“Oh, man,” Will groaned. “Is there anything like somebody else’s dishwashing liquid?”
Peter grinned.
“Never in a million years would I have bought New Apple Blossom Dawn,” said Will. “But right now, it’s saying everything to me about my life!” He sambaed in place, as he stood washing.
And as Peter pushed the potatoes and onions around in the skillet, he felt a kind of contentment—not exactly “making breakfast for my best friend in his beautiful home, with my amazing boyfriend”-type contentment, but close. He added some smoked paprika, which he found in the cupboard. Outside, across the river, green hills hummed in unison in the cheery morning light.
Can I have this? Peter thought. Can I morph my life into this, or do I just go on waiting and drifting, and see what happens? How pathetic I am, to go on and on about love, yet remain so passive, so content without it. Somehow, I used to have more energy to pursue love.
The aroma of fried potatoes filled the kitchen.
No, wait—I never pursued it. Harold and Nick just . . . happened. “Looks like we’ve got an awesome day for it, eh?” gushed Will, toweling his hands and giving Peter an enthusiastic tap on the butt. He hummed a bit of a Stevie Wonder song—“You Are the Sunshine of My Life”—as he began to set the table.
Aldebar and Jonathan were delighted when they came down and found everything ready. The four devoured breakfast and cleaned up as a team. By a quarter of twelve they were walking out the door.
“Two cars?” said Peter.
“We could do one,” said Aldebar. “The Navigator has tons of room, even with the chair.”
“Why don’t we take ours, just in case,” said Peter, with a glance toward Will.
“We’re hunting big game,” explained Will.
They helped Jonathan into the car, while Aldebar loaded the wheelchair into the back.
“We’ve got this down to a military maneuver,” said Jonathan.
“Were you ever in the army, Aldebar?” said Peter, jokingly.
“You know I was in the marines, right?” he said.
Peter and Will were both stunned.
“What—seriously?” said Will.
“Wait,” said Peter, “let me get this straight: You’re an RN who knows all about opera and you were in the marines?”
“It just happened,” said Aldebar, laughing, with a wink.
“That’s amazing,” said Peter. “Jonathan?”
“What can I tell you?” said Jonathan. “He’s Superman.”
Chartered in 1795 by merchants who ran the place, Hudson was the fourth largest city in New York State by 1820—a bustling port on a major American river. By the end of the nineteenth century, though, river commerce was winding down and the town was flooding under waves of gambling and prostitution. Governor Thomas E. Dewey started busting up the rackets in the early ’50s, and throughout the ’60s and ’70s Hudson was on life support, owing to the same kind of helplessness that still afflicted Peter’s hometown, where a long-ago boom in canal- and rail-fueled commerce was never bested. At which point a group of local antiques dealers came together—cue the string quartet!—and ignited a revival. Hudson’s new antiques trade at first reflected and then helped fuel a demographic shift in the area, which saw traditional families give way to more young couples, couples without children, retirees, single folks, and weekenders, all of which, of course, meant gays. By the ’90s, on Warren Street, the main thoroughfare that climbs up from the river in a battery of modestly scaled commercial blocks, storefronts that once offered quotidian stuff like clothes, shoes, drugs, and hardware now stocked items whose value derived chiefly from their having survived history with a little dignity.
Presumably, there was a mall nearby, where people now went for their hardware—which these days was made in China—and shoes—Brazil. But around noon on a beautiful spring Saturday, Hudson’s Warren Street would come alive with well-shod folks from as far away as New York, hankering not for Buster Brown oxfords but for marvelous things, charming things. And as they began strolling from shop to shop, these folks, whether just-looking-thanks or actively searching for something, would almost visibly charge up with brilliant discoveries about how we once lived, and how we choose to live now, and how we survive through our histories . And if, just a block or two off Warren, in the part of Hudson that remains unrevived, in a house that was hacked into apartments after Grandpa George’s refrigeration business went bust and Aunt Betty died of lung cancer, there was an empty windowsill on which that lovely pink Deco vase had stood for decades, the one that was now close by in a shop vitrine, poised to be snatched by someone who really values design and character—well, that was America in the twenty-first century.
