Now and Yesterday

by Stephen Greco

  He twisted in his seat and craned to see everything out the car’s windows, as they slipped past the bridge’s easternmost tower and under its roadway. He wanted to catch all the views he could. In a sequence of wild-angle glimpses, then upside down, as Will leaned way back to look out the rear window, the bridge never looked better.

  Will hated the thought of having been groomed, even benevolently, to be a plastic person, vacu-formed in someone else’s shape. He respected his parents, but had always reserved the right to pick and choose from among their own lifestyle choices and even from his friends’—from Luz’s, certainly from Enrico’s, and now from his new friend Peter’s, though Peter’s, despite the man’s age or maybe because of it, had begun to look not just interesting but fascinating.

  He looked great tonight, Will thought. The hair looked cute, the jacket was fresh—he looked younger, somehow. Will’s parents weren’t nearly as stylish, though they thought they were, and they probably were, for Santa Barbara.

  Will kept returning to a thought that arose for him at G: What were his parents doing during the ’80s, when he was growing up and they were golfing at the Montecito Country Club, when Peter and Harold were visiting Machu Picchu and discovering that the two of them fit together spiritually like those massive, irregular stones that the Incas carved to fit together without a hair’s space in between? How did the Incas do it? How was it possible? Will had seen photos of the stones, and Peter told him of trying to fit a credit card between them and finding the task indeed impossible. Why hadn’t they visited Peru as a family? Will wondered. And what were his parents doing at the same time Peter and Harold were visiting the Taj Mahal? Touring a four-hundred-year-old garden outside Kyoto with a Zen monk? Were Will and his family at their cabin on Jameson Lake in the Santa Ynez Mountains, downing granola before an early-morning fishing expedition, when Peter and Harold were alone in the Sistine Chapel, after hours, inspecting the restorations with a Vatican curator? Once, Will’s family traveled to Belize, via Miami. Could they all have been in the same airport lounge for an hour at the same time, when Peter and Harold were on their way to or from Antarctica?

  Peter had told him lots of stories about traveling, about his life. Was it something like the life Will wanted? How did one arrive at such a life? Was the future a walled garden you glimpsed through a gate, for which you needed a key—and did you discover, once inside the garden, that it constituted the entire world, and outside was the prison? Will saw that once in a movie. Peter did seem to be offering some kind of key, and that had begun to seem so different from—even opposite to!—so many of the blessings Will had been raised to enjoy and seek.

  Valentine’s Day caught Peter by surprise. Not that he didn’t know it was approaching; he just didn’t realize he was involved. Work was distracting him. The McCaw people had accepted the proposal that Peter and his team sent over. The gig had been secured! But then, the night before the holiday, as he was noting things to do on his calendar for the following day, Peter heard the beat-beat-beat of the tom-tom and realized he should probably use the occasion to say something to Will.

  Valentine’s Day had always been more of a couples thing than a dating thing, for Peter. Is anyone equal to the holiday other than the partners in a committed relationship—and even then, he wondered, does anyone feel loved enough to join in the yearly hoopla unequivocally, without quiet doubts about the significance of the other or secret regret about having possibly been able to do better? Established couples try to have fun with the day, gazing fondly on what the other has become, honoring each other for time served. New couples, toying with romance, make a game of the day, giggling, then maybe fighting and giggling, then making up and maybe giggling some more—all the while asking themselves, Is it really you, you, you? Nick once made Peter a meat loaf in the shape of a heart and presented it in a red-and-gold-foil, heart-shaped candy box. It was a cute gesture that was also a question about faithfulness. Yes, Peter answered, I love you and am yours till I die, but to sensitive ears—ears attached to an intelligent body that’s forever in need of more information about love—there is a thrum of dread on Valentine’s Day, hinting at loss, which is a natural condition of life, and isolation, its chief axiom.

  At least, that’s the way Peter looked at it—though he knew this was not the sentiment he should try to frame into a breezy note to a young beau. Though Neruda does have a line somewhere about Death being the third party that’s always in bed with two lovers. Couldn’t that make a funny valentine—funny-smart?

