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Bob’s working relationship with Carl had finally reached a state of equilibrium - and, miraculously, one he was happy with. They worked well together, and they liked each other as people, which was more than Bob would have thought possible when they had been thrown together on the Watergate story. But they had made it to a good place, and Bob had been confident nothing would rock that boat.
The only problem was that Bob had not been entirely honest, and with Bradlee’s declaration that they were now playing the real hardball and if they had anything to declare they ought to declare it now, the time to own up to his own duplicity was approaching. A duplicity which, Bob feared, might sink them.
They left the office together, Bradlee’s warning ringing in their ears, and by silent agreement they walked together across the street and up the ramp to the Post’s above-ground parking garage.
Carl spoke first, staring at his feet and drumming his fingers on the hood of Bob’s car. “I think we should probably -”
“Talk, yeah,” Bob finished. “Somewhere secure.”
Secure turned out to be an empty parking lot looking out towards Bay Bridge, eating their french fries one at a time to prolong their excuse both for being parked and for not talking. With the windows rolled up to prevent eavesdropping Bob’s car smelled even more strongly of fast food and cigarette smoke than usual, a stomach-churning combination that had nevertheless become almost a comfort in his months of working with Carl.
Carl popped his final fry into his mouth and wiped his fingers on the outside of the bag. Bob steeled himself. They’d had a good run of it, working so closely together and developing a bond so deep their colleagues called it spooky. But that bond meant they had a duty to be honest with each other, and once Bob came clean it would all be over.
His thoughts were interrupted by Carl sucking noisily at his soda. He grinned at Bob around the straw. “Sorry. You were getting in your head about it so I figured I’d ruin some of the dignity of the moment.”
Bob’s chest ached at the reminder that Carl knew him so well and accepted him as he was, anxieties and peculiarities and all, and that Bob, not Carl, was about to ruin it. But before he could, Carl spoke again.
“There’s one thing,” he said, still mumbled around the straw, gaze fixed somewhere just above the gearshift, “a thing I haven’t told you. Something they could use to ruin me.”
As Bob stared, lost for words, Carl slowly lifted his eyes, hooded and wary. The straw caught briefly on his lower lip as it slipped from his mouth, parted slightly in anticipation of Bob’s response.
Bob swallowed. “Me too. One thing.” He could feel his face heating under Carl’s gaze, a wordless giveaway. It was no good; his cheeks would scream out his secret even if he kept his mouth shut.
“What a coincidence,” Carl said. His eyes roved over Bob’s face, cataloging the redness and the way Bob’s teeth dug nervously into his lip. They lingered, Bob thought, just a second too long. “Think it’s the same thing?”
It was implausible. But they had dealt in seeming impossibilities before, and if Bob had learned anything about Carl Bernstein in that time, it was that they were more alike than they seemed. “Yeah. I think it’s the same thing.”
Very little had changed between Bob and Carl since their mutual veiled confessions in Bob’s car after the Mitchell story. Bob liked it that way.
He had never had a gay friend before. Or, as he had begun to think of it, a normal friend who just happened to be gay. Their shared secret wasn’t how they had met or why they were friends; it was merely something they had in common.
That commonality made it easier to trust Carl with other secrets, too. Without Bob’s conscious notice Carl had quickly come to know more about him than anyone else did, and he in turn had learned just as much about Carl. Soon they were finishing each other’s sentences not just during the course of their investigative work but for everyday things - food preferences, to-do lists, even sometimes personal anecdotes. It was exhilarating to share that kind of spiritual closeness with another person without having to sleep with them.
Even more exhilarating was the ability to joke about his sexuality as if it were any other joke. Carl generally began that process, setting down whatever he was currently bored of doing to fold his arms and fix Bob with an authoritative stare.
“Honest answers only,” he would say, “would you fuck Jeb Magruder?”
“Magruder? You’re kidding. That man is so slimy if you touched him you’d come away wet.”
“Could be a positive. You wouldn’t need lube.”
Ridiculous as the hypotheticals were, Bob always found himself playing along. “By that logic, Richard Nixon’s gotta be the best fuck in Washington. He’s the slipperiest of them all.”
Those jokes could never happen in the real world; even in the safety of their own homes, if anyone were to hear them the consequences would be immeasurable. But safe in their idyllic bubble and the knowledge that professional sweeps had declared their apartments bug-free, Carl could laugh and ad-lib, “sorry for calling so late, Ron, just wanted to run something by you for comment before we go to print. I’ve got a tip saying Nixon’s the best fuck in Washington - you know anything about that?”
