Page 81 of We Could Be So Good
“Tonight?” Andy supposes they’ve been making eyes at one another all evening.
“From the beginning.”
“Of the evening?”
She laughs in his face. “From when you met him. He’s adored you from the jump.” She pauses. “No,adoreisn’t the word. I adore ice cream. You adore handmade suits and baseball. Nicklovesyou. He’s in love with you.”
Andy’s throat feels thick and he knows he’s blushing. He turns his face away, watching a teenager ride his bike in lazy circles in the lamplight. “Don’t be silly,” he finally says, because this is typical Emily hyperbole. Nick has alwayslikedhim, obviously, and Emily is reading too much into it. There’s no way Nick had been—attracted to? sweet on?—Andy for all that time. The implications are more than Andy can grapple with.
Emily stretches her legs out so her feet dangle over the edge of the fire escape, one flat black shoe hanging precariously from her toes. “I’ve had four glasses of wine and I’m feeling very honest, so I’m going to tell you this, even though it’s probably a bad idea.”
“Now you have me intrigued.”
“When I was with Gerald, I know that’s how I looked at him. I could feel it on my face. Gooey devotion.” She brought her cigarette to her mouth. “I had seen it on Nick’s face a thousand times, so when I felt my own face doing it, I knew.”
It takes Andy a minute to remember that Gerald is the cardiologist. “HowisGerald?”
“Don’t change the subject. I don’t know what you’re doing here with your china and your dinner parties. If you let him think that you’re—I don’t know, setting up house with him, then make sure you mean it.”
“I mean it,” Andy says.
Emily is quiet for a moment. “I’m not the one you need to tell,” she finally says.
***
When they come back inside, Jeanne is sitting on the floor, Linda’s head in her lap, Nick’s record collection scattered around her. Linda is smoking a neatly rolled joint. When Andy sits down beside them, she offers it to him.
“Don’t give it to Andy,” says Emily from the sofa. “He won’t know what it is or what to do with it, the poor lamb.”
“I know what it is,” protests Andy, and honestly he might be a little insulted. “That,” he intones, using his best Walter Winchell voice, “is a jazz cigarette.”
Linda, evidently under the influence of the cigarette in question, starts giggling.
“I’m afraid this means you’re all beatniks,” Andy continues. He’s at the stage of tipsiness where it’s time to either slow down or fully commit to a lost evening. “You smoke your funny cigarettes and play the bongos and attend jamborees.”
“Anyone who brings out a bongo will have me to answer to,” Nick says darkly, leaning in the kitchen doorway. He hadn’t been in the room when Andy came in from the fire escape and now Andy feels himself smile up at him, helpless and fond.
“I have bongos,” Linda says. “And I’ve been to jamborees.”
“Nick should write a profile on you and sell it toLifemagazine and become famous,” Jeanne says.
“I’ve read that profile,” Nick says, still leaning distractingly. “At least three of them. Nobody needs another. If I wrote a profile of you, it wouldn’t be because you’re a beatnik.”
Andy wants to know what Nick would write about, but Linda speaks first.
“Nick, how do you have a hundred records and not a single one you can dance to?” Linda complains.
Nick kneels down beside them and shuffles through the records. His sleeves are rolled up to his elbows and his top button is undone. Andy knows he’s staring and isn’t sure he can stop. “Here,” Nick says, handing a record to Linda. “And this one, too.”
“Now you have to dance with me,” Jeanne says, her words the tiniest bit slurred. “It’s the law.”
“Well, in that case.” Nick holds a hand out and helps her to her feet, then waits as Linda fiddles with the turntable.
Nick is, unfortunately, an excellent dancer, and Andy has no idea how he’s supposed to take his eyes off him as he spins Jeanne deftly around the room. “Fly Me to the Moon” plays, and Nick guides Jeanne over Andy’s and Linda’s legs and around the coffee table.
“We should probably move the sofa against the wall,” suggests Emily. She’s lying on the sofa, a cigarette in one hand, displaying no signs of wanting to get off the sofa, let alone move it.
Andy, who was raised to believe it’s a mortal sin to sit out a dance if a woman needs a partner, gets to his feet and holds out his hand to Linda.
