Now and Yesterday

by Stephen Greco

  “I’m fucking lovesick, as much as I ever was with Harold or Nick,” said Peter. “I can’t stop thinking about him and I can’t explain why. And you know how hardly anybody holds my interest nowadays.”

  “Charming,” said Jonathan, whose deteriorated physical condition was hard to overlook. The flesh under his jaw had gone slack, his smile brittle and eyes sunken. He was gaunter than ever and looked lost inside his black cashmere sweater. A day’s worth of silvery stubble frosted his normally clean-shaven head. Around the house, where he spent more and more time, he could move about on his own, but in public Jonathan was now using a wheelchair. In order to better focus on his film, he said, he was planning to move upstate, Aldebar and all, to the house in Hudson. There, he would continue working for as long as possible with Connor Frankel, who lived in a nearby town.

  “But tell me, Peter, why this one?” said Jonathan. “And yes, maybe it is the documentarian in me who wants to know. What does this one have that your friend Tyler, for instance, doesn’t have? Why not any of the men I have set you up with or your friends have set you up with—men so much more, shall we say, suitable?”

  It was a good question. Even with men who “looked good on paper,” which invariably meant close to Peter in age or salary, there were variables that always got in the way. Peter thought about this for a second.

  “Well, darling,” he said finally, “damage aside—and you know how many men our age are damaged goods—I need someone who is both decorous and a renegade. You know? I have all the solid citizens wanting to date me, and all the young renegades wanting daddy sex, but each type is boring, in itself. Will is somehow both these types in one, which is absolutely fascinating.”

  Jonathan chuckled.

  “And cute isn’t a marker for that, is it?” continued Peter. “I happily register cute boys I see out there, but I don’t feel like pursuing them anymore, because it never leads anywhere.”

  “Except that this one is cute . . . ,” said Jonathan.

  “Well, yes. So I’m told.”

  “OK, so you plan to go on pursuing. Good for you.”

  “But that’s precisely what I don’t plan,” said Peter.

  “What?”

  “No-oo,” whined Peter. And then he whispered, “I think old age has made me shy.”

  “Shy,” repeated Jonathan.

  “I’m trying not to clobber the kid with my old tricks.”

  “C’mon. The way you wooed Harold was no trick. You just showed him how a romantic hero operates. And since then you have only gone from that prime to the prime you were in when you landed Nick, to the prime you’re in now. The kid probably wants to see some of that star stuff.”

  Peter picked up his glass and sat back.

  “Well, thank you, darling, but age has made me very specific in my needs,” he said, taking a sip. “I want to be known exactly as who I am—not as an operator. Will and I tell each other that we’re trying to do something new with our friendship, unprecedented for each of us. We’re both promising to go beyond our usual tricks—you know, the cute young man stuff he falls back on, and the older guy stuff I always trot out.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “I mean, he gets all the guys he wants, but nothing serious pans out because it’s always about the tricks. If, through me, he really owns for the first time how much there is to him besides all that, then that’s awesome—even if he does take this new understanding and go find someone his own age.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, you know—I hope not. Anyway, aren’t there tons of examples in history of younger men digging older men?”

  “I guess.”

  “The funny thing is, Jonathan, I love being lovesick.” Peter shook his head, suppressing a grin. “This damned fever itself is exactly as, I dunno . . . useful as love. Very entertaining for an old man. The fear that usually comes with lovesickness, the feeling that you’re gonna die, unless you get the kiss—forget about it! At this age, I know I won’t die.”

  “How convenient.”

  Peter suddenly realized that Jonathan was looking tired.

  “I’m boring you, dear friend,” said Peter. Jonathan waved away the comment.

  “You’re sure it’s really love, then?” pressed Jonathan. “Even if there’s no possibility of suicide?”

  “I’m not sure what it is. I’m not sure I ever knew what love is. No—I am sure: I have never known really what love is, though I know I have been loved.”

  “Fine. But wouldn’t real love be better than what you have? I’m just asking.”

  “I don’t know. What can I do but identify it as love and play it out accordingly?”