Peter and his friends arrived early enough to find parking spots right on Warren, close to each other. And for two hours they explored, sometimes as a full clump of four, sometimes two by two, and sometimes as a threesome, while someone dawdled or peeked into a shop that no one else was interested in. They took turns wheeling Jonathan. Peter and Will just had to poke through a “junk store” that Jonathan disdained; Peter and Jonathan lingered at a fancy shop to chat with the owner about an oil portrait of a young man; they all diligently inspected the place that specialized in prints, the one with the great furniture, and the one with all the books and photographs. Will looked at tables and lamps here and there, but didn’t see anything he liked. For $10, he bought an old black-and-white photograph of a college rowing team. The clerk gave him a recycled green plastic supermarket bag, lined with a paper bag, to carry his purchase in.
At one point, Peter and Will were in a gallery looking at seascapes—watercolors and oils from an amateur Danish artist who had died in the ’80s. The owner represented the estate.
“This was a little fishing village on the North Sea he returned to every summer,” she said, as they inspected a small watercolor. “A place called Lønstrup. Lovely light, as you can see.” The piece was primitive bordering on clumsy, but it had the charm of simplicity, depicting a few village houses seen from the hill above them, their red roofs a bold slash between the white and ochre of stone walls and the blue of the sea. The scene was rendered with a genial looseness and lack of pretension.
“That’s the way the roofs are there—red,” she said. “He was a dentist who lived in Copenhagen.” All the works were surprising affordable.
“It’s sweet, isn’t it?” said Will.
“Absolutely,” said Peter. “The price is certainly good. What do you think?”
“I dunno. I like it.”
“It’s nice.”
“It is. . . .”
“We can keep it on the short list and come back if you want.”
“Should I just get it?”
“Up to you.”
“Mmm. Maybe I should think about it and see how I feel later in the day.”
“Good idea.”
Around two-thirty Jonathan suggested lunch, so they went over to a cafe that was owned by a friend of his, who also owned a popular place in New York. The place was busy, but welcoming. The staff knew Jonathan and quickly prepared a table that could accommodate the four of them, plus the chair.
Lunch was relaxed and Jonathan was talkative. As the crowd thinned out, the owner came over with some free desserts and sat with them a while. During coffee, Will asked to be excused. He had received a text that needed to be answered with a call, he said. When he returned fifteen minutes later, Peter noticed that he had his green bag with him, which seemed curious, though Peter didn’t give it a second thought. Maybe he went back for the seascape.
After lunch there were more shops, including a high-end kitchenware place where Peter bought a wind-up timer in butter yellow, and then it was time to head home. With endearing tact, Aldebar suggested that “we” might be getting tired.
“Maybe a little around the edges,” said Jonathan.
“I’ll just take two minutes to circle back to that watercolor place,” said Will. “It’s onl
y a block or two that way, isn’t it?”
“Jon, why don’t you guys go ahead,” said Peter. “We have to go look at a watercolor.”
“Take your time, please,” said Jonathan. “I’m going to go take my nap. You guys should go on that drive I told you about. It’s only an hour and really worth it. We’ll see you at dinner.”
“It’s good, right?” said Will, when they were back in the gallery, looking at the piece.
“I love it,” said Peter. “It’s passed the test of time.” Red roofs, dazzling ocean. The owner looked on approvingly.
“I’ll take it,” said Will. And the owner wrapped up the picture and included a brochure about the artist.
Just as they were stepping out of the gallery someone greeted them.
“Peter?”
It took a moment to place the man.
“Arnie—my goodness!”
It was someone Peter had known since college, a composer who taught, Peter thought he remembered, at a community college. It had taken a moment to recognize him because the man had changed so much in the years since Peter last saw him: He’d put on a lot of weight, and his once thick, black, curly hair had gone gray and scraggly. He looked old, yet there was still that diffident, impish smile....
Peter introduced Will to Arnie and asked if he was still teaching. “Oh, yes—composition,” said Arnie, naming the college, which was in the next county. “Which leaves me time to do my own work.”
“And you live nearby, right?” said Peter.
“Over in Catskill.”
