Now and Yesterday

by Stephen Greco

  Peter nodded.

  “Yes, but,” he said.

  “Look,” said Tyler. “You’re both unique human beings. You’re not defined by your ages, or your generations, or your salaries, or anything else.”

  “That’s another thing—money.”

  “Of course it is. He’s not making a million dollars a year.”

  “Neither am I, but no.”

  “Two different, unique human beings.”

  “Thank you, Tyler. This is very helpful. We are friends, aren’t we?”

  “Bestest ever.”

  “You know, most people bore me,” said Peter. “You know that, right? Most men bore me. But when you and I do things, I have a really good time. Our friendship has come to mean a lot to me.”

  “Boss, that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  “I really value being able to talk about things with you.”

  Tyler nodded his head once, decisively.

  “Well, that is my honor,” he said.

  “To be continued,” said Peter.

  “Yeah, I should scoot.”

  “Go in peace.”

  “Thanks for the . . .” Tyler mimed an explosion and made the sound of a bomb going off.

  “It’s the pod,” said Peter, gesturing toward the vast space beyond them.

  After Tyler left, Peter jotted down a few more McCaw thoughts that arose from the line he’d been pursuing for Royal Caribbean: faith vs. heresy, orthodoxy vs. revealed knowledge. Politics and social change were sometimes explained in such terms. Then he closed his laptop and sat back. Another cloud was in place.

  If only he could do the boy-toy thing, Peter thought. It would be lovely to be content, as many successful, single gay men of his generation seemed to be, to play around in what Colette or Oscar Wilde would probably have called the demimonde, with adorable, expertly styled young men who spoke earnestly of becoming actors, yoga instructors, or fashion directors. Yet Peter had found that so many earnest party pretties have nothing else on the ball, and that any interest generated by a turn of phrase or a curl of lip usually dissolves before dinner is over. He was still cursed by the lofty intellectual goals and high romantic intentions that were driving his desires forty years before, when he met Harold.

  Ah, Harold! Unlike Peter’s first encounter with Will, which apparently had taken place without Peter even being aware of it, at Jonathan’s party, the first encounter with Harold was the proverbial thunderbolt. It was cloudy that day, Peter recalled—a Saturday morning in early fall, which in Ithaca meant that the days were already cold enough for the boys on campus to be wearing bulky sweaters, scarves, and down vests, though many were also still sporting shorts, which they wore with boots and thick socks. A new recruit to the town’s first food co-op, Peter was picking up his friend Shira, who’d cofounded the co-op, and her friend Harold, whom she knew from folk dancing, for a drive in Peter’s thirdhand Dodge Dart to a farm twenty miles away, to collect fresh eggs for distribution at the co-op’s repurposed storefront, in Collegetown. Peter pulled up in front of Shira’s house, a shambling old mansion on the edge of campus that had been converted into apartments, and found Shira and a cute guy with long hair and a scraggly beard waiting on the porch. As the two of them clambered down the wooden steps and into the car, Peter thought it was odd that his friend should volunteer to duck into the backseat and let the cute guy sit up front. Shira later admitted this was a setup.

  As they drove, they laughed as the car was buffeted by strong gusts of wind blasting in from the lake. Desperately, Peter tried to stay on his side of the smallish country road while keeping up with small talk about the coming snow, the co-op’s new commercial food scale, and the folk musicians who were scheduled to appear on campus that fall. He also tried to steal glances at Harold for whatever clues could be gleaned about his body from knees, hands, and the shapeless brown cable-knit sweater he was wearing. Yet the road was twisty and hilly, and Peter was forced to keep both eyes on it. But then, at the farm, while waiting for Shira to conclude dealings with the farmer, Peter feasted as he and Harold chatted. Harold gestured as nobly as an ancient senator in a painting by David; he shifted his posture with the casual strength of an astronaut on a television newscast. Even as Peter squinted and shielded his eyes from the sun that was trying to stay out, he gorged on details like eyes that were not brown but greenish-brown and hair that was not brown but brown-that-had-once-been-blond. It would only be a few years later, after Peter and Harold had moved to New York, when Harold would lose the beard and trim his hair. By the time Harold was working for the Times he’d lost most of his hair anyway and was shaving what was left.

