Now and Yesterday

by Stephen Greco

  Peter shook his head. Two different stories. How to collate past and present, except to unclench and let them scrape against each other like colliding supertankers? Traffic on Varick was light, as usual for that time of night. This was the same route home that Peter had taken for decades, and the city flashed by in the sparse, shadowy, familiar frames of a black-and-white movie, except that almost all Manhattan streets were now hiding too much wealth to bristle with much noir, and the corner of Varick and Chambers, where a gang of bat-wielding children tried to ambush his cab in ’78 or ’79, now boasted an expensive bistro with sidewalk tables.

  Yes, Nick was love, as much as Harold ever was, if love was the switching on of the body’s full capacity to process every second of existence with every cell. The man had a great heart, as well as a natural eye for art and ear for music. But Nick was also disaster, because with him, heightened experience came at a high price. He turned out to be an emotional wreck for almost the same reason he was good company and great sex: a messy desperateness to please. Glibly, Peter, as he and Jonathan left the gallery that night, had compared the relationship to the fossil fuel economy: It deadened as much as it brought to life. Blotching Peter’s memory of Nick was a massive oil spill that felt important historically, but not exactly a pinnacle of achievement.

  How to think about this man? The memory of Nick, which was ultimately a manageable thing, was not the same thing as the human being itself, in the flesh, walking around, showing up at parties. Peter had no other exes, except this piece of living, breathing evidence of a nine-year-long mistake. He had learned in therapy not to think of it that way, but on some level he couldn’t help doing so. A dead partner was far more convenient than a living ex! The memory of countless irksome Harold issues that for years had contributed to the normal amount of day-to-day friction between him and Peter dissolved, over that final year, in a voluptuous bath of caregiving and care-getting. Harold’s success as a husband was burnished by retrospect and crystallized, after his death, into myth. And what helped the process was the fact that lots of other widows shared similar myths, as after other wars.

  The memory of Nick, by the same token, fit into no narrative that Peter could work out. In the story of Peter’s life, Nick was a chapter without a number. Even as he told people he was looking for his “third and final marriage,” counting Nick as the second, Peter continued to compare all candidates to Harold, admitting only nominally how unfair this might be to himself and others. Nine years? Even that was a point of contention between Nick and him. Nick measured the relationship from the first stay-over sex, which happened a week after the two first met in a public park, late at night, when Nick blew Peter and they exchanged numbers. Peter measured from the first declaration of de-facto boyfriend-hood, which took place almost a year later, after a prolonged sex-only thing morphed into friendship and the two started going to parties and clubs together, as each other’s first-option dates. It was a status, claimed Nick, that was long overdue. The relationship didn’t seem real enough to Peter even then, absent a lightning-strike moment, but he did recognize that a certain momentum had built up between them. And since old friends kept reminding Peter that it was OK to quote-unquote move on with his life, he tried to relegate the Harold figurine to a niche and keep shuffling forward.

  At first, Peter was impressed by Nick’s embrace of a new life. When they met, Nick was still living in the suburban New Jersey town where he’d grown up, and had just emerged from a relationship with a woman, though since his late teens he’d been sneaking into the city by bus to suck cock. After meeting Peter, and succumbing to sermons about eros and identity, Nick came out and immediately became fabulous. He moved to Chelsea, signed up at David Barton, rethought his hair and wardrobe, and found a job at a top interior design firm that hired him away from the suburban decorator whom he’d been working for since he was seventeen. He was handsome and affable, and for two or three years he did well in his new stratum. He and Peter met each other’s families, took some trips together, and started talking about buying a place together upstate. Then Nick became too fabulous. The gym and new haircut led to parties and clubs, and then to certain parties that were all about drugs. Nick started hanging out with the wrong people: attractive men who seemed cool and affluent, but weren’t as smart as they thought they were—members of some of the pseudo-A-list circles that are always there, eddying with debris, on the edge of the New York social gyre. Peter warned discreetly and smiled when introduced to new faces, but Nick couldn’t get enough of these people, nor they him.