Very little had changed, but Bob liked where they had ended up.
They had settled into a routine in Florida: eat breakfast together at Bob’s mother’s kitchen table, go for a morning swim, then decamp to their respective ‘offices’ until they had both met their self-imposed word quota for the day. Once they were done writing, the evening was theirs. They both felt they had earned the rest.
But inactivity didn’t come easily to either of them anymore, and more than a few evenings found them hiding from mosquitoes on the screened-in porch, passing beers and draft pages back and forth. It was a slower, luxurious version of their daily routine of the last year and a half, and Bob enjoyed it too much to spoil it by arguing unless Carl was really wrong.
“We can’t turn this in,” he repeated, brandishing Carl’s own typed words from that morning back at him. “Look, here. You write about Deborah like you’re sweet on her.”
Carl batted away the paper with his beer bottle. “Who says I’m not?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Bob said emphatically. His own beer had been knocked over by a particularly vehement sweep of the arm a while ago and he had been stealing sips of Carl’s ever since. “What’s Sloan gonna say when we ask to put his name on a story that’s just about how pretty his wife is?”
“He’ll say I’m right, she is very pretty, and everyone who buys the book should know it.”
Bob snorted, hiding his smile behind the page of praises to Sloan’s admittedly lovely wife. Stupid, drunken arguments with Carl were always more fun when Carl played along. “He’ll probably just be thankful you didn’t write about how pretty he is. The biggest miracle of Watergate is that he never said anything about you staring at him all the time.”
“Nonsense,” Carl said, tapping his beer against Bob’s lips through the paper. Bob obligingly lowered it and opened his mouth to let Carl pour several drops onto his tongue with drunken precision. “I’ve only got eyes for you.”
“Aw, shucks, don’t say that. You’ll make me blush.”
Carl shrugged. “Alright, I won’t.”
The words brought Bob up short. Despite Carl’s careful pouring, a few drops had landed on his chin. He wiped them off with the back of his hand and studied Carl’s easy, open expression. Not teasing. Not a joke.
“Don’t say that now,” Bob clarified, a distinction that made perfect sense to him in the moment but probably wouldn’t hold up under sober examination. “Let me think about it.”
“Alright. Tell me what’s so wrong about calling Deborah pretty again,” Carl said, with a smile and another shrug, as if he hadn’t just changed everything between them.
Despite Bob’s drunken catastrophizing, nothing at all changed after Carl’s accidental admission of something towards Bob. Neither of them brought it up again, and they treated each other no differently. Even the knowledge that Carl felt something for him wasn’t as earth-shattering as Bob had initially thought it. Bob had found Carl attractive for their entire partnership; there was nothing astonishing in Carl finding Bob attractive right back. They were, after all, each other’s polar opposites and perfect match all in one.
On their return from Florida and after some time to reflect, when it became clear Carl was indeed not going to say anything, Bob found he even liked the idea of Carl’s attraction to him. Attraction to and from other men, in Bob’s experience, was often furtive and fraught with the danger of discovery or betrayal. Carl’s attraction to him felt safe, warm, friendly. He began to take advantage of it.
The hectic pace of their lives continued unabated, but something of the close, unhurried routine they had developed in Florida had come home with them on the flight back to Washington and stuck around, lurking in the midmorning shadows of Bob’s kitchen as they drank their coffee and dodged calls from the office on Saturdays. It had become normal to spend time in each other’s space, to spend the night on the couch rather than call a late-night cab. A domesticity had sprung up between them.
Bob knew that Carl had always thought him a little too buttoned-up for his own good, but the more time they had spent in each other’s homes, the less Bob had begun to care about appearances. You can only see a man’s dirty laundry so many times before you begin to think perhaps it isn’t so bad if he sees yours. Knowing Carl was attracted to him only made wearing clothes around Carl seem more unnecessary.
Carl rolled his eyes and made stinging jokes about Bob’s fashion sense, but Bob could read between the lines and see those eyes linger on his bared thighs or midriff or arms. As summer neared and Bob’s state of undress neared the limits of what counted as dressed, more than once he caught Carl looking away from him with guilt written clearly in every line of his posture.
Carl stubbornly wore as many layers as he always had, and while Bob would have enjoyed seeing him in less, it was more important that they were two friends who were attracted to each other and comfortable enough in their friendship not to do anything about it.
The last weekend of May brought with it the promise of a classic DC June, warm breeze doing little to dispel the sticky, heavy air. Bob had decided that, barring any new nuclear threat alerts, he was not going to leave his apartment for anybody.