  The next day, at the office, Peter fussed with work for an hour before texting Will. There was a video call with McCaw to gird for, and some personal boundaries to get clear in his brain, before beginning to work closely with a man his friends called a demagogue. Peter had never been one to let a client’s personality, even when insufferable, get in the way of a gig; and doctrinal objections were rarely a problem for anyone in advertising. Moreover, the thought of this assignment as a career-defining pinnacle was beginning to loom large in Peter’s mind. So as he pondered all this he decided that the text to Will should not go first thing, as if he had been obsessing about the guy instead of tending to business; nor should it go as late as lunchtime, which would make the text look too unimportant. It should look third on a list, Peter decided, after God and country, so it was around eleven-thirty when he managed to thumb a few words to the man who was now never off his mind.

  Hey, buddy! A shower of hearts for you today. Cheers! P.

  He made it a point to use proper punctuation, to help give the message a more formal, less breathless feel, and he added a burst of shiny, little, red emoji hearts to the message, to connote light fun. For a minute he experimented with a second line—trying to say something about a text message being a poor substitute for “a handwritten note delivered by my man”—but it wasn’t working, so he gave up and sent the shorter version.

  Then he realized the text was dumb and picked up the intercom.

  “Tyler—are you there? May I have a word, please?”

  He should have asked Tyler for help in the first place. Ty would have known the right direction to take, if not the precise line to use.

  Will’s reply came immediately, much more quickly than Peter had dared hope: Funny! Cheers! You too!

  Peter stared at it for a second. The message seemed warm, but it was so short. Did it mean everything or nothing? Did it represent spontaneous thought or a measured position?

  “You rang?” said Tyler, appearing at the door.

  “Read this, please,” said Peter, thrusting his iPhone at his young colleague.

  Tyler read and chuckled.

  “OK,” he said.

  “Not too needy, right?”

  “No.”

  “And he’s not being guarded or anything, is he?”

  “Doesn’t sound that way.”

  Peter sighed in relief.

  “How’s it going?” asked Tyler. “Are you an item yet?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know!” bleated Peter.

  “And you’re tortured by not knowing.”

  “Yes—like never before! We share constant surprise at the stupidity of other people. We share disdain for people who automatically require you to be like them. We share contempt for the wrong kinds of vulgarity, and delight in the right kinds.”

  “Now that’s what I call bedrock,” said Tyler.

  “Everything seems to be . . . rushing at me!”

  “Well, that’s life.”

  “I shouldn’t call,” said Peter. It was a question.

  “To follow up on a text? Not really.”

  “Can I tomorrow?”

  “Sure.”

  “Ahhh!” Peter pretended to scream, in frustration.

  “You could pray, boss,” offered Tyler brightly. “Didn’t you say you were raised Catholic?”

  “Raised but lapsed,” laughed Peter. Tyler was either being flip or truly open to any form of magic that might exist. “As a kid I could never
pray for personal gain, let alone for a boyfriend. I was taught to pray for starving orphans and earthquake victims—things like that.”

  “I dunno,” said Tyler. “This is turning into kind of an earthquake, if you ask me.”

  “All set?” said Laura, dropping by Peter’s office, shortly after Tyler left.

  “For McCaw? Absolutely,” said Peter.

  “I brought you this,” she said. “A little Valentine’s Day present.”

  Laura handed Peter a mock-up of the cover of Advertising Age, featuring Peter’s face and the caption, Agency of the Year.

  “Cute, thank you,” said Peter. “For inspiration?”

  “Just to keep in mind what we’re aiming for. People are already buzzing, you know. And can I tell you something? Even the ones who are aghast seem to be jealous of us.”

  “People are aghast?”

  “Some people. You know—people who are bounded by their own prejudices.”

  “Ah, well . . .”

  “Thank God you’re not one of those black-or-white types.”

  “So we’re off and running, eh, buddy?” began McCaw, an hour later, on the video call. It was just the two of them.

  “We’re poised to do some great work,” said Peter.

  “I’m sure we are.”