  And for a while, Peter tagged along with Nick in some of these circles and actually liked being a tourist there. Beyond the clubs and parties, it was drug and sex scenes that Nick brought him to, and there Peter gratefully called Nick his Beatrice—though Nick, of course, hadn’t read Dante. On a little K, or coke, or snortable heroin, after an all-night party, Peter glimpsed another side of the city he thought he knew well, a darkly seductive refraction of gay life that felt lusciously poisonous: the hazy, twelve-hour fisting scenes, laced with the acrid-sweet reek of burning rock; the endless and apparently fruitless nipple tugging and cock jerking; the piles of cash and pots of lube and scatter of sex toys; the calls in sick and follow-up messages to people who had more and could be there within thirty minutes; the uncertainty whether it was dawn or dusk, and indifference to either.

  And as a social observer Peter valued many of the insights he took away from that world: a secret about America’s hunger for amusement, yielding one night from a moment of stupid congress with a decorative, sparkle-flecked wall panel inside the elevator of some party-stranger’s building; or a discernment between looking and real seeing, such as Peter found crooning one morning, upon exit from a popper suck marathon, from the greenish tinges of a rosy dawn sky. But Peter also liked the social observer’s distance he was able to maintain from all that, the permanent outsider position he tended to enforce. More than once—bored, or simply ready to return to reality—he said good-bye to Nick and left him at one of those scenes. Then he stopped accompanying Nick on such expeditions altogether, his ability to do so partly the result of sober parents who’d drastically overwarned against all sorts of evils, during the ’60s. Heroin—it’s too good to try even once! Nick would have heard that tagline as an unironic invitation to party. Monstrous partying for him, in those days, meant monstrous partying again and again and again; and Peter continued to warn gently, again and again, though he also decided that Nick’s partying was a parody of the heroic and thus more interesting than mere addiction.

  Jesus!

  For too long Peter was resigned to the tirades and bad behavior. One morning, when Nick showed up at Peter’s house at dawn, he called Peter a “big loser” for having bolted from the party earlier. Peter was hurt, but responded by making breakfast. Nick was swinging wildly from elation to depression by then, and Peter gamely tried to engage with the ills and issues that Nick brought up during those moods. Peter was a caregiver, after all; it was his duty to endure. When Nick became enamored of a whole group of strung-out, steroided, bodybuilder-hustlers, endlessly distracted by their own meth-fueled narcissism, Peter tried to help his so-called boyfriend see the changes in his own personality: Affability turned to pushiness, generosity to insistence, judgments and preferences to belligerence and intolerance. But attempts to question Nick’s choices led to shrieking accusations of betrayal. Then Nick started missing work and making excuses; suddenly he was fired. Peter knew the relationship was over when he started hearing through the grapevine about Nick’s scuffles with club security and his demented late-night phone calls to friends, to borrow money.

  Thank God we never moved in together, thought Peter.

  How to talk about Nick? What to call him?

  My “ex”? How pedestrian.

  In couples therapy—which they entered after Nick’s second rehab, as an alternative to demonizing each other for the rest of their lives—they salvaged what they could of the affection and res
pect they originally felt and started re-parsing their story as a friendship or a family thing. Everything had to be different, if they were to survive healthily, and Peter welcomed the questions that arose for him personally, in therapy, about the premises and purposes of romantic bonding—even if it bothered him that caretaking was so closely related to codependency, that till-death-do-us-part could be as much a rut as a heavenly path.

  The cab driver hadn’t uttered a word since picking Peter up at the gallery—not even a “yes” when Peter told him his destination. As they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, Peter sat up and forward, in case the driver should need help negotiating the turnoff at Cadman Plaza, as some did. But toward the end of the bridge the driver pulled smoothly into the right lane, and veered quickly left after exiting. Obviously the guy knows what he’s doing, thought Peter, sitting back. The plaza was named after a radio preacher from the ’30s. It was so safe now, quiet and trim, without the massive bushes that bristled with nighttime cruisers and their predators back in the ’70s, let alone the trolleys and elevated trains that bustled up from the waterfront on Old Fulton Street, decades before that....