When Carl arrived, unannounced, calling from the lobby payphone to complain about his own stuffy apartment, Bob buzzed him up and answered the door in nothing but worn, low-slung athletic shorts. Carl had seen him in just as little by the poolside in February, so his gobsmacked expression as he stepped past into the apartment was perhaps more shocking to Bob than Bob’s state of undress apparently was to Carl.
Carl coughed and looked politely away. “Sorry, I guess I did kind of show up spur-of-the-moment. You could have finished dressing before you buzzed me up; I would’ve waited.”
“I am dressed,” Bob said, perplexed. “It’s five hundred percent humidity or thereabouts. I’m not about to put on a shirt if it’s just you here. Unless you want me to?”
Carl’s averted gaze made something in Bob’s stomach twinge unpleasantly. Carl never looked away. He joked, and he rolled his eyes, but he never acted like he was now. It made Bob self-conscious. Was there something wrong with how he looked? Did Carl not find him attractive like this, chest hair matted with sweat, stomach a tad pudgier than it had been in Florida now that he had the time to feed himself properly?
“I’ll put on a shirt,” he said awkwardly, forcing his elbows straight to keep himself from crossing his arms over his chest to hide it.
Carl’s head jerked back around to fix Bob with a panicked, guilty stare. “You don’t have to,” he said quickly. “I mean, I don’t want you to, if you don’t want to.”
“You don’t want…” Bob repeated, in an attempt to parse Carl’s words. “So it’s okay? You’re okay with it?”
Carl shrugged. He played it off well, but Bob knew him. Carl only moved so easily and languidly when he was suppressing some feeling or impulse, and the Carl before him just then was nearly sauntering as he made his way into Bob’s living room and hesitated before the couch. “Yeah, of course.” He winced at the frank disbelief he must have read in Bob’s face, sighed, and sank heavily onto the faded green velvet. “You asked me not to say anything.”
It took Bob a second to follow his train of thought.
“This is too much,” he said, as it dawned on him how thoughtless he had been. He should have asked what Carl was comfortable with, instead of basing his decisions on his own comfort with Carl’s theoretical nudity. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed you wouldn’t mind just because I wouldn’t.”
Carl smiled - crooked, wry, a little self-deprecating - and gestured for Bob to sit beside him. “Yeah, well, it’s a little different, since you’re not…”
Not as good looking as Carl, not attractive enough now that Carl had seen him on a lazy Saturday in shorts he’d pulled from the very back of his drawer? Or not attracted to Carl?
“Of course I am,” he said, in hopes it was the latter. That was a misconception easily cleared up.
“But in Florida, you said -”
“You sprang it on me. And since then I thought - I like that we’re attracted to each other, and we’re friends, and that’s it. We don’t have to sleep together, we can just be what we’ve always been. It doesn’t change us.”
Carl nodded slowly. “Right. I get what you’re saying. It is nice.”
He clearly had to make an effort to look at Bob the way he normally did through the rest of the afternoon, but that would be an easy fix; Bob just had to keep Carl’s newly-expressed boundary in mind. Small changes like that were how you kept relationships functioning smoothly.
Still, nothing changed. They had found their equilibrium long ago, and after so many ups and downs in their work life had failed to shake it, Bob was fairly certain nothing could. They were Woodstein, yes, but more importantly they were Bob&Carl, and that bond was unbreakable. He didn’t want to break it.
Sometimes, though, he wished he could adjust it. Just a little. Just a slight sideways shift in the meaning of that ampersand from Woodward & Bernstein to Mr. & Mrs. Or Mr. & Mr., as the case may be.
He said nothing about it to Carl. He was not about to rock the boat. He had been the one to shut things down, when Carl’s confession of attraction might otherwise have led to a different sort of more-than-friendship than the one Bob now spent his days with Carl imagining. He liked what they had - loved what they had - and he would not be the one to jeopardize that. Call it cowardice or call it pragmatism, but as far as Bob was concerned that was where things stood.
There were too many variables: Carl might not feel the same and might therefore try to put distance between them if he knew, or their newly-heightened profile might make the scrutiny on them too intense to do anything about it even if Carl did want to. Better to stay as they were. Better, Bob had almost convinced himself, to call it good enough and leave it at that.
The world did not give him the chance to convince himself fully, however, because with the release of their book and what should have been a great new phase in their partnership, things did change - for the worse.