  “You know, I do think we need to explore this ‘take back America’ thing a little more, so we know what it is, exactly, but we’ll discover this together. . . .”

  “I know what it is. And it’s time. That’s all any of us is saying.”

  McCaw cocked his head brightly and raised his eyebrows in emphasis, and the screen lit up with likable. Video calls were still not all that common, but McCaw was known for using them and Peter saw why. The man who cannily controlled his media image was positioned in the middle of a perfectly composed, and thus perfectly seductive, video shot. Someone had made sure that the picture was professionally lit and contained a family photo, a shelf of books, and a bit of American flag. Peter knew that so much information was being emitted from the shot itself, and received subliminally, that McCaw’s words themselves were only part of the call.

  “Hendy, let me say this once again,” said Peter. “I know it’s in the proposal—I just want to be clear. We have to be open about the use of language like ‘taking back.’ It may come with freight we don’t want.”

  “Sure, Peter, of course,” said McCaw. “But I love that you get the underlying imperative here. I mean, look, we both inherited traditions, didn’t we—you growing up in the fifties, and me the sixties and seventies? And we both lived through all those transgressions of the seventies, right? We got the change. We tore down what we thought was decrepit, fine—that had to happen. But, so far—and be honest—what have we created, beyond freedoms and license? What are we going to bequeath to our successors that’s more substantial than what we ourselves inherited? A nation keeping up with the Kardashians? You must ask yourself this, as a gay man.”

  “I . . . do.”

  “Then let the great work begin.” McCaw beamed beatifically.

  Peter knew the last line was a quote, but not, until after the call, from what: Angels in America.

  Afterward, despite concerns that still lingered in his mind, Peter felt exhilarated. He could manage McCaw, maybe even move him in a good direction, with some smart thinking. The idea of big money was savory, for sure, but Peter had never been much of a careerist, having drifted upward from success to success. The exciting thing for Peter was this opportunity to be a real player, to see his clever little ideas and understandings and mental tricks finally mean something big—get some traction, draw some fire—and push things somewhere on a global scale. Wasn’t wanting this, too, like panting for true love instead of boy toys, about being almost sixty—a fruition of the process of constantly opting out of small and meaningless effort, that starts in one’s thirties, or should, to afford a steady ascent into bigger realms, toward higher levels, where both love and work are sacramental?

  That night, Peter stayed home and ordered in Thai food. He watched Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on Netflix and found himself remembering the time he and Harold had once found the movie starting on television and were so excited to see the thing from the beginning that they blew off plans to see a zombie version of Giselle at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Meanwhile, that same night, Will was attending a little Valentine’s Day get-together at Enrico’s. The tiny jewel-box apartment was packed with stylish young men—they were clumped around the table in the foyer-dining area, where a buffet had been laid under a fall of red crystal hearts, suspended from the chandelier, and jammed into the black salon, which was so full that people could barely move. As a mix of “bitter love” tracks played in the background, compiled by a DJ whom Will had featured in the magazine, Will was explaining to a trio of strangers that he and Enrico weren’t boyfriends.

  “Oh, we thought you lived here,” said one.

  “You seem to know where everything is,” said another.

  “Well . . . everything’s, like, two steps away,” said Will.

  Will was annoyed that Enrico was behaving as if they were cohosts—asking him conspicuously to find the corkscrew or fetch more ice. Will was attending the party just to be nice; he hadn’t wanted to go. For another thing, he was bored with Enrico’s crowd, which was comprised of pretty boys Will found markedly superficial, including Olivier, the magazine’s fashion director, who had arrived at the party with a small claque of dandies who looked like they were all within three years of each other’s age, three centimeters of each other’s height, and three pounds of each other’s weight.

  “Hi, there,” said Will, when Olivier squeezed past.

  “Hello,” burbled the Parisian, looking mildly perplexed.

  “From the magazine—I’m Will.”

  “Oh, yes, hello,” said Olivier, producing a slender hand.

  They chatted for a moment, about city traffic and the town car Olivier had waiting outside, about Enrico and the party decorations, but it was clear that Olivier’s interest was elsewhere. Then Will found himself astounded when Olivier admitted he didn’t know that the music track then playing, Femi Kuti’s “Sorry Sorry,” was a bloody valentine to Nigeria.

