
Nathaniel’s gaze lights on the paperback rack, still empty, and when he catches Patrick’s eye, there’s something almost like a smile there.
Patrick makes dinner—the tofu and broccoli that Susan sometimes cooks, the recipe written out in her handwriting and attached to the refrigerator with a magnet. While he cooks, Nathaniel leans against the counter, occasionally grabbing a piece of broccoli or tasting the sauce.
“What I wanted,” Nathaniel says, “was to go back and feel like the person who lived in that house was a stranger.”
Patrick remembers, back in March, sitting with Nathaniel on the couch in his apartment, thinking about the things that split your life in two, the things that make the person you used to be into a stranger—or maybe make whoever you are now into a stranger.
“That didn’t happen?” Patrick asks.
“I didn’t think I’d miss that person. I don’t like him, I don’t respect him—and it’s pathological that I’m talking about myself like that.”
“What did you miss?”
“I used to know what was what.” He reaches past Patrick to open a cabinet and take out three wine glasses.
“I was wrong, obviously, but I got up in the morning knowing that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. I was so good at being good.” He fills the glasses from one of the bottles of wine that’s started to appear in Susan’s kitchen.
Patrick remembers Nathaniel plunging into icy water uncomplainingly and wonders if that was what it was like for him to be good.
“And now you’re winging it?”
Nathaniel sips the wine and makes a face. “You’re going to tell me everybody’s winging it.”
Patrick was absolutely going to say that everybody’s winging it, at least everybody he’s ever known. Instead he jiggles the handle of the frying pan and turns the heat down.
“Nobody should be winging it when they’re forty,” Nathaniel says, and it sounds like he knows it’s grade A bullshit.
“You don’t even believe that.” The kitchen is starting to get smoky, so Patrick puts the stir fry into a serving bowl—they’re too fancy to eat out of frying pans, apparently—and shouts “Dinner!” loud enough that Susan will hear it where she’s on the fire escape, talking on the phone, the cord stretching to its limit through the window.
“You know what matters,” Patrick says. “You can’t be good if you don’t know what matters.
” Because that’s what they’re talking about, isn’t it?
Being good? Figuring out what good is in the first place?
Nathaniel gives him a funny look, not quite a smile—so rarely a smile—but something sweet and surprised. “Well,” he says, and looks away.
The rice might be a little burned, but Patrick sprinkles chopped cashews over the top and everyone says “ooh” like they’ve never seen a cashew before.
Eleanor has a smashed-up piece of broccoli.
Tim Buckley’s on the record player with a song that should be too sad, too elegiac, remember me sung too many times for anyone not to do what they’re told.
But it isn’t sad. Or maybe it is, but they’re still eating semi-burned food while Nathaniel details just how frightening a driver Susan is, and Patrick tells a story about how Susan once got onto a highway via the off ramp, and the lights flicker because everyone who has an air conditioner is running it tonight, during summer’s last gasp.
Susan falls asleep on the sofa while they’re watching The Tonight Show , slumped against Nathaniel’s shoulder . They aren’t in their usual seats. Patrick’s in the armchair because it gets a breeze from the open window, and he’s completely lost patience with the heat; he’s ready for fall.
“The two of you made things right?” Patrick asks, his voice low enough not to wake Susan, or Eleanor, who’s asleep in the next room. All day, things between Susan and Nathaniel had been—not the way they’d been earlier that summer, but easy in some other way.
Nathaniel’s quiet for a moment. He has an arm around her shoulder, his fingertips making dents in the gauzy cotton of her shirt. “Yeah, things are better.”
“Good.”
Nathaniel kicks his feet up onto the coffee table. “I asked her what would happen when she met someone new.”
A few weeks ago, Patrick asked Susan the same thing, but he hadn’t told Nathaniel—it still feels like a question he wasn’t allowed to ask.
No—it feels like a question that shouldn’t matter.
Why does Patrick need to know what happens when his friend—his sister-in-law, even—meets a new man?
