Page 88 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
“What I wanted,” Nathaniel says, “was to go back and feel like the person who lived in that house was a stranger.”
Patrick remembers, back in March, sitting with Nathaniel on the couch in his apartment, thinking about the things that split your life in two, the things that make the person you used to be into a stranger—or maybe make whoever you are now into a stranger.
“That didn’t happen?” Patrick asks.
“I didn’t think I’d miss that person. I don’t like him, I don’t respect him—and it’s pathological that I’m talking about myself like that.”
“What did you miss?”
“I used to know what was what.” He reaches past Patrick to open a cabinet and take out three wine glasses. “I was wrong, obviously, but I got up in the morning knowing that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. I was so good at being good.” He fills the glasses from one of the bottles of wine that’s started to appear in Susan’s kitchen.
Patrick remembers Nathaniel plunging into icy water uncomplainingly and wonders if that was what it was like for him to be good.
“And now you’re winging it?”
Nathaniel sips the wine and makes a face. “You’re going to tell me everybody’s winging it.”
Patrick was absolutely going to say that everybody’s winging it, at least everybody he’s ever known. Instead he jiggles the handle of the frying pan and turns the heat down.
“Nobody should be winging it when they’re forty,” Nathaniel says, and it sounds like he knows it’s grade A bullshit.
“You don’t even believe that.” The kitchen is starting to get smoky, so Patrick puts the stir fry into a serving bowl—they’re too fancy to eat out of frying pans, apparently—and shouts “Dinner!” loud enough that Susan will hear it where she’s on thefire escape, talking on the phone, the cord stretching to its limit through the window. “You know what matters,” Patrick says. “You can’t be good if you don’t know what matters.” Because that’s what they’re talking about, isn’t it? Being good? Figuring out whatgoodis in the first place?
Nathaniel gives him a funny look, not quite a smile—so rarely a smile—but something sweet and surprised. “Well,” he says, and looks away.
The rice might be a little burned, but Patrick sprinkles chopped cashews over the top and everyone says “ooh” like they’ve never seen a cashew before. Eleanor has a smashed-up piece of broccoli. Tim Buckley’s on the record player with a song that should be too sad, too elegiac,remember mesung too many times for anyone not to do what they’re told.
But it isn’t sad. Or maybe it is, but they’re still eating semi-burned food while Nathaniel details just how frightening a driver Susan is, and Patrick tells a story about how Susan once got onto a highway via the off ramp, and the lights flicker because everyone who has an air conditioner is running it tonight, during summer’s last gasp.
Susan falls asleep on the sofa while they’re watchingThe Tonight Show, slumped against Nathaniel’s shoulder.They aren’t in their usual seats. Patrick’s in the armchair because it gets a breeze from the open window, and he’s completely lost patience with the heat; he’s ready for fall.
“The two of you made things right?” Patrick asks, his voice low enough not to wake Susan, or Eleanor, who’s asleep in the next room. All day, things between Susan and Nathaniel had been—not the way they’d been earlier that summer, but easy in some other way.
Nathaniel’s quiet for a moment. He has an arm around her shoulder, his fingertips making dents in the gauzy cotton of her shirt. “Yeah, things are better.”
“Good.”
Nathaniel kicks his feet up onto the coffee table. “I asked her what would happen when she met someone new.”
A few weeks ago, Patrick asked Susan the same thing, but he hadn’t told Nathaniel—it still feels like a question he wasn’t allowed to ask. No—it feels like a question that shouldn’t matter. Why does Patrick need to know what happens when his friend—his sister-in-law, even—meets a new man? How is that his business? He hadn’t known how to explain that to himself, let alone to Nathaniel. But if Nathaniel asked her too, that has to mean something.
“I told her that I was worried whoever she met wouldn’t like us very much,” Nathaniel goes on, and that brings Patrick up short. That isn’t what he’d been worried about, not exactly. He’d been thinking about Susan moving away, starting a new family. What Nathaniel’s getting at is something different—Nathaniel’s assuming that there is a three of them, that there’s something here that matters, something worth hanging on to.
“What did she say?” Patrick asks, his throat tight.
“That she wasn’t going to fall in love with anyone stupid enough to interfere with a good thing. And that anyone she got involved with would have to fit into this.” With Nathaniel’s free hand, he makes a circular gesture encompassing all of them.
“Good.” Patrick can’t find any other words. “Good.”
“Obviously,” Susan mumbles into Nathaniel’s shirt. “Maybe the two of you can shut up now so I can get some sleep.”
“Time for bed,” Nathaniel says, getting to his feet and hauling Susan along with him. “If you spend the night on the sofa, you’ll wake up with your bones crooked.” Patrick watches, his heart in his throat, as Nathaniel walks Susan to bed. She makes some unhappy sounds, and he tells her to quit whining, and Patrick thinks he could go on like this forever.
They shut the door to Susan’s apartment as quietly as possible and go downstairs. Nathaniel takes a shower long enough that steam starts to creep out from under the bathroom door.
“I missed your water pressure,” he says when he comes out, one towel wrapped around his waist and using another to dry his hair.
“Our water pressure,” Patrick says, immediately feeling stupid about it.
