Now and Yesterday

by Stephen Greco

  “One day”?—shit, thought Peter. We’re talking about his will. By this time next year, someone else will be living in this apartment. All the lovely décor will have been dismantled—not even a year old. Has the place even been photographed?

  Peter reclaimed the seat he’d occupied for the first part of the meeting, when they went over Jonathan’s wishes for his films and the new grants for documentary filmmakers he was endowing. A foundation was being formed to receive the bulk of Jonathan’s estate—around $11 million, excluding the house upstate—and administrate the grants and raise additional funds. Peter was to be a member of the board.

  “I think we’re in good shape, gentlemen,” said Mark. “The only thing that’s left to discuss is the directorship of the foundation. Peter, we’ve just talked a little bit further about it and would love your input.”

  “Would our young friend be interested in the gig, do you think?” said Jonathan, who had been seated in his chair when they arrived that morning and had remained there throughout the meeting.

  “Who?” said Peter.

  “Will.”

  “Will?”

  “We need someone who knows the arts and can understand the mission.”

  “I . . . gather he was planning to stay in magazines,” said Peter, slightly flummoxed. “Wouldn’t you want someone who could run a business?”

  “Well, maybe, but . . . ,” began Mark.

  “Magazine people have a way of going off and doing something more profitable, eventually—the smart ones, anyway,” interrupted Jonathan. “Maybe Will would be interested in going sooner rather than later.”

  “Maybe,” said Peter. “Ask him. You knew him before I did. Are you asking me to ask him?”

  “No—I’ll do that,” said Jonathan. “I just wanted to get your thinking.”

  Ted smiled at Peter and gave an approving nod.

  “He’s a smart guy,” said Peter.

  “Mature, responsible?” said Mark.

  “As far as I can tell.”

  “The mission is simple,” said Mark. “Give away the money, raise more money. And, of course, protect the money.”

  “I think he’d be terrific,” said Jonathan. “Young blood—you know.”

  “Then you’ll have a chat with the young man and let us know?” said Mark.

  “Yup,” said Jonathan.

  “Good,” said Mark. “Then we’re done.”

  The group rose and lapsed into small talk. Aldebar appeared as if by telepathic summons and helped Jonathan to rise, then stood close by him.

  “Oh, and I hope you’ll all be able to make the screening we’re doing next month,” said Jonathan. “It’s a rough cut—and I hope you won’t think me coy when I say I still don’t know how it’s all going to end.”

  Peter, who was checking his iPhone, winced when he overheard that.

  “Tom and I will be there,” said Mark, warmly.

  “I’m really proud of this one,” said Jonathan.

  “Mary and I will fly in, of course,” said Ted. “We wouldn’t miss it.”

  “Connor says that art made him miss his calling as a movie star,” said Jonathan, with a laugh that turned into a cough. Within seconds, Aldebar was offering him a sip of water.

  “No, I’m fine, I’m fine,” said Jonathan. “He’s really taking to it, Connor is. A big ham!”

  At the door to the apartment, after the others had gone down in the elevator, and while Aldebar was tidying up the library, Peter and Jonathan shared a moment alone.

  “Wow,” said Peter.

  “Yeah,” said Jonathan.

  “How ya doing?”

  “Surviving.”

  “Good.”

  “I don’t really do anguish, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “Probably why I went into documentaries, instead of dramas.”

  “Interesting.”

  “One foot in front of the other.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “So Will—huh?” said Jonathan.

  “It’s up to you,” said Peter. “You really think he could do something like that?”

  “Of course he could. He’s smart and responsible. He could probably do anything he sets his mind to. It’s not like it’s anyone’s destiny to be in magazines.”

  “I dunno. He might like the glamour of it—the parties, the stars.”

  “He might—in which case, he’ll say no. He might also want to give away vast amounts of money and do some good in the world.”

  “I marvel that you thought of him, honestly.”

  Jonathan smiled in a manner Peter thought sly.

  “Or is there something else here,” continued Peter, “that I’m not aware of . . . ?”

  “No,” chuckled Jonathan. “I just have in mind that great machine that collapsed in the eighties, that used to shift the power ever so gently from the seniors to the freshmen who looked promising.”

  “Yeah, that’s all gone now.”

  “Except that I can damned well do what I want with my money.”

  Jonathan said those words more forcefully than anything he’d said in the meeting, and Peter heard so much in them—sadness, bitterness, resolve. He gazed lovingly at Jonathan and then, on an impulse, gathered his friend into a hug and kissed his forehead. It was a shock to feel the frailness of Jonathan’s body and to catch the scent of something scalpy, though not precisely unclean, mixed with Jonathan’s Black Tourmaline. As Peter gently released his friend, the idea of losing him suddenly seemed more terribly real, and Peter felt a small shudder in his own breathing and an involuntary twinge in the center of his brow, in that spot where the muscles know, before we do, that worry could give way to weeping.

  “My brother is being such a prince,” said Jonathan, continuing to steady himself by holding Peter’s arm. “Did you notice? He has every right to expect some of that money, but he’s being very supportive.”

