Page 33 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
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It turns out Nathaniel likes sexy evil men in frock coats as much as Jerome does. Last month, after Patrick bought that paperback from Jerome—paying for it with change from his own pocket, simply because Nathaniel mentioned their neighbor might want it—Nathaniel had meant to bring it right up to Maria Valdez, but he’d gotten distracted. During that night’s bout of insomnia, he read the entire book. It was the least hideous sleepless night he’s spent since 1961.
The next morning, he gave the book to Maria and asked her if she had any recommendations for something similar. It turns out there’s an entire genre of fiction that’s mostly about beautiful young women who start out in bad situations and wind up in worse ones before falling in love with a handsome doctor or the Duke of Lancaster. The rhythm of it all is a relief. The villains are worse than he is, straightforward bad guys who all but twirl their mustaches. The heroines tend to be optimistic naifs who are bad at noticing risk; he’s decided not to evaluate whether that particular quality has any personal relevance. He and Maria began passing dogeared paperback romance novels back and forth.
Now, on the windowsill next to his bed, Nathaniel has a stack of Anya Seton and Daphne du Maurier paperbacks that Patrick bought him for ten cents apiece from a sidewalk vendor on MacDougal Street. In Nathaniel’s notebook, he’s written “AnyaSeton,” but in his mind he knows he means the books, talking about them with Maria, and the fact that Patrick bought them.
Also on the windowsill next to his bed are the books Patrick lent him last month. At the bottom of the stack isThe Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It opens with bad intelligence getting people killed. He’d had a nasty moment when he wondered if Patrick was on to him, even though Nathaniel was an analyst, not the sort of operative most people imagine when they think of spies.
But of course Patrick doesn’t know, because if he did, he’d have sent Nathaniel packing. Patrick had simply lent Nathaniel a book he enjoyed, and now that book judges Nathaniel every night, mere inches from his pillow.
In his little notebook he writesMaria being funny about books. Then he writesAs the World Turns, even though Patrick must never know how sincerely Nathaniel enjoys it and how desperately invested he is in the fate of Penny Hughes. Next, he writespistachio ice cream, which, inexplicably, he’d never tried until this month.
If he keeps going, his notebook will be full of all the loveliest things in the world, things that in any just world he wouldn’t be allowed near.
* * *
“Did you ever play professionally?” Susan asks. The woman is relentless. Nathaniel’s afraid she won’t stop until she’s assembled a full dossier on him.
They’re in her apartment, listening to the Kinks. He’d like to think that Susan starting this interrogation in the middle of “A Well Respected Man” is a coincidence. However: guilty as charged, he supposes.
He tells her the truth. “I wasn’t good enough.”
At first he was afraid that if he said too much, Susan and Patrick would connect the dots, and someone would say something to the wrong person and it would end with Nathaniel in a secret prison in the Panama Canal Zone.
But he’s been here for three months. He’s talked to hundreds of customers. Faculty from various New York colleges visit Dooryard Books all the time, and there is no world as small as the world of people who went to a certain kind of school. Viv was finishing her graduate degree at Radcliffe while he was doing his undergrad at Harvard; they probably know people in common. One customer is the spitting image of a boy Nathaniel knew in prep school. A doctor Maria complains about shares an uncommon surname with Nathaniel’s former secretary. It isn’t like he’s in deep hiding.
He wants this to mean that nobody’s looking for him—surely they’d have found him already if they thought he posed a risk. But he’s familiar enough with intelligence gathering to know that finding a single person is usually a matter of luck.
He has, however, had enough time to assess the nature of the threat. Even if they know he photocopied the files, they wouldn’t kill him without finding out what he did with the copies. He can stop worrying about sniper rifles, at least. And if he really wants to be rational, he can find comfort in the fact that of all the underhanded things he’s heard of the agency doing, he’s never heard of anything suspicious happening to former analysts.
This should make it easier to go outside, but evidently his subconscious isn’t interested in rational arguments. Or perhaps the danger that threatens to engulf him at his worst moments isn’t the fear of a bullet to the head so much as it is the contents of his head.
“You weren’t good enough for what?” Susan asks.
“Boston Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symph—”
“Okay, so you weren’t one of the fifty best violinists in the country,” Susan says. “You realize there are professional musicians who aren’t in world class symphony orchestras but also aren’t playing on street corners while people throw spare change into their violin cases.”
“I know,” Nathaniel said. “But I was better at other things.” One of his professors took him out to lunch and told him that the government was going to need mathematicians if they had any hope of fighting the Soviets. Nathaniel was flattered; his fate was sealed. He’d get a job doing something important, something special and valuable and useful. He could be that person, and not the person he was starting to fear he was. Working for the agency felt like putting on an unobjectionable suit, and what Nathaniel wanted more than anything was to be unobjectionable.
Susan sits up just enough to put on a different record. Still the Kinks, but this time it’s “Sunny Afternoon,” and now Nathaniel knows he’s being roasted.
“It was 1950,” he says. “I was terrified.”
“About being gay?”
That wouldn’t have been the word Nathaniel used back then, if he’d even let himself use a word. “About not being the right kind of person,” he says. In 1968, that sounds weak and sad.
“Sometimes I still think I should be wearing little white gloves while I have lunch with the other ladies in the Junior League,” Susan says. Nathaniel already guessed that she was raised like he was, more or less. In the refrigerator downstairs, there’s a porcelain pitcher full of milk, because Susan insists that pouring milk directly from the carton into a coffee cup is disgusting for mysterious reasons she can’t articulate. Nathaniel, for the same mysterious reasons, agrees. Patrick calls them both bourgeoisie collaborators.
Nathaniel opens his mouth to point out that ladies in the Junior League would simply never leave their gloves on during lunch, but Susan catches his eye with a look that’s half amusement, halfdon’t you dare. He knows that she knows exactly what he was going to say. There have been few times in his life he’s felt as transparent as he does around Susan, and even fewer that he’s wanted to.
“Are you still terrified?” Susan asks.
Nathaniel thinks about it. “Of being the wrong kind of person? I already know I’m the wrong kind of person.” The last few months have etched that much into his bones. That, he supposes, is the first step. The first step toward what, he couldn’t say.
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