Now and Yesterday

by Stephen Greco

  Peter’s part of the complex was designed to be “like home” and had the formulated realness of a sitcom set. Comprising a kitchen, “living room,” and gym, in addition to work pods and the Den, the place wrapped around a loggia halfway up into the corporate maze, chiefly on what had been the twenty-third floor. The aerie looked out into the atrium, affording views of people going between levels, clients waiting, way down there, whiz kids taking a moment to clear their heads, way over there. Throughout the hive, people spoke quietly. Every so often laughter could be heard echoing through the atrium, and when there was no human sound at all there was the barely audible whusshh of massive amounts of air being circulated by a dramatically exposed system of ductwork.

  As Peter was chatting with Tyler the phone rang. It was Laura, the company’s vice president for business development. She had one of the few conventional offices, on the twenty-fifth floor.

  “I have to take this,” said Peter.

  “Hey, are we on for tonight?” said Tyler.

  Peter nodded yes and mimed texting, and the boy took off.

  “Laura, darling.” Peter swiveled around in his chair, to gaze out the interior window in back of his desk, into the atrium.

  “Wanna hear something funny?” Her voice sounded perpetually, if superficially, cheerful, and she never started phone calls with a greeting, as if a conversation were already in progress—a habit that put the other person in the somewhat defensive position of having to know instantly who was calling and what it was about.

  “Always,” said Peter.

  “I just got off the phone with McCaw’s people.”

  “Henderson McCaw?”

  “He’s leaving Fox and starting his own media company. They’re looking for someone to rebrand the whole thing—TV, Internet, radio, documentaries, live events.”

  “Amusing idea. So?”

  “You’d be perfect for it.”

  “I doubt that very much. And how are you today?”

  “And they wanna start deep with the DNA, Peter.”

  “Whose DNA?”

  “Their message, their thinking—and the national mood. And the global mood. They’re not just thinking national; they’re thinking global.”

  “Like the Taliban.”

  “I’ll have their plan in my hands by the end of the day.”

  “C’mon. Don’t you think they should have someone who likes the guy?”

  “I don’t know—don’t you like him?”

  “I think he’s—Laura, he’s basically Satan.”

  “Now . . .”

  “He’s completely ignorant, for one thing.”

  “No, he’s anything but that and you know it. The point is, this could mean millions of dollars in billings. It would be one of our biggest accounts.”

  “You can get somebody else, easily. I’m not the only genius in this joint.”

  “You’re the one he wants to talk to, Peter.”

  “Me? Specifically?”

  “Apparently, he loves the talking car.”

  Laura said she was going to meet with McCaw’s people preliminarily and get a clearer idea of the scope of the project. Peter agreed to think about the assignment, but said he wasn’t promising anything. Good advertising involved the ability—and willingness—to think exactly like a client, to feel his hopes and fears as symbiotically as possible, while mapping these emotions dispassionately onto a) market realities, and b) the collective unconscious. Going deep in this way—into the individual’s quest for wellness through personal hygiene, as Peter did for a facial tissue, for example, or her birthright of easy breathing and clean air, as he did for a sinus medicine—could be an interesting venture and a rewarding one; at times, it even felt noble. But diving into the panic McCaw was stirring up felt dangerous to Peter. The values McCaw espoused on Fox were backward and hateful, yes, and success in the assignment would probably mean the propagation of those values. But the underlying dissatisfactions McCaw exploited—including, perhaps, a certain existential rage at the limits of life itself—seemed deeper than Peter wanted to go, personally, for any assignment.

  Yet that limit alone, now that it had arisen, was also slightly intriguing.

  Peter went on with his morning—writing copy, returning calls, making some notes for the afternoon’s client meeting. Then, just before noon, Jonathan called. He was in the neighborhood. Could he take Peter to lunch at Fred’s or somewhere?

  “What are you doing up here?” asked Peter, cheerfully. “Shopping?”

  “My new urologic oncologist is on Park.”

  “Oh,” said Peter. Alarm clutched his stomach.

  “Yeah,” said Jonathan. “Not good.”

  “Shit.”

  “Listen, if you’re busy, we can talk later.”

  “No, no—I’m good. This is a good time,” said Peter. “I’m glad you called. I’ve been worried about you. I do have a thing here at the office at three, but—you wanna meet now? I’m walking out the door.”

  Barneys was empty and Fred’s still quiet when Peter arrived. The hostess, a gorgeous dark-haired girl in big heels and a little black dress, took Peter straight to Jonathan, who was installed at one of the tables by the big windows along Madison Avenue.

  “Your e-mail was so sweet,” said Jonathan.

  “It was a fantastic party,” said Peter. “I just hope you had a good time.”

  Jonathan barely rose and the two men kissed. Peter silenced his iPhone as he sat down.

  “Why do I know I’m also going to receive one of those delicious Pineider cards of yours in the mail?” said Jonathan.

  “Because . . . I wasn’t raised in a barn?” said Peter.

  With a flourish he unfolded the napkin and draped it over his lap.

  “Everyone wants to know why you showed up alone,” said Jonathan.