The issue came to a head, perhaps predictably, in the middle of an argument. They had returned from yet another exhausting and increasingly tedious book-signing to Carl’s messy apartment, and barely had they made it through the door before they were bickering about anything and everything. It was so like old times that Bob could hardly believe they were really there in the here and now, published co-authors and dear friends.
He didn’t even know why they were fighting.
“Carl, stop,” he said, cutting Carl off mid-argument. “What are we even arguing about?”
Carl closed his mouth, blinking. “I… don’t know. I think I just wanted to fight with you about something.”
That was the crux of it. They had been fighting more often ever since the release of the book, and Carl was always the instigator. Bob could feel him pulling away, putting just the kind of distance between them Bob had feared he might if Bob ever confessed wanting to be even closer than they were, but he was helpless to do anything about it.
“Why?” he tried. It came out pathetic and pleading, which only seemed to make Carl angrier. “I don’t want to fight with you. I miss you. Can’t we just be the way we were?”
Carl looked away, mouth set in a mulish line. His quiet voice was as tight as his pinched expression. “I can’t act like your boyfriend forever.”
“What? I don’t want you to act like my boyfriend,” Bob said, perplexed. In his surprise, he didn’t have time to formulate a more eloquent response - or, at the very least, a response that wouldn’t make Carl’s face go even more pinched and set his eyes flashing with a familiar Bernstein-ian frustration as he rounded on Bob.
“What you want is to be with me without being with me. And if that's because you really don't feel anything for me beyond, you know, then that's okay, I'm not hurt.”
Bob was too startled, too blindsided, to do anything more than listen while Carl started up an agitated back-and-forth before him, shoes scuffing the grimy carpet as if they, too, needed to vent their frustration verbally.
“But we've had plausible deniability so far, you know, because we've been working on this whole thing, this story, and so of course we've spent so much time together. But come six months from now that's not going to fly anymore, and - and I would risk my career to be with you, but it's time for me to stop kidding myself that you might change your mind about that,” Carl said. His agitation had subsided over the course of his speech, and now he sounded merely tired. In a way, that was worse. “So I'm protecting myself by pulling back now, slowly, so that by the time we have to be just normal friends it won't feel like such a loss.”
Bob was reeling. He couldn’t think. His thoughts had never moved as quick as Carl’s; he needed time to come to conclusions, to make decisions. And it sounded like he had a big one to make here.
“Listen, don't say anything right now, okay?,” Carl said, too gentle. “You don't have to say anything at all, and I don't want you to say something just because you're confused or you’re - I don't know what you're feeling. Just give it a day.”
“Carl, I - I need time to think,” Bob said desperately.
“You had time to think.” Carl’s flat tone said he would not give Bob an inch without a better answer. “I gave you time to think after Florida.”
“I thought - I didn't know. I thought you were just... I thought you just liked how I looked.”
Bob had to cringe at the sound of his own voice. In hindsight it seemed so foolish; how could a pathetic admission like that make Carl any less angry with him? How could the knowledge that Bob had been an idiot all this time keep Carl from leaving?
But Carl only stopped pacing and stared, as if he, too, had been an idiot. “Oh. Well I do like that.”
“So I just... need time now that I know what I'm really supposed to be thinking about,” Bob said. He needed time to fit this new understanding into the daydreams he had been harboring these past few months, and back further into the months where he had assumed their closeness was nothing more than friendly. He took a breath. “I know what I have been feeling. I just don’t know how you feeling it too works with all that.”
He couldn’t bring himself to look up, but he heard Carl’s shaky answering inhale anyway.
“Okay. You can have your time. But not forever.”
“No. Not forever.”
Nothing, Bob was learning, could last forever.
There was, as Bob perhaps could have predicted if he had ever let himself think about it, no grand resolution. They simply shifted. They were still Bob&Carl, but slowly sitting beside each other on Carl’s couch became Bob’s ankle propped on Carl’s knee, and then Carl’s calves flung over Bob’s thighs, and then it became thighs pressed together and legs intertwined on Carl’s bed, closer and closer until they were linked in every way Bob could name.
And very little had changed.
They were friends, and they were gay, and they were attracted to each other, and they touched each other and kissed and fucked and comforted each other on difficult nights, and Bob thought they might even love each other, and it had all snuck up on him so gradually that, in the end, it simply felt natural.
Carl never asked him point-blank to say it. But every now and then, he would lift his face from Bob’s breastbone to grin and say, “still thinking about it?”
“Give me fifty years or so,” Bob would say. “I should have a pretty good idea by then.”