“Good for you.”
“I dunno. I just feel a little blessed just to be here, so I wanna . . . you know, do it right.”
“And you never got sick? That’s amazing.”
Peter shook his head.
“But your partner . . . ,” said Will.
“Right,” said Peter. “He did, and I didn’t. Am negative and intend to stay that way.”
“I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose someone you love like that.”
“It’s no day at the beach, lemme tell ya. But seriously, you go on. You try to be better—a better person.”
“So . . . you guys weren’t monogamous? And please tell me if this is none of my business and I’ll shut up. I’ve just never known anybody personally who . . .”
“No, not at all, Will,” said Peter. “I don’t mind talking about it. Although when I know ya better, I’ll give you the full version. Basically, we were totally committed to each other, forever—but this was way before the idea of gay marriage was even talked about, among gay men. In fact, the so-called revolution required just the opposite: We were not going to do love and marriage the way mainstream society did it. This was the seventies, yo! We thought that being true to each other—and to gay culture or whatever—meant allowing each other certain freedoms. We were gay boomers and we wanted it all. So we made rules to detail what the freedoms were.”
“Rules?”
“Like having to spend at least four nights a week together. And on the other nights, no staying out all night, which meant past two a.m. No threesomes, because we tried threesomes and they didn’t work for us. Everybody had different rules, you see. Harold traveled a lot, so we were both allowed to hook up when he was out of town—but no hookups ever in our apartment.”
“And you didn’t think he would ever fall in love with someone else?”
“Not at all,” said Peter. “Absolutely never a doubt about that. We totally trusted to love each other until death did us part.” Peter paused. “And then death did us part.”
Will thought about that for a moment.
“I just find that amazing,” he said. “You guys were very lucky to have had that.”
“We were indeed,” said Peter. “And, Will, we did it all in totally textbook, trailblazer style. Our families knew and liked each other. We were the cool uncles for all our nieces and nephews. We went to weddings and kids’ birthday parties as a couple—the whole thing.”
“You must miss him.”
“Every day. But life goes on, right?”
Will nodded.
“Makes me angry to think about how slowly the world reacted to AIDS,” he said. “I did some queer studies at Berkeley.”
“It was war,” said Peter. “I’d always heard about World War Two, as a kid, from my father, but I knew I’d never go in the army. I protested Vietnam, like everybody did. AIDS was my war.”
“My dad just missed Vietnam.”
“Remind me to tell you my antiwar stories.”
“Protests? Demonstrations?”
“Some snowy night by the fire.”
The antipasto had been devoured. When the waiter arrived to clear the table, they decided to have one more glass of wine, instead of dessert.
“Have you always been out?” Will asked.
“Pretty much,” said Peter. “You?”
“Pretty much.”
Will explained how accepting his parents were, how liberal his childhood friends. His parents did worry about sexually transmitted diseases, though.
“Of course,” said Peter. “And you’re careful, right?”
“Oh, sure,” said Will. “Probably too careful.”
“I know,” sighed Peter. “People can go too far, trying to stay safe. The utter rapture of a sexualized world! The thrill in this heightened, primal awareness of other men, that I think Mother Nature gave us for hunting or whatever, that we just don’t tap anymore! We don’t have to totally chuck all that, just because of a flew fuids. . . .” Peter stopped and tried again. “A few fluids . . .”
Will hooted, and Peter shook his head.
“Oh my goodness, two drinks—that’s all,” said Peter.
“No worries,” said Will.
“We’d better get a check.”
It was around one-thirty. Will wanted to take the check, in gratitude for an evening at the opera, but Peter suggested they split it, and Will graciously acceded.
As they headed for the subway, Peter felt a thousand conversations in his head that he wanted to continue, but he only suggested to Will that they get together again sometime soon.
“Sounds great,” said Will.
They took the 1 train south to Times Square, where Will had to switch to the 7. Peter had decided, in the interest of a neater parting, to wait until Fourteenth Street before switching to the express. As the Times Square stop came, Will, before rising from his seat, leaned into a little kiss on Peter’s cheek—“Thanks again; get home safely”—which Peter reciprocated once he understood what was going on. This took a moment, because he had decided to be a good boy and not expect a kiss. Yet after Will was gone, as the 1 rattled southward, and Peter sat there in the glaring subway light—reaching for his iPhone, inserting earbuds, pulling out the New Yorker—he thought that he had actually gotten surprisingly close to Will over a little antipasto, and a kiss on the cheek didn’t feel inappropriate at all.
CHAPTER 8
The next day brought one of those New York moments when everyone is talking about the weather, though the weather itself was hardly extreme enough to account for all the buzz. Skies were gray, it looked like snow—simple enough. The real storm was people’s engrossment in the media’s extremely calculated frenzy over an approaching nor’easter that might drop a ton of snow on the city and paralyze it—or might not, as was often the case with such storms. Either way, a looming nor’easter was a reliable cue to trigger latent fears that New York copes with every day but rarely moans about—plunging elevators, crashing subway trains, falling skyscrapers!—so why not moan endlessly, when you can, about how you’re going to get to work in ten feet of snow, what you’re going to do with the kids if school is cancelled, and whether or not the sanitation department is ready with the plows? Living stoically with constant unseen threats, New York loves to seize now and then on storm clouds as the opportunity for an urban ritual whose necessity mounts with every passing plunge- and crash-free day: the public display of vigilance, an aptitude required of all citizens here, perhaps even more than the cleverness and ambition we usually associate with the city.
