Page 12 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
“Ask him to run down during the next commercial break, if he doesn’t mind. Tell him it’ll take less than three minutes.” He hangs up. “Be nice to him,” he warns Jerome.
“I can be terribly nice,” Jerome says, in what he probably thinks is a sultry voice.
Nathaniel comes in from the street door and doesn’t flinch when Jerome makes a spectacle of himself, kissing Nathaniel’s hand.
“Anyway,” Patrick tells Nathaniel, “we write the seller, title, description, and purchase price in this book. Then we give the seller a receipt.” He turns to Jerome. “I’ll take everything but the paperback. We don’t sell paperbacks.”
“It wasn’t for sale. I finished it on the subway and dropped it in the bag.”
“Maria reads these,” Nathaniel says, frowning at the paperback. “I don’t think she has this one.”
It takes Patrick a moment to realize that Maria is Mrs. Valdez. Nathaniel’s been here for less than a month and apparently they’re on a first name basis.
“For you, it’s for sale,” Jerome tells Nathaniel.
The cover price is fifty cents. “I’ll give you a quarter,” Patrick says.
“Thirty cents,” Jerome counters. “It’s a good one. I do love a sexy evil man in a frock coat.”
That’s a good candidate for the gayest sentence ever uttered, and Patrick figures Jerome earned the extra five cents just for the effort. He digs a quarter and a nickel out of his pocket and drops them on the counter. Then he pulls ten dollars out of the cash register for the rest of the books and watches as Nathaniel records the sale and writes a receipt.
“How do you know what to pay?” Nathaniel asks.
“Baby, he makes it up,” Jerome says.
Patrick sighs. “Jerome gets a forty percent cut of what I think I can sell the book for. Good copies sell for fifty percent of the cover price, but anything rare or special I have to figure out using—”
“Tea leaves,” Jerome says. “A crystal ball. Your womanly intuition.”
“Using my decade of experience. Speaking of which.” He rifles through the papers on his desk until he comes up with the latest issue ofAntiquarian Bookman,the trade magazine where booksellers list books for sale and books they want. Patrick scans it every week for books he has in stock, then sends a postcard with a quote to the bookseller who wanted it. When he finishes with an issue, he lends it to Jerome or one of his other favorite scouts, so they’ll know what to look out for.
“Pleasure doing business,” Jerome says, giving a demure wave of his fingers before leaving the shop.
“Is he your friend?” Nathaniel asks while Patrick is lightly penciling in the price on each book’s flyleaf. Patrick can’t figure out if the subtext iswhy would you be friends with someone like thatorare you loversor if Nathaniel’s just curious.
“Yeah,” Patrick says. “But if you’re asking whether we’re—uh.” He suddenly just does not have what it takes to say “lovers” or “fucking” in front of a man over ten years his senior. Nathaniel has to know that Patrick’s queer, but the world is full of people who spend their whole lives pretending not to notice anything they don’t like. “Not lately,” Patrick finishes, hedging.
“I see,” Nathaniel says, apparently satisfied, which makes Patrick suspect he answered the question Nathaniel meant to ask.
This is where most straight men hurry to explain that they don’t know anything about any of that business because of how normal they are. Nathaniel doesn’t do that. Instead he leans over and puts a cap on the ballpoint pen that’s sitting on Patrick’s desk.
Still, Patrick expects Nathaniel to seize any reason to leave. Maybe he’ll say he wants to finish watchingLaugh Inor he needs to bring that book to Mrs. Valdez, anything to get him away from a conversation about Patrick’s gay sex life. Patrick almost doesn’t blame him; he’d climb out a window if he had to hear about a straight person’s sex life.
“I can close up on my own,” Patrick says, feeling merciful, “if you want to finish whatever you were watching with the Valdezes.”
But Nathaniel stays, never more than a few feet away as Patrick runs the cash register tape and locks up.
* * *
“Where do you get a violin restrung?” Patrick asks one morning when Nathaniel emerges from his bedroom. He’s wearing one of Patrick’s t-shirts. Patrick tries not to notice the way thethreadbare shirt shifts on Nathaniel’s shoulders as he reaches for a cup of coffee—he’s not as skinny as Patrick first thought.
“It’s just that you mentioned your violin needs work,” Patrick says when Nathaniel’s starting in on his second cup of coffee. He doesn’t add: Susan asked me to flush the pills down the toilet and then she cried; the only time I’ve seen her smile in the last month is when she’s making music with you.
“It isn’t my violin,” Nathaniel says, finally looking up from his coffee mug. “It was in your shop.”
“Pal, that violin cluttered up the shop for years. I lowered the price to two dollars and still nobody bought it. It’s your violin now, good riddance to it, no take-backs.”
“Two dollars,” Nathaniel repeats, and now he’s all the way awake. “TwoAmericandollars?”
