Now and Yesterday

by Stephen Greco

  “Everything OK?” said Will, as Peter poked into a kitchen drawer for a couple of paper napkins.

  “Absolutely,” said Peter, shutting the drawer and squeezing past Will, to wet the napkins in the sink. “Will, I can’t believe what a fantastic job you’re doing.”

  “Nice crowd,” said Will.

  “No spills, either,” said Peter.

  Will laughed; there actually had been a small spill that Will cleaned up before Peter could notice. The crowd was nice, thought Will—attractive, smart, and mixed in a way that seemed to be exactly what he had been looking for, socially: gay and straight, men and women, young and old—though Peter was probably the oldest person in the room. Yet Peter didn’t seem that way at all. He had a certain energy that fit right in with this mix—that seemed to spark it up, in fact.

  He seems like a nice guy, Peter thought. Organized, yes, and there’s something great about the way he moves—negotiating the limits of my little kitchen, making his work look easy.

  It was an unexpected pleasure for Peter to squeeze so smoothly past Will in that tight space—to make just the right moves in coordination with the guy, to notice that their synched moves meant they were on the same wavelength about how a body should move in those circumstances. It was a pleasure as visceral as in a dream. With a flood of emotion Peter realized he hadn’t had that feeling of being in someone’s wake like that since Harold. He’d been close to other men, of course—danced, had sex. He and Nick had even shared that same kitchen, though with Nick there was always bumping into each other and never quite moving together in a way that felt natural. It was something special, Peter realized, to co-inhabit close quarters with someone gracefully; to coexist choreographically; to know always where the other body was and what its trajectory might be; to sense its progress, not just by visually tracking its parts but by detecting the movement of air surrounding it, triangulating the sounds it made, processing the molecules of sweat or fabric softener emanating from it—one per billion being enough to let you know if you’re a bit closer to it or a bit farther away.

  Peter had taken this smoothness between Harold and himself as organic proof of their compatibility, but he hadn’t remembered this in a conscious way until that evening. Suddenly, he felt that with Will he was once more speaking a native language that he hadn’t spoken in decades.

  Wow, interesting, thought Peter.

  People ate all the food and stayed late. They started leaving around ten. Jonathan made a date with Peter for the opera, as he was leaving. He also made a point of saying good night to Will, giving the guy a little hug—which Peter thought odd. Tyler, on his way out, asked Peter to join him and “some crazy people” at a bar in Williamsburg, but Peter declined.

  “I’m sticking right here,” he said.

  “Then see you at the office,” sang Tyler. “Thank you very much. Fantastic party.” Then he whispered, “I hope you two will be very happy.”

  “I’m glad you could come, Tyler.”

  “He’s so into you.”

  “It’s his job. I’m paying him.”

  “Alrighty.”

  After the last guest had gone, Peter was delighted to see that the house had been returned to normal, and the trash and recycling taken to the cans out front.

  “You were wearing a suit, weren’t you, that night at Jonathan’s?” said Will.

  “Yeah, I guess I was.”

  They were standing at the end of the kitchen counter, equidistant from the front door and the two armchairs where Peter liked to sit and talk with friends. Will had already tucked away the envelope Peter gave him.

  “Is a suit more your work look?” said Will.

  “Actually, no, it isn’t,” said Peter. “I doll up in Brooks Brothers only for very special occasions.”

  “It’s a good look. Men should wear suits more often.”

  “I agree. I remember once on a Nile cruise we met this older gentleman—a dealer of antiquities from San Francisco, Louis Pappas. He wore strict Brooks Brothers and nothing else. Blue blazer, gray slacks, period. Lovely man—white hair, very courtly. He spotted us at dinner on the first night of the cruise and invited us to join him at his table. He ordered wine and he insisted we dine together every night. It was three or four nights, I think. I remember he was looking for a head of Alexander, to buy for a client.”

  “This was you and your late boyfriend?”

