Now and Yesterday

by Stephen Greco

  “I don’t mind using the word ‘abomination’ to describe same-sex marriage, because that’s what I think it is,” said the senator.

  “And that’s why we love ya,” said McCaw. “You tell it like it is.” He smiled and lit up the screen with a parody of cheer that seemed as needy as it was undergrad.

  Not that McCaw was stupid or unsophisticated. His quick rise to prominence proved he was anything but. Somehow, more effectively than anyone else since McCarthy, McCaw had been able to exploit that enduring strain of the American psyche that is sometimes truly revolutionary, sometimes merely cranky—a strain that seeks always to get some real or imagined oppressor off the backs of decent people. He claimed several million followers and had begun appearing at rallies that were more revivalist than political in feel. “Shove it!” was McCaw’s take on anything established, though the last thing he and his people seemed to call for was systemic thinking about social or economic realities, or careful analysis of exactly what to shove, and where, and how far, and why. McCaw’s power was to mobilize a single emotion: the nostalgia for a simpler America that was either long gone or never existed. And that was more than sophisticated—it was priestly.

  “And you go all the way, don’t you, Senator?” said McCaw. “You want to roll back civil unions and the legal benefits that go with them.”

  “That’s right, Henderson, and for the same reason,” said the senator. “I just feel—well, you know a lot of us feel—that we have to take America back.” Some of the guests in Jonathan’s library booed, in a light, party-friendly way.

  The senator was wearing a red suit; McCaw was in dark blue. Behind them, through a large window, across a body of water, was the Statue of Liberty. The interview was apparently being televised from a makeshift studio or visitors’ center on Ellis Island or somewhere in New Jersey.

  “What does that mean, ‘Take America back’?” declared one of the guests, a gray-haired lawyer in a suit and bow tie whose name Peter couldn’t remember. “Take it back from whom, from what?” Some of the others laughed. “From the present day? From a nation of 320 million people? Why not take America back to the Stone Age?” More laughter. Then the lawyer turned to his partner who, like him, was wearing a bow tie. “It sounds like what hawks used to say about Vietnam: ‘Bomb them back to the Stone Age!’ ”

  The lawyer saw that Peter had overheard this last remark.

  “Right?” he said. “What a dope.”

  Peter smiled back.

  “You’re right,” said Peter. “But he is a dope with an audience. He’s reaching people.”

  “With pure ignorance,” said the lawyer.

  “Well, yeah. But ignorance is real, sadly,” said Peter. “It’s powerful.”

  “Look at him,” continued the lawyer. “Where is that, Liberty State Park?”

  “It’s actually the golf course at Liberty State Park, they said,” said the lawyer’s partner.

  “Oh, perfect,” said the lawyer.

  “Look at the way that shot is composed,” said Peter.

  “I get the creeps when those people use the phrase ‘Lady Liberty, ’ ” said the lawyer, suddenly in a lighter mood. “Actually, I get the creeps when anybody does.”

  Peter snickered.

  “Me too,” he said. “But I wouldn’t take this populist thing too lightly. God knows, the Europeans don’t. It created Reagan, derailed Clinton—you know. . . .”

  “At least we’ve got some smart thinkers on our side,” said the lawyer’s partner.

  “I wish we had some killers on our side, too,” said Peter. “If we expect to hold our own, we need some of that shit our fathers brought into World War Two.”

  The word “shit” made the partner wince.

  “Ooh, baby!” said someone else nearby, in a campy accent. “Save some of that for me.”

  A round of snickers.

  “Excuse me,” said Jonathan, suddenly appearing. “May I flip this off?” He switched off the television before anyone could answer. “People, you are here to have fun. Eat, drink, and be merry, please! Inspect furniture.”

  The lawyer and his partner drifted off, while Jonathan pulled Peter close to him.

  “Party, darling,” said Jonathan.

  “Yes, of course. Sorry,” said Peter.

  “Have you said hi to Connor?”

  “I’m too scared.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. He’s a pussycat. And now that he’s decided to come out he’s a changed man.”

  “Really? Details, please.”

  “All shall be revealed,” said Jonathan, taking Peter by the arm. “But first you must see what we did in the master bath. I found some tesserae in Rome that are the absolute point of existence—recycled, seventeenth-century.”

  Two hours later, Peter was home in Brooklyn Heights. He was standing at his bathroom sink, drying his face with a white terrycloth towel and studying his reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror.

  The hairline, stabilized for the moment. No further receding or thinning through the crown. And still no gray—except for a few in the sideburns, though only one or two new ones this year. More of those whiskery things in the eyebrows, which need more frequent trimming. And the nose hair, of course. Still—it could be worse.

  He peered more closely, in a magnifying mirror mounted to the wall on an accordion arm. The light in the bathroom was bright white.

  No wrinkling, even around the eyes—that’s something! But a distinct fleshiness of the face that was never quite there before. Tiny new bumps on the forehead that probably admitted no pathology other than age. And, yes, some sag around the jaw and upper cheek, which a bit of gentle pushing, as in a surgical consultation, could momentarily counteract. What was that, a muscular issue? How much worse it would be, without the regular facial massage during bath time that Uncle Malcolm once recommended to a fascinated little boy!