  Shira directed the loading of the backseat and trunk with crates, and at the storefront she directed the unloading. They all put in a few hours slicing cheese and weighing vegetables, then went home to Shira’s place for dinner, where they made a mushroom-and-shallot frittata with the fresh eggs they’d brought back to town and a spicy cabbage salad with peanuts and toasted tofu. Harold was studying English lit as an independent major, Peter learned—which meant smart. He was from Queens and, like everyone else, didn’t smoke. His voice was deep and slightly breathy, like a movie star’s, and though he’d asked how many cylinders Peter’s Dodge Dart ran on, he scarcely knew any more about cars than Peter did. In fact, as the evening went on, Peter saw that Harold was just as dreamily poetic as one might hope—political but not nearly as strident as the otherwise admirable activists of the Student Homophile League, as it was then called, and seductive but not whorish, like the townies Peter was meeting in the county’s one gay bar that wasn’t even gay until ten p.m. on weekend nights. Instantly, Peter felt chemistry—or something more thrillingly inertial than anything he’d ever felt for a human being except the brother of his high school girlfriend, a boy whom the girlfriend often half-jokingly complained saw more of Peter than she did.

  And Peter’s attraction for Harold was amplified by the headiness of those times, the early ’70s, when epoch-changing antiwar protests and historic civil rights demonstrations—revolution as a collective act, not a theory—made every day feel like the stuff of legend. Why not throw personal liberation into a fall weekend centered on post-supermarket food activism? Harold knew that Peter was gay, because Peter talked about it all the time and because Shira, at least then, was a lesbian; and Peter knew that Harold, who was supposedly seeing a woman named Jane, was not likely to be hemmed in by big, bad, bourgeois, capitalist-patriarchal norms. So when Harold’s sweater came off after dinner, as the three of them sipped roasted barley tea and compared the diaries of Anaïs Nin with those of Virginia Woolf, and Peter glimpsed a promised land beneath the rumpled collar of Harold’s plaid flannel shirt, open to the sternum, he grew bolder. Peter said he didn’t see why men couldn’t share erotic friendships, too, irrespective of sexual identity and society’s judgments; Harold and Shira agreed. Then, from inside Harold’s shirt, Peter caught his first whiff of a clean-but-potent funkiness that would intoxicate him for decades to come, and he flipped into high gear.

  “Wow, look at the time,” said Peter.

  “Mercy,” said Harold.

  It was past one. Shira invited them to stay the night, offering the living room and bringing in a pile of mismatched pillows and blankets. Then she retired to her own room, gently drawing shut a pair of glass-paned doors that were draped in pink-and-orange Indian cotton bedspreads. Peter and Harold flipped a coin, which yielded Harold the sofa. Peter made himself comfortable in a nest of blankets on the rug just in front of it, and the two of them fell asleep holding hands, which Peter suggested they try, whispering that it was OK for their bodies to be close and their spirits to soar around the universe, while dreaming, like twin shooting stars.

  Peter’s dreams that night came true within weeks. He and Harold were kissing by Thanksgiving and had plunged into full-on sex before the holiday break. They read books to each other—Harold hadn’t read Eros and Civilization, Peter hadn’t read Midd
lemarch —and traded stories of childhood. Peter hadn’t realized he’d grown up “in the country,” and Harold hadn’t thought it odd to be able to sneak into the 1965 World’s Fair every day, for free. They ran into few of the trip wires that can deactivate a young relationship—Harold was neither a hothead nor a wimp, nor overly suspicious or under-demonstrative—and by spring, everything about Harold was dear to Peter. Even Harold’s nipples, which had looked a bit small and flat to Peter when he first saw them at a folk dance gathering, came to seem the most perfect nipples God had ever created. Same for chest hair and toes.