  Jonathan laughed weakly, and Peter sat forward again, putting down his drink.

  “I like his tonality, Jonathan,” he said. “I like his goofy face, the way he combines grace and klutziness. I fantasize about where Harold and I would be right now and I want to be there with Will.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Jonathan, with a little signal to Aldebar, who had appeared to check on the drinks. The new aide was a good-looking, muscular man in his thirties—a trained nurse, Jonathan had said, but commanding a smile as seductive as a porn star’s.

  “Sure, I fantasize about him sexually,” said Peter, “but I also think about gardening with him and napping with him in the seat of an airplane, the sun pouring through the window, as we’re flying off to Rio.”

  “You and your child lovah.”

  Peter smiled and took a breath.

  “I almost did have a child lover once,” he mused. “Did I ever tell you? Dylan Zeleski. He was twelve—a very grown-up twelve. His parents were in a rock band and brought him to dance class, three times a week, on the third floor of Carnegie Hall, near my office. Remember when I had that office at Carnegie Hall? They used to dress him in a little leather biker jacket, with a tight little T-shirt and tight little jeans. Off the hook! And he had blue eyes, and black hair, and, ooh, white-white skin. That kid knew exactly what he was doing, Jonathan. He’d come in and ask for candy, and put air quotes around the word “candy.” Twelve years old! And this was precisely the point in my life when I would have had my own twelve-year-old, if I were straight and a parent, my therapist pointed out. We never did anything, Dylan and me, though I talked about it for three years. I thought it went away, but maybe it’s here again.”

  “Boy love?”

  “Whatever it was. A certain nostalgia for the kids one doesn’t have.”

  Jonathan raised an eyebrow.

  “Have you always wanted kids?” he said.

  “Yes—but I probably won’t, now,” said Peter. “Unless Will wants them.”

  It was partly a joke, and Jonathan rolled his eyes.

  “I’m having dinner there tomorrow night,” added Peter.

  “Does he know how you feel?”

  The question stopped Peter.

  “No,” he said.

  “Ever made out?”

  A pause.

  “Not really.”

  Jonathan shook his head.

  “Well, protect yourself,” he said.

  “I know,” said Peter.

  “What if he’s just not into you?”

  “I know.”

  “You have to ask the question and get the answer. That’s my advice.”

  “Even if it’s no. I know. And I don’t want to abandon him as a friend, if it is no. I don’t want him to think I’ve been lying about seeing so much in him and finding him unique among men. I think I could just get through the crisis of his not loving me, if it meant bestowing on him some new sense of worthiness. . . .”

  Jonathan closed his eyes, then opened them.

  “Girlfriend, you’re a mess,” he said.

  “Oh, how did we ever get this old?” sighed Peter. “Weren’t we just twenty-seven and marching in the streets and making history and showing the world how to wear a blazer with a T-shirt? Whatever happened to the timelessness of being twenty-seven?”

  “Don’t
look at me,” said Jonathan.

  Peter tilted his head.

  “Am I ridiculous?” he said.

  “No,” said Jonathan. “You deserve love and you always will.”

  “Because we’re boomers and entitled?”

  “Because you’re a human being.”

  “Thank you, dear friend.”

  “And speaking of dinner, let’s have some,” said Jonathan, twisting in his seat and calling toward the dining room. “Aldebar, if you would?”

  Winter days had been feeling oppressively dark and short, and Will and Luz had been talking about how trapped they felt in New York. Unable to fly somewhere south for a little vacation, they decided to make “sunny” the theme of their little dinner party. They bought new dinner plates and place mats in shades of yellow and orange, on sale at Crate and Barrel, and created a menu they called “Mexiterranean” that combined a grilled fish with lemon that Luz had learned from her mother, who was Mexican, and a spaghetti puttanesca that Will was creating with Greek olives and Santorini tomatoes he found at a local specialty shop. At six o’clock on the day of the dinner, the two were in their kitchen, busy with final preparations.

