Now and Yesterday

by Stephen Greco

  “Be nice,” said Will.

  It was a modest, one-story cottage tucked into a mass of ill-tended hemlock bushes and old beech trees. The rain coming down on all those leaves sounded like applause over machine-gun fire.

  “You made it,” shouted Arnie, as Peter and Will dashed up a weed-edged path of stone and gravel to the porch. The yard was a swath of overgrown green that might once have been lawn, patched with humus-layered bare spots under the bushes and trees.

  “Yeah,” said Peter. “Easy drive.”

  “C’mon in,” said Arnie.

  The orange-gingery scent that greeted them inside reminded Peter of Old Spice. Two big brown pit bulls bounded over to welcome the guests eagerly, as shoes were wiped and jackets taken.

  “Don’t worry, they’re very friendly,” said Arnie. “Gustav and Alma. Big sweetie pies.”

  Will knelt down to greet and fondle the dogs, which were delighted with the attention.

  The cottage had been a summer place for a New York family, built in the ’20s, explained Arnie. It had been winterized in the ’60s by the professor from whom he bought it.

  “Very nice,” said Peter, looking around.

  “Thanks,” said Arnie. “Look around, make yourselves comfortable. I’m just putting the water in the pot.” Though the day was cool and wet, Arnie was wearing a pair of cargo shorts with his hoodie and T-shirt, and a pair of clogs with thick gray socks.

  The place was homey in a cute-bordering-on-kitsch way. In the living room, a crowd of mismatched bookcases laden with books, CDs, and mementos was accented with aggressively charming accessories like a blue glass vase in the shape of a violin and a pair of vintage paint-by-number landscapes in shadowbox frames. The room’s color scheme—cornflower blue for the painted wood floors, maize for the walls—appeared to be taken from the Mexican folk art retablo that was displayed prominently on a cabinet. The furniture included several handsome mid-century modern pieces, but it was clear from the haphazard way they and the rest of Arnie’s things were arranged that he was more of an accumulator than a collector.

  He came back with a tray of tea and cookies, and they installed themselves around the coffee table. The dogs trotted off to another room.

  “Some of this stuff was Professor Birdwell’s,” said Arnie, about the furniture. “He and his wife were serious modernists. I just liked it, and it’s pretty well made. I see stuff just like this on Warren Street for prices I can’t believe.”

  “It’s great,” said Will.

  “Had to replace the windows a few years ago. The roof is next.”

  “Eww, big job,” said Peter.

  “It’s always something,” said Arnie. “I’d love to do the kitchen one day—not that I’m much of a cook.”

  Through a doorway Peter could see what must be Arnie’s den, with an upright piano piled with sheet music.

  “So you guys had a good weekend?” said Arnie.

  “Pretty good, yeah,” said Peter. “Lots of eating and cooking . . .”

  “And talking,” said Will.

  “Cool.”

  “We took an amazing drive. Gorgeous country.”

  “And Jonathan showed us a bit of the film he’s working on,” said Peter.

  “Oh?” said Arnie. “What’s it about?”

  “Good question. I guess it’s about life—gay life. American gay life. Nominally, it’s about Connor Frankel.”

  “What? The artist?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s lending his name to a gay-identified project?”

  “It’s kind of about him. He’s coming out.”

  “Will wonders never cease?” said Arnie. “I thought he was pretty closeted.”

  “He was, for the first eighty years of his life,” said Peter. “I gather he’s decided to make a change.”

  “Well, good for him,” said Arnie. “The titan takes a baby step.”

  “People will go at their own pace, won’t they,” observed Peter.

  “I guess,” said Arnie. “But I’ve always felt a little—what?—judgmental about people like that. And him in particular. Supposedly such a revolutionary, a fearless innovator!—pfff! More like a big coward.”

  “That could be a little . . . ,” began Peter.

  “Harsh? I know,” laughed Arnie. “As you see, I have a little anger around this.” His manner in expressing such a strong condemnation was oddly jolly. Peter remembered this about him—the mixture of cheer and the doctrinaire.

