Page 51 of We Could Be So Good
He sticks the newspaper back where he found it and shoves the entire stack of magazines onto a shelf. Then he wraps up the cord of the vacuum and returns it to Mrs.Wojcik.
As he climbs back up the stairs, he can hear his phone ringing. He takes the steps two at a time and scrambles to unlock the door before missing the call.
“Hello?” he nearly shouts.
“Nick?”
At the sound of Andy’s voice, any and all of Nick’s cool evaporates. “Thank God it’s you. I was honestly beginning to worry.”
“Sorry, I just—”
“You don’t have to explain. How’s your hotel?” Nick asks, half because he wants to steer the conversation somewhere normal before it has a chance to go wrong, and half because he wants to be able to picture where Andy is.
“I’m at the Mayflower. Let me tell you, I’ll be bringing this up at the next budget meeting. The Holiday Inn would have been just fine, but instead I have about six acres of blue velvet all to myself.”
“It’s nice, though?” he asks, because that’s safe. And boring.
“I guess so. I mean, it definitely is. But it’s quiet. I hate waking up someplace so quiet.”
“I know,” Nick says, because he does. “It’s too quiet here, too.” That’s the closest he can get to telling Andy that he misses him—both because of the operator who might be listening in and because he doesn’t trust himself to say it calmly.I miss youseems like the key to a door that he doesn’t know if he ought to open.
There’s more silence, and it occurs to Nick that what Andy probably wants is chatter, something to fill up the silence of his empty hotel room.
“I’ve never stayed at a hotel,” Nick says. “Never been much of anywhere.”
“Where have you been?”
“Went to Hackensack once.”
Andy laughs—strained and thin, but it’s still a laugh. “Come on, you must have been somewhere.”
“Jersey City, a couple of times, to visit a cousin. Long Island, for a christening.”
Nick doesn’t usually feel like his life is small or parochial, but compared to Andy’s, it really is. Not only has he hardly been anywhere, he can’t even think of anywhere he’d particularly want to go. He lives in New York, for Christ’s sake. People comeherewhen they want to see things. But now, Andy all the way in Washington and Nick in his tiny apartment, Nick has a sense of a widening, fracturing gap.
“What’s your hotel room like?” Nick asks, wanting to picture Andy, to feel like he isn’t so far away.
“It’s blue.”
“That’s it? Blue?”
“No, really. You’ve never seen so much blue. Blue carpet. Blue bedspread. Blue curtains. Blue sofa and chairs. Thelampshadesare blue.”
“Where are you sitting?”
“On the floor next to the bed.”
“That can’t be comfortable.”
“The carpet’s like marshmallows. I’m never getting up.”
There’s something about Andy’s voice that’s careful. Not anxious—Nick’s well aware of how Andy sounds when he’s worried—but deliberate. It’s like he’s holding back. There usually isn’t much of a delay between an idea popping into Andy’s head and it coming right out of his mouth, but tonight he’s checking himself. This is probably how he is in meetings.
Nick hates it. He knows Andy’s just trying extra hard to make things safe and normal between them, but he hates the sense that their interactions have to be filtered. He’s gotten used to Andy holding himself open like a book for Nick to read. He’s gotten used to Andy wanting Nick to read him.
“When were you going to tell me that you were going to Washington?” Nick asks, reaching for something real, something that will force an honest answer—not about the thing neither of them wants to talk about, but honest in general. “I mean, I get that you left earlier than maybe you meant to, but when were you going to tell me?”
Andy laughs, staticky and abrupt over the phone. “As late as possible.”