  Peter nodded but said nothing, realizing he needed to try and stay composed.

  “And you, good friend—so are you,” continued Jonathan. “This is . . . a strange time, for all of us. Petey, I’ve been thinking a lot about you. OK, we’ve just spent the morning talking about reality. So tell me: Whatever happened to the sexual adventurer? You used to be out there for all of us, long after we bonded with our mates and took it off the streets or gave it up entirely. Even when you had boyfriends, you had adventures, right—you and Nick? You told me. So why are you now . . . courting in this way?”

  Peter sighed and slumped against the door.

  “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Why prolong this not knowing? Ask the guy, is it a relationship or not? It’s so unlike you not to go straight for the answer. If it’s not right, let it go. There are plenty of boys out there, if that’s what you want.”

  There was such concern in Jonathan’s voice, when he had so much else to be thinking about! In the space of a second, Peter’s face melted into a mask of misery. He felt himself tearing up.

  “I don’t know what I want, Jon,” he said. “I’m afraid.”

  Jonathan, surprised, tried to comfort his friend and took his hand.

  “But you were never afraid.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” said Peter, giving in a little to the sobbing. “But I am now. That’s . . . age. That’s what age has done to me.”

  They were silent for a moment, then Jonathan spoke.

  “Afraid of . . . losing him?”

  “No,” said Peter, his eyes closed, as if to prevent more tears. “Afraid of the fucking shame and embarrassment when he says, so very kindly, no, but how flattered he is. Confirming that all this time he’s been dreading my saying exactly that. Watching him go very politely through the whole rejection thing and then tell me that he still wants to be friends. And, of course, it’s all rehearsed.”

  “Would that be so terrible?” Jonathan asked quietly.

  Peter shook his head and said nothing, wiping away tears with his fingers.


  “Would it kill you?” asked Jonathan.

  “No. It wouldn’t kill me.”

  They stood there for a moment, a dying man comforting a supposedly vital one. And later, when he remembered it, the moment would remind Peter of the time when Harold, home from the hospital for the last time, emaciated and already showing signs of dementia, rose in the middle of the night, in the dark, from the daybed where he’d been sleeping, to bring Peter, who’d awakened coughing, in the bedroom, a glass of water.

  He came to the door like a ghost, his eyes closed, meaning to help me.

  “Do you need a tissue?” said Jonathan. “Paper towel?”

  Peter smirked and stood up straight.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” he said. “I can’t believe I’m walking into a meeting in forty minutes.”

  “Listen,” said Jonathan, “I’m going up to Hudson, from the first of the month on. I’m going to live up there now.”

  “Oh.” It was another seismic shock, though Peter had known it was coming.

  “You bring your boy up there for a weekend. Promise you will.”

  “Sure. That would be nice.”

  Back in the days when Jonathan’s “great machine” was functioning, Peter hadn’t understood its workings nor the system behind it. Friends of friends, usually men a little older than he and more successful, asked him to jacket-and-tie lunches and engaged him in genial conversation about this and that; and when they got around to talking about what Peter’s career goals might be, other than the poet thing, he never had much to say. He didn’t have a plan for his life—though that in itself might well have qualified him for special attention. He didn’t know it, but those men were examining him—sometimes in a gentlemanly manner; sometimes lasciviously, as per the loose sexual manners of the time; and sometimes in both ways at once. They wanted to see what he might be capable of, or worthy of, and what they might be able to provide. Yet just as Peter could have become a beneficiary of the machine, the thing broke down, with AIDS. Everyone in books and fashion and antiques and the arts who’d ever taken Peter to lunch died—and he’d often thought that that might be one reason why, having to fend for himself, he’d drifted into his current line.

  I’d probably be running some foundation somewhere, myself, thought Peter, as he strode from Madison Avenue into the lobby of his building, a soaring nave of gleaming marble, glass, and steel. Giving away grants from some ducky little converted town house in the East Sixties. An office full of good antiques; happy enough—but not really in the game.

  The voltage of advertising hit him right in the face that day, as he stepped off the elevator and into the atrium. The girls at the reception desk were smiling a little more magnetically than usual, their voices galvanized as they spoke into headsets, directing calls, while in back of them, on a thirty-foot expanse of video wall, large-scale animations representing the company’s biggest clients fluxed with provocative flash. The kids tripping up and down the atrium’s jungle-gym stairway and across the main floor seemed a little sparkier than usual. And outside the Gymnasium, a large meeting room off the main reception area, a young woman in dark leggings and a cropped jacket, clearly a member of the client team inside, was standing next to a refreshment table, emitting signals that were apparently terribly important into her cell phone.

  It was a big day at the office: Important clients were everywhere. Peter nodded to a colleague, a creative director, who rushed past him with a delegation to greet an A-list television star waiting in the reception area with an entourage. A new series, Peter thought, or a voice-over for some high-profile campaign. Upstairs, in his own private warren of offices, where Peter was headed, key members of McCaw’s communications team were spending the day with Peter’s top people, led by Tyler, going through an inaugural series of conceptual explorations.

  The great work begins.