  It was chemistry, it was luck, it was a rare alignment of stars, Peter mused. That’s why thinking about it explained so little and was of no value in predicting the future. You’re caught by someone’s laugh, or the look of him dashing across the street, and that’s it. It’s only an observation, a memory, perhaps a motivation to pick up the phone.

  Tyler was right: It wasn’t about cuteness. But then what did Will see in Peter? A smart guy? A successful guy? A guy with comps to the opera? A guy who was, wait, vulnerable? Until Tyler mentioned it that day, Peter hadn’t actually embraced that side of himself as anything but ordinary.

  Sure, I’m vulnerable, he thought. Everybody is.

  Yet the news, as delivered by Tyler, was as much of a surprise as Harold’s remark about growing up in the country.

  Really? I never thought about it that way.

  Peter’s reverie was broken by some shouting from the floor of the atrium. A client from the waiting area had wandered in front of the lift, thinking it was, indeed, a sculpture. The workmen were protesting.

  “Acapulco Sand?” said Luz.

  “Too pink,” said Will, testily.

  “White Marigold?”

  “No, too green!”

  They were standing in Schatz’s Hardware on Steinway Boulevard, in front of a panoramic display of Benjamin Moore paint chips—three broad panels of wood cabinetry on a wall in the back of the store, lined with hundreds of color strips in graded intensities, arranged by hue. The lighting on the panels was brilliant but warm.

  Will was agitated and Luz was trying her best not to be. For days they had more or less been arguing about what color to paint the living room. Will was being difficult about the choice, vacillating among mossy greens, dusty blues, and muted golds, without really being able to say why. They’d amassed a thick file folder of sample colors torn from magazines, and decided several times on a final choice, which then, a day later, Will would contradict. And though Luz was perfectly amenable to almost any color, she did expect a dialogue around its choice, and was interested in knowing why Will would prefer the colors he did and how he thought they would play in their house, against their belongings.

  “Can I help you?” said a saleswoman.

  “Yes, please,” said Will. “We’re looking for a nice tan.”

  “For a living room,” said Luz.

  “Something between a tan and a burnished browny-gold,” said Will. “But not too dark. Not as pink as sand, not as yellow as khaki. Maybe paper bag?”

  “Paper bag,” said the saleslady.

  “Paper bag, but with a hint of sun,” said Luz, echoing a phrase Will had used on their way over to the store.

  “The yellowy tans are in here,” said the saleslady, zeroing in on a narrow patch of color wall.

  Will pulled out a few strips and pointed out shades to Luz: Henderson Buff, Yorkshire Tan, Dunmore Cream.

  “Can we look a bit?” asked Will.

  “Yes, of course,” said the saleslady.

  “How do they even think up this many names?” said Luz. “Look, and they’re not all stupid.” She showed Will a strip of blue chips. “This is exactly what I would have thought Athens Blue would look like.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Nail polish names are the worst. I saw one the other day called Jizz.”

  “Can we focus, please?” said Will.

  Luz picked up another strip and showed him.

  “No, Luz, yuck. Those are beige.”

  “How come Enrico isn’t helping you with this?”

  “Oh, please. He’d have to mix his own color. None of these would be right. Besides, we’re giving each other a rest.”

  “Oh?”

  “It was turning into the same thing, all over again—superficial, whatever.”

  “You said he was a nice guy.”

  “He is. But he takes the whole A-list thing way too seriously. And I know he thinks I fit into it perfectly.”

  “And you don’t.”

  “I don’t know what I fit into,” said Will gloomily.

  “So you guys just aren’t talking?” said Luz. “That sounds brutal. Then again, you are men.”

  Will had told Luz he felt lost, when he returned home from his New Year’s Eve outing. The life of a trophy boy was no longer for him, he said, but he didn’t know what else was out there. Did he have a good time? asked Luz. Yes, said Will, but it wasn’t about having a good time anymore. Did he like Enrico? Yes—no. Well, maybe.

  “Sag Harbor Gray?” said Luz.

  “Maybe,” said Will.

  “Northampton Putty.”

  “Ooh! No. What about the one just below it?”

  “Crown Point Sand.”

  Will exhaled.