  “Yeah, in, like, the early eighties. So check this out. One morning we’re supposed to go for a ride in a felucca—you know, one of those Egyptian sailboats—and Louis tries to get into the boat—he walked with a cane, by the way—and he falls into the Nile, right in the mud. I mean, it was only two feet of water and he was fine—all of these cruise people jumped into the water to save him—but he was a mess. Mud all over his blue blazer and gray flannel slacks! They found his cane and helped him back to the ship, and Harold and I went on the felucca ride alone. And don’t you know, when we returned to the ship, later, there was Louis in another blue blazer and another pair of gray slacks. The first outfit had been sent out for cleaning. That was all he ever traveled with, he told us—blue and gray. It made it easy.”

  “Amazing.”

  “Can you imagine? That world? Kind of great. But I think we may have moved on.”

  Nile cruise. Dead boyfriend. Peter heard himself slipping into that thing he did with young men he was interested in. Only, until then, he hadn’t known he was interested in Will, nor was there much foundation, he knew, for him to be interested, beyond the boy’s looks and five hours of employer-employee communication. Peter wanted to ask Will to stay for a drink but couldn’t find the courage. The choreographic ease between them had somehow morphed into a field of gently repellant energy. Will looked quite ready to be dismissed.

  “Hey, well—thanks again,” said Peter. “Your great, great work totally helped make the party a big success.”

  “You’re welcome. It was fun,” said Will. “You know, being new in New York, it’s nice to be able to visit a party like this, with really cool people, even if I’m still, you know, the bartender guy.”

  Peter felt touched, suddenly.

  “Well, then, Will . . . the next time I do one of these things, you’d be perfectly welcome to come as a guest, if you want. I mean, I’d like that. People enjoyed talking to you. . . .”

  “Oh, that would be nice—thank you.”

  “Great.”

  “Cool.”

  “And, you know,” continued Peter, “I get invited to tons of events all the time, big parties and such, and I hate going alone and love to spread the wealth. So maybe, I dunno, sometime, you’d wanna come along. . . .”

  “Yeah, maybe. Cool.”

  They agreed to talk further, then said good night—with a handshake, instead of a kiss, though in New York’s kiss-everybody circles, even the mention of possibly attending an event together put the two of them squarely in kiss-each-other territory.

  There were several more texts from Enrico for Will to read, on his way to the subway. It sounded like Enrico, too, had been at a party, but bored. Will went straight through the turnstile and put away his phone, without answering.

  Him, I’ll deal with tomorrow, he thought. Right now I need to get home and into the bathtub.

  CHAPTER 6

  “Mortality just isn’t the horror it’s cracked up to be. Though it’s certainly no picnic thinking you might not be around next summer.”

  “No.”

  Jonathan was on the phone with Peter, updating him on the Connor Frankel film project.

  “It’s partly a gift, I think, mortality,” said Jonathan, “an opportunity for comfort, even joy—if you embrace it. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I think so,” said Peter.

  It was late on a weekday morning. Peter, with the earbuds of his iPhone stuck in his ears, was walking through the bright, spacious aisles of the largest Walgreens in suburban New Jersey, fifty-five minutes from Manhattan. He was doing reconnaissan
ce on the design and display of mass-market body and skin care products, in advance of a client meeting with the makers of a line of organic wellness products. He was taking pictures of shelves and displays, gathering products to purchase and take back to the office for discussion, and generally letting himself take in the big-box store vibe. A car and driver were waiting outside in the parking lot.

  “But you have to embrace it,” said Jonathan. “That denial-of-death thing we remember from Psychology 101 was only the beginning. America’s gotten completely cut off from the natural flow of life and death. You know. Most people today know as much about death as they do about sex, which is nothing, of course, except for what they see on TV—and that’s pure entertainment. This commitment to entertainment is blotting out our humanity, Peter.”

  “I know.”

  “These are notes I make for the film. I’m on my laptop. Anyway, I can see all this much better now. Thank you, cancer—thank you very much.”