  It was still early. There was time for a nightcap in the garden, one of Peter’s favorite things to do after a party, in all but the coldest months. He applied some moisturizer.

  In all, still plausible. And with a few drops of the expensive facial serum and the right haircut, completely possible.

  Somehow, though he could also afford face work and knew plenty of men who’d taken that step, Peter had never seriously considered surgery. He knew that the flesh had matured a bit, but saw no reason to stop conceiving of himself as essentially the same person who had moved into the apartment thirty-odd years before. And even when a random reflection or cell phone photograph clearly showed diminishment and reminded him of the kind of aging that was in force when he was a boy, which made all his aunts and uncles go elderly years before Peter’s age now, he never thought, Gee, I’m old. Peter knew that that kind of aging no longer applied to a huge swath of the population. Demographics said that old people were staying fitter and living more healthily; psychographics said that they were embracing greater expectations about their later years—the expectations themselves serving partly to protect people from certain effects of aging. Wouldn’t anybody who could naturally cling as long as possible to some of the same expectations they’d always had, whether noble—“I will one day write a novel,” “I will once again fall in love”—or silly—“I will grow my hair long next fall or maybe even go blond”? Though Peter knew that falling in love again probably belonged in both categories.

  Conceptually, he had no problem with aging. As a child he always envisioned himself at the exciting age of fifty, which since he’d been born in 1953 meant just after the year 2000—the Future!—and which, for the first two decades of his life, meant a golden age promised by science fiction, when everyone, at least according to comic books like Mystery in Space and Strange Adventures, would go about in flashy jumpsuits, weirdly exhilarated. Then later, in college, fifty began to look like a different kind of golden age, when one might live quietly in a shack on a lake, with a shaggy lutenist and a couple of Labrador retrievers. Personally, he’d always found that aging made mo
st men more attractive, and he believed, knowing himself to be not particularly handsome, that he might well have benefited from the process, while also going to the gym every day, taking his vitamins, and learning what worked for him clothing-wise, year after year.

  He was aware, of course, that American culture and gay life were pitilessly youth-oriented, but he’d never suffered from this professionally or socially. And any lingering concerns that might have been developing about taking his clothes off with younger men had been dispelled a few years before, on Fire Island, at the Pines beach house he shared every summer with Jonathan. Three visitors arrived one weekend: a friend of Jonathan’s, a distinguished surgeon who was around their age, and two cute, skinny, muscular boys, both in their early twenties—the surgeon’s boyfriend and the boyfriend’s best friend. Both boys were fun and warm, both had real jobs and career goals; and over the weekend the single boy and Peter hit it off. Then on Sunday, after the guests departed, Peter confided gleefully to Jonathan that he’d had sex with the boy, but confessed surprise that the boy had been so into him, physically. Jonathan replied adamantly. “Dope! The boys who want older men want you because of your body, not in spite of it.”

  Peter decided to make the leap of faith. After that, he allowed himself to accept the term “daddy” for himself, if someone used it. He decided to ignore his Freudian-based objection to the term and the specter, from an ancient newsreel, of a venerable, white-bearded Ezra Pound striding over the heath with a walking stick.

  Also, the cock is great and the feet are in good shape—that’s something, too. Old men can get such grossly gnarled feet.

  Peter changed into sweats and heavy socks, and poured himself a drink. He opened the door to the garden and stood there, letting the cold night air stream in. It was probably too cold to go out and sit.

  “My little house,” he said out loud, in a kind of baby talk that he and Harold used to share. Outside, a few steps from a small iron porch led down to a sizable garden with a patio, which his landlady tended diligently but rarely used. As a joke, Peter liked to tell people that he lived in a single-family house with his live-in gardener. The garden, now mostly bare, still looked inviting in a late-fall way. The hosta was all gone, leaving patches of bare earth and slightly stranded-looking shrubs, but the hydrangea along the back wall were still blooming, and yellowed leaves still clung to the dogwood that dominated the part of the garden nearest the house.

  It was a one-bedroom apartment that occupied the parlor floor of a hundred-and-fifty-year-old Federal brick row house, the top two floors of which were occupied by Peter’s landlady of thirty-seven years. The place was best described as shabby chic. Boasting immaculately restored original details like plank floors and plaster moldings, and thoughtful improvements like the bank of multi-paned windows and a glass door onto the garden, the apartment had been his and Harold’s home, and then Peter’s alone. Harold died there, having returned to more loving surroundings after a yearlong decline in the hospital. Though the apartment was modest in comparison to Jonathan’s, it boasted what Peter always called “good bones”—and a garden that, in Peter’s book, was worth two or three extra rooms anywhere else. Over the years he’d made the place more comfortable, shifting out most of the inexpensive basics with which he and Harold had set up house and bringing in more adult furniture, serious cookware, and custom-made wooden blinds. The place had been Peter’s home now for longer than any other place he had ever lived—far longer than the house he grew up in, a modest subdivision split-level built by his father in 1954, where Peter lived for sixteen years, before going off to college. The Brooklyn apartment had thus seen the vast bulk of Peter’s life unfold and also acquired a certain psychic heft, as now, on some nights, in primal dreams where mysterious forces repel and attract a dreamer along pathways of shadowy spaces, the place seemed to warp itself, by some cellular logic, into Dad’s split-level castle and even, Peter suspected, the womb.