  “I can’t tell,” he said.

  About his date with Peter Will had said little, only that it wasn’t a date.

  “We were just hanging out,” said Will. “His friend got sick and he had an extra ticket.”

  “So what’s he doing, going out with younger guys?” Luz asked.

  “He’s cool. He had a partner who died, like, years ago. He survived the whole AIDS thing.”

  “He wasn’t looking for action?”

  “We just talked. It was fun. I thought he might try to hit on me, but he’s not like the rest of those A-list guys. Sorta shy, actually.”

  “What a line! He’s got you wrapped around his little finger.”

  “No way, Luz,” said Will. “It’s just a friendship.”

  “Are you attracted to him?”

  “Not really.”

  “No?”

  “I mean, he’s attractive for a guy his age.”

  “See? I’ll bet he likes you.”

  “I’ll say this: He takes me seriously—more than Enrico. I mean, he runs this big ad agency and still wants to know all about my family. I really don’t think he cares about getting into my pants, which is itself kind of attractive.”

  “Omigod, this guy is good.”

  “I think he’s more damaged than he realizes. He says his partner’s death was the making of him, but it’s clearly also this huge weight around his neck.”

  “You don’t get over that kind of thing,” said Luz.

  “He talks a lot about the past. He told me that in 1964 he thought he had, quote, seen the future of mankind when he heard Barbra Streisand sing ‘People’ for the first time. You know that song? According to him, ‘Some queens are still living in that same future.’ Not him, of course. ‘Western culture keeps making new futures. ’ ”

  It took Luz a moment to process this idea. She blinked in a comically exaggerated way.

  “I know,” Will continued. “I had to think about it, too.”

  “Have you made a choice yet?” said the saleslady.

  “What about Danville Tan?” said Luz.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know!” whined Will, suddenly throwing the chips he was holding down on the counter in front of them. The outburst surprised both Luz and the saleswoman.

  “Calm down,” said Luz. “It’s only paint.”

  The saleslady slipped away.

  “Sorry,” said Will. “I’m fine, don’t worry.”

  “Don’t be such a princess,” said Luz.

  “Sorry. It’s just that what if . . . I don’t wanna make the wrong choice!”

  “Then we’ll stick with what we’ve got.”

  “Landlady White
,” snapped Will. “We didn’t even choose that. It’s the absence of a choice.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “But what if we do the tan instead of putty and the whole room comes out too yellow?”

  “Jesus, Will—life goes on.”

  Will drew close to Luz.

  “Peter said something that’s been kicking my butt,” he whispered. “He said that as a child he expected to be at home in the world, and that as an adult he had made himself at home in the world.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Luz. “And?”

  “It reminded me of something my boss in L.A. once said to me, about taking yourself seriously.”

  “OK.”

  “Have you ever felt that?”

  “What—serious?”

  “At home in the world. Comfortable with your life.”

  “I don’t know. I suppose so.”

  “I’ve never felt it—about anything. I thought I did, but I don’t.”

  “Some people don’t have that particular feeling,” said Luz. “But they still have lives.”

  “It made me feel like I wasn’t equal, or something,” said Will.

  In a corner of Will’s mind was a thought about how easy it had been for his parents, who started their family and built their house just as the prosperity of the ’80s was cranking up. Family pictures showed his parents looking like young movie stars back then: His dad was the Tom Cruise of aerospace, the deceptively casual boy entrepreneur in designer jeans, a polo shirt, and Armani sport jacket, all in “relaxed” proportions; his mom was the Brooke Shields of private education, always perfect in a Dynasty hairdo and pumped-up interpretation of a classic suit or dress, finished with a tasteful array of big jewelry. Even the design of their multimillion-dollar, in-town ranch was pumped up with faux-Mission arches and fountained patios. Nothing in Will’s life until New York—not school, nor religion, nor any of the jobs he’d ever held—had shown him how to keep up that kind of largeness or formulate another kind that allowed for new times and his own personal preferences. That it could take some effort to maintain a scale of living his parents found effortless came as a frustrating surprise.