  Peter had been looking at the label on a bottle of shampoo. But when Jonathan called he tossed the bottle into his cart and wheeled to the end of the aisle, out of traffic, in order to concentrate on his friend’s call. In a way, he thought, many of the store’s products hoped to build sales on consumer emotions deriving from exactly the life-and-death urgencies Jonathan was talking about. From the shelves behind Peter came kind word of real benefits from scores of well-meaning brands, along with the loud and sometimes comically crude blandishments of other brands more interested in higher profits than the well-being of their consumers. Even seemingly small choices that go into product design—imagery, typeface, color, texture, material—determined what would fly and what would nose-dive as the result of deeply rooted consumer responses that Peter was paid to diagnose. Did the image of the sun on this tube of skin cream say “warm and life-giving” or something more akin to “scorching and carcinogenic”? Did the particular shade of green on the packaging of that shower gel resonate as “earthy and natural” or “bio-hazard from Mars”? Was the plain, sans-serif typeface on a vial of “complexion clarifying serum” more about purity or sterility? Some brands seemed to represent real souls who genuinely cared about the human beings on the other end of the supply chain, while other brands clearly stood for robo-execs programmed to know how the choice of a color called “process dark spring green,” printed on high-density polyethylene and seen under electronic ballast fluorescent lighting on the shelf of a big-box store, would affect the bottom line.

  “It’s precisely because mortality is this ultimate failure that we don’t want to think about it, we Americans,” continued Jonathan. “Mortality is a kind of anti-achievement. It’s all about the flesh, like obesity, so an obviously mortal person, say a cancer patient, is thought to be—well, may even think himself to be—weak or stupid or out of control. Which of course we all are with death, aren’t we?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Denying mortality is denying the body, which is exactly what we did when we transformed sex into entertainment, so we could control it, right? I mean, happily we deny visceral pleasure, even experience itself. Not so much gay men, but there, too. Where are the new sexual explorers to replace the ones we used to know? Gay men are having sex like straight guys nowadays. They need it to be over in a flash, because prolonged pleasure and joy would mean losing control, which no one really wants to do. . . .”

  Jonathan paused.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I know I’m going off here.”

  “You go, girl,” said Peter.

  “Anyway, I’m making notes and having the most incredible conversations with Connor. He says he doesn’t feel he has to be in control of ‘that side of things’ anymore. Can you imagine? Coming out at eighty-three? Oh, and listen. We’ve had to adapt the process to fit my delicate condition. We’d been hoping to visit a few of his former homes together and shoot there, but I just can’t bop around the way I used to. So now the interview part is just him and me sitting in chairs, talking, thinking out loud.”

  “Interesting,” said Peter. Jonathan was simply going to talk on camera with Frankel My Dinner With André–style, session after session, until one of them couldn’t do so any longer—presumably, this would be Jonathan—at which point the assistant director and editor would take over and shape the film.

  “Yeah, it’ll be great,” said Jonathan. “He’s letting us use some personal photographs.”

  “Nice.”

  “Petey, Americans just don’t want to think anymore. Why is that?”

  “I dunno.”

  “They have preferences instead. Would you like nonfat milk in your Frappuccino? Whole milk? Soy milk? Two-percent? Extra shot of espresso? Drizzle on your whipped cream? Most people don’t know how to go any deeper or even that deeper exists. Tell me, Petey, did you get any logic in high school? Any statistics?”

  “Logic—I got a little in math. It was ‘the new math.’ ”

  “Me too! They used to teach stuff like that, didn’t they? How to think. But they don’t anymore. Do you think people who like Henderson McCaw can tell you the difference between induction and deduction?”

  Peter snorted a little laugh.

  ”And if they can’t handle thinking,” continued Jonathan, “forget about thinking through.”

  “It’s funny,” said Peter. “Your job is discussing life and death with one of the world’s greatest living artists. Mine, apparently, is having lunch with a scumbag like Henderson McCaw.”

  “What?”

  “That’s right—next week.”

  “Oh, Peter. Business?”

  “Could be. Big cross-platform branding thing.”

  “Really.”

  “My superiors are pressuring me to consider it.”

  “Why?”

  “Why else? Money.”

