Page 41 of We Could Be So Good
“Neither. I think it would be a lot weirder if you didn’t mention it.” He pours himself some coffee and leans against the counter, facing Nick. “So, what did she say?”
“That I owed you an apology.”
Andy frowns. “Which you gave me last night. We don’t need to have this conversation. Please. I embarrassed myself. It won’t happen again.”
“I hurt your feelings.” He’s hoping that Andy will give him a clue about where he went wrong so he doesn’t make the same mistake twice, but Andy only flushes and looks away.
“That’s unavoidable under the circumstances, and not something you need to apologize for.”
Nick doesn’t follow. Maybe there’s still some gin in his system, or maybe his head is too full of rocks and garbage to do much in the way of thinking, but either way he doesn’t understandexactly how he hurt Andy, much less how it was unavoidable. “It is, though. I don’t want to insult you.”
Andy gives him a confused look. “I mean, I know that, Nick. Anyway, I’m sorry. I meant what I said. I shouldn’t have interfered.”
Nick shakes his head. “I don’t care about that.”
“You don’t need to say that.”
Nick isn’t just saying it. He can’t even remember the man’s name, or whether he even knew it in the first place. If he wants what that man had to offer, he can find it that very night, in one of any number of similar bars.
But that isn’t what he wants, and that’s the problem.
Chapter Nine
Nick ought to visit his mother this weekend, but he already knows that he won’t. He just doesn’t have any interest in surrounding himself with people who might hate him if they knew who he really was. He doesn’t usually put it to himself that baldly, but Friday night still has him a bit shaky.
He loves his mother. He loves his nieces and nephew. Growing up, he was surrounded by family at every turn—aunts and grandparents, cousins and uncles and vague hangers-on. Being a part of that large, loud, fractious Russo family is as much a part of his identity as being a reporter or a baseball fan—or queer. But the knowledge that his belonging to that family is contingent on keeping a secret—on implicitly agreeing that a part of him needs to be hidden away—makes him feel fragile in a way he hates, and so he keeps his distance.
Before Andy came to live with him, Nick would sometimes stay on the subway for an extra stop in the morning, getting off at Fulton Street and walking to the fish market. He’d stick his hands in his pockets and watch the boats pass beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, solid and permanent, the time before its existence impossible to imagine, absurd as a concept.
Sometimes he imagines ships just out of sight, rounding the bend into the harbor. His father had been fifteen when he left Ragusa, he and his younger sister the last members of their family to survive both the war and the flu.
His mother’s family had come earlier, aunts and uncles and cousins and what must have been half the population of a tiny fishing village on the Ionian Sea.
He can’t quite imagine it, can’t quite imagine having a village. He can imagine his father’s journey more easily. He wonders if leaving everything behind is a Russo trait. As the crow flies, he’s five miles from the place where he was born, ten miles from the house where his brother and mother live today. It feels like more.
Nick realized two things at about the same time: one, he didn’t want to tend bar or work at the docks like most of the men in the neighborhood, and two, he wanted other boys in a way he wasn’t supposed to. Those two things got tied up together in some ways that made sense and some ways that didn’t. There was a general understanding in the neighborhood that anyone who didn’t work with his hands was about one step removed from wearing lipstick and feather boas—one step removed from the queers by the naval yards, the fairies of the Village and Harlem. The people in the neighborhood had all but drawn him a map of where to find people like himself.
And so his after-school job as a night copyboy at theBrooklyn Eaglebecame a way out of the neighborhood and also a way he’d somehow be able to be queer. It worked, he supposes.
Nick never looked back.
Or at least he’s trying not to.
***
“I have news,” Andy says solemnly, coming up to Nick’s desk. “And you can’t get mad about it.”
“Has telling someone that they can’t get mad ever worked? Even once?”
“Okay.” Andy looks like his heart is going a mile a minute. He’s twisting his tie so aggressively that Nick wants to slap his hand away. “So, I have tickets to opening day at Yankee Stadium. They’re playing the Red Sox. And you’re coming.”
“Oh no. Andy,no.”
“Andy, yes,” he says, nodding.
“You’re going to wear a Red Sox cap and we’re going to get murdered—literally murdered, Andy—on the way from the subway to the stadium.”
“Ah!” Andy says triumphantly. “We can take a car.”