“OK. Yeah, we’re just up for the day—you know, doing the Hudson thing.”
Arnie rolled his eyes in a friendly way. He was dumpily dressed, Peter noted sadly, in clothes that looked neither vintage nor retro, but worn. The absentminded professor?
“Driving back tomorrow,” said Peter. When he mentioned Jonathan, Arnie said he remembered him and knew he lived in Hudson, but didn’t see him socially.
They chatted a little about teaching, a little about advertising. Arnie was part of the crowd that Peter moved in, during those early years in New York, only unlike Peter and Jonathan, Arnie had never found financial success. Then again, thought Peter, maybe Arnie hadn’t been seeking that.
“Do you get down to the city much?” asked Peter.
“Once in a while,” said Arnie. “For a concert or something. It’s expensive.”
It was an awkward moment. In the mid- and late ’70s Arnie was the one who, among all of them, seemed poised for success, and was even a little farther along toward it than the others, with occasional commissions from out-of-town orchestras. The first dinner party Peter had ever attended in a restaurant’s private dining room was hosted by Arnie. Yet nothing more had really happened for him, and at some point, during the ’80s, he just left town.
The late afternoon sun was making everything look golden. But Peter noticed that Arnie’s teeth looked yellow, not because of the light.
“It would be great to catch up,” said Peter, “but we’re running.” And he really did mean that it would be great, since he had always liked Arnie—in fact, had been very close with him, at one point. Inviting him back to the house, of course, wasn’t an option.
“Well, look,” said Arnie, “did you say you were driving home tomorrow? I’d love to invite you guys to stop by for tea, on your way back to the city.”
Peter was surprised by the idea, but not put off.
“If there’s time,” continued Arnie. “It’s right on the way.”
“It’s an idea,” said Peter. “We still haven’t figured out the day yet. Can I let you know?”
“Of course,” said Arnie, and they exchanged phone numbers. “I’m home, working, all day.”
“Terrific,” said Peter. “I’ll call or text.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Arnie.
“Same here,” said Will.
“Wow,” said Peter, as they walked to the van.
“Seems like a nice guy.”
“Omigod!” hooted Peter.
“What?” said Will.
Peter halted, grinning, taking Will by the arm and looking around to make sure they were alone.
“OK, here’s why I didn’t just say no,” he said, in an excited whisper. “Arnie and I used to be boyfriends!”
“No way.”
“Yes! A million years ago—for about six months, in college. Before Harold and I signed on the dotted line.”
“Wow.”
“So I didn’t want to just blow him off.”
“Of course not.”
“What a surprise—Arnie!”
“Well, hell, we should have tea with him.”
“Oh, I couldn’t ask you to do that.”
“It’s fine with me. I think it would be fun.”
“Really? You wouldn’t mind?”
“It would give me a chance to see what you saw in him.”
Peter snorted, as if he knew well that that could stand some explanation.
“He used to be so cute . . . !”
“No, I’m sure,” said Will.
“No, that came out wrong. Arnie’s a good composer and a very decent human being.”
“He seems cool. Nice smile.”
“Well, here’s the thing,” burbled Peter. “He was the most amazing kisser. Luscious kisser! It was Arnie who made me realize that sex could be sweet. I think it was the first time I’d ever giggled during sex—ya know?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Instead of that grunting thing—which can be nice, too, of course.”
“Very nice guy. Though definitely not as well taken care of, whatever, as you and Jonathan. But so what?”
“Right. So what?”
They settled into the front seat of the van.
“It’s not like we’re on a fixed schedule tomorrow,” said Will.
“I just don’t want to get home too late,” said Peter.
“Catskill. Where is that?”
“Other side of the river.”
“Fine.”
“Actually, it might work. Lunch with Jonathan, tea with Arnie, and then we can hop on the Thruway. Which might be better for us, anyway—driving home in the dark.”
“There ya go.”
The drive suggested by Jonathan took them home on a scenic route that afforded a succession of splendid river and mountain views. Traffic was practically nonexistent, so Peter found real pleasure in negotiating the road’s gentle ups, downs, and arounds unimpeded, at an appropriately stately speed. Contentedly they ambled over ridges and down into little valleys, along routes that were so well insinuated into the rolling landscape they could only have been built upon ancient paths. They glided through quiet junctions marked by only a house or two; past stretches of field and forest that gave way to grand vistas.
