Page 11 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
“What, did your ears stop working? How about ‘Light My Fire’?” Susan strums a few bars.
“I think my line is that all music recorded after 1955 sounds like noise.”
Susan narrows her eyes. “I don’t buy it.”
Nathaniel makes an aggrieved sound and starts to play something classical.
“Oh wow, Patrick, he’s playing Bach. We have a serious musician on the premises.” Susan’s voice drips with sarcasm.
The sight of Nathaniel playing classical violin sets off an alarm bell for Patrick. It isn’t even the first one that Patrick’shad since Nathaniel arrived. He doesn’t fit the pattern of the other strays. No track marks, no dog tags, no unsavory friends calling in at the shop. Patrick would swear on a bible that the man hasn’t touched any kind of drug since moving into this building. He hasn’t even helped himself to the beer in Patrick’s refrigerator.
It’s only a matter of time before he dusts himself off and goes back to whatever life he left behind. It’s a good reminder that Nathaniel is as temporary as anyone else. So is Susan, for that matter—she’ll get back on her feet and buy a ticket to San Francisco, taking Eleanor with her.
Nathaniel segues from Bach to “Love Is All Around,” the same exact notes Susan played a few minutes earlier, and Susan laughs. It’s a sound he hasn’t heard since she came here. She joins in.
Something warps and twists in the music. Susan says, “Okay, okay, I see where you’re going” and the sugary pop ballad transforms into something moody and strange, like it’s been filtered through Bob Dylan by way of a haunted house.
Through the back window, the snow dusts the branches of the dead tree in the yard, before settling on the ground in wet clumps. The song twists and shifts again until it’s something almost cheerful. The radiator clangs in a messy counterpoint. The baby stirs, and when her eyes open, she gazes at Patrick.
4
Patrick’s about to close the shop when someone walks in.
“Gracious,” the new arrival says, dramatically stepping backwards and clutching his chest when he sees Patrick holding Eleanor. “Tell me you didn’t make that.”
“Okay, first of all, fuck you,” Patrick says, leaning in to kiss Jerome’s cheek. “Second, there’s nothing wrong with babies.”
“Ofcoursenot, darling. But when an old queen—”
“I’m twenty-seven!”
“Like I said. Nobody’s seen you in weeks, and now I know why.Procreating.”
“She isn’t mine.”
“Exactly how sure are you about that?” Jerome asks, one plucked eyebrow carefully arched. He has on a fur coat but no wig or makeup. It makes Patrick panicky when Jerome goes out in drag—it’s only a matter of time before he gets arrested—but when he told this to Jerome, he got an earful about how wearing false eyelashes in broad daylight isn’t any more of a crime than Patrick going home with every queer rare book collector on the East Coast. The worst part is that he was right. “I always thought all white babies looked the same, but they can’talllook just like you.”
“She’s my niece,” Patrick says.
The expression of camp scandalization drops from Jerome’s face. “Your brother?”
It hits Patrick that he’s going to have to go through this every time he tells someone about Eleanor. “Not coming home.”
“Well, shit,” Jerome says. “I’m sorry, baby.”
Patrick shakes his head. “What do you have for me today?”
Dooryard Books has some regular book scouts who come by every couple of weeks or months with a few well-selected books they think Patrick might want to buy, but they’re the minority. More common are those who arrive with an A&P bag containing two decent books and a lot of nonsense, and Patrick buys the entire lot so that way they don’t go elsewhere the next time they find something precious. There’s a man who drives his 1949 Buick up to the store, double parks, and insists that Patrick look at whatever he has in the trunk. There’s a retired schoolteacher who Patrick meets in a parking lot in Hoboken, like they’re selling heroin or machine guns rather than copies ofLittle Women. There’s a man with what Patrick swears must be a false mustache who arrives twice a year with a milk crate full of books so good that Patrick can only hope they aren’t stolen.
Jerome is in a class of his own. A few years ago, he walked into the shop, asked for a copy ofGo Tell It on the Mountain, then had a lot to say about race relations when it turned out Patrick didn’t have any James Baldwin in stock. When he came back a week later with a stack of James Baldwin and Richard Wright and one inscribed copy ofInvisible Man, Patrick bought them all.
Today he has a Bloomingdale’s bag full of nice enough leather-bound books, probably part of a set that got split up, a flawless first edition ofManhattan Transfer, one paperback with a lady in a nightgown fleeing an old house, and a book Patrick’s never heard of calledLadies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes. “Very funny, very gay. Elderly lesbians,” Jerome says, like this is a crucial selling point, and maybe it is. “Make sure you read it before you sell it.”
“Okay,” Patrick agrees.
It’s nearly closing time, and Patrick was alone in the shop, but he’s been waiting for an opportunity to show Nathaniel the process for purchasing and pricing books. He picks up the phone and dials Susan’s apartment. When Nathaniel isn’t in the shop, he’s usually with Susan, whispering, their heads bent together, their instruments in hand, increasingly eerie music drifting out of Susan’s apartment and into the stairwell. Otherwise, Nathaniel is across the hall. If Mrs. Valdez is home in the afternoon, she and Nathaniel watch soap operas on the Valdezes’ color television while Mrs. Valdez irons her uniform.
“He’s with the Valdezes,” Susan says. “They’re watchingLaugh In. Want me to send him down?”
