Page 75 of We Could Be So Good
Nick is quiet for a moment. “I suppose that’s why nobody would publish it here.” He disappears back into the kitchen and Andy resumes reading. He can’t believe this book is going to make him readPhaedrus. It’s possible that at some point he knew something about Plato, but it’s vanished along with calculus and the order of the planets. “Do you have a copy ofPhaedrus?” he calls out.
“Do I have a what?”
“Plato’sPhaedrus.”
“Oh yeah. Sure, it’s right over by the— No, I fucking don’t have any Plato in my apartment, for fuck’s sake, Andrew.”
This time Andy does roll his eyes. God forbid anyone point out that Nick has literally hundreds of books in his apartment.
“Are you really enjoying it?” Nick asks later when they’re sitting down to eat.
“Yeah,” Andy says, surprised. “It’s sweet.”
“Sweet.”
“And very, very gay.” He puts his fork down. “There’s gay sex.”
Nick’s eyes widen. “Mark Bailey is reviewing this for theChronicle.”
“I mean, it isn’t explicit. But it happens anyway.”
“What happens afterward?”
“Huh?”
“After the sex?”
Andy thinks back. “Cuddling, I guess? They’re asleep on the sofa together. And then one character asks the other to move in with him.” He doesn’t say that everything leading up to the sex is, for lack of a better word, romantic. When she was packing for an airplane trip, Andy’s mother used to bring these novels in which handsome doctors fell in love with their nurses (“It’s escapism, and the only thing that keeps me from worrying about plane crashes,” she used to say before shoving three battered fifty-cent paperbacks into her bag). This book is as romantic as any of those (which Andy knows, because he used to skim them, hungry for any point of commonality with his mother).
“They don’t regret it?” Nick asks, voice oddly aggressive given that they’re talking about a pretty sappy novel.
Andy realizes that Nick doesn’t believe him—he thinks Andy’smisread the book. He absolutely does not believe that the little blue paperback sitting on their coffee table contains a story that is both queer and non-tragic.
“No, not at all,” Andy says, but then reconsiders. “No, I’m wrong. They don’t regret the sex, but they’re all constantly disparaging themselves for not liking women. That’s getting on my nerves, to be honest.”
“That’s how it is for some people,” Nick says, and that’s when Andy realizes that they’re having two separate conversations. Nick isn’t talking about the book at all—or, not only about the book.
“Oh?”
“Yeah.” Nick pushes away from the table and brings his plate to the sink.
“Nick.”
“I mean, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but people like me are supposed to be ashamed of ourselves.”
Andy swallows. “People like us.”
“Right, right. But—how on earth are you not?”
“Ashamed? Are you?”
“No.But it took time.”
Andy realizes that Nick’s waiting for Andy to change his mind, waiting for a crisis Andy isn’t going to have, and he doesn’t know how to go about reassuring him. “Nick, I don’t know. The fact is that I don’t have anything to lose, do I? I’ve lost the person who meant the most to me and the person I have left doesn’t seem to mind that I’m queer.”
“Your dad?” Nick asks.
“Oh my God.” Andy isn’t sure whether he wants to laugh or cry. “I’m talking about you.”
