Page 78 of We Could Be So Good
“Before eight o’clock on a Saturday morning?”
“Neighborhood’s always crawling with cops. You’d think they’d have better things to do.”
First, they go to the A&P, where Nick buys noodles, canned tomatoes, and a lot of weird-looking vegetables that Andy refrains from commenting about.
“They’re eggplants, Andy,” Nick says, so maybe Andy’s face is doing some commenting of its own. “Trust me.”
“I do,” says Andy, maybe a little too earnestly. “Everything you make is delicious.”
Then they go to the bakery on Cornelia Street, where Nick gets two loaves of bread, glowers away Andy’s offer to pay, then hands the grocery bag to Andy to carry. A few doors down is a cheese store that Andy has passed a dozen times but is too intimidated by to consider going in.
“Where else are we going?” Andy asks when Nick emerges with two paper-wrapped parcels of mysterious cheese that he dumps into Andy’s shopping bag.
“Just the butcher.” The butcher Nick likes is a block away on Jones Street, a hole-in-the-wall that’s long since passed old-fashioned and ascended into a sort of battered permanence. The floor is covered in sawdust and meat hangs in the window. There’s no need for Andy to go in—he could wait on the sidewalk as he had at the cheese shop and say hello to all the dogs that come past. Except. Well.
Nick greets the butcher in Italian. He’s told Andy that he only speaks kitchen Italian, but this is a flat-out lie because right now the butcher is clearly trying to sell him what looks like beef and Nick is saying no, no, he wants something else. The butcher asks a question, Nick answers, and, honestly, somebody speaking a language that literal millions of other people speak shouldn’t affect Andy in quite this way. In fact, there’s the butcher speaking Italian right now, and Andy in no way wants to push that man against the counter and do lewd things to him. It’s just a language! Jesus.
As he watches, Nick leans a hand against the counter and laughs at whatever the butcher says, again refusing the offered cut of meat. When most people laugh, they become more attractive. But with Nick, who’s already about as good-looking a person as Andy has ever seen, laughing transforms his face into something accessible—he exposes a crooked tooth and a pair of fillings, hiseyes scrunch up so you can no longer see their warm brown depths, and a road map of creases appears around his eyes and mouth.
And if Andy hadn’t already known he loves Nick—if Andy had managed to tuck that truth away where he keeps everything else he doesn’t want to deal with—he would have known it then, watching Nick laugh with the butcher on a sunny May morning.
***
After humoring Andy by letting him chop the eggplant, Nick sends him out on an errand.
“Wine,” Nick says. “Three bottles of red, plus another for the chicken.”
Andy makes a mental note to buy at least five bottles. Or maybe a full case of wine? Is that the sort of extravagance that might bother Nick? It isn’t as if they aren’t eventually going to drink twelve bottles of wine, right? And buying a case brings the cost down, so maybe it’s the opposite of an extravagance?
“And...” Nick’s voice trails off as he stirs a pan of onions. “Remember when you brought me—when you got those flowers?”
Nick is facing away, so Andy can’t be sure, but he thinks Nick might be blushing. He repeats Nick’s words to himself.When you brought me flowers.He remembers Nick’s expression when Andy walked through the door with all those daffodils; it had lodged in Andy’s memory because it didn’t quite make sense. At the time, he hadn’t been able to tell whether Nick was embarrassed or pleased or something else.
If Nick wants flowers, then Andy will fill the apartment with every bouquet and posy and arrangement he can get his hands on. He’ll raid a florist. He’ll break into a funeral home—which, all right, maybe not that.
Except, no. He imagines Emily and Jeanne and Linda walking into an apartment filled with flowers. They wouldn’t know what to think—or they would, which might be worse. All right. He needs to buy flowers. Just some. A normal, non-alarming quantity of flowers. Not all the flowers in the world. He can do that.
He’s still standing at the door, his wallet in his hand, and Nick is staring at him.
“Haha,” Andy says. “I’m going now. Bye!” And he flees.
At the wine store, he makes life simple by buying a case of the same wine he bought the last time, because he knows Nick likes it. Then he pays extra to have it delivered within the hour, because carrying a crate of wine anywhere, let alone up four flights of stairs, is something he will happily pay somebody else to do.
When he bought the daffodils, he had just seen them outside the corner store. They weren’t anything fancy. Today, in front of that same store, there are only scraggly bundles of carnations and he isn’t having any of that. There’s a flower shop near Washington Square Park, though, so when he returns to the apartment an hour later it’s with an armful of sweet peas.
“You’re back,” Nick says, stirring something at the stove. “Too bad there’s no wine left in Manhattan because it’s all at our house. I tipped the kid fifty cents.” With the wooden spoon, he gestures at a crate on the floor next to him, then turns around and sees Andy. And the flowers, presumably.
After looking at every flower in the shop, much to the consternation of the florist, Andy settled on sweet peas because one, they’re pretty; two, they smell good; and three, they don’t look expensive, at least to Andy’s notions of what expensive flowers look like. He chose a jumble of pinks and whites and purples, no greenery, no baby’s breath or other bullshit filler, on the theory that it would look less stuffy. And if he puts them in the quart jarthat used to hold Nick’s mother’s spaghetti sauce, they might look like they belong.
“I got these for you.” Andy makes himself tag on those last two words so Nick will know this wasn’t an errand; it’s a gesture. It’s someone bringing flowers to the person he loves. Simple as that.
Nick doesn’t say anything, but he calmly sets the wooden spoon on the rim of the pot, crosses the room in a few strides, and kisses Andy hard. He crushes Andy against the door and Andy has to move his arm to the side to avoid ruining the flowers.
***
Andy figures there has to be some official etiquette regarding how to greet an ex-fiancée, but if so, he’s never heard of it.
“Do I hug her?” he asks as he haphazardly putters around the apartment. “Shake hands? Kiss both cheeks?”