  “But c’mon,” continued Arnie, “if you get married and are so out of touch with your soul that you wake up to it only when you have grandchildren—I mean, I guess I can have some pity for you and the fact that you missed half your life. Now, if you know what you want, like Frankel, and have lovers, and simply choose to keep it secret because of some pact with polite society, then that’s reprehensible. I hafta conclude that you don’t take your soul very seriously, and I have to wonder what kind of art comes out of that.”

  “Sure,” said Peter, “but you do have to admit, some pretty un-together people have made some pretty good art over the years, haven’t they?”

  “I suppose you’re right,” said Arnie. And then he directed an aside to Will: “I came out in 1968 and expected the whole world to be out by 1970.”

  Laughter all around—which gave Peter a moment to wonder if the cheer in Arnie’s manner had given way to a certain kind of smugness in the politically correct. Their generation had forged politically correct as a tool of revolution, but now that the revolution had been superseded by something else, those who still wielded the tool without a little irony looked a little pathetic, even if, to an old comrade, the act also nostalgically evoked the heady aspirations of exciting times. In fact, thought Peter, Arnie had probably undermined himself with that attitude, over the years, among New York’s cultural elite, despite his musical talent. Smugness, like a hundred other personality traits, can cause someone to pass on a project without ever explaining why, sometimes without their even knowing why. A pass can be as simple as an instinct about the other person—unconscious, yet decisive. And even when people are conscious of what they consider to be flaws in other people’s personalities, they rarely take it upon themselves to advise or instruct, leaving the others without the benefit of input that just might—if they happen to be open to it—help them improve their karma. Thus, whatever people like Arnie tell themselves about why a project or career didn’t work out—“I was too smart!” “I was too nice!”—the explanation remains conveniently untested.

  “So you guys know each other from back in the day?” said Will.

  “So long ago,” said Arnie.

  “Before New York,” said Peter. “Ithaca.”

  “Mrs. Beddoes’s rooming house.”

  “Oh my goodness, right!” Peter had forgotten the name, but remembered the third-floor room of the big white house just off campus, where he and Arnie had spent a whole day and night in Arnie’s clanky metal bed, first getting to know each other. Arnie’s hair was long and luxuriously black back then, scented with musk oil.

  “And then you knew each other in New York, in the seventies?”

  “Yup,” said Arnie.

  “What was it like, back then? How were things different—I mean, for gay men? I try to get Peter to talk about this all the time, but he’s so buttoned-up.”

  Peter made a face in quizzical amusement, but remained silent. Was this an interviewer’s tactic for drawing out a subject? An appeal to the obvious professorial side of Arnie, inviting him to lecture?

  “Everything’s changed and nothing’s changed,” pronounced Arnie, with something between a smile and a sneer.

  “There must have been this amazing moment right after liberation, but before AIDS,” said Will. “Not just for sex, but the whole idea of gay culture. I would love to know how it was—how it changed you.”

  Peter and Arnie looked at each other, each expecting the other to make a comment. Then Peter spoke.

  “Well
, it may have changed people in different ways,” he said, the slight pause following this diplomatic statement allowing him to register the fact that here, unlike in Jonathan’s much solider house, he could hear the rain pounding on the roof and the windows. It had been raining, too, he remembered, on that day in Ithaca when he and Arnie first got to know each other. Under a single umbrella—a broad, striped thing meant for golf, that Peter brought with him to college—they walked back to Arnie’s house after a sculpture class. The pounding rain made the umbrella sound like a drum. Their sneakers got soaked and so did the bottoms of their jeans, but that was OK. Then, in Arnie’s room, after some mint tea and talk of Rome and a song that Arnie had set to a poem of Auden’s, which he rendered a cappella, they lay in bed for hours, naked, kissing and touching, being happy with just being close, because it felt so marvelous. And though the little romance didn’t last more than a few weeks, it gave Peter a chance to be himself for the first time in his life and the faith that someone like Harold might be out there. And then, all of a sudden, there Harold was.

