Page 100 of We Could Be So Good
“I called her. I hope that’s okay.” Andy stirs his spoon in the last inch of soup, where he’s left all his rejected bits of carrot.
“This afternoon? You called her today?”
“Yes. Is that— Did I cross a line?”
“No. I— Thank you.” So that was Andy on the phone with his mom this afternoon. That was Andy she was walking through the process of making soup. That was Andy she was telling that men need someone to look after them—and, apparently to that end, she taught him how to make Nick’s favorite soup. And now Nick has a lump in his throat and he can’t talk.
“You okay?” Andy looks concerned.
Nick shakes his head. He forces himself to take a drink of water and look at the ceiling for a minute. “The last few days have been... not good,” he says when he returns his gaze to Andy’s face. “I missed you.” It’s only been two days and it’s fully ridiculous that Nick’s even admitting any of this. He blames Andy. He’s a terrible influence.
“Me too.”
They have to talk; there are too many things unsaid hovering between them. But that conversation will keep for a while and so will the dirty dishes. He stands up and holds his hand out to Andy, then pulls him to his feet.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Over the next few days, Nick occasionally finds himself thinking that things are back to normal—or whatever passed for normal before that fight on Friday—but then he’ll catch Andy’s eye and realize he’s wrong. The fundamentals are the same—dinner and coffee and sex and the easy sort of conversation that they’ve always had. But every step of the way it feels... deliberate, maybe. Like when he’s bringing Andy coffee he’s accomplishing something with capital letters, like a truth that used to be inside him is now set in print, notarized, undeniable.
It feels like the beginning of something, or maybe the end of something else, and Nick might know what if he thought about it, but instead he doesn’t. He feels his heart trip in his chest when Andy comes to his desk in the evening when it’s time to leave; he feels his face heat when Andy rolls toward him in bed, a proprietary hand on Nick’s hip.
Sometimes when Andy looks at him, it’s like the radio has tuned in to the right station, the static dropping away and everything going momentarily clear. The plausible deniability that Nick has been holding on to with both arms isn’t there anymore and he has no choice but to see the truth of things—Andy’s here,he isn’t going anywhere, he doesn’t want to go anywhere, they could keep doing this, or something more than this, indefinitely.
It’s terrifying. People will likely connect the dots and realize why they’re living together. If Andy stays forever—Christ, this should not make him so goddamn giddy—that likelihood changes to a certainty. He tells himself that there’s a difference between being exposed by dirty cops and people who know the two of them guessing the truth, but they both feel like the same kind of danger. He knows they aren’t, but there’s something about the inevitability of exposure that feels like cold handcuffs snapping around his wrists.
Honestly, he’s used to it. Fear of exposure has been a constant in his life; he doesn’t know how to stop being afraid any more than he knows how to stop his heart from beating. Sometimes he feels like the fear is crowding out everything else, though. He wants the good things in his life to take up the space they deserve, but he doesn’t know how to go about doing that, or even if it’s possible.
***
“It’s a dog and pony show,” Nick grumbles when he gets his assignment.
“And we cover those, too,” says Jorgensen.
Today’s the annual Operation Alert drill, a nationwide exercise in collectively engaging with the fiction that hiding under desks and avoiding elevators will do anything to help you survive a nuclear attack. That, and it’s a not-so-subtle reminder of the dangers of communists or Russians or not voting for Eisenhower—take your pick. Tomorrow, most papers will run the government’s accounting of how much death and destruction the fictional attack would have caused: millions dead, cities destroyed.
“It’s pro-nuclear propaganda,” argues Nick.
Jorgensen throws up his hands. “You’re covering the protests!”
That’s not much better. Last year the protests consisted of a dozen or so tired picketers from the Catholic Workers and a couple of vagrants who didn’t want to leave their benches and take cover. They were all arrested, most sentenced to thirty days. It had been monumentally depressing.
Still, Nick does what he’s told. The weather’s irritatingly sunny and Nick peels off his jacket on the way to City Hall Park. Lilian’s been assigned as the photographer, so he’s got that going for him, at least. She gauges Nick’s mood and doesn’t bother with small talk, wordlessly accepting Nick’s offer of a cigarette instead.
The drill hasn’t started yet, so the protesters are marching with homemade signs; they’re nearly outnumbered by the cops who are hanging around, ready to arrest them as soon as the sirens sound.
Nick checks his watch. They have twenty minutes to get their quotes and photographs, and then Lilian can get some shots of the creepily empty streets.
He isn’t sure if it’s his imagination or if there are more protesters compared to last year. The nicely dressed middle-aged people are the Catholic Worker crowd—he’s pretty sure that lady in the black dress is actually Dorothy Day herself—but there are also a few young men with beards and overgrown hair and young women in trousers or with their hair down. It’s the Washington Square Park bongo demographic and they’re so young that Nick is torn between feeling jaded and optimistic.
There’s also a woman with a stroller and two kids. The one in the stroller is still a baby and the older one is maybe four, with pigtails and scuffed saddle shoes and an expression of pure belligerence. He nudges Lilian and they head in that direction. When they get closer, he sees that the woman is younger than Nick byseveral years, but with purple smudges under her eyes that suggest that the baby who’s currently fast asleep in the stroller might be nocturnal.
He gets her name—Christina Mendoza—and asks her why she doesn’t have a sign.
“We came to feed the ducks,” Mrs.Mendoza says, all indignance and a Brooklyn accent even thicker than his own. “How am I supposed to know there’s all this malarkey going on? And if a bomb were to go off in five minutes, I’d still rather feed the goddamn ducks first.”
Nick wants to know where this woman thinks she’s going to find ducks anywhere in Lower Manhattan but decides this might be of secondary importance. “The purpose of the drill,” he says, gritting his teeth at repeating the government line, but spurred on by some instinct that he needs to keep her talking, keep her mad, “is to foster a sense of readiness among the citizens—”
“Readiness for what?” she asks, shaking her head as if in pity at Nick’s idiocy. “I hug my kids every night. I kiss their dad before he leaves for work in the morning. I’d say I’m about as ready for nuclear war as the next person. And I’m just too tired to get back on the subway, so if they want to arrest me, they can try.”
