Page 38 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
Jerome shrugs, clearly unimpressed, and gets to his feet. “What do you need when you go nuts?”
“Stick close to me.”
“Not a hardship,” Jerome says with a showy little leer. “Let’s go.”
On the way out, they run into one of the regular customers. Beverly is a reporter at theTimes. She wears a trench coat, big orange-tinted sunglasses, and Coco Chanel. Nathaniel would have thought she covered fashion or style, looking like that, but he’s seen her byline on national news. She must live in the neighborhood, because she often comes in with a net grocery bag over one arm.
“I need something for a flight,” she says today. “Quick.”
“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Nathaniel suggests, because he just finished it and knows it’s still next to the cash register where he left it.
“Already read it,” Beverly says.
“Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes,” Patrick says. “Loved it, by the way,” he tells Jerome.
“I told you,” Jerome says. “But are we letting straight people read it?”
“Oh for f—pete’s sake, go have lunch and stop cluttering up my shop.”
Outside, the vertigo hits Nathaniel before they’re at the end of the street, but it isn’t bad enough that he needs to stop walking. The restaurant is only ten minutes away, on the corner of Greenwich and Charles, and Jerome chatters the entire time.
As soon as they’re seated, Jerome leans forward. “Are you and Patrick—” He tips his head to the side and lets his silence finish the question.
“Ah, no.”
“Why not?”
Nathaniel truly does not know how to answer that, so he just stares.
“I mean, you should, if you swing that way,” Jerome says, then waves at someone across the room and blows them a kiss. “I’d be first in line if I were still in the market for moody white boys.”
This is where a person should say that he isn’t like that. Nathaniel says, “The chicken sandwich looks good. Moody?”
“Get the ribs. He has a chip on his shoulder.” Jerome touches his temple, the place where Patrick has a scar. “He tell you about that?”
“Yes,” Nathaniel says. He knows that Mrs. Kaplan gave Patrick stitches after he had a run-in of some sort with the police.
“Plenty of folks who get arrested get fucked up about it and stay fucked up about it. They print your name in the paper when you get caught in a raid, you know. You take a kid like Patrick—nice, middle class, probably got straight As—and throw him in the Tombs? His aunt and uncle can suck my dick, pardonmy French, ohhello, Richie!” He waggles his fingers at someone passing by.
“Right,” Nathaniel says, trying to make sense of what Jerome is telling him and square it with what he already knows. He spent his career assembling facts into coherent explanations and this set of facts isn’t particularly difficult. Patrick got arrested in a raid and beaten up, his aunt and uncle kicked him out, and then somehow he came to Mrs. Kaplan. Nathaniel doesn’t know the details, doesn’t know why Susan and Patrick maintain a silence around this topic as sharp and as deep as the silence around Michael. “And he was so young,” Nathaniel says, a little guilty about fishing for information.
“Still in the twelfth grade. Anyway, he keeps everything locked up tight. He’s always ready for people to sail right out of his life. To leave him on the curb like an old mattress. The only people he even halfway believes in are that old lady and his brother. And, well. I guess that only leaves the old lady. Anyway, can’t blame him, but a girl likes to be trusted. Two orders of the ribs,” Jerome tells the waitress. “Extra coleslaw. Amazing lay,” he tells Nathaniel. “In case I didn’t make myself clear.”
“Good to know.”
“Isn’t itjust.”
The ribs are, indeed, delicious, and so is the coleslaw. So is the company. It reminds Nathaniel, in a bizarre, fun-house-mirror kind of way, of long lunches with colleagues, the kind where you order a second drink and cheerfully complain about everyone else you’ve ever worked with. Except it’s extremely unlikely that the person across from him at this chipped formica table will be even slightly responsible for toppling any Latin American democracies.
Jerome walks him home. Nathaniel tries to thank him but Jerome waves it away. “I’m not having you lose your marbles on my watch. Kiss kiss!”
Patrick’s at the cash register exactly where Nathaniel left him. Does he keep it all locked up tight, as Jerome said? Is he untrusting? Maybe Nathaniel can’t see it because he, himself, isn’t particularly open or trusting. He remembers Patrick, at the grocery store, fretting about Susan leaving. Maybe it isn’t that he doesn’t trust people, but that he doesn’t trust them to stay.
“Have a good time?” Patrick asks.
“We talked about you the whole time.”
Patrick sighs. “Where did you go?”
