Page 86 of We Could Be So Good
“Ever since what?”
“Ever since we ran into that cop at the fire in Gowanus.” Andy remembers the way the cop’s eyes had narrowed when he realized that the Nick Russo who was writing the stories about the missing police evidence was the same Nick Russo he had once arrested. Andy hadn’t put it together at the time, and Nick had probably been too shaken up to realize, but now it seems all too clear.
Something happens to Nick’s face, and Andy knows he’s watching the last shreds of denial get whisked away. He wants to take Nick in his arms, but they’re in the middle of the newsroom. Instead the best he can do is squeeze Nick’s shoulder and tell him to talk to Jorgensen.
One of the photographs catches his eye. It’s the one where they’re each carrying two sacks of groceries. Andy’s caught mid-laugh, his face turned to Nick. It’s a good picture, and that might make Andy angriest of all, because under any other circumstances he’d want to keep it. But he can’t keep it, because it’s sordid. It’s a weapon. He and Nick laughing and buying groceries is now an ugly, dangerous thing.
***
“Are you going to drop that story?” Andy asks mildly that night while they’re clearing the table after dinner.
“What? Hell no.”
Andy forces himself to sound calm. “Why not?”
“Those photographs are just more proof that they have something to cover up. They wouldn’t have bothered otherwise.”
“Did you tell Jorgensen?” Andy asks, already fearing the answer.
“If I showed those pictures to anyone, it would be as good as admitting that I’m queer, and that you are, too. Jorgensen’s smart enough that he’d figure it out right away.”
He’s right. The fact of the photographs is an announcement that whoever took them knows Nick has something to hide. Even if Jorgensen doesn’t have any problems with a queer reporter working for him, the news would get around. There’s nowhere in the world gossip travels faster than at a newspaper.
“You’re right,” Andy concedes. “Okay. You can find a pretense to drop the story, then.”
“I already said no.”
Andy’s known for over a year that Nick is stubborn, but this is ridiculous. “Listen, Nick. They’re not going to be able to hurt you with those photographs, right? You haven’t been doing anything incriminating in public lately. So they’re going to try something else. How do you know those kids who mugged you weren’t put up to it by the same people who took those photographs? And even if they weren’t, the next people who hurt you will be.”
“You’re overreacting.”
“Nick. I can’t stand the idea of you getting hurt. I can’t.”
“This is my job,” Nick says, something grim and closed off in the way he says it.
For as long as Andy’s known Nick, he’s understood that Nick keeps people at arm’s length, and for good reason. This is how Nick stays safe—or thinks he does. But sometimes there’s a fatalistic edge to his isolation, as if he thinks that he’s doomed to be alone. Or, in this case, that he’s doomed to go do stupid, dangerous things.
Nick squeezes his hand but doesn’t say anything and Andy doesn’t pursue the topic because the thing is, it never works. Heprobably asked his mother a dozen times not to take a dangerous assignment, and she never listened, because she went where the story was. That was her priority, not her son’s worry.
He isn’t sure why he expected any different from Nick.
***
After finding the photographs on Monday morning, the rest of the week is quiet. It isn’t even strained, because Andy won’t let it be, and Nick meets him halfway. Andy’s heart is working double time, but he thinks he’s doing a good job of hiding it.
On Friday, Andy lingers after the usual morning meeting. He watches as the editors file out of the room, the last one shutting the door behind him.
He’s been meaning to ask his father about expanding the Sunday supplement. Right now it’s a Frankenstein’s monster of syndicated columns, recipes, television listings, and a seemingly random assortment of features. Andy wants to know what it would cost to turn it into a proper magazine—a magazine with theChronicle’s editorial perspective and the cachet to be financed by something other than ads for department store underwear sales. What he’s not comfortable saying—what he’s not even sure he’s comfortable thinking—is that theChronicle’s editorial perspective is something he can change. If—God help them all—he’s this paper’s publisher, then that’s very much in his job description.
And he’s not sure he can separate his own perspective from the paper’s. He’s not sure he should. Right now Andy’s perspective is shaped by too many things to count: the values he had passed on to him by his parents, the things he saw in Washington, the fact that Nick’s been shutting the curtains before so much as cooking dinner in case someone across the street has a telephoto lens.
For now, though, he’s only asking about budgets.
But his father speaks first. “Have you decided whether to put your mother’s apartment on the market?”
Andy had offhandedly mentioned this plan last week, but the idea of actually getting rid of all his mother’s things is daunting both physically and emotionally. And he’s a little hesitant to sell the apartment without Nick having said— Well, Andy isn’t sure what he’s expecting Nick to say. He isn’t expecting an engraved invitation to spend the rest of their lives together, but he needs to know that Nick actually wants him to stay.
That isn’t quite accurate—it’s pretty obvious that Nick does want him there, but deciding to settle down with someone can’t possibly be as simple as Andy not moving out. He feels like there ought to be a conversation, some kind of confirmation that what they’re doing actually is settling down. He’s had this thought so many times that the phrasesettling downhas ceased to carry any meaning.