  “I just remembered: We don’t have any coffee,” said Luz, zesting lemons for the fish. “You think they’ll want some? I could run out and get some, or ask Mrs. Lavris.”

  “Eh, let’s not bother,” said Will. He was slicing the tomatoes and arranging them on a sheet pan, for a pre-roast. On the stovetop was a pan in which capers, olives, anchovies, and garlic were sweating in olive oil. “If people want, we can have tea. More likely, we’ll just keep going with wine.”

  “I hope we have enough,” said Luz.

  “Oh, he’ll bring some, I’m sure,” said Will. “And speaking of alcohol . . .” Will danced over to the freezer and, with a flourish, took out a bottle.

  “Limoncello!” sang Luz.

  “A bottle of sunshine!” exclaimed Will.

  “Shall we have some?”

  “Why not,” said Will, opening the bottle and pouring them each a glass.

  “We never felt this depressed in L.A., did we, in February?” said Luz, after taking a sip.

  “We didn’t, did we?” said Will. “But the days are just as short there.”

  “Was it the latitude?”

  “The climate?”

  “Something about the desert?”

  “You really suffer from this oppressive winter thing, in New York, don’t you? Everybody’s complaining about it. You see it on their faces.”

  “We had kitsch, actually—right? That’s like sunshine in architectural form.”

  “Oh, Luz, you’re right!”

  “I mean, driving into a Mayan palace for a corn dog . . .”

  “Dropping off your dry cleaning at a Chinese temple . . .”

  “Kitsch against the winter!”

  “Kitsch against the blues!”

  Finishing the tomatoes, Will threw the pan into the oven and wiped his hands.

  “You know what we need?” he said, dashing out of the kitchen.

  “What?” shouted Luz.

  He reappeared instantly with a pair of sky-blue Havaianas, still new, with the price tag dangling.

  “A centerpiece!” said Will.

  “Eww!” said Luz.

  “No, watch,” he said, taking a slender, cylindrical glass vase from a cabinet and attaching the flip-flops to it with some kitchen twine. He removed the price tag, then placed the creation on the kitchen table, which had been set for four, and stood back to admire his handiwork.

  “Really?” said Luz.

  “I guarantee you one of them will bring flowers.”

  “Mm-hmm—maybe both,” said Luz, slyly.

  Will made a face of mock-dread.

  “Oh, God, do you think we’re headed for disaster?” he said.

  “I thought you said having both of them over was the best way to do it.”

  “I did, but what the hell do I know?”

  At the same moment, Peter was standing deep beneath Times Square, on the 7 train platform, the lower-most level of the subway station said to be New York’s busiest, where eleven lines converge, on three levels. He had with him two bottles of a good sauvignon blanc, a bunch of expensive, waxy French tulips in a fleshy pink, and a copy of Eliot’s Four Quartets, wrapped as a gift. Though he was as far from the sky as anyone can be in New York without a hard hat, he was still sporting the sunglasses he’d thrown on just before leaving the house. A Queens-bound train had just left the station, so the platform was almost free of people. An LED display promised the next train in six minutes.

  Though he’d set out early, as usual, he was now stressed about time, on top of a certain malaise about dinner that he’d been nursing all day. On arrival at the station he’d found that the N train he’d meant to take wasn’t in service between Times Square and Queens Plaza, owing to an accident—though no one could say what kind of accident—so he’d had to figure out an alternative route to Will’s house. Now, if the 7 came as promised and the transfer at Queens Plaza happened quickly—and the travel time was really twenty minutes, as a harried assistant station manager suggested—he could still be a little early for dinner, which was called for seven. And that was the way he wanted it, because Peter didn’t like being late for important things and was perfectly willing to walk around Astoria or sit in a coffee shop, if he landed there before the dot.

  His underlying malaise—now, typically, in the bullying company of an unplanned worry, planted in his mind by New York—was the result of being both sad and happy: sad, because Peter’s loneliness made a dinner like this loom larger than it should; happy, because dinner would be fun—though he wasn’t sure if it was going to be just Will and him, or Will’s roommate, too, or one of those informal dinner parties for a group that young people seem to be able to rustle up on no budget. The invitation said “maybe a few friends”; Peter had been too shy to ask for more details, earlier in the day, when confirming with Will by text.

