Page 27 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
Patrick sometimes explains things to Nathaniel like perhaps he suffered a head injury or recently immigrated here from another planet. Which, come to think, isn’t inaccurate, except the head injury is more of a psychological one, and the other planet is the Central Intelligence Agency. At first, Nathaniel thought Patrick was talking down to him, but soon realized Patrick is simply delivering background information that he thinks Nathaniel might need, and doing so as succinctly and neutrally as possible. One imagines the vagabonds and mental cases he and Mrs. Kaplan take in—Nathaniel very much included in that description—might from time to time need a refresher course in reality.
“Iris told me about that,” Nathaniel says, very casual, as if he didn’t once have a report cross his desk positing that the Soviets must be the ones fomenting last summer’s race riots, because what other reason could there be for people to be so upset? “She said it wasn’t even one shooting. She said it happens all the time.”
Patrick pours out a cup of coffee and hands it to Nathaniel. “It’s common enough that it isn’t always first page news.”
Nathaniel grimaces. “If this were a country with leaders we don’t care for—someplace in Eastern Europe or Latin America or Southeast Asia—we’d call it an uprising instead of a riot.” How very liberating to say something like that aloud. This is how the radicals lure you in. The marijuana and comfortable clothes are merely the thin end of the wedge; the next thing you know, you’ve condensed the last twenty years of Americanforeign policy and the entirety of your career into a few damning syllables.
Before he can drop some acid and burn the flag, Nathaniel heads into the shop and dusts the shelves angrily, alphabetizes angrily, and sweeps angrily, all the while refusing to pinpoint precisely what he’s angry about. The loss of a good man? The setback this means to the movement? The worry that he might be complicit, in a literal sense, rather than a demographic one?
It’s a chilly April morning, but when Patrick flips the sign to Open, Nathaniel props the door with volumes S and T of an outdatedEncyclopedia Britannica. Then he drags the table to the front of the store, followed by the coffee maker and some mugs and a half empty box of Chips Ahoy.
Patrick watches all this silently, but instead of shutting the door and asking Nathaniel if he’s gone nuts—which, yes, thanks, several months ago, no sign of it letting up any time soon—Patrick puts on a sweater and gives his spare cardigan to Nathaniel.
* * *
All things considered, Nathaniel might have found somewhere better to lie low than a building inhabited largely by political subversives. He thought a sleepy little side street bookshop owned by an old lady and attracting practically no foot traffic would be a perfect place to get his act together. For a man who spent over fifteen years in the business of amassing intelligence, it turns out he’s an utter dud. Well, that’s the CIA for you.
Patrick is a flagrant homosexual paying an employee under the table and running a business that likely receives as many stolen goods as any pawn shop. The sheer number of sexual deviants entering this store would be enough to merit a police raid. Men who saydarlingand wear scarves for decorativepurposes. Women whose clothing was never bought in any ladies’ shop.
Even the Valdezes are on the radical fringe. Mr. Valdez mentions his union alarmingly often. Iris will have an FBI file before she’s twenty. Hector has mentioned Che Guevara in favorable terms more than once, even if one of those times was to point out that he was handsome; whether Hector is correct is beside the point. Maria seems normal but she can’t possibly be, not if she’s responsible for two children turning out like that.
And Susan—Susan is the worst of the lot. Before coming here, Susan Larkin had been a name typed on a file label, alphabetically between a Beat poet and a civil rights leader. There had been hundreds of names, telephone records, travel itineraries, photographs, lists of known associates. Nathaniel had been meant to look at each of those pieces of information as a data point and find a pattern of subversion. Instead the only pattern he could make himself see was that the CIA was illegally spying on Americans, which meant Nathaniel was effectively employed by the secret police.
He quietly photocopied as many of the files as he could fit into the inside pocket of his suit coat, quit his job, left town, and wrecked his life. Four months later, his shock seems painfully naive. Had he really thought the underhandedness was confined to foreign soil? There should be a stronger word than naiveté.
