Now and Yesterday

by Stephen Greco

  “Oh, my.”

  “Bach, Schubert, and Britten. The details are a surprise.”

  “OK.”

  “I want people to have a nice time remembering me, including you and your boyfriend.”

  “I know it’ll be beautiful. Who’s the tenor?”

  “Don’t change the subject,” said Jonathan, glaring.

  “What—Will?” said Peter.

  “Don’t tell me you fucked it up.”

  “No, I haven’t fucked it up. I think it’s happening, for real.”

  A gurgle arose from Jonathan’s throat that sounded like satisfaction.

  “You were so afraid, for so long,” he mused.

  “That’s right, I was,” said Peter. “I still am.”

  “Lose that,” snapped Jonathan, sternly. The normality of boy talk seemed to animate him.

  “I’m trying,” said Peter.

  “You went for it—that’s good. I never could, after Roberto.”

  “No?”

  “Didn’t know how.”

  “But you’re so good at taking care of yourself.”

  “In some ways.”

  Peter remembered wondering, when Roberto died, where Jonathan would find another man so matched with him in disposition. Roberto was a cultivated Mexican, from a Jewish family of means. They had met in Paris, while Jonathan was doing a film there, and immediately bonded. Everyone knew their relationship was epically correct. Jonathan may have been from a poor family and Roberto from a rich one, yet the critical mass of arcane interests and refined tastes between them meant a thousand possibilities. Starting with Paris—and a visit to a tiny Grand Guignol museum, which each was thrilled the other knew about—they began turning those possibilities into a life together, and continued to do so for fifteen years.

  Love had never happened again for Jonathan, though he hadn’t looked for it nearly as hard as Peter had. And when he looked, he said, he had no luck. He once described breaking up with a guy because he’d met his parents and saw, in their commonness and sloth, the kind of “programming” the guy would have to be battling his entire life, which would undoubtedly limit anything the two of them would be able to cook up together.

  “Harold was kee . . . kee . . . he was kee-ping you from it,” slurred Jonathan, with some effort.

  “Sorry, Jon?”

  “You should have asked Harold if it was OK.”

  Peter was startled.

  “Actually, Harold gave me explicit permission, one day in the hospital,” he said. “A month before he died.”

  “Did you listen to him?”

  Peter said nothing

  “You didn’t, did you?” said Jonathan. “Because only after he was dead were you the per . . . per . . . the per-fect boyