Page 50 of We Could Be So Good
“You see that Robert Moses is trying to shut down the Shakespeare Festival?” Lilian asks Bailey.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Maureen’s fit to be tied. He says it’s no good for the lawn.”
“Jesus Christ,” Bailey grumbles. “That fucker.”
Nick doesn’t care even slightly about any Shakespeare festivals, but complaining about Robert Moses is practically his favorite hobby. For a moment he feels a swell of fellow feeling for Bailey. It’s terrible.
He must look friendly or something, because Bailey turns toward him. “Did you read that book yet?” Bailey asks.
“Which book?” Lilian asks.
“The Charioteer,” Bailey says.
“No,” Nick says with feeling.
“Oh, Nick, you ought to,” Lilian says.
“What, you’ve read it, too?”
“We bought a copy in England when we went on vacation a few years ago. It’s a darling book.”
“Darling?” Nick repeats, because if there’s any word to describe the books he’s gotten from Bailey,darlingsure isn’t it. For all the shit Nick gives Bailey, he understands why Bailey likes these books, and he understands that the endings have to be miserable in order for publishers to agree to put the books out. But Nick’s tired of dead queers. Nick’s tired of people like him having to suffer in order to provide the right kind of ending. He’s done his time with shame and doesn’t want any more of it. “So it’s not going to make me want to stick my finger in an outlet?”
Bailey and Lilian exchange a look that Nick can’t translate. “No,” Lilian says.
Nick still isn’t reading it, but he shrugs, hoping to let the subject drop. And it does. The two of them move on to some play that they’ve seen and that Nick can’t bring himself to care about. They share the usual workplace chatter involving people Nick knows peripherally, and he wonders if these names also belong to the club. He doesn’t ask, of course.
But he wonders. If there really are so many queer reporters, then it’s that much less remarkable for any one of them to be queer. Safety in numbers, maybe. And there’s something more than that—there’s the sense of commonality, like when he realized that Jimmy from accounts receivable was from Nick’s old neighborhood in Flatbush. It’s something like kinship, a concept that he finds himself reaching for despite it never having done him any good. But he wishes he were the sort of person who could give it a try.
***
Nick hasn’t really given the apartment a good cleaning since Andy moved in a month earlier, so with nothing better to do with himself after work, he dusts and mops and tidies. He borrows a vacuum from Mrs.Wojcik downstairs and shakes the carpets out the window.
Andy’s detritus is everywhere—books left facedown all over the apartment, a mostly empty coffee cup on the bookshelf, ties draped across the furniture. He finds Andy’s glasses—missing for over a week—on top of theEvolume of the 1938Encyclopedia Britannicathat Nick bought secondhand. Nick has never knowna grown man as careless with his belongings as Andy, but now these objects at least serve as solid proof that Andy lives here and will come back.
When he’s done, the apartment smells like an unholy mixture of pine needles and lemon peel, so he throws the windows open. The idiot orange cat is sitting on the fire escape, so he scoops the animal up and brings him in. He doesn’t feel like carrying him downstairs, so instead he opens a can of tuna fish and puts it on the floor, then watches the cat scream bloody murder at the can before realizing that it’s food. Even the company of the world’s least competent cat is better than no company at all.
Finally he sits on the couch and begins to go through the magazines that have accumulated. He quickly realizes that he can’t throw any out, because Andy likes to tell himself he’ll get around to reading them. But nobody has ever had enough time to read all the magazines Andy subscribes to. There’sSports Illustrated,TheNew Yorker,Esquire,Time,Life, and theNew Republicand some others he picks up at the newsstand. Andy reads fast, but nobody readsthatfast.
Tucked between two issues ofNational Geographicis a copy of theVillage Voicedating from a few weeks back. That’s got to be safe to throw out. But then he sees that Andy has dog-eared a page. Curious, he opens the paper and immediately flinches at the headline: “Revolt of the Homosexual.” When he scans the article, words and phrases jump out at him:platinum-haired freaks,perverse,pathological. His gaze catches on the odd slur here and there. Seeing that language in print, instead of hurled at strangers in the street, muttered disapprovingly everywhere else, is a punch in the gut.
More from habit than anything else, he goes back to the top and forces himself to read the article through. This time it’s adifferent set of phrases that stick with him:We no longer have the energy to hide. You can’t know the strain on a person in always pretending. How many times has he thought something like that? He had a similar thought only yesterday, sitting with Mark Bailey and Lilian at lunch.
Every now and then he thinks that maybe it would be easier to tell the world, even though it would mean throwing away safety and saying goodbye to the life he’s worked so hard for. He’s always thought that this feeling is in the same category as standing at the top of a tall building and wondering what it would be like to jump off, a fleeting impulse of pure self-destruction that doesn’t really amount to anything.
His breath catches when he gets to the queer person’s response to being calledmiserableandunworthy to live:We’ve finally rebelled against feeling this way because our human nature can no longer stand it. If every queer person starts out feeling defective and ashamed, how many ever find a way to stop? He knows that for him, the trick was to get away from the people who would have thought he was repellent if they knew the truth—or at least the people who would say so to his face. There’s no real getting away from it.
But he’s never thought of his refusal to be ashamed as a rebellion and he’s never framed the harm done to him as discrimination. It seems obvious now, seeing it laid out like this.
Why had Andy dog-eared this page? It has to be because of this article rather than the ads for spaghetti joints and bowling alleys that march up and down the side columns. Had Andy meant to show the article to Nick? Had he wanted to contact the writer onChroniclebusiness?
Or had Andy read this article and seen himself in the same way that Nick does? A month ago Nick would have laughed at theidea, but at this point he doesn’t have much doubt that Andy is attracted to him, at least a little, at least in theory. Even if Nick’s come-ons had made him flee to Washington, even if nothing ever happens between them.
He wonders, does Andy think of himself as queer? Did he read this article and think of those words as belonging to him, as describing him? If something happened between him and Nick, would he consider himself queer? Plenty of men wouldn’t. Plenty of men sort of hated the men they got off with or wanted to get off with. He wouldn’t have thought Andy was like that, but people get themselves all tangled up over less important things every day.
He thinks about lunch yesterday with Mark and Lilian and that odd sense of belonging he could almost—but not quite—reach for. He thinks of Sunday lunches at his brother’s house, of weddings and Christmases where he holds himself carefully aside, not even thinking about the truth.
