Now and Yesterday

by Stephen Greco

  “Seems easier.”

  “OK. I don’t even know if they do Sunday returns this late. It’s not like a car rental.”

  “I can drop it off on the way to work.”

  “You’re a champion.”

  Where would they be in a year? Peter wondered. With some lovely memories of their first Thanksgiving and Christmas together, to cherish for years to come? He was glad now that they hadn’t hopped into bed together automatically, months before. That would have been too ordinary a beginning for a relationship so monstrously excellent. In the coming months, there would be plenty of opportunities to get beyond all the scripts and tricks, as they said they wanted to do. And yet Peter might also be able to find some satisfaction with a plain, old-fashioned, Damon and Pythias–level friendship, if the romance didn’t want to come true—if, say, Will, in therapy, didn’t uncover the ability and fortify the desire to love an older man as easily as a younger one.

  Might be able . . .

  Will tried again with the radio and found a good jazz station, so they listened to Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald as they navigated through the mess of city arteries, toward Queens.

  “He kissed your foot?” squealed Luz.

  “Mm-hmm,” said Will.

  “In a nice way?”

  “Yeah. It wasn’t supposed to be hot. It was sweet.”

  “So, no tongue.”

  “Luz!”

  “You guys.”

  “It was lips only, as if he were kissing my hand. It was very courtly, actually.”

  Luz had been working on a brief, when Will came in. The kitchen table was cluttered with law books, and she was in sweats, her hair pinned up in a plastic butterfly clip. Will dropped his bag, got a can of Diet Coke from the refrigerator, and sat down with her.

  “It was a pretty nice weekend,” he said. “The house is insane.”

  “Tell me the short version.”

  “There’s a pool, a full gym, thirty-mile views. Architectural details like you wouldn’t believe. And he has his own film studio up there, Jonathan. Which basically means a room where people come with their laptops, and they sit around and view footage, and talk about it, and edit. Two of them stay right there, in, like, these guest rooms that are part of the studio wing.”

  “Oh, my.”

  Will listed the things they had done: the shopping excursion, the lavish meals, the visit to Catskill.

  “And it was so weird,” he said. “We’re coming across the Triborough Bridge and guess who he gets a call from?”

  “Oh, boy.”

  “The devil in client-form.”

  “McCaw.”

  “Yup. I gather they had a lot of back-and-forth over the weekend, though Peter didn’t let me see any of it. I mean, I think he didn’t want to bother anyone with work. . . .”

  “What was it about? Anything serious?”

  “They were just talking about a meeting with some TV people. I think they’re developing a talk show. But it’s the first I’ve heard of it. And it sounds like Peter’s really close to this guy, and I have to say it makes me feel kinda weird. I mean, you could see that he was stressed or whatever, while he was talking, but he was also sort of sucking up, too, in a way.”

  “That’s his job, dude.”

  “Yeah, but it was a shock, after the weekend. I really thought we were getting to know each other.”

  “You are.”

  “But this thing. He’s working pretty closely with this guy—drawing this big paycheck to do something that’s probably going to be detrimental to the entire human race. I’m not sure I’m in favor of it, Luz.”

  “Well, look . . .”

  “And you know what? I think part of him was glad I saw him take the call. He never talks about this part of his work, and I think he knows it’s a little off, and that I might disapprove, like a lot of people disapprove. So now it’s out in the open, though we really didn’t have any time to get into it. This only just happened! He said we’d talk. And it’s so funny that this was on the same day that we visit his friend in Catskill—the guy who hasn’t compromised his principles one little bit, in his whole life, which of course means that he’s totally poor and completely marginal. But still . . .”

  “Guillermo, with respect, I have to finish this brief.”

  Will rose from the table.

  “I love you,” he said, picking up his bag.

  “I love you,” said Luz.

  Then, heading off, Will shook his head. “To live through AIDS, only to be seduced by the dark side,” he said.