  “Honestly,” said Arnie, “I would say that I was so elated by those first years in New York that what came afterward totally shell-shocked me.”

  “Really?” said Will.

  “It was like the revolution I had believed in failed, or was hijacked by AIDS,” continued Arnie. “And then, after we battled for AIDS awareness, the emotional response brought acceptance for gay men on completely different terms from the ones we formulated.”

  “What terms did you want?” asked Will.

  “Oh, you know,” said Arnie, looking at Peter, who smirked and nodded. “Against the patriarchy. Certainly not conventional marriage, condoned by church, state, and the IRS. We were looking toward some other bond among men, something truer.” He air-quoted “truer.”

  “Ah,” said Will.

  “Something more about brown rice and plaid flannel shirts,” said Peter.

  More laughter.

  “How long have you been here?” said Will.

  “In Catskill? Since eighty-four,” said Arnie.

  “May I ask why you left New York?”

  “It’s complicated,” said Arnie, who went on to decry the violence and filth of the city back in those days, and the fear of an unknown killer of gay men that added to the tension of city life. He said he wouldn’t have admitted it then, but it was a kind of lack of stamina that caused him to leave New York. Living there and then was “too hard for an unambitious dreamer” who had grown up in modest circumstances in suburban Long Island.

  “And I didn’t love the kind of gay life I found in the city, either,” he said. “It was all about Broadway and Fire Island. And in serious musical circles, then, even if you were gay you had to be a real, quote-unquote, gentleman—preferably Episcopalian, possibly Presbyterian.”

  “Really?” said Will.

  “All that decorum crap,” said Arnie. “I have a bit of the Radical Faerie in me, Will. I’m Jewish, my parents were lower-middle class, I wasn’t that cute—unlike the adorable creature you see before you now. I didn’t fit into A-list circles or any other circles I could find. I knew a few people from college, but I never felt like they were my crowd. In fact, what I felt was that I couldn’t keep up with the clothes, and the hair, and the accessories of the people who I thought were my crowd. . . .” He paused. “Everything was about conspicuous consumption. Just like now.”

  “That’s what America is,” said Peter.

  “Is it?” said Arnie. “I didn’t think it had to be.”

  “Sounds like you don’t miss New York, then,” said Will.

  “Not really,” said Arnie. “I was priced out of it.”

  “That place on Cornelia!” said Peter.

  Arnie shuddered. “The tub in the kitchen!” he said. “The day I got up and found a dying mouse in my coffee cup, I knew I had to get out of there. And even that was expensive, for the time.”

  “You wouldn’t believe what they’re charging for co-ops on Cornelia now,” said Peter. “A studio in that same building was like a million dollars! It’s all renovated.”

  “Of course it is,” said Arnie. “The whole island of Manhattan is. Mazel tov.”

  “What about the music, the concerts?” said Will.

  “We have concerts here,” said Arnie, expansively. “And though I still live in poverty, at least my poverty is genteel.”

  Peter and Will demurred.

  “No, I live like I want,” said Arnie, “even if it is on the edge of what passes for reality.”

  “How so?” said Will.

  “The Real Housewives of Fire Island Pines, or whatever they call it,” said Arnie.

  Will laughed.

  “The A-List,” he said.

  “That’s reality,” said Arnie.

  Peter felt a kind of pride when it dawned on him that it was Will who was driving the conversation. Whether Will was acting the reporter out of awkwardness or a genuine interest in history, it was nice to see him taking part in this visit between old friends as a peer. And it was nice to see Arnie, for his part, according Will the respect due a friend of Peter’s, even a boyfriend. Arnie might well assume they were boyfriends, Peter thought, and if the subject came up and Will felt like going into detail, well, that might prove amusing.

  But the subject didn’t come up. The three chatted on for almost two hours, about this and that, and then, when Arnie offered to switch from tea to wine, Peter suggested it was time to get going.

  “I wanted to know if he had a boyfriend,” said Peter, when they were back in the van, heading toward the Thruway.