  “I’m a lonely old bachelor, that’s why,” said Peter. “And I doubt anyone was paying attention to me.”

  “You’re not that lonely. You do have your young ward, after all.”

  “His boyfriend is in town.”

  “I thought you were sweet on him.”

  “Tyler? Jonathan, I’m not even attracted to him in that way. He’s just fun. A valued coworker.”

  “You like his energy.”

  “Exactly. God knows, I haven’t had real sex in I don’t know how long.”

  “No?”

  “I talk about boys, I go out with ’em, but I’m not gettin’ any love anywhere.”

  “Well, maybe we should do something about that.”

  “Like what—get me a hustler?”

  Jonathan made a squeaky “maybe” sound.

  “No,” continued Peter. “I have to face the awful truth that my standards have gotten stratospherically high, in my old age.”

  He instantly heard his words about the “awful truth” in context and felt a pang of regret. Normal chitchat was suddenly over.

  “Don’t worry,” sighed Jonathan, as a pair of stylish women sailed past, following the hostess to a table. “Oh, this is so exhausting.”

  “Tell me everything,” said Peter.

  “OK.” Jonathan took a breath. “From boys to cancer. It might be stage four. It looks like it is.”

  Peter winced.

  “No.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Damn.”

  “I was at Sloan-Kettering all morning.”

  “And?”

  “You can see it in the scans. It’s gone into the bone—you know, the spine. It’s ‘aggressive’—that’s the word they’re using. And remember I was having this little ache in my back . . . ?”

  “Ugh.”

  “I thought maybe I pulled something in the gym. My trainer gave me some stretches for it.” Jonathan shook his head. “Funny, huh?”

  “What’s the next step?”

  “Chemo, radiation. They’re figuring it out. But we’re going to start doing something fast.” Jonathan managed a wan smile. “We’re going to be aggressive, too.”
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  “Good.”

  “There’s this place in Cleveland—superspecialists—where they want to send me for a consult.”

  “OK.”

  “It’s not gonna be much fun, this next year.”

  “No.”

  “And they’re clearly not too optimistic, either—though there’s such a reassuring language around all this.”

  They were silent for a moment, then Jonathan continued.

  “The word ‘options.’ There are always options—apparently even for people who will be dead by next summer.”

  “They’re making advances all the time,” said Peter quietly.

  “Are they? In prostate cancer?”

  There was anger in Jonathan’s voice, and fear.

  “I’m totally here for you, no matter what,” said Peter.

  “I know you are, darling—thank you,” said Jonathan, attempting to brighten. “Could you possibly go through the treatment for me and pay for it, as well?”

  Peter smirked.

  “I’m sorry,” said Jonathan. “That came out wrong.”

  “It’s OK,” said Peter. “I know you have insurance.”

  “Oh, yes—a million-dollar cap,” said Jonathan. “The doctor says I probably won’t burn through that, in one bout of anything. Very comforting—the thought being that I might not need insurance after that.”

  Jonathan shook his head. Just then a waiter arrived, with two enormous menus.

  “Can I get you gentlemen started with something? A bottle of water?”

  “You sure can,” said Jonathan. “A bottle of Fiuggi, please. And do you have any dry sherry? I would kill for a few sips of Manzanilla.”

  The waiter smiled slyly.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “For you, sir?”

  “Better not, thanks,” said Peter. “Oh, wait—on second thought, make it two sherries.”

  “Very civilized,” said Jonathan.

  “Yeah—if they have it,” said Peter. “Watch him come back and ask if Dry Sack is OK.”

  “It’s so funny,” said Jonathan, sitting back in his chair and slightly repositioning his silverware. “You live through AIDS, Vietnam, 9/11; you eat well, you take care of yourself—all so you can live long enough to start facing the diseases that are waiting out there for old men, anyway. . . .”

  “We’re not invulnerable, are we?”

  “But, darling, I thought I was! What’s the point of buying a new house and doing it up, if not to live there blissfully and safely, forever and ever?”

  A spray of midday sun, tinctured with a steely glare reflecting off the glass building across the street, was fingering through the latticework screens covering the windows. Traffic on Madison pushed uptown sluggishly.

  The waiter arrived with the water, took their order.

  “Did you know that Michelangelo was cured of kidney stones at Fiuggi?” said Jonathan.

  “I did not,” said Peter.

  “He was. Wouldn’t it be nice to have the kind of ailment that one went to a spa to cure?”

  Besides being a filmmaker and a collector of pots and manuscripts, Jonathan was a war vet. As a young man he’d been drafted and sent to Vietnam. He told Peter about it once, soon after they first met, in the ’70s, without many details, and never mentioned it again. Jonathan had come from a poor family from Queens with low expectations. They hadn’t been able to avoid the draft, like richer, better educated people did, and Jonathan vowed, once he returned home, to go back to school and find a path through life that exposed him to less risk and more of the blessings of American liberty. A thread running through all the documentaries he did, especially a well-known series probing the lives of living artists, explored themes of self-invention, self-permission-giving—self-liberation.

  “I take it you didn’t have any symptoms,” said Peter.