How is that his business? He hadn’t known how to explain that to himself, let alone to Nathaniel.
But if Nathaniel asked her too, that has to mean something.
“I told her that I was worried whoever she met wouldn’t like us very much,” Nathaniel goes on, and that brings Patrick up short.
That isn’t what he’d been worried about, not exactly.
He’d been thinking about Susan moving away, starting a new family.
What Nathaniel’s getting at is something different—Nathaniel’s assuming that there is a three of them, that there’s something here that matters, something worth hanging on to.
“What did she say?” Patrick asks, his throat tight.
“That she wasn’t going to fall in love with anyone stupid enough to interfere with a good thing. And that anyone she got involved with would have to fit into this.” With Nathaniel’s free hand, he makes a circular gesture encompassing all of them.
“Good.” Patrick can’t find any other words. “Good.”
“Obviously,” Susan mumbles into Nathaniel’s shirt. “Maybe the two of you can shut up now so I can get some sleep.”
“Time for bed,” Nathaniel says, getting to his feet and hauling Susan along with him.
“If you spend the night on the sofa, you’ll wake up with your bones crooked.
” Patrick watches, his heart in his throat, as Nathaniel walks Susan to bed.
She makes some unhappy sounds, and he tells her to quit whining, and Patrick thinks he could go on like this forever.
They shut the door to Susan’s apartment as quietly as possible and go downstairs. Nathaniel takes a shower long enough that steam starts to creep out from under the bathroom door.
“I missed your water pressure,” he says when he comes out, one towel wrapped around his waist and using another to dry his hair.
“Our water pressure,” Patrick says, immediately feeling stupid about it.
“Point taken.” Nathaniel nudges the dog with his toe. Walt, who’s been napping in the middle of the hallway since that afternoon, doesn’t even twitch. “ Our dog might be in a coma.”
“I made some room in the closet for your tuxedo,” Patrick says. “Definitely not our tuxedo.”
Nathaniel turns away to hang up the towel he was using on his hair, but Patrick still catches the twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Susan wants to go to the opera!”
Patrick doesn’t bother arguing, but he does corner Nathaniel against the wall.
Patrick only means for it to be a kiss—upstairs, Nathaniel was yawning, and there are shadows under his eyes.
But Nathaniel kisses back, then mouths his way down Patrick’s neck, pulling aside the collar of his shirt.
He makes a dissatisfied sound. Before leaving, he’d kissed a bruise into the place where Patrick’s shoulder meets his neck, and it’s gone now.
“You’ll just have to give me another one,” Patrick says, and feels the shudder go through Nathaniel. “Yeah?” he asks, like he doesn’t already know. Nathaniel’s only answer is to bite Patrick’s lower lip, not particularly gently.
Patrick gets a hand on the back of Nathaniel’s neck, feeling the damp strands of hair and the tension of the muscles beneath. Nathaniel tips his head back against the wall and lets himself be kissed.
It feels like it’s been longer than a week, and not just because they’d spent weeks before that taking one another to bed at every opportunity.
Patrick is hungry for the familiarity, for the way his hands and his mouth know Nathaniel’s body as surely as he knows how Nathaniel takes his tea.
He hadn’t known it was possible to miss someone in a way that feels like continuously reaching out toward empty space.
He hadn’t known that there could be a pleasure in missing someone, when you know they’re coming back.
They make their way to bed, eventually, and Nathaniel pushes Patrick so he’s on his back, Nathaniel’s damp hair in his face, Nathaniel’s thigh between his legs.
He lets himself get pinned in place. This isn’t the way Nathaniel usually likes it, and Patrick has the sense that he’s being indulged. He lets Nathaniel indulge him.
Through the open window comes the sound of “Little Green Apples” playing on somebody’s radio, along with a breeze that cools the sweat on their skin.
Everything is lush and slow; they’re spending time like it isn’t something that ever runs out.
And maybe it won’t. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe they get to have this for as long as anyone gets to have anything.