  “Well, good luck.”

  “Thanks. But wait—can I ask you to hold a sec?”

  With his friend on hold, Peter sent himself a two-word e-mail: “serum” and “McCaw.” He needed to remember to ask Tyler to prepare a dossier on Henderson McCaw and also to work up a little study about whether the word “serum” was doing the same work in the consumer’s mind that it was thought to be doing until then. Previously, the word sounded expensive and clinical-in-a-good-way, when used in the context of skin care. But did “serum” now, because of growing talk about bioterror and pandemic, carry a stronger whiff of world annihilation?

  “Sorry, I’m back,” said Peter. He noticed a shopper—a well-dressed, middle-aged woman, undoubtedly within the wellness client’s target demographic—watching him as if she couldn’t figure out why a man in a black Prada suit would be pushing a cart so full of toiletries through a Walgreens on a weekday morning.

  “Listen, we can talk another time, if this isn’t good,” said Jonathan.

  “No, no. Now’s good. I’m just shopping.”

  “I’ll let you go. I just wanted you to hear what we’ve been up to.”

  “Sounds like good stuff.”

  “It’s just that—thinking our way up to death, trying to think beyond it, is so crucial to our species. To be able to do that was an evolutionary advantage—as important as language itself, in my view. ‘Hello, death’ is possibly the most important thing we can say to ourselves. Embracing death becomes this huge advantage to survival—not the individual, the culture. You know the way they say that microbes that wiped out practically the entire human race, thousands of years ago, became part of our genome and made us stronger?”

  “Like you just said—adaptation.”

  “Exactly,” said Jonathan. “Accepting death brings a usefully heroic dimension to everyday life.”

  Peter often said he’d never have achieved his current state of fulfillment, personal and professional, without the loss of Harold. Before it, he was a longtime companion who wrote a little poetry. Not a dishonorable role, yet he wasn’t aware of wanting more until suddenly he had less. After Harold’s death, Peter had to become more focused on earning a li
ving. He started in magazines and saw he could make ends meet, which was nice—though the need to do so proved its own reward. A life need not be long to be whole, as he and Harold used to say. Without Harold, it seemed the only thing to do was try to make his own life more whole.

  Conveniently, though Peter had lost no loved ones during childhood, he had been well trained to face death and keep going. He had grown up with the Bomb—the constant threat of sudden nuclear annihilation. It was a dogma, that threat, and religiously taught. At one point he and his schoolmates were ducking-and-covering at school at least as frequently as he was receiving communion in church. And there were other lessons, too—from actual religion, Catholicism, which told him that he’d witness the glory of the Second Coming after rising from a death he was thus fervidly to await; from social studies, which taught him that he might be called to risk his life one day in war, as his father had done; from science fiction, which reminded him weekly at the movies that aliens from space could be preparing to ray-gun his village or devour his brains. And then an impressionable boy’s quandary over death blossomed into a usefully self-examined neurosis, with adolescence and Freud’s gabble about eros and thanatos, which he came across in the little public library he visited regularly with his mother.

  “Anyway . . . ,” sighed Jonathan.

  “Yup,” said Peter, focusing back on the call after watching another shopper, an elderly gentleman, inspect an end-of-aisle display of multivitamins targeting “go-go seniors.”

  “We’re charging ahead,” said Jonathan.

  It was such a boomer thing to do, thought Peter—Jonathan’s letting the battle with cancer become part of the process. The plan reminded Peter of performances during the 1980s by choreographers with AIDS who decided to incorporate their physical and even mental decline into their work, appearing sometimes solo, sometimes with loving colleagues, in performances that didn’t so much exploit the ghastly situation as explore it in an unprecedented way. The results were sometimes thrilling, even if hard to watch. The good artists made good work, and the bad ones at least made something interesting. Jonathan said he was glad for the opportunity to “take the project away from a standard documentary, into the realm of Bach’s Art of the Fugue, an almost theoretical exploration of a theme. . . .” Peter only hoped that his friend could pull it off and avoid the cinematic equivalent of paint drying.