  Old stories—perhaps not so grand, at that.

  Since Harold’s death Peter had been the sole custodian of their romantic history. Of the mess with Nick, though, there were two custodians, which was much less convenient—especially when it came to Peter trying to tell Will or anyone else where he had come from and where he thought he was going. Maybe the thing to do was coalesce the best parts of one’s past into as nice-and-trim a present as can be confected, while wrestling the nastier chunks into a box, jamming down the lid, and hoping for the best.

  Anyway, maybe the age of thinking about love the way I do has passed, thought Peter, as the cab pulled up in front of his house. He paid the driver, stepped out of the cab, and watched it tear away. The vestibule of the house was the most inviting one on the block, with his landlady’s toile-pattern wallpaper, in crimson and white, visible from the street through double doors that featured large windows. As he mounted the stoop he couldn’t help thinking, as he often did—maybe too often?—of the day in 1975 when he and Harold entered the house for the first time, after a realtor took them there on a summer afternoon, and of the autumn night years afterward when Harold left it for the last time, his body in the hands of a funeral director.

  Love is probably more pedestrian nowadays, thought Peter. No ascent of Machu Picchu, but an episode of Will & Grace. Fine—I guess. Except what if my boy Will and all other gay men under forty really do think of love that way—pedestrian? What if he says “yes” to me someday, but “yes” means only “OK for the moment,” fine for an episode or two, and not “yes” the way I wish he would mean it: “I have been joyously aware of your presence in the universe since the dawn of time and will love you completely until the end of eternity”?

  CHAPTER 11

  Will’s magazine was headquartered in a carefully restored, hundred-and-thirty-year-old brick-and-limestone building in SoHo that once housed a department store whose chief claim to fame was that it was the first such store to put price tags on the goods for sale. The proprietors were seeking to eliminate haggling. The building, whose façade boasted sumptuous architectural detail, faded with the neighborhood itself, after its mercantile heyday in the 1880s and ’90s, and stayed faded for almost a century, even through the 1970s and ’80s, when SoHo revived as New York’s center of art galleries. Then, as the galleries began decamping for Chelsea and SoHo was colonized by high-end retail, the building was reconfigured for a couple of luxury brand shops on the ground floor, and media and design offices on the upper floors. Those who worked in the building now helped move goods with conspicuous prices as effectively as the original department store employees ever did, only now the goods were ideas, notions, fancies.

  The magazine’s weekly editorial meeting had been proceeding more rapidly than usual, that day in early February, because Colin, the editor in chief, had touched down ninety minutes late at JFK, after a few days in London, and had phoned to ask Herman, the managing editor, to start the meeting as usual. They were assembled in the magazine’s conference room, designed in a faux-industrial aesthetic that had required exposing and expensively refinishing original structural elements like iron columns and beams. Seated around a gleaming arc of a table made of bleached recycled ash were key editorial and art staff, with a few representatives from the advertising and marketing departments; perched around the room’s periphery, standing against walls and sitting on the floor, was a small band of interns. Herman sped them through the issue plan, with updates on the cover and most important photo shoots, the short articles in the front of the book, the longer features of the main section of the magazine, known as the well, and the back of the book, which included a section devoted to party pictures. The lineup was basically the same as it had been when they last went through it, which, given how messy some issues could be, pleased and relieved everyone, including Will, whose chief interest was his interview with a new Senegalese R&B star named Assetou. The piece was scheduled for a front-of-book section devoted to up-and-comers, and was still slotted for two pages.

  It was just before noon and the meeting was basically done. People were surreptitiously checking their phones for time and texts, and hoping to get an early start on their lunch plans. Then the editor in chief swept in, trailed by his assistant, Sebastian, who’d collected him from the airport in a town car, and the meeting basically started over.