  “Then you’ll save him.”

  “I’m not sure that’s my job,” said Will.

  “Right. Your job right now is to let me work.”

  CHAPTER 19

  “You kissed his foot?”

  “I sure did.”

  “I’m so jealous!”

  “Oh, come on . . . ,” said Peter, giving Tyler’s shoeless foot a playful tug. They were sitting on the wooden floor of a loft in Bushwick, in socks, scattered about the space with twenty or so others, waiting for a dance performance to begin. Or maybe it had begun, since the performers were already sitting and lying on the floor among them, in rehearsal attire, stretching, warming up, and sometimes talking quietly to each other—passively acknowledging the presence of an audience, but not engaging any onlookers too directly.

  “No, I know I have to live with these feelings, somehow.”

  “We must go on.”

  Audience members continued to chat quietly among themselves, in advance of some cue from the lighting or the dancers that the performance was elevating.

  The loft, which was called the Performance Research Collaborative, a name that certainly sounded like it belonged to a public space, was also clearly someone’s home. A stove, a sink, and a shelf of provisions were tucked into a corner behind the young woman seated at the door, who was taking people’s $12 admissions, asking them to remove their shoes, and directing them to install themselves on the floor “anywhere in the space.” It was in a former factory building that was one of the few structures still standing within those several blocks of Bushwick—the others having been torched during the blackout riots of ’77, then pulled down and not replaced with anything. Decades later, that whole edge of the neighborhood was still mostly abandoned. Even the trees were gone, though here and there, amid crumbling pavement, saplings and bushes pushed up boisterously. Where buildings had once been, there were now barely discernable lots, which Peter guessed might not even be technically anyone’s property; nor was there much rubble, or even cyclone fencing, or indeed people to be kept out of any particular patch of scraped-bare terrain, except the lone other soul who got off the same train as Peter and headed in the same direction. Peter had thought Tyler was kidding, earlier that day, when they agreed to meet at the performance and Tyler said, “When you come out of the subway, just look for the building.” In fact, Peter took the train, instead of a car, only to see what it would be like to emerge from underground into an apocalypscape stretching into the distance, empty except for a boxy fortress a hundred yards away, whose third-floor corner windows beaconed light weakly into the dusk.

  “I think he sees that I’m wounded,” said Peter. “Which is, you know, a nice starting point.”

  “I see that, too, Peter,” burbled Tyler. “You’re a total wreck!”

  Peter laughed. Some of the dancers were standing now, but people were still talking. From his spot on the floor Peter also saw that the loft’s windows faced Manhattan. A frieze of Midtown skyline postured above the sill.

  “So can you come with me to this McCaw dinner?” whispered Peter.

  “I told you, I have a performance that night,” said Tyler.

  “Please! Can’t you get out of it?”

  “Of course not. Why don’t you take Will, anyway? Or a woman. Wouldn’t this be the kind of thing to which you take a lady?”

  “That’s just what I’m supposed to do! The gay guy brings a terrific dame who d
oesn’t mind if he’s discreetly introduced to someone special. That won’t give me the protection I need!”

  “I see, and I would.”

  “A man would, yes.”

  “Take Will.”

  “I’m afraid to ask him. I don’t think he likes McCaw.”

  “No one does. You don’t, even.”

  “Still.”

  The dancers started moving, slowly, randomly, with seemingly uninflected, everyday little gestures. Sometimes they addressed each other with simple statements that described their position or perhaps existence itself—“I’m here now,” “This is us, in here”—or they addressed audience members the same way. People responded with the kind of smiley, unbroken eye contact meant to both constitute and signal rapt attention. There was no other sound except the occasional creaking of the floor. It was a very quiet, gentle, un-frontal, even ungelled type of performance that might better be described as an exercise or a ritual, Peter thought, since it seemed unguided by any plan of development or complication that would have yielded an actual composition. Instead, the performance seemed to aspire to the state of a condition. A peaceable regard among dancers and audience members seemed to be the point of it, a mutual limning and observance of certain rules of conduct in the actual coming together. And in this way, of course, Peter felt the performance, though not theatrically riveting, to be well worth the journey to Bushwick, since it was an advance look at a kind of social research of which the wider world might not receive word or benefit for years—and this could prove useful in serving certain brands, if American behavior continued to move in the bovine direction it had been moving for years.