Those photocopied files are now at the back of Patrick’s safe, stashed in an ordinary manila envelope and shoved behind some first editions that Patrick is saving for a rainy day. If Nathaniel’s learned anything about Patrick over the past two months, it’s that he’s effectively blind when it comes to anything that might be paperwork.
Far and away the worst part is that Nathaniel likes all these radicals. The Valdez twins are brilliant. Susan has the kind of charisma that penetrates the cloud of misery engulfing her; he’sslightly terrified to discover what she’ll be like when that cloud dissipates a little. And Patrick is—
Patrick is a twenty-seven-year-old man who reads books approximately eight hours a day yet has the muscles of a stevedore. He has a deranged penchant for feeding the hungry and has, by all appearances, had sexual relations with the entire homosexual male population of the neighborhood, or at least those literate enough to set foot in a bookstore. He’s utterly unbothered by the fact that Nathaniel can’t leave the building without an emotional crisis.
At that, Nathaniel’s psyche goes into free fall, as per usual. For the love of god, it’s been months. He has got to snap out of it. That trip to the guitar store had felt like the Charge of the Light Brigade, and he can’t even take the garbage out without his hands getting clammy and his heart thundering in his chest.
He’s very much afraid this is insanity. Which would, of course, be one more reason for the powers that be at Langley to lock him up. You can’t have disaffected analysts in possession of state secrets running mad in the streets. And Nathaniel knows a lot more secrets than what’s inside the manila envelope.
“Your whole body just went rigid,” Susan says. They’re in her apartment, the baby asleep for once in her life, as he and Susan attempt to turn a perfectly decent folk song into the kind of music that’s one step removed from inciting a riot. He’s considered telling her that the government—he can blame the FBI—is fixated on celebrities, but that would probably only encourage her. In those files that he destroyed his life over were pictures of her at enough protests that it’s a wonder she found time to do anything else. She apparently spent the entirety of 1967 at anti-war protests and the previous eight years at civil rights protests.
The fact that Nathaniel is going along with this is only more evidence of insanity.
She lights a joint and holds it out. He takes it, because it’s one of the only things that keeps the panic at bay and the abyss at a comfortable distance. He’s adopting a comprehensive approach to moral degeneracy, it seems.
He takes a hit and passes the joint back to her, not bothering to put the violin down. When he first came across it in the kitchen, he hadn’t even hesitated before picking it up and tuning it. Fifteen years should have been enough to get him out of the habit, but here he is, like the intervening years never happened. Perhaps that’s the appeal—the sense of turning back the clock to a time when his hands were clean, his future safe and certain. When he looks at Hector and Iris, he envies the blank slate in front of them.
“Oh brother,” Susan says and hands him back the joint. “Whatever you’re thinking about, either get it off your chest or think about something else. It isn’t doing you any good stuck in your head.”
“Take your own advice, madam,” Nathaniel says, because the woman hasn’t said a single word about her dead husband. It had taken Nathaniel weeks to figure out the man’s name. Sometimes, Nathaniel can tell when a conversation is drifting too close to the subject by the way Susan and Patrick slam on the brakes.
But their grief is still there, right on the surface, nearly a palpable thing. Nathaniel remembers taking his own grief and tucking it away, far out of sight, never looking at it and certainly never letting anyone else see it. It’s fossilized now, the hardened remnants of the place grief used to be.
“We’ll play something cheerful,” Susan says, and proceeds to sing a happy little song about overthrowing the government.
* * *
“We need ground rules,” Susan says after they’ve spent afew weeks doing what she charmingly calls dicking around with music. Now, evidently, they’re doing something more intentional—premeditated, even—and this requires rules. “No songs Dylan ever covered. No songsIever covered. And none of those ballads about men on white steeds going off to war.”
That’s all perfectly unobjectionable but Nathaniel doesn’t have the disposition to enter a negotiation without making his own demands. “No hand claps,” he says.
“Nothing about falling in love.”
