Page 42 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
“Look, Julius isn’t usually a handjobs in the bathroom sort of bar,” Patrick says right before they go inside, “so if you go back to someone’s apartment, call me when you leave. I’ll pick you up in a cab.”
Patrick is being kind, but Nathaniel thought he had made this clear. “You really have no idea, do you? I’ve only been with women, and I only did that because I was supposed to. I know that sounds tragically repressed—”
“No,” Patrick says, and you really have to be one of the world’s worst liars to give yourself away with a single syllable.
“Of course it’s tragically repressed! But I’m not going to achieve complete sexual liberation on your timeline. Or, possibly, any timeline.”
Patrick touches Nathaniel’s elbow. “Hey. There isn’t a timeline. If you don’t want to—”
“Wanting to isn’t the problem.” He feels like they’re speaking completely different languages. He’s twelve or so years olderthan Patrick, but right now they’re from different planets. The generation gap evidently fissured at some point between 1928 and 1940. But even that isn’t accurate: the professor who tried to pick him up that morning is older than Nathaniel. Viv is older than Nathaniel. There are plenty of homosexuals older than Nathaniel. Patrick’s generation didn’t invent the concept.
But they may have invented the idea of not hating yourself for it. Nathaniel doesn’t know. He deliberately doesn’t know; he made sure never to look around or pay attention.
“We can go home,” Patrick says. “I shouldn’t have pushed you.”
“Well, now Ineeda drink,” Nathaniel says. He pulls open the door to the bar.
It’s hot and stuffy, loud with conversation and music. It’s a bar, nothing special about it; it’s almost pointedly nondescript.
A few weeks ago, Jerome told him that during the day, Julius attracts middle-aged writers from established New York periodicals, and that at night it’s filled with gainfully employed queer white men. Jerome meant it as a caution—don’t go there, darling, you’ll be bored out of your mind. Right away, Nathaniel can see what Jerome meant. The prevailing aesthetic is so neatly combed and tidy, so very middle class, that Nathaniel wouldn’t have stood out here a year ago. Now, with his hair two inches longer, his clothing casual and a bit rumpled, he still fits in. There are a few men wearing suits that Nathaniel might once have owned. A few patrons are young enough to be college students, but he isn’t by any means the oldest person here.
“Do you need me next to you?” Patrick asks.
Nathaniel would like to know exactly how Patrick thought any of this would work if Nathaniel still needed him in arm’s reach at all times. “Go make friends,” Nathaniel tells him. Patrick fades into the background.
Nathaniel finds an empty stool, orders a drink, and checks the clock over the bar. It takes two minutes before someone slides onto the seat next to his and offers to buy him another. Nathaniel glances over long enough to see that the man is about his own age, blond, and wearing a shirt with the first two buttons undone, tie loosened around his neck. “I’m waiting for someone,” Nathaniel says. The man goes away.
Another five minutes pass, during which Nathaniel nurses his drink and watches the bartender mix and pour and stir. The man is in his early twenties, and handsome enough that Nathaniel has to wonder if it’s a job requirement. He helps himself to a cigarette from a pack someone left on the bar. At some point during the time he’d been losing his mind, he accidentally quit the habit and now the smoke in his lungs is simultaneously foreign and a sudden relief.
Finally, Patrick slides onto the empty stool and waves the bartender over. “What are you drinking?” he asks Nathaniel.
“An old fashioned.”
“Two old fashioneds,” Patrick tells the bartender and slides three dollar bills across the bar.
Nathaniel thinks he understands why Patrick picked this place. He wanted Nathaniel to know that he could walk into a bar full of gay men and blend in, and that the crowd of people is the same as he’d expect at a nice restaurant or an art museum. These aren’t Patrick’s people or Jerome’s people. He’s letting Nathaniel know that he can have this, that he can be this.
He’s also, apparently, letting Nathaniel know that all he has to do is sit on a stool and someone will effectively offer to have sex with him. Honestly, Nathaniel hadn’t thought it would be that easy. It gives him that same feeling he’d had when George asked him for drinks, the sense that he’s something of an object. It makes him hot with embarrassment, and then even more embarrassed that he likes it.
“I can’t believe people bother with these when there isn’t even any grass in them,” Nathaniel says, stubbing out the cigarette and pushing the ashtray away. “You’ve made me into a radical dope fiend, Patrick, and I’m looking at all these nice, clean-cut young people like they’re cops.”
Patrick gives him an odd look, like he’s waiting for the punch line.
“Take Me Home,” Susan’s song from last summer, comes on the jukebox. Nathaniel and Patrick exchange a glance that’s half wince, half amusement, and Nathaniel feels like they’re alone here, like everyone else in this bar, in this city, on this planet is far away.
“What are we drinking to?” Nathaniel asks when the bartender puts two old fashioneds in front of them.
“Courage,” Patrick says.
Nathaniel lifts his glass. “Drink on, drinkers.” After a few months at Dooryard Books, you start quoting Whitman, apparently.
Patrick grins, sudden and surprised. “That poem was about a gay bar. Kind of.”
They leave once they finish their drinks, taking the long way home.
“I had a good time,” Patrick says when he’s unlocking the door. It’s dark enough in the shop that Nathaniel would be afraid of tripping if he couldn’t navigate this place blindfolded by now.
“You don’t need to sound so surprised,” Nathaniel says. “I know I’m not the most thrilling company, but we make do.”