  Peter loved it when the office felt this electric. The sheer energy of being inside a major ad agency at the dawn of the Age of Truly Global Mass Culture was like a drug. Madison Avenue was now the undisputed control room of civilization, whereas Washington and Hollywood were only its rec rooms. Actions like voting and going to the movies seemed quaint, now that the purchase and consumption of the right soft drink or the right body wash promised to put the experience of Life Right Now into focus. More than in politics and entertainment, the higher processes fibrillating the top levels of advertising were charged with the full juice of vast national and global conversations, of the collective unconscious itself; and the people involved in these processes, even when not actually working, existed in a higher orbital, spiritually, than everyone else; they inhabited a better place than Earth, a possible planet where the abundance of everything good was a given. For not only were these young ad execs among the best and the brightest, the most creative, self-actualized, and best-paid individuals of their generation, they could depend on the daily exhilaration of work and play at the font of contemporary civilization, the source of ideas that functioned for consumers like answered prayers.

  Being in this line of work, wielding its lightning, was an ultimate privilege, Peter often mused—ten times better than riding to a party in a limo with Nick’s one-time friend Madonna and her crew. At the agency, Peter got to create campaigns—movements!—that would sweep whole continents with messages about products and services so beneficial that people would spend trillions of dollars on them; and along for the ride, in that traffic of wants and needs, aspirations and means, came fresh ideas about self and family and nation and world, which brought life on Earth forward, upward. Talk about illuminati! Here was the true elite. Tyler and the rest weren’t hoodooing around with naïve, medieval travesties of so-called secret, ancient wisdom. They were serving humanity by generating enlightenment from moment to moment, conjuring new values and powers and orders and blessings—which was the chief thing, Peter felt, that separated him from Jonathan and the gentlemen of their generation, who had devoted themselves to older values and powers and orders and blessings. Those guys were a little less aglow.

  In the Den, one of the largest work spaces in Peter’s offices, he found things running smoothly. The meeting was the second of two that morning, before lunch. The McCaw team, numbering seven, headed by Sunil, the chief strategist and adviser, and Katy, the speechwriter, were comfortably installed in the room’s funky collection of mismatched chairs and sofas, and in oversized beanbag cushions on the floor. Interspersed were key members of Peter’s staff. The room’s décor, meant to trigger creative thinking, was accented with an array of toys, board games, and indoor sporting goods that would have been at home in the Brady Bunch house. With a minimum of fuss, Peter slipped into the back of the room and perched against an old-fashioned stereo console, just as Tyler was beginning.

  “What is a big idea?” said Tyler. He was dressed that day for the kind of authority clients expected of him: in an olive-drab suit, much more expensive than it looked, with a pair of Jack Purcells and a plain T-shirt. “We say that brown is big this season—which it is, by the way—but what do we mean by that?” On a flat-screen monitor in back of him was a slide with the phrase, BROWN IS BIG RIGHT NOW.

  “It’s popular; people are feeling it,” said Katy.

  “The fashion industry is giving us a lot of it,” said Sunil.

  “All true—fashion, home décor, product design,” said Tyler. “People are feeling brown. But we can go deeper. The truths we’re looking for are wide and deep—that’s the bedrock we want to build on.” He flipped to a new slide, featuring three words: VERITIES, EQUIVALENCES, and VALIDITIES. “So I want us to keep in mind these three kinds of truth, as we think about our goals.” Then he launched the group into a discussion of relevant definitions and differentiations.

  Peter had seen Tyler conduct this kind of exercise before, with other clients, and it was always a success. And sure enough, the McCaw people were rapt and soon contributing freely and fruitfully. They seemed a friendly enough bunch, Peter thought—not New
Yorkers, most of them, but clearly sophisticated and, of course, very smart; no more “other” than other clients, all of whom are teammates until you remember they are also exacting employers. No one on the team was any more of a monster than McCaw himself; there wasn’t a wacko, wingnut, or dingbat among them. And as far as Peter could see, there were no doctrinally fueled disconnects in anyone’s thinking. Was the monstrous sound of McCaw’s “Take back America” message more a product of the media than of the man and his supporters? Was there a more useful way of framing the underlying question—“Whose America?”—than as a backward-or-forward thing, in the context of a posthege-monic nation coming to grips with an approaching nonwhite majority?

  “This is how we begin to measure big,” continued Tyler. “Now, how big is brown? In what ways is it big?”

  The group threw out ideas about what brown could depict or express, what it might be equivalent to, and how it might be particularly valid right now. Tyler carefully guided them to expand or focus their contributions. Katy traced a sequence of thought from “earth” to “dirty” to “natural”; Sunil traced one from “skin” to “humanity” to “diversity”; others suggested “wood,” “the environment,” and “activism”; “coffee,” “stimulation,” “self-indulgence.” Tyler recorded these ideas on large sheets of paper posted to the walls.

  “From ‘dirty’ to ‘self-indulgent’—not bad,” said Tyler, looking over the sheets, and the group laughed. “No, really,” he said, “very good.”

  Even from his seat in the back of the room Peter could see, from people’s body language, that they were enjoying working together and sparking off one another’s ideas.