  “Well, the back stuff,” said Jonathan. “And I’ve lost a little weight recently, felt a little under par. I chalked it up to work.”

  “How’s it going, by the way?”

  “The film is going. We’re set to start shooting in January—we were set. I suppose it’s anybody’s guess what’s going to happen now.”

  “You’ll see how it goes.”

  “Sure, but I’ve got to get this done, Peter. It took me twenty years to talk him into it.”

  Jonathan’s current project was a profile of Connor Frankel, the painter who’d attended his party the night before. A homosexual gentleman of the old school, Frankel was extremely private and had never come out publicly. He and another well-known artist had been lovers in the ’50s, yet history books took little note of this fact, let alone of the influence that an emerging gay imagination might have had on the artists’ revolutionary work. Frankel, now in his eighties, was finally willing to talk.

  “You’ll figure it out. You’ll get some help. It’s a very important project.”

  The waiter delivered the appetizers and wished the men Bon ap-pétit .

  “It’s interesting,” mused Jonathan, picking up a fork. “My next film turned into my last film, this morning—if I’m lucky.”

  In the hour that followed, the restaurant filled up, lunch got noisier, and one sherry turned into two. The two friends talked of politics, space exploration, and the number of cable TV cooking shows devoted to cake. The conversation raced from subject to subject, perhaps a bit more rapidly than usual.

  Afterward, on the sidewalk, they hugged and said good-bye.

  “So we’ll talk,” said Peter. “I’ll call you later.”

  “Thanks, Pete—thanks for listening.”

  “You’re a prince and I love you,” said Peter, over the din of traffic. “We know how to take care of each other, don’t we, our generation? We learned it the hard way.”

  Jonathan nodded.

  “Promise me one thing,” said Jonathan. “Help me do this right. I want to leave something behind.”

  “Your work.”

  “Of course, my work. But I need your help to do something else. I’ve been talking to friends in philanthropy. I’d like to endow a prize for film or some kind of institute. I’m going to need a board of directors.”

  “Of course,” said Peter. “Anything I can do.”

  “I don’t want to be morbid, but they’re already talking to me about this hospice that’s associated with Sloan-Kettering. It’s a very homey place, apparently—for when they’re done being aggressive with me. Or maybe I’ll go upstate—I don’t know.”

  Peter shook his head.

  “No, really,” said Jonathan. “I wanna leave some mark, as my mother would have said. A few months is not enough time to do everything I wanted to do in this world. As of yesterday, I was still looking for someone to get married to and adopt kids with.”

  “We’ll figure something out.”

  “Good.”

  Peter put Jonathan in a cab, then began walking back to the office.

  “My next film turned into my last film.”

  The windows of exclusive Madison Avenue shops quietly beckoned with suggestions for a more comfortable life, expensive merchandise that had been freshly created for the season—not just fall, but that fall. An upscale cookware shop was showing some Thanksgiving china in a particularly fresh-looking shade of burnt orange. It occurred to Peter that he might stop in and pick up four dessert plates. And then he thought, Poor Jonathan! Will this Thanksgiving be his last?

  And suddenly Peter found himself wondering whether he, himself, would ever enter that store again. Of course he would; there was no reason to think he wouldn’t; it was one of his favorite stores. Yet what if the previous time he was in there, a few months before, had been the final time—if, for instance, he was about to be clobbered by a bus on his way back to work, or die in a subway crash on his way home? Wouldn’t that be sad—a middle-aged gay man, on an August afternoon, contentedly comparing pepper mills for the last time and not even realizing it?

  Even before reaching the corner of Sixtieth St
reet, Peter was thoroughly unsettled by the onrush of old memories. The idea that the next anything, or the previous one, could be the last had been a panic-point for him ever since the ’80s, when people got sick on a Friday and were dead by Monday; when author friends told him that the books they were working on were turning into their last ones; when Harold realized that the job he was aiming for and being groomed for at the Times would never be his. Those days!—when Harold was home again after his long ordeal in the hospital and Peter wondered whether this would be the last time Harold tasted his beloved yakitori or this the last time he heard the overture of his favorite ballet, Giselle. With a sting of sadness mixed with thrill, Peter remembered the last time he and Harold made love, just before Harold got really sick. They didn’t know it would be the last. It was on a long weekend in London, where they’d gone to see the Royal Ballet. They’d napped in their hotel room, after shopping and tea, and were dressing to go out, when a squeeze past each other in the bathroom turned into a kiss that overtook them thunderingly. He remembered thinking that Harold was as sexy that day as when they’d met, almost twenty years before—his eyes as true, his laugh as entertaining, his touch as reassuring.

  And a walk down Madison Avenue could always be one’s last, too.

  Peter stopped for the light. He noticed that a perfectly coiffed gray-haired woman in front of him was sobbing lightly as she spoke on her cell phone. He couldn’t hear what she was saying. She was dressed like an executive, in a black suit, and carrying a briefcase. She was wearing a pair of gold earrings in the shape of turbo shells—a gift from someone? A splurge for herself? Then the light changed and he moved on with the crowd.