  Moreover, thought Peter, it was bracing to think of this genial ceremony taking place in the middle of such a barren district, in a room that once thundered with industrial knitting machines. Did it represent the end of a great strain of culturally critical performance art, that had begun so disruptively and subversively in the ’60s with happenings and such, and was now petering out like a plague that had evolved beyond virulence? Maybe. But it was also fun to sit shoeless on the floor with young folks, as in a kind of religious observance, observing rules of humility that presented themselves as rules of hospitality.

  The performance wound down with the dancers returning to their original positions and becoming still. And then, with a cue that came not from the lighting but from the dancers’ faces, reflecting the transition from one kind of presence to another, people knew that the performance was over. They warmly applauded and the dancers warmly acknowledged, then the audience rose and everyone greeted one another warmly.

  Tyler congratulated one of the female dancers who happened to be standing near him and Peter, then Tyler directed Peter’s attention to one of the male dancers, a lithe, muscular redhead who was talking to admirers on the other side of the room.

  “Cute, right?” he said. He had bumped Peter’s knee during the performance, when the dancer, in a stretchy T-shirt and knit cutoffs, had come particularly close to them.

  “Is that your friend?” said Peter.

  “No, no, Leah is over there,” said Tyler, turning to catch the eye of a tall blond woman who was with a group near the door. He waved and she waved back, meaning that they would be speaking as soon as the pointedly unhurried, post-performance mingle allowed.

  Then the dancer they liked was standing right next to them, talking to a gaggle of gay friends who had obviously come to see and support him; and soon enough he was accepting Tyler’s congratulations.

  “You guys were great!”

  “Thank you,” said the dancer, with a shy smile. His hair was in attractively messy ringlets. He suddenly seemed gay himself, and no longer only the generically gorgeous human being that dancers sometimes embody.

  “You work with Miguel, don’t you?” said Tyler, prompting a few words about a young, it-boy choreographer and his excitingly “transgressive” process.

  “He was totally smiling at you,” said Tyler, after the dancer went off and they were making their way toward Leah.

  “He was not,” said Peter. “He was just being nice. Very sweet smile.”

  “He was into you. You should have said something.”

  “Nooo . . .”

  “He has a thing for daddies. I can tell.”

  Peter gave Tyler a push. He had always thought of himself as shy, but in truth, since becoming older, Peter had learned to be cautious in dealing with younger men. One was no longer an equal with everyone else. One didn’t want to put anyone in an uncomfortable spot with an overture, nor, of course, did one want to be rejected. Yet just as he had been getting comfortable with caution, Peter discovered that some younger men really did like older men. It was a fact he now took seriously, even if it did mean learning how to spot the ones who fetishized an older man in an unconscious attempt, perhaps, to avoid developing their own identity, power, and income.

  Leah was still revved from the performance. She said the audience had been larger that evening and the performance “more intense” than it had been the night before. She explained that the text had been developed during improvs, with contributions from the dancers; it was sometimes hard to dance and talk at the same time, she said. And at some point, the conversation was joined by three other dancers, including the young man Peter and Tyler liked.

  “Do you see a lot of dance?” the dancer asked Peter, while Tyler continued to talk with Leah and others.

  “Yeah, a bunch,” said Peter. “You know—ballet, too.”

  “Cool.”

  Peter was surprised by the dancer’s interest and friendliness.

  “I mean, Tyler’s a performer, too,” said Peter, “so he’s always telling me about things I should see.”

  “I know. I’ve seen his work.”

