Page 57 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
When he gets home, it’s late enough that he expects Nathaniel to be asleep, but the apartment’s empty. At Susan’s door, he can hear the muffled sounds of a television. He isn’t sure whether to knock or let himself in, so he knocks lightly before turning his key in the lock.
They’re on the couch, Nathaniel’s head on Susan’s shoulder, his eyes shut and his mouth half open. Eleanor’s on Susan’s lap, also asleep.
“Turn the TV off,” Susan whispers. “I’m trapped.”
Patrick puts the jar of soup into Susan’s refrigerator, then turns the dial until the television clicks off.
“Come here,” she says, patting the sofa cushion. “Closer. Jeez, Patrick, I took a shower and everything, get over here.”
He does as he’s told, until Susan’s arm is around him, pulling him into a one-armed hug, Eleanor between them. “This is platonic cuddling,” she whispers, then tightens her arm when he tries to pull away. “We used to do this.”
They’d stopped, maybe because she’d gotten serious with Michael and it was just too weird, maybe because Patrick gotout of the habit of touching anybody except the men he brought home.
Loving Susan is easy and obvious, plain in a way that isn’t covered byfriendorfamilyand madesister-in-lawfeel like an inside joke. Maybe she got grandfathered in before he forgot how to care about people—not just careforthem with bus tickets and sandwiches, but careaboutthem in a way that feels like putting cash on a card table.
“So loud,” Nathaniel mutters from Susan’s other side. “Harridan.” Patrick feels like he’s waiting for the roulette wheel to stop spinning, his heart in his throat, his wallet empty; it isn’t even a new feeling, where Nathaniel is concerned.
“Stop thinking,” Susan says. “You aren’t any good at it.” He kisses the top of her head. She smells like baby formula and incense. So does he, probably. When he slides his arms around her, her chin digs into his shoulder and her hair gets in his mouth, just like it always did.
17
A hell of a lot of people manage to spend years of their lives collecting books without noticing that most books aren’t particularly valuable, and virtually anything you do to them is only going to make them worth even less. Patrick’s lost count of the number of people who’ve told him about the whole room they have—on the Upper West Side, in Ossining, at their summer house on the Cape—that’s filled with books. Patrick could tell them that he, too, has rooms full of books and it’s not like people are beating down the door to pay a fortune for most of them.
Still, he humors collectors, at least those within a subway ride, because book people don’t usually consider parting with their collections unless they’re hard up for either money or space. Patrick will comb through what they’ve got and offer a fair price for anything he thinks he can sell, as long as he doesn’t already have multiple copies of it in stock.
Answering that last question was always a bit of a mystery. Did he still have those three leather-bound copies ofThe Golden Bowl, or had he sold them? Or was itThe Bostonians? But Nathaniel finished his inventory, and Patrick now has an alphabetized list of nearly all his books. It’s eighty pages long, typed. Nathaniel punched holes along the side and bound it with brass brads.
“But what if I buy more books,” Patrick had asked.
“You’ll pencil them in and cross off whatever you sell. Then you’ll retype an updated list next summer. Or I will.” The prospect of retyping eighty pages brings Patrick no joy, but the idea that Nathaniel might be around this time next year is good enough that he doesn’t care.
So when Patrick enters Viv’s apartment, he can tell almost right away that he’ll need to come back with a hand truck.
“The problem,” he tells her, “is that you and I have identical taste.” Clearly, she had the right idea with all that muttering about coals to Newcastle. “I’m going to go broke today.”
He spends the entire morning going through her shelves. She has first editions of Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Carson McCullers, and Anaïs Nin. None of them are perfect. They were clearly bought to read, and some have underlinings and dogeared pages. Some have “Maryanne Verdano” written on the flyleaf in faded blue ink. Patrick doesn’t have the heart to tell Viv that all these signs of use detract from a book’s value. Instead he offers her what he thinks is a fair amount for a total of fifty books and the standard half the cover price for another hundred.
She sighs. “I don’t know what I’ll do with the rest. I can’t take all these books with me, and I can’t afford this place on my own.”
“Nathaniel will be sorry to see you go.”
“I’m only moving to Barrow Street. You’ll see more of me than ever.”
He declines her offer of a drink, writes her a check, suggests that she call that bookstore on Worth Street to unload the rest, and is about to leave when he sees another shelf in the doorway to the kitchen. This is the sort of apartment where bookshelves have been shoved against every wall, wedged between every piece of furniture. It’s a mode of living that Patrick’s only too accustomed to.
He can see why she didn’t draw his attention to these books in the first place. They’re paperbacks, and not even nice-looking paperbacks. There isn’t an unbroken spine among them.
“Are these Gothic romances? I don’t meanThe Monk. I mean the sort of books with women in nightgowns running away from creepy houses on the covers?” A closer inspection reveals that they are.
Viv sighs. “They were Maryanne’s. I wasn’t sure what to do with them, other than take them with me. I can’t throw them out.”
Patrick had assumed Viv and Maryanne broke up, but that isn’t how you talk about someone who’s still alive. He clears his throat. “Do they have sentimental value or are you willing to part with them?”
“Everything in this apartment has sentimental value, but I can’t keep it all. I don’t even want to keep it all.”
“I’ll take them all for…thirty percent of the cover price? Nathaniel’s crazy about them. He’ll be over the moon.”
“Anything for Nathaniel.” She has a little twinkle in her eye that lets Patrick know she assumes he and Nathaniel are together. He’s not going to correct her, because this isn’t about the particular nuance of his and Nathaniel’s friendship, and at this point he doesn’t even know if she’s wrong. It’s about this woman giving her late partner’s books to someone who will know exactly what they’re getting.