  Even after the much ballyhooed Disneyfication of Times Square in the ’90s, Peter’s mental picture of the subway station there remained three levels of filthy, crowded, screeching hell. Yet as he stood on the platform he noticed that things seemed cleaner and better maintained than in the rest of the station, probably because the 7 train ran only from Midtown to points in Queens that, for decades, had served the city as solidly middle-class bedroom communities, and the platform was used more by well-trained worker-citizens than by the raucous masses that populated other regions of the “crossroads of the world.” The mouse-colored porcelain floor tiles were mostly uncracked; the wooden benches, unscratched; the white tile walls opposite the platform, unstreaked by the mysterious crud you see oozing from cracks in the walls in lots of other stations. The cream-colored ceilings looked freshly painted and relatively soot-free, as did the cream and red of a broad team of overhead pipes that ran a course, bracketed together, parallel to the tracks, above the edge of the platform, into the distance. Or were they electrical conduits? Peter realized that sewage and drainage pipes would have to be larger—and sure enough, he spotted several much larger pipes, vertical ones, attached to some of the station’s century-old steel columns and to a bank of massive concrete piers, at least five feet thick, that were at the end of the platform. The piers looked like they could be supporting the tonnage of all of Times Square’s buildings.

  The place is so massively overbuilt, thought Peter, who sometimes obsessed about such things when nervous. Is that the way they did infrastructure in the early twentieth century? Will this hole in the ground still be here in a thousand years, even after the skyscrapers melt away or are encased in ice?

  Fluorescent lighting made the whole place shadowless. And, in the absence of a train, it was quiet, too, except for occasional safety announcements and the rumbling that echoed down periodically from the tracks on levels above.

  So when it rains, thought Peter, and Times Square floods, is all the runoff sluiced
right through the station, down into some kind of chamber that’s even deeper below the surface—a cistern, or a reservoir, or some fractures in the famous Manhattan schist on which this part of the city is built? Is it all drained off somehow to the river, through massive culverts under the city?

  A little girl in a purple parka was sitting with her parents on one of the benches, near where Peter was standing. The parents were talking quietly, their bulging shopping bags from Modell’s, Sephora, and Forever 21 between them, at their feet, while the girl squirmed restlessly, periscoping around. The girl caught Peter’s eye and smiled, and he smiled back generically: an older guy in shades, with flowers, obviously not from Queens—a guy who meant her no harm. At the end of the platform, where the station gave way to tunnel, was a police control booth, unmanned, with a boxy little chemical or biological detection unit posted outside, like a sentry.

  Was the platform even snug, as New York places went?

  Well, not exactly. It felt peaceful in the bomb-shelter sense of the word, though surely just one bomb that was strong enough—the kind they talked about practically every day in the media, a dirty baby nuke—could transform this bomb shelter into a tomb. Such talk sometimes betrayed an oddly gleeful tone, Peter thought, as if someone believed that the acceptance of the “inevitability” of such an attack was a comfort and the option of dying better than living in a world in which cultural supremacy had shifted away from New York and America itself, toward other continents. Yet . . . couldn’t the inevitability of death, the idea that the end might be just there, coming within reach, be comforting in a way, if you didn’t have better things before you, like a dinner party with the man who might become your lover? With no love in your life, wouldn’t death be welcome—not a thief, ready to steal something from you, but a loyal sentry, posted somewhere out there on a timeline that was customized for you by God or fate, ready to embrace you at that moment tenderly called “your time”? And if death were out there on your timeline, visible in the distance, shouldn’t he—and of course it was a “he”—be saluted, despite the prospect of a lovely dinner, so that familiarity could help mediate the impendency of his arrival? For someone looking for love as hard as Peter, the idea of one’s own death—as personal as a lover, promising an embrace as specific as a lover’s—did afford some shadowy splendor. . . .