We Could Be So Good

by Cat Sebastian

I’ve never known anyone so fussy about pans.” “You’ve never known anyone else who has pans,”

“You’re filthy,” Andy says, as if an animal sitting in a trash can could be anything else.

Andy knows for a fact that nobody else in the building, or possibly the world, leaves their windows open so feral cats can wander in.

Some barely awake part of Andy’s mind registers that Nick could buy groceries on his own and let Andy sleep in like a normal person, but Nick knows how much Andy hates waking up alone. This is Nick’s idea of a compromise.

The butcher Nick likes is a block away on Jones Street, a hole-in-the-wall that’s long since passed old-fashioned and ascended into a sort of battered permanence.

He’ll raid a florist. He’ll break into a funeral home—which, all right, maybe not that.

It’s all significantly less bizarre than it might have been, embracing the woman he once thought would be his wife, the mother of his children, his partner through thick and thin. It shouldn’t be this easy. It feels like greeting an old friend.

Emily looks at the dishes and does a double take, probably not expecting bone china to make an appearance in Nick’s apartment. She glances at Andy and raises an intrigued eyebrow. Andy smiles as if he has no idea what she’s getting at. So what if he brought his grandmother’s wedding china with him to Nick’s, carried in the back seat of a cab like a sack of groceries? It doesn’t have to mean anything, and it isn’t as if Nick knows. Besides, the wineglasses are from Woolworth.

The engagement feels ancient, almost irrelevant, a funny thing that happened to them on the way to friendship.

He had been almost overwhelmed with it, hardly able to believe that this was normal for most people, that this was how most people experienced family. The idea that he could have that, or something like that, opens up inside him and takes root.

Families might usually be bonded by blood, but maybe sometimes they’re bonded by shared secrets, by a delicate mixture of caution and faith, by the conviction that hiding together is better in every way than hiding alone.

The truth is that after last night, Andy feels like his body has been rearranged in some subtle way and that now it belongs to Nick;

It’s one of his worst qualities, this need for reassurance, this fear that he’s not wanted.

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.

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.

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 phrase settling down has ceased to carry any meaning.

His father joking is rare enough. His father joking about communist orgies is something else altogether.

And more than that, it means something to Andy—something he can hardly put into words—that his father is speaking up when he could have remained silent.

He thinks of all the ways his father has tried to reach out to him in the past few months: the repeated offers of a place to stay, the fact that he didn’t even blink at the idea that his son might be queer, and—maybe most of all—his conviction that Andy can, in fact, successfully run the paper. His father is trying.

He’s panicking. He knows he is, feels the fear swirling around in his head and his gut, displacing anything like logic or goodwill.

“Listen to me.” Nick’s voice is low. “Sweetheart, listen.” But Andy doesn’t want to listen. “I don’t want you to leave me.” “Baby, I’m not leaving you. I told you, I didn’t accept the offer.”

Andy wants to somehow persuade Nick—and maybe himself—that there isn’t an inevitable end to this. But he has a sinking sense that he’ll lose that fight, that no matter how long they stay together there will always be a piece of Nick waiting for the end, and that breaks Andy’s heart.

This is probably how spies feel. Andy is glad he isn’t a spy.

Andy’s notion of happiness has always hinged on sharing a home with someone, and he might not get to have that.

But a newspaper is more than a legacy or a job or a family business—it’s a mouthpiece, a microphone, a way into the hearts and minds of hundreds of thousands of people.

It’s really only then that Andy realizes what he’s asking for. He’s asking for his father to be a father. And it feels like the biggest favor he’s ever asked of anyone. He nearly apologizes,

Andy had always figured he’d have that kind of life when he grew up, but now that he knows queer people aren’t allowed it, he doesn’t want it. He feels cheated, like he’s gotten to the last page of a book and it turns out the whole story was a dream. The dog dies in the last chapter. You never find out who stole the diamond necklace.

The fact that this thing that’s been a source of such comfort to him probably never existed in any meaningful way makes him feel rattled.

It feels so implausible that Andy was ever there, that Nick got to have the past few weeks. He never thought he would, so Andy’s absence makes sense in a grim sort of way. Now Nick feels foolish, like he tricked himself, believing a fairy tale that was never his to begin with.

Andy might not even want it. Andy might decide that Nick isn’t worth the trouble, and Nick wouldn’t blame him. But even as that thought crosses his mind, he imagines Andy rolling his eyes.

“I’m here about the City Hall situation,” Nick says, hoping it will get that dopey grin off Andy’s face, even if Nick wants to remember that expression forever. He wants it printed on playing cards and commemorative plates. “Right,” Andy says. “The City Hall situation.” “Smooth,” Sal mutters.

“We’re friends,” Andy says. And it doesn’t feel like an understatement or a euphemism; it feels like the bedrock of the truth, the inescapable fact of who they are.

He has no idea how they’re going to manage to make it work, but they have to find a way because Nick has never, in his whole life of wanting things that were just out of reach, wanted anything so bad.

Can you try not to piss off cops who are connected, Nicky? Jesus. Or at least try not to do things that make it easy to blackmail you? One or the other? It ain’t healthy to do both.”

Maybe the trick is to put fear in its place so it doesn’t take over.

The cat manages to look bewildered and offended the entire trip back to the apartment and up the stairs, as if he hasn’t been in this stairwell dozens of times.

“I want this with you. I want everything with you. And I need you to know that. I don’t know how we’ll make it work, but I want it anyway.”

“It’s more than that, it’s—fuck. I want a life with you. I want this to be—I want more than we can have.” Andy is looking at him so carefully, too carefully. “But I want it anyway,” Nick admits.

the truth is that he feels for Andy every goofy thing anyone’s ever felt about anyone else.

“I’m not going to pay cash for real estate,” Andy says, whatever the fuck that means.

Everyone duly praises the cat’s stupidity and Nick feels very pleased with himself.

Nick knows that when Andy thinks too hard about the Chronicle, he still feels a little sick to his stomach, and Nick’s own demons make sure to say hi a dozen times a day. But they have one another, an unmapped future, and the bone-deep certainty that they can figure it out together.

Nick finds an extension cord long enough so that if they put the record player on a table near the edge of the roof, they can dangle the cord into the bedroom window, where Nick plugs it in. The cat is sitting on Nick’s pillow, regarding these proceedings with intense skepticism.

The Chronicle is fictional but it occupies the old Sun building in Lower Manhattan.