  It does mean something that we wound up here—that I stayed here, Peter thought.

  It was only the third place that he and Harold looked at, and the nicest house on the block.

  “That’s it,” said Harold, when they were still several doors away. The realtor had shown him around once already and told the landlady he and Peter were “very nice and very interested.” Harold clasped Peter on the shoulders and did a little dance as they sped up to approach the stoop.

  “It is nice,” said Peter.

  It was a steamy day in June. They’d arrived in Brooklyn only two weeks before, to stay with friends until they found a place of their own. Harold was starting a job at the Times—which would undoubtedly lead to better and better jobs there—while Peter was still writing poetry. Both were wearing T-shirts and cut-off jeans. Peter’s shirt was appliquéd with a pink ice cream cone and Harold’s proclaimed “Cabbage Is a Good Thing” in Russian.

  The landlady, Angela, showed them around. Everybody liked everybody else and agreed that white was much better for the place than the shocking yellow and orange of the previous tenants. The dogwood hadn’t even been planted in the garden yet.

  “But can we afford it?” said Peter, afterward. The rent was $25 a month more than the budget they’d agreed on.

  “We have to look at this in the long term, Peter,” said Harold, beaming. In this and in all other things, his boyfriend’s determination, which balanced prudence and optimism, made Peter so proud—to love such a man!

  And the place was still a rental, decades later, though at ten times the original rate. Peter, thus far in his life, had been perfectly content not to own a home and to remain in this one, even if it wasn’t gigantic or lavish—though his recent financial success had opened up the question of a place, perhaps, upstate.

  Would Harold have been pleased to know that Peter was still living in the same place, years later? Peter smiled—and wondered if he would have been anything like the man he was now, if Harold had lived. Would he and Harold have slipped into the same kind of gray-flannel adulthood as Jonathan’s crowd, buying property, consolidating security? Maybe. And of course it wouldn’t have been so terrible to go on taking care of each other and of their little segment of society, the way those men did—though adultness itself had evolved so astonishingly, over the decades! Peter realized that since first laying eyes on his garden at twenty-two, when he was already an adult, he and the rest of the world had effectively lived at least three additional lifetimes, from childhood to adulthood, with the coming of three technological game-changers—computers, the Internet, and cell phones—each of which had forced a full mental cycle that began in naïve excitement and finished in smug sophistication. The resultant shift, personal as much as cultural, was far headier, he thought, than the one his grandfather used to describe, between the horse and the automobile. The same period, of course, saw the ebb of space exploration, supersonic transport, and network television—civilization, in fact, being a lot like himself: the same as before, but different.

  He stood at the door, letting himself relax. The garden was as quiet as it got, in its annual cycle. During the other three seasons, across neighbors’ fences at night came the sounds of air conditioners, or friends enjoying an al fresco drink, or the little kids down the block who should be in bed, playing in their yard. But starting then, in mid-October, the garden echoed at night only with the whisper of chill and rustle of sharp winter stars, and for Peter this had always been a kind of music, both exciting and terrifying. Would it ever be warm again? Would the sun and sunny times ever return? Could we really protect ourselves from the barrenness we feel encroaching at this time of year? He had heard this music first as a child of seven or eight, when asked by his parents to take the garbage out, one dark late-fall night after dinner; walking with no coat across the yard to the garbage can, the sound of a dog barking coming from several houses away, a vast precariousness thundering above and beneath him, above and beneath them all; his subdivision being the farthest extent of their little upstate town, befo
re miles of thick woods and a mass of dark hills that crashed up against the sky. And he heard the music again when he stood with Harold at Machu Picchu’s Intihuatana stone, the “hitching post of the sun,” to which Inca priests ritually tied the sun to halt its dangerous progress away from men; instantly and with a shudder Peter felt the power of ancient sun worship. And even now he found slightly distasteful the cheer of weathercasters who bantered lightly about the coming end of daylight savings, a time when the slow and comprehensibly steady slide into life’s precariousness takes a stupid, man-made jerk forward, for reasons no one seemed to understand anymore.

  Yet there was ecstasy in those chill harmonies. Tuning into planetary cycles felt like liberation from the strictures of civilization, even if it was civilization that kept us alive.

  “Now this is more like existence as I understand it, eh?” said Harold, as they stood in the roofless ruins of the Inca temple, looking out over the Urubamba Valley, shading their eyes with their hands, squinting.

  “ ‘High reef of the human dawn,’ ” said Peter, quoting Neruda, from one of the scores of books they’d devoured in preparation for the trip to Peru. It was early morning, before the day tourists arrived; they’d spent the night at the site’s tiny guesthouse. Morning brightness pressed down to meet the jutting peak they stood upon.

  “We’ve always been here and we always will be, Peter.”