Page 54 of We Could Be So Good
When Nick drives past the subway station, he doesn’t see Andy. Since it’s only April and Coney Island is still relatively empty, he’s able to find street parking, so he parks the car and goes off on foot.
He looks up and down Surf Avenue and Stillwell but still doesn’t see Andy. He ought to have given Andy an intersection where they could meet, but he was too busy thinking of how badly he wanted to see him and how badly he wanted to get out of that house.
If he were Andy, where would he go? He’d get off the train, realize his mistake, find a pay phone, and—he’d probably still be by the pay phone. Nick enters the station and, sure enough, there’s Andy, sitting on a bench near the token booth.
Nick stands there for a minute, unobserved. Andy has on a shirt and tie, which likely means he hasn’t changed since getting off the plane. He must have taken a cab home, dropped off his suitcase, and gone directly to the subway. On his lap is amagazine—Sports Illustrated, if Nick has to guess. He looks tired. He ought to be home eating soup or catching up on sleep, but instead he’s here because—
Well. He could be here because he doesn’t like to be alone or because he likes Nick’s mother’s cooking. But at least Andy isn’t actively avoiding him. Nick still doesn’t know if they’re going to have a conversation about what happened last weekend or if they’re going to sweep it under the rug. The first prospect is terrifying and the second is depressing.
At that moment, Andy turns and sees him. He looks the same as he ever does, and Nick doesn’t know why it surprises him. It’s only been a week.
“Oh, that’s not creepy at all,” Andy says, getting to his feet and grinning. And blushing, because of course. “How long were you there?”
“Thirty seconds, jerk.”
“Likely story. You probably drew a picture of me to put in your scrapbook.”
There it is, that smile that splits the difference between smug and bashful. Nick wants to kiss it off his face. Some of that must show in his expression because Andy looks away, that smile still in place.
“What if I did?” Nick asks, feeling ridiculously bold. But he thinks Andy’s flirting with him, or at least trying to, and Nick wants to make sure he doesn’t let the ball drop. His heart’s in his throat.
Andy’s smile doesn’t falter, exactly, but it melts a little, going soft at the edges as his eyes go wide.
“Let’s walk over to Shatzkin’s. I’ll buy you a knish,” Nick offers.
It’s sunny, one of those clear April days that make you forget it could rain for a solid week at any moment. The breeze that comesin off the sea is cool, but nothing a jacket can’t contend with. And the boardwalk is almost empty, nobody but a few people out for a stroll, a beat cop, and some seagulls fighting over the contents of a spilled garbage can.
The beautiful thing about Shatzkin’s is that they have exactly one type of knish on the menu, so Andy is spared the ordeal of making a choice and the man behind the counter is spared a coronary. They take the knishes outside and find a bench at a comfortable distance from the marauding seagulls.
“How was the rally? What was it like?” Nick asks.
“There were thirty thousand people there, or close to it. Did you know that one of the organizers is gay? And a communist, apparently.”
Hearing Andy saygay—which Nick only hears from other gay men—makes him feel like the bench has turned into a seesaw. “He’s probably neither of those things. Every civil rights leader gets called a communist. Every communist gets called a queer.”
“Well, he was arrested for vagrancy, and it was the sort of vagrancy that involved another man.”
The knish has turned to lead in Nick’s stomach. “And people just...know? They talk about it? He still has a job?”
“Apparently.” Andy shrugs. “It’s an open secret.”
“Jesus.” Being a...known homosexual, or whatever the parlance is, seems bad enough. Being Black on top of that—and one who’s involved in a movement that’s already greeted with violence at every turn—is something Nick can’t imagine.
“You okay?” Andy asks, nudging him with an elbow.
“Yeah, yeah.”
The frame of a roller coaster looms in front of them, disconcertingly fragile, silent and still in the off-season, birds squawking from the rails.
“I missed you.” Nick feels shy saying it, even though it isn’t even close to the sappiest thing he’s said to Andy, or Andy to him. But nowI missed youcarries an extra weight that’s new and a little unwieldy.
“Yeah?” Andy says it as if he’s surprised, the idiot.
“I like it better when you’re around.” He tosses a bit of knish to a seagull.
“Good thing I’m around, then.”
They don’t have to have this conversation. They could eat their food, sit on the bench, and trust that they’re good enough friends that they don’t need to clear the air about what went wrong last Sunday.