  “They did this thing last fall at Rico’s, the company he works with. . . .”

  “Right, right,” said the dancer, naming the company’s director. “You must see everything he does.”

  “I dunno—I guess,” said Peter, suddenly realizing that the dancer might be wondering if he and Tyler were a couple. “Since we’re coworkers, I try to see what I can, but sometimes it’s hard.”

  “Yeah, sure . . .”

  They exchanged a few more words, then the dancer asked Peter to wait while he went to fetch a flyer for an upcoming performance he was in. When he put the flyer into Peter’s hand, he extended a sincere-sounding invitation to come and see the show. Peter said he would try.

  Later, on the way back into the city, Peter told Tyler that he would never have approached the dancer, let alone have been able to recognize the dancer’s interest in him, without Tyler’s gentle hint. And though this thing with Will precluded any additional complication, it was nice to feel in the game.

  “See what I’m sayin’?” said Tyler.

  The incident also helped Peter see that Tyler’s own long-professed interest in him might be more than just a fetish-fueled “boss” thing—which Peter found touching, though he didn’t mention this to Tyler.

  Peter did ask Will to go with him to Henderson McCaw’s dinner party and Will reluctantly agreed. Peter said that a rising editor should include purely social evenings like this one in his busy schedule, if possible, especially since McCaw would undoubtedly be sophisticated enough to surround himself with a wide range of interesting people and not simply fellow ideologues. But Peter was wrong. The guests turned out to be mostly ideologues and funders—a money crowd, more than a social one, though the evening was not a fund-raiser per se, but a perk for people who had made substantial donations to McCaw’s foundation and were expected to do so again. Except for Peter and Will, it was thirty garden-variety New York blue chippers, skewing toward Palm Beach and a bit toward Palm Springs; and in a sense the evening felt like the anti-Bushwick, in that everyone in attendance was as far from bovine as possible. With scorching immodesty, they smiled and swanned and with the practiced cordiality of their kind bristled with quiet aggression that reveals itself not onl
y through the generic cheer of the salon but the choreography it takes to carry off expensive clothing, jewelry, hair, shoes, and face work.

  McCaw’s home, too, had been built as the setting for performance, meant, like so much New York architecture, to showcase wealth in action. It was an enormous limestone Beaux Arts mansion on Seventy-third Street, a few doors from Fifth Avenue. Actually the family home of McCaw’s wife, Jenna, the house was built by Jenna’s great-grandfather, a prominent tin magnate, in 1903, though over the years family members had moved away; and until McCaw and Jenna moved in, a few years before, in anticipation of McCaw’s bid for national attention, the place had been occupied only by Jenna’s brother, who lived alone upstairs, in a top-floor apartment. From the street, the house was imposing: a rusticated ground floor whose unframed windows, capped with muscular keystones and voussoirs, contrasted with the more delicately fluted, black-and-white marble columns and balconied cornice of the portico; a piano nobile boasting three towering windows with cornices supported by voluted brackets with pendant garlands; a third story of three square windows with punchy, shouldered frames; and above that, for the recessed fourth floor, a balustrade spanning the entire width of the façade.

  “Nice place,” said Will, when he and Will pulled up in the town car that Peter had hired for the evening.

  “Lord,” said Peter.

  “What did you expect?”

  They were both in black tie—Peter in a standard Brooks Brothers tuxedo, Will in a black Prada suit he’d accessorized with a pair of brand-new, blindingly white Chuck Taylor basketball sneaks. Peter had chuckled over Will’s outfit when he ducked into the backseat of the car earlier that evening, after the car had gone ahead to collect Will.

  “Cute,” said Peter, settling in and giving Will’s knee a rub and a pat.

  “Thanks,” said Will. “I couldn’t do the standard thing. My tux is so old.”

  “Very creative. I wish I could get away with something like that.”

  Will’s hair had a bit more pop than usual—a bit more volume, deeper color saturation.