Standing at his office window, looking out onto Madison Avenue, Peter wondered how differently the people scurrying below might process the weather from the way country people did. The sky—at least, as much of it as he could see—looked low and heavy, the light leftover and stale. Since moving into his present office the year before, Peter had always wished the window faced west, instead of east, country boy that he was. Western skies tell so much more about the coming weather than eastern skies do. And though Peter enjoyed the city’s storm frenzy as much as anyone, at that moment he envied those upstate who faced greater actual danger from a nasty winter storm. He wondered what people might be doing at that very moment in his hometown or in the hills thirty miles north of there, where Jonathan had a house on the other side of the Hudson River, in a town called Hudson. Those folks would be checking their supply of salt for the front steps; calling a neighbor with a snow plow, to arrange for clearing the driveway; checking the pantry for enough food for a few days or simply the ingredients of something wonderful to make after the world had become immobilized. He remembered how the morning light upstate, on a clear day after a snowstorm, seemed to radiate both down from the sky and up from the fresh snow on the ground, revealing something essential about the trees and buildings you thought you knew; and how well this view, from the window of a cozy house, married with the aroma of a roasting chicken or a baking apple-cinnamon cake.
The view ou
t the other window in Peter’s office, the one that looked into the atrium, revealed coworkers buzzing about as usual that morning.
I wonder what frenzies buzz in those little brains, he thought. As usual, the agency was in the midst of preparing several new business pitches. There were big presentations the following week for their vodka and skin care clients. And then there was McCaw.
Peter had tried to make some notes, earlier that morning, on the basic terrain of the McCaw assignment and some directions that might be promising, but he had gotten nowhere. Was the job a play on the irritation of a certain segment of the populace, and their seduction into a cult of personality? What were the irritants? How large was the segment? How could personality help? Was it about the formation of a political movement and thus attached to the trajectory of “America,” the idea; or perhaps something more religious, building on the human habit of faith? Instead of notes and diagrams, Peter had come up with a series of singularly inert-looking doodles. To shake himself up, he decided to grab his laptop and go sit in one of the semicircular balcony pods that overlooked the atrium. That’s what the god-damned place is for, he thought.
Floating above the gentle ambient buzz in the atrium that day were the sounds of a team of workers installing a new sculpture there. Already suspended from the roof of the atrium was half a spray of artificial clouds, which seemed to be made of transparent plastic, framed into great puffs by concealed ribs. On the floor below were the rest of the clouds and a brand-new, bright yellow boom lift—itself, with its curiously expressive extendable arm, looking like a sculpture. After securing several wires attached to one of the clouds on the floor, a worker stepped into the bucket of the lift and was boosted to the top of the atrium, under the direction of someone whom Peter guessed was the sculptor. The finished installation was going to look great, Peter thought. The clouds looked somehow classically Japanese, like those surrounding Mount Fuji in a Hiroshige print. Peter made a mental note to introduce himself to the sculptor.
“Prepared for the storm?” said Laura, whom Peter had run into on his way to the pod. Rather than her usual suit and heels, she was wearing jeans, a turtleneck, and a pair of hiking boots of the Madison Avenue variety. The look placed Laura in the early 1970s, when she would have been in college.
“Hat, scarf, and gloves,” said Peter.
“I’m supposed to be in Paris on Thursday,” said Laura. “Now I’m wondering if I can get there.”
“You’ll be OK.”
“Sunil called again.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Just checking in.”
“We’re on track for the fifteenth.”
“I know.”
“Look, I know how good a job this would be—believe me. But I wanna make sure we know what we’re saying yes to.”
“Besides the money.”
“Besides the money and besides the stories that Business Week and the Journal are gonna run about us being in bed with Henderson McCaw.”
“Could be good, honey. There is a way to spin it.”
“Of course there is. I just . . . have to look at the thing as a whole. And, I mean, purely on the work level, this office cannot just pull the creativity out of the freezer, thaw it out, and serve it up. We have to grow the stuff out in the fields, Laura—cultivate it, then harvest. . . .”
Peter paused.
“Sorry, I’m getting a little fancy,” he said.
“I know, but I’m buying it,” laughed Laura, continuing on her way. “Just keep going.”
In the pod, Peter made some notes and paused. Then another cloud was in place and the worker in the lift returned to the floor, to start on the next one.
“Constructing the weather,” “building a climate” . . . hmmm. Was there anything in there? Peter wondered. He made more notes.
McCaw was trying to exploit and further goad a massive shift in the American psyche, which would fail miserably if not synched with the planet’s alternative weather system, the collective unconscious. That much was clear to Peter.