  “Cheers, everyone,” said Colin, plunking himself down at the head of the table, in a spot that Herman had vacated. “Sorry to be late.”

  A short, conspicuously well-groomed man in his early forties, with a broad forehead and prominent nose, Colin embodied all the energy of a Hollywood studio head. He was known for commanding serious Hollywood instincts, too—for beyond being intelligent and plugged-in, he was gifted at penetrating new cultural phenomena and gathering smart thoughts about them into a bubbly mix that felt essential, issue after issue. A pair of black Louis Vuitton sunglasses was pushed up in his salt-and-pepper hair. As the meeting recommenced, Herman, standing behind Colin, passed the editor a copy of the issue plan, while Sebastian hovered by in the corner, continuing as quietly as possible with the ongoing series of calls and texts that made Colin’s hectic life possible.

  “We’ve just been through the issue . . . ,” began Herman.

  “Good,” said Colin, preemptively. “Let’s just run through it quickly, since there are a few changes.”

  This was news no one wanted to hear, yet the kind of thing that was always expected. Herman patiently reported again on the big shoots.

  “Good,” said Colin. “And Steven is happy?” Steven was the photographer doing the cover.

  “He got some good stuff. We’re looking at it tomorrow,” said Herman.

  “Good,” said Colin.

  Herman gave an overview of the big well stories.

  “Good,” said Colin. “Now here’s the thing, before you go on.” He was scratching notes on his copy of the lineup. “I want to drop the water politics movie. It feels like we’ve done it before—sorry, Eddie”—Eddie was the intern who’d brought the idea to the table and written the story—“and I want to do a story on this amazing filmmaker Elton introduced me to—the guy who did the thing about making chairs, that got all that attention at Sundance. . . .”

  “The Upholsterer,” suggested Herman gently.

  “Yes, The Upholsterer. You won’t believe this guy. Genius craftsmanship! And you know who he’s married to. . . .”

  “That actress,” suggested Herman.

  “Uh-huh! So two pages,” said Colin, annotating his lineup, then looking up. “Elton’s going to record a conversation with him over lunch tomorrow and send us the file. And we can shoot him in London—Sebastian, you’re on that, right?”

  Sebastian, on the phone, nodded and pointed to the call he was on.

  “So, now . . . ,” said Colin. And he and Herman c
ontinued running down the new front-of-book lineup, quickly and telegraphically, as if they were discussing it between themselves, yet everyone else just kept sitting there, silently watching, in case they were needed.

  “The kids from Costa Rica—one, right? We still love them,” said Colin. “The pretty hotel, that’s still two. We’ve got the ad and our party there—good. The writer in prison, OK; the new ballet girl, OK. The fashion designer from Seoul—we love her—that’s four pages. The singer from Senegal, one—she’s amazing, Will, right?”

  Automatically, Will nodded.

  “The blind gallerist, one,” continued the editor in chief. Then he paused. “One or two? How did the photo come out?”

  Herman grimaced.

  “Gallerist, one,” said Colin, in response. “Wait, isn’t this the kid who used to be a model?”

  “Yes,” said Herman.

  “And Carole couldn’t get a good picture of him?”

  “It’s not beauty, is the thing,” said Herman. “But it works as reportage. I actually think it’s OK that way.”

  “I’ll look at it,” said Colin, checking the lineup as a whole and adding up the pages. “And we come out even. Everything else is the same. Good. Oh, and the creative for the new watch . . . ?”

  One of the ad people nodded, with evident satisfaction.

  “Well done,” said Colin. “We’re in good shape, people. Thank you.”

  Everyone understood that the London shoot would take the issue even further over budget, and require time the schedule didn’t allow, which meant extra calls and hair-pulling for several people at the table, yet no one said anything—not even the fashion editor who was charged with looking into putting one of the new advertiser’s watches on Elton’s filmmaker’s wrist, for the shoot. The meeting ended when the editor in chief rose and swept out of the conference room, taking Herman and Sebastian with him.