They said little, perhaps a bit talked-out for the moment.
The road, at one point, after curving along the shoulder of a little mountain, brought them over a bridge that spanned a lush ravine. The ravine fell away into a valley whose far side was a hilly landscape entirely of green. It was a view that was more than just pretty, Peter thought: It was deceptively simple, since it described the result of eons of erosion and evolution, ongoing processes that had been basically undisturbed by history. These were hills that had never been cleared or much occupied, and only sporadically visited, ever. They looked now the way they had for centuries. Anyone who had ever driven there, or hiked up there before the road was built, or walked along the Indian path that was there before the road—say, the young local artist who did a series of woodland sketches there in 1853, determined to make his native landscape as famous as Rome’s; or the bootlegger who took shelter in a tent nearby, with a Bible and a bottle of whiskey, after abandoning a thriving business that was raided by state police in 1951; or the housewife who stopped there in a Chevy with another woman’s husband in 1963, after dirty dancing to Perez Prado in a riverfront dive and deciding to drive far from town—all would have seen th
e same view. And Peter had always been clobbered by this sense of conflated eras and possible futures from the views he discovered on drives he made as a restless teenager and from similar views ever since. Rome’s hills might be more marked, storied, mythologized, but these—ushering little streams down toward larger ones, and those, onward toward the Hudson—embodied some of the same glamour as those on the Tiber, suggesting that opulence can gestate among piles of earth even without something physical being built there.
The glamour of a ravine, or a water gap, or a stand of hills derives not only from beauty, after all, but from function—and function can be marvelously unpredictable. Who could have predicted that the hills where Peter grew up, which saw the coming and going of canals and trains and bowling alleys and beauty salons, would also engender Peter and his kind?
This kind of life, this kind of weekend! he kept thinking. How impossible it would have been for my parents to imagine such things, when I was a kid! Yet in some ways this life was always here and I was simply one of those who was able to see it.
A little upstate town overrun by antiques dealers, its main street a strip of shops where everyone spoke gay. Men like Jonathan living in great mansions, and still others in shacks.... Peter was almost afraid to imagine what Arnie’s place was like.
“Should I text Arnie and say we’re coming?” said Peter, breaking a genial silence that had lasted for miles.
“Sure, if you want to,” said Will.
“Maybe four?”
“Sounds good.”
After a few more miles they realized it was later than they thought.
“It’s close now,” said Peter.
The sky was managing to hold on to a bit of its glow, but day had already left the depths of woods and hollows they were passing. They were on the final leg of their drive, before reaching the turnoff to Jonathan’s road, when they rounded a bend and came upon another valley vista, only this one broader. Far below, in a village at the bottom of the valley, lights were coming on, shimmering through the dusk. A radiant strand of highway led from one end of the valley into a bowl of splattered, glittering filaments, and then narrowed again into a strand that disappeared into darkness at the far end of the valley. It was a view of suppers being cooked, homework being done, TV being watched. And Peter wondered, as they passed serenely above the scene, whether the van’s headlights might be visible below, or the echo of its engine audible that far away, across the valley, from someone’s back porch or bedroom window—someone, perhaps, who was conjugating Spanish verbs and wondering where his life would lead. Often as a child, Peter, doing homework at his desk or lying in bed on a spring night, with the window open, listened for the drone of vehicles shifting gears, coming from the highway a mile or so away. The sound, echoing over lawns and rooftops and treetops, was a seductive clarion reminding him of all those who must be traveling toward the main road a few miles beyond, which led to New York and untold, glorious possibilities. As he headed home with Will to dinner, the memory of this sound scalded Peter’s heart with joy, in a crystalline moment suddenly outside of time, where things past and things to come were dazzling facets of a singularity all to be beheld at once. To be this close to love, in a rented van, on a spring evening, was splendor of a type that Peter couldn’t remember the likes of, yet felt he had always known.
Now and Yesterday Page 33