And there’s twice as much of the stuff these days as when Jung coined the term, he thought, since there are twice as many people in the world. All that meat, all that spirit—it either counts for something or it doesn’t. It either changes what we’re doing, in the media, or it doesn’t.
And especially now, with massive, instant interconnectivity, the clouds and currents in all that unconsciousness were fluctuating faster than ever. Fashion people knew this very well and happily tapped into it. Sometimes on a runway, amid the usual notions of Soldier, Whore, Ballerina, and Russian Peasant, you’d see an acrid shade of green or beguilingly graceless bump of silhouette—a true surprise!—and you’d know you were receiving news of some important shift in human thinking. And though there was no better way to apprehend shifts like this except to venerate fashion and, perhaps, to wear the clothes themselves, the news was exactly as important as E = mc2 and “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”
Peter stared at the clouds. Vigilance paid off. Everything is a tell, he knew, if you just know how to look at it.
“There you are. What are you doing?”
It was Tyler, at the entrance to the pod. Peter waved him in.
“I like the view,” said Peter. “What’s up?”
“I know you’re busy, but can I get sixty seconds? I need a jolt on the Royal Caribbean pitch.”
“Shoot.”
Tyler plunked himself down on the pod’s curved banquette. He, too, had dressed in honor of the approaching storm, in a funny amalgam of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, meets Freeport, Maine: layers, flaps, and the knit wool skullcap that all the boys were wearing that season.
“OK,” said Tyler, “they want to hype their spa services, and I’m trying to unpack the logo. I am thinking crown, royalty, service, pampering, hot-and-cold running staff. And then maybe there’s something in the blue—though their blues are standard process royal and navy, and I don’t know if we can get away with overlaying a bunch of azure thinking. . . .”
Tyler broke off, and Peter thought for a moment about what he’d heard, before raising a finger.
“Let me suggest another direction,” he said, crisply. “Here’s what I see: ocean, limitless horizon, out beyond the sight of land, the infinite frontier, peace but danger, this little cork bobbing up and down on top of water that’s three miles deep, the passenger threatened but available for comfort, the voyager discovering simple pleasures that could be the last but in some ways are the first. Water, rebirth, the presence of infinity—am I getting anywhere?”
“Gee, boss, I think I just got a boner,” said Tyler. “Thanks.” The boy stood up and was ready to dash away.
“Which of course brings us to the body,” continued Peter. “Floating, suspension . . . See if that gets you anywhere. Oh, and Ty—also? Those little maps of the decks.”
“Ooh, I love those maps—floor plans. The Lido Deck!”
“Right? Like porn. You can get lost in them. Remember porn. Don’t condescend to that.”
“I won’t. You’re a champion,” said Tyler. “Say, how was the opera?”
“It was lots of fun, thank you,” said Peter.
“You took your new friend.”
“I did, indeed.”
“And?”
“We had a great time. Dinner afterward—talk, talk, talk.”
“You gonna see each other again?”
“I hope so. Maybe.”
“Yay for you.”
“Thanks. I think I might be a little obsessed. I’m actually having a hard time concentrating today.”
“Really? After one date?”
“It wasn’t a date.”
“But you’re obsessed.”
“I think there was chemistry. I love his laugh and his sharpness; I think he might find me a little interesting. But . . . you never know.”
“Never know what?”
“Never know if you’re, you know, cute enough or whatever.”
“Are you serio
us?” shot Tyler. “Don’t worry, Charlie. You qualify on that score.”
Peter’s expression squeezed into a grimace.
“Tyler, please,” he said quietly. “Can’t you see I’m fragile over here?”
“I’m sorry, boss,” said Tyler, seeing that Peter did look a bit upset. “Omigod, you’re so vulnerable.”
“That’s exactly how I’m feeling.”
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to be a jerk. I was just being me. So do you think this might be serious?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve only seen each other once?”
“Yeah, and so why am I suddenly obsessed with him? I can’t figure out how I’m supposed to think about it.”
“Don’t think about it. Just do it. I can’t believe I’m speaking in taglines.”
“It happens to all of us, eventually.”
“Go out again. See what happens.”
“Right.”
“I’m completely jealous, of course,” said Tyler. “But I am here for you totally, as a friend. Anything I can do to help.”
“Talking helps,” said Peter. “Thank you.”
“OK—then, seriously? It’s not about what you think of as cuteness.”
“No?”
“I guarantee that’s more in your mind than his.”
“Hmm.”
“And it’s not about your age or your generation—and, believe me, I know how absorbing you find all that. That’s just not the way he’s thinking about it—I guarantee it. I suggest you don’t torture him with any of that.”
“Define ‘torture.’ ”
“Mentioning it.”
Peter smirked. Tyler knew him well.
“I already did, a little,” said Peter. “So my plan to dazzle him with my insight about the collective unconscious—the way some older gay men resist new archetypes like Lady Gaga because they feel they already own Madonna and Barbra Streisand—that’s not a good idea?”
“Uh, no.”
“But I talk about that with you.”
“Because we’re friends, and we work together and that’s our world. If you’re really interested in this guy, you wanna go easy on that. For real. Can’t you just talk about Lady Gaga?”
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