Page 1 of We Could Be So Good
Part I
Nick
March 1958
March1958
Nick Russo could fill the Sunday paper with reasons why he shouldn’t be able to stand Andy Fleming. Not only is he the boss’s son, but rumor has it he’s only slumming it at the New YorkChroniclecity desk—a job Nick has been hungry for ever since he first held a newspaper in his hands—because his father threatened to cut off his allowance. He can’t type. He roots for the Red Sox. He has no idea how to buy subway tokens. He has this stupid habit of biting his nails and then, realizing what he’s doing, abruptly stopping and looking around furtively to check if anyone saw him. He blushes approximately five hundred times a day. He has a cluster of tiny freckles at the corner of his mouth shaped like a copy editor’s caret and, since Nick can’t stop looking at them, those freckles are going to ruin his career.
With covert glances across the newsroom, Nick catalogs all the things he doesn’t like about Andy and stores them up like a misanthropic squirrel. He’s Nick’s age, twenty-five or so, but has definitely never done an honest day’s work in his life, probably not even a dishonest day’s. He’s gangly, not short, but maybe a buck thirty soaking wet. His hair is that in-between color that on women gets called dishwater blond and on men isn’t called anything at all because it usually looks brown after being slicked back or combed smooth. But Andy doesn’t slick his hair back. He parts it on the side like a six-year-old. Nick doesn’t bother withany of that garbage, either, but that’s only because his hair is curly and has ideas of its own. Nick’s hair laughs in the face of pomade.
It’s offensive, is what it is, that the boss’s son thinks he’s going to play at being a cub reporter. It’s possibly even more offensive than the story behind how Nick got the job, which owes more to the old city desk editor going senile than anything else, but Nick isn’t going to think about that right now.
The point is, Nick knows how to hate people. He’s no stranger to a grudge. He ought to spend the rest of his career resenting the ever-living daylights out of Andy.
Instead he lasts less than a week. Less than a day, even. About forty-five minutes, to be exact, and that’s Andy’s fault, too.
***
Nick meets his doom in theChroniclemorgue, a godforsaken maze of filing cabinets on the third floor where seventy years of clippings are stored in some loose approximation of alphabetical order. When he sees Andy there, he supposes he has to give the kid some credit for knowing that the morgue exists in the first place, let alone where to find it. He’s just congratulating himself on being gracious when he realizes that Andy doesn’t have any of the file drawers open. Instead he’s standing there, tugging at a drawer handle and swearing.
Well, he’s saying things likeratsandjeezand Nick thinks there might even have been agoshin there.
“Can I help you?” Nick asks.
“Oh crud,” Andy says, turning the bright pink of Coney Island sunburns. And then he collects himself, or at least he tries to. Nick watches it happen, watches the embarrassment subside andget replaced with a mask of affability. “Nick, right?” Andy asks. “This is embarrassing, but I seem to have gotten myself into a predicament.” He gestures at the filing cabinet, where the end of his tie is stuck inside a closed drawer.
The first thing Nick notices is that Andy’s tie is pale yellow with tiny white flowers scattered across it. Nick’s own ties run the gamut from gray to blue to gray-blue to one that even has gray and blue stripes, not because he’s particularly attached to those colors but because that’s what normal people wear. Nick has spent years making sure that when people look at him, they don’t see anything that sticks out like a sore thumb—they don’t see anything at all, they hardly even see a person, just a man in a suit.
Maybe when you’re the heir to a publishing fortune, you don’t need to worry about that sort of thing. Instead you can spend your time dropping out of law school and dropping out of business school and then flitting between the capitals of Europe for a couple years, not that Nick has made it a point to learn all about Andy’s history or anything.
The second thing Nick notices is that the drawer is jammed. Of course it is. Nothing in theChroniclebuilding works as it’s supposed to, from door handles that require special jiggling to stacks of carbon paper that come tumbling down if you aren’t careful to a cafeteria worker who prays loudly for you in Hungarian if you don’t eat your potatoes. Figuring this out is a sort of organic hazing process that junior reporters and copyboys have to endure. It goes hand in hand with learning how the newsroom works; by the time you’ve mastered the hot-water tap in the eighth-floor men’s room, you probably have a byline.
But nobody can haze the owner’s son, even if he is here unwillingly. Nick isn’t sure, though, what the alternative is; it’s not likethere’s an operator’s guide to how to survive in this place, and even if there were, it would be as thick as a phone book.
“There’s a trick to opening it.” Nick has to step close to Andy to execute the trick—close enough that he can smell aftershave, close enough that he can hear how fast Andy’s breaths are coming. Jesus, the kid must have been in a panic when he thought he was trapped down here, tied by the neck to a couple hundred pounds of metal and old newspapers.
Nick shoves the cabinet with his shoulder and then pounds the lower left corner of the stuck drawer with his fist. It pops open, rolling out smoothly, as if judging anyone who ever doubted it.
“Oh gosh, thanks,” Andy says. “And here I was, trying so hard to make a good impression. I offered to come down here and get the clippings myself instead of sending a copyboy.”
Nick, fool that he is, recognizes this as both a confession and a dare. Andy Fleming—Andrew Fleming the fucking Third—is daring Nick to do the most clichéd thing someone in his position can possibly do and make friends with the boss’s son.
Nick has never known how to turn down a dare.
“Next time,” Nick says, “send a copyboy.”
“Right,” Andy says, sounding abashed. He makes a useless effort to smooth his tie, which is now hopelessly creased and probably ruined, and turns toward the elevators. “Thanks, Nick.”
“Wait. Stay still.” Nick can’t send the kid back to the newsroom looking like he’s been mugged. He reaches out and smooths Andy’s tie as best as he can, then straightens his lapels, which had gone all askew when he battled the filing cabinet. “If you button your jacket, it’ll hide the worst of the damage,” he suggests.
Andy flashes Nick a smile, a thousand watts of professionallystraightened teeth, and it’s like a two-by-four to the head. It takes Nick a minute to arrange his face.
***
April1958
From there, it’s only natural for Nick to invite Andy out for drinks with the handful of reporters who’re waiting to see whether they need to rewrite anything before deadline. And then after that, what can Nick do but keep an eye out for Andy? He can’t let the kid wander around unsupervised, can he? It wouldn’t do to let one of the copyboys find his desiccated skeleton shackled to a filing cabinet or trapped in the fire stairs. Workplace morale would plummet.