  “He’s lamenting the rape of his homeland,” said Will.

  “I have this song on one of my Buddha Bar mixes,” said Olivier, nominally to Will but for the amusement of his claque.

  Pathetic, thought Will. Olivier had never really listened to the song. Wasn’t an editor supposed to know more about the world he lived in? It happened to be a song that Will and Peter had taken apart recently, one night after their dinner at Peter’s place.

  They’d been talking about the course of civilization since World War Two, and the song came up in the mix they were listening to.

  “Let’s see what won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1945,” said Peter, Googling the answer: Appalachian Spring. “Great, terrific piece. But just listen to Femi. Does Appalachian Spring contain one-tenth the pathos of ‘Sorry Sorry’? Don’t tell me that civilization has declined.” They’d had a few drinks, but Will was impressed. Peter was right. And since then Will’s ears had been a little more open.

  Suddenly, at Enrico’s, Will realized that he was at the wrong party. Enrico and his friends were as insistent that Will vacu-form himself into their mold as Will’s parents had been to theirs. If he stayed too long with this crowd, he would turn into something like the gay men his parents knew, who had always seemed too decorous, too tame, too self-edited. Maybe that was why Peter was so optimistic about the future, so ready to party, for an old man: He was unbounded politically, socially. And that led to happiness. What a goal to point your vectors at!

  Will found Enrico and made an excuse, then bolted from the party. On his way to the subway he texted Peter an invitation to dinner at his place.

  Can we say next Friday? Luz and I will make something at our place. Please come. Maybe a few other friends. Easy, relaxed. Say yes!

&nbs
p; CHAPTER 12

  During the week leading up to dinner, Peter thought constantly about Will. He had to make an effort to avoid adding Will-this and Will-that gratuitously in conversations with friends, and was careful, too, to show restraint in contact with the young man himself, texting him only now and then, with a perky thought about some cirrus clouds or a crowded party. He didn’t call, because there was little to say that could be said, at this stage. They hadn’t yet reached the stage of daily check-in—though that would come soon enough, if they really were becoming close friends. So Peter’s plan, for the moment, was to allow the right amount of interest to filter through to Will and hope he would feel something midway between cherished and abandoned.

  Filtering was a new mode of behavior for Peter. He had always been quite direct, emotionally, and had used bold, romantic displays to win Harold and Nick—like falling to his knees in the middle of Lincoln Center plaza, one evening before an opera, to beg Harold’s forgiveness for being twenty minutes late; or showing up at Nick’s office, on their first anniversary, with a bottle of champagne, two glasses, and tickets to Amsterdam. Yet that was then, and Will was now. It was because of his unprecedented age that Peter felt he should commit to a course of second-guessing. He hoped that that would make the infatuation of a fifty-nine-year-old man with a twenty-eight-year-old man a little less ridiculous. This was, after all, the first time he was lovesick as an old man, he told Jonathan, at dinner one night that week, and he didn’t know if the condition functioned the same way it had done decades ago. He wanted to explore it a little, before either playing by the rules or breaking them.

  “That’s a strong word, ‘lovesick,’ ” said Jonathan.

  “Yeah, but that’s what it is,” said Peter.

  They were at Jonathan’s place, alone in the living room, chatting quietly over pre-prandial drinks. Above them, over the sofa on which Jonathan had installed himself, loomed an epic diptych by Connor Frankel, in pulsing blues, greens, and yellows. The room looked larger and more formal than it did when filled with guests, and seemed better able, when empty and still, to articulate the designer’s intended balance between settled and surprising. Beyond, in the dining room, Aldebar, Jonathan’s new live-in assistant, hired in lieu of the hospice option, was setting the table and plating the elaborate meal that had been ordered in from a nearby restaurant. Jonathan had invited Peter over as an opportunity to hear his friend gush about his new infatuation. “I want to hear everything,” Jonathan said—though it was clear, too, that he didn’t want to dwell on his failing health. So Peter gushed.