Page 4 of We Could Be So Good
And there will be a next time, Nick knows. They’ll come back to watch a team they both hate, to drink warm beer and marinate in the sun. He stretches his arm over the empty seat beside him and looks up, watching pigeons roosting in the rafters. Other birds swoop and dive, and Nick lets the warmth of the sunlight soak into his skin.
***
June1958
“I want you to meet her,” Andy says.
“I’ve met her. I’ve known her for three years, which is two yearsand ten months longer than you,” Nick points out. Emily Warburton is, in fact, one of the handful of people at theChronicle—in the world—that Nick would call a friend.
“I want you to meet her as my... girlfriend.”
Nick mumbles something about third wheels and having to take a phone call, not sure why he’s resisting this idea but resisting it anyway.
Andy gives him this flat, disappointed look that Nick recognizes because Nick invented it and now he’s going to have to sue Andy for copyright infringement.
“Ugh, I can’t believe you’re going to make me say this,” Andy says.
“Say what?”
“You’re my friend. Right?”
Nick stares. What the fuck? Who asks that kind of question? “Yes?” he says cautiously, waiting for the catch.
“Right. So I enjoy spending time with you and Emily. Emily enjoys spending time with me and claims to enjoy spending time with you. You enjoy spending time with Emily, which I know because you voluntarily talk to her about non-work-related topics, and that’s more than I can say for just about anyone else. I know you enjoy spending time with me for the same reason. So, it stands to reason that all three of us would enjoy spending time together. I want my friend to like my girlfriend. It’s lunch, Nick, not six months in a submarine. And it’s my treat.”
Nick stammers out some kind of agreement, and then they work in mortified silence for the next hour.
Nick has never seen anyone fall in love before. But when he watches Andy put his hand on the small of Emily’s back as they walk to the table, and when Emily smiles at Andy over her shoulder, he’s pretty sure that’s what he’s witnessing.
For a minute, he’s annoyed that he’s about to lose his two closest work friends—or friend-friends, whatever—in one fell swoop. They’re going to pair up and leave him alone. Or, Christ, they’re going to try to pair him up with one of Emily’s friends and eventually figure out that he’s queer and then—well. It all ends with Nick losing his friends, doesn’t it?
But then Nick recalls how Andy had proposed this lunch.We’d all enjoy spending time together, he had said. Andy was trying to tell Nick that he wouldn’t lose anything by Andy and Emily pairing up.
Andy might be the most scatterbrained person Nick’s ever met. He might be incapable of having a conversation without letting it spiral in a dozen directions. He might live his life in total ignorance of where he put his pen, hat, coffee cup, and press pass. He might subsist almost entirely on coffee and whatever food Nick reminds him to eat.
But he’s really, really good at people—at guessing what a person might be feeling and knowing what it will take to make them feel better. It sounds so simple, so unremarkable, but when it comes down to it, Nick thinks it might be pretty rare.
And so he puts on his best smile, his most charming manners, and sets about trying to prove that Andy and Emily won’t regret letting him hang around.
They make sense as a couple. She’s sharp and a bit cynical, with dark hair and the air of always being on the verge of laughing. Her father is some kind of banker and her mother is a Rockefeller, so she’s one of the few people at the paper who wouldn’t be dating Andy to get ahead in the world. She’s a general assignment reporter for the women’s pages, but as far as Nick can tell, she mainly writes about sofas.
“There was a shipping error and the entire fourth floor iscovered in samples of upholstery fabric,” Emily says, “all of which deserve to be burned as an example.” She pauses, watching as Nick and Andy perform their usual exchange of pickles (which Andy regards as an abomination) and tomatoes (which Nick maintains threaten the stability of his sandwich).
“You know,” she says, “you can order sandwiches without tomatoes and pickles. They have people in the kitchen whose whole job is to make sandwiches.”
“But then Andy wouldn’t get an extra tomato.”
“I need my extra tomato, Emily.”
“God forbid you not get your tomato, darling.” And then Andy and Emily beam at one another. Nick has to look away, because what passes between them seems so fond as to be almost private.
That night, he can’t settle down. He paces the length of his apartment, from the empty spare room to the front door and back again, until the old woman downstairs bangs on the ceiling with her cane and shouts at him in Polish. He shouts back an apology and makes a note to get her something nice the next time he goes to the bakery down the street.
He’s jealous. Not of either Emily or Andy, not exactly. It’s envy more than jealousy, he decides. It isn’t even that he wants someone to adore him the way they obviously adore one another. It isn’t even that he wishes he had a chance to fall in love. He remembers Andy’s hand on the small of Emily’s back as they walked out of the restaurant. That’s what he wants, and he doesn’t even know what to call it.
He changes out of his suit and puts on a pair of jeans and a leather jacket, then heads out, up to Greenwich Avenue, where at least he can find someone to take the edge off.
***
