Page 26 of We Could Be So Good
“The—” Andy stops himself, realizing that shoutingthe subway toilet!in the middle of a rush hour crowd isn’t exactly discreet. “People do that?”
“And here I thought you were a man of the world.”
“Anyway, my point holds.”
“I really appreciate your permission to get my—” Nick clears his throat and Andy’s pretty sure that’s a flush he sees high on Nick’s cheeks. “But it’s only a source.”
If he’s meeting with a source, then Andy doesn’t need to ask what story this is for: it’ll be the dirty cops and the missing money. Andy dangles the keys from his fingers. “I don’t need these. I’ll wait in that café on the other end of Barrow Street and you can come find me when you’re done.” The idea of being alone in Nick’s empty apartment feels all wrong, like Nick’s absence will be a tangible thing, like it might sink into his bones and never leave.
***
Andy hails a cab because he doesn’t feel like crowding into a subway car with everyone else hurrying home to start their weekend, and Nick isn’t around to give him Looks about it. He has the cabbie drop him off at Sheridan Square, in front of a bookstore where he can buy something to keep himself busy for the next few hours. Then, armed with a pulp detective story, he turns down Barrow Street in search of that café.
One thing he likes about the Village is that there are more people on the sidewalks than there ever are on the Upper East Side. There are little old ladies dragging groceries in handcarts, and there are men in suits awfully like his own. At this time of day, there are always people out walking their dogs after getting home from work. There are parents with children in strollers and old men sitting on stoops. But there are also young women with cropped hair and wearing trousers and young men with slightly longer hair and... well, they’re also wearing trousers, obviously, but a bit on the tight side. A lot on the tight side.
Maybe it’s because of that conversation he just had with Nick, but he’s aware of an atmosphere in the neighborhood that he’salways known is there but hasn’t ever properly noticed. It’s different,knowingmen are looking at one another, compared withnoticingthat men are looking at one another.
And maybe he’s noticing a little too obviously, maybe he’s letting his gaze linger just a little too long on one man who walks past him—leather jacket, jeans, an honest-to-Godbeardon hisface—because that man looks back over his shoulder and throws him a glance that Andy couldn’t misinterpret if he tried.
He does try. A little. He doesn’t want to think of the possibilities that exist in a world where he returns that glance. Everything is simpler and safer if he doesn’t think about that, and Andy has long since made peace with being the kind of person who doesn’t swim against the current. He has enough trouble without borrowing any.
***
When he gets to the café, he snags a table near the window and orders a cream cheese sandwich on date bread, which seems to be on the menus of half the coffee shops and cafés in the city. They’re never particularly good, but they’re never bad, either. He also orders a cappuccino, which will probably keep him up too late, but when in Rome.
The book, however, is dull, and Andy ought to have known better than to try a new author when he has nothing else to do with himself. Someone left a copy of theVillage Voiceon the table next to him, so he flips through it idly. He reads half a dozen papers a day, but he’s never done more than skim through theVoice. It isn’t theChronicle’s competition and it isn’t theChronicle’s audience. It has the tiniest fraction of theChronicle’s circulation. There isn’t any comparison. The style is looser and less serious, butsomehow more insistent. The writing feels conversational, but like an important conversation, like a conversation he’s a little pleased with himself to be a part of.
He gets lost in theVoice’s world of blistering reviews of movies he’ll never see and meandering paeans to music he’s never heard of. And then he turns the page and sees a headline that seems like it might be visible from space: “Revolt of the Homosexual.”
He feels his face heat and reminds himself that he isn’t doing anything wrong. He’s reading a newspaper. Hundreds of other people have read this same article. The article is styled as a dialog between two men: one a homosexual and one a self-described “straight guy.” His focus skitters wildly across the page, picking up a phrase here, a jarring slur there, and he forces himself back to the beginning.
Why have so many fairies come out in the open recently? Wherever I go I run into them—the Village, East Side, Harlem, even the Bronx, Andy reads. And then the answer:We no longer have the energy to hide. You can’t know the strain on a person in always pretending.
He realizes he’s biting his nails and forces his hand around his now-cold cup of coffee. That’s Nick the man is writing about. That’s Nick, and it’s the people in tight trousers walking around this neighborhood, and he’s pretty sure his freshman year calculus professor, and at least one of the boys from his dorm, and—
He thinks about that man looking back over his shoulder at him, and he thinks about what some other, braver version of himself might have done, and he has to admit to himself, even if never to anyone else, that the article is talking about him, at least a little. At least theoretically.
Not really, though, because Andy likes women. Dating women isn’t a burden to him. He isn’t hiding, like that man in the article.Sure, he’s looked at men and felt the same thing as when he looks at women, but he’s always known he wasn’t going to do anything about it.
When he learned the words for men who liked men, he knew they didn’t apply to him, couldn’t possibly apply to him, and thank God for it because Andy had enough problems without being queer. Those words weren’t for men who could have happily, cheerfully settled down with a woman. Nothing about that life he could have had—the life he’ll wind up having with someone he hasn’t even met yet, the kind of life hewants—feels like hiding.
Andy reads the rest of the article as carefully as he’s ever read any piece of newsprint. He reads the demand for acceptance and basic rights, the rejection of shame and fear. He reads the calm rebuttal of all the usual arguments against homosexuality, and the statement that it makes no sense to argue against a thing that simply is.
Andy ought to have guessed that there were people campaigning for homosexual rights in the same way that people campaign for the rights of any subjugated group, but seeing it in print makes it real. That’s what newspapers do, isn’t it? They make things concrete, they make it hard to look away.
He imagines what would happen if theChronicleprinted something like this—a call to arms. And the fact is that he can’t. He can’t imagine any paper doing it, but here one is, right in front of him.
He goes back to the beginning and reads the article another time, and by the end his sweaty fingers have picked up some of the newsprint. He feels like the text of the article has gotten under his skin, inside of him, because he can’t stop thinking about it.
The café gets louder, and a man helps himself to the empty seatat Andy’s table. When he finally looks at his watch, it’s past nine thirty.
It isn’t like Nick to be late. In fact, Nick’s more likely to phone the café to leave a message letting Andy know there’s been a change in plans than he is to forget they have plans in the first place. But Andy didn’t give Nick the name of this place, did he? He only said the coffee shop on Barrow. Even sitting in it, he can’t remember its name—it’s one of dozens of similar places with similar round tables and similar rickety chairs. Nick may even have gone to some other coffee shop on Barrow and not found him.
Another half hour passes and Andy decides to leave. He doesn’t have a key to Nick’s apartment, but he heads there anyway. If Nick isn’t there, Andy can always go to his own apartment; his keys are still at Nick’s, but the doorman will let him in.
But he already knows he won’t do that. If Nick isn’t at his apartment, Andy will sit on the stoop and wait for him. There isn’t any question.
When he arrives at the building, he looks up, counts to the fifth floor, and sees that the light is on in Nick’s apartment. Did Andy forget to turn it off that morning? Usually Nick checks before leaving, with some pro forma grumbling about not having stock in the electric company.