  “I know—me too!” said Will. “I didn’t know how to ask!”

  “We’re such pussies.”

  “I could live that way, though. It looks comfortable enough. Quiet. Maybe fewer things.”

  “Right? Underheated rooms, broken-in furniture . . .”

  “Floors you have to sweep twice a day, because you keep your boots on inside the house . . .”

  “Well, maybe not that rustic.”

  Will laughed.

  “I’d need a mudroom,” he said.

  “And better china,” said Peter. “I don’t know what to make of a teapot shaped like a kitty with its paw up.”

  “But seriously, I’m glad we stopped.”

  “Good.”

  “He’s an interesting guy. Remember, for you, queer theory is the residue of something you lived through. For me, it’s a college course that I always felt should mean more to me than it did. Until today. I mean, it was like meeting someone from Pompeii who could tell you about the volcano.”

  “Ouch,” said Peter.

  “You know what I mean.”

  The rain continued, heavy at times. Night came and took away all views but that of the highway. Traffic was thick and moved slowly—in front of them, a trail of glaring red and, to the left, a surge of piercing white, snapping into focus for a second through the windshield, as the wipers swept across, then instantly blurry. The occasional thwunk of spray from a passing truck, hitting the van broadside, punctuated the chorus of shhsss from everybody’s tires.

  The texture of reality felt different, too—and how could it not feel so, at the end of such a weekend? Things were palpably more intimate between Peter and Will, not just because of the specific experiences they had had together, but because they had agreed, tacitly, again and again, to have so many experiences together in so short a time. They had made the Pact of Frequent Reconnection and passed through the Portal of Constant Company, and were now in a dimension that only partly resembled the one they’d left on Friday. They were a thing now. The weekend had revealed this.

  Now and then, Will fiddled with his iPod and the radio, but couldn’t find anything they wanted to hear. Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Massenet, and world news all seemed wrong. Highway noise made listening difficult, anyway. Sporadically, they talked about things like Oscar nominations and tourism in space, but then were silent for long stretches, and Peter liked those
stretches. There were plenty of things to say, about work, and summer plans, maybe even Will’s therapy, but they would all be said in time, now that they were a thing. Silence was good—a new construction between them that itself provided a kind of communication.

  As he drove, and Will began to doze, Peter fantasized that he and Will were boyfriends.

  Here I am returning to the city after a weekend in the country with my boyfriend—my boyfriend who is asleep in the other seat. My tall and handsome boyfriend, with the gray-blue eyes and the amazing calves . . .

  The fantasy was as delicious as a comic book yarn. Will’s legs were stretched in front of him and his hands were kind of tucked between them.

  He’s so cute, the way he sleeps. Still so neatly put together! This is precious cargo I’m carrying—my boyfriend. So I have to drive that much more safely. I am responsible for his life, and that’s an amazing responsibility to have, all of a sudden!

  It was such a different feeling from all the mooning and obsessing Peter had been doing over Will.

  What would his family say if we were in an accident and I was responsible for Will’s death or something? They don’t know who the hell I am. “Who is this guy?” they’d wonder. “What was Will doing with him?”

  He was the new boyfriend! They were a thing.

  Mile after mile, traffic grew heavier. Civilization became denser and traffic signs more frequent—as legible in the bad weather as they were designed to be, those lovely, helpful poems in a typeface Peter knew was called Clearview, floating in reflective fields of Strong Green, also known as RGB #0, 153, 0.

  Will woke when Peter took the van onto the shoulder, in a small detour around roadwork. Glare from the banks of work lights outside, as well as from traffic in both directions, now squeezed closer for the detour, lit up the inside of the van.

  “Where are we?” said Will, adjusting himself in his seat. Their heads glowed theatrically in the harsh light.

  “Yonkers,” said Peter.

  “Cool.”

  It was around nine.

  “I thought we’d swing over to Astoria and drop you, then I can go on to Brooklyn.”

  “And return the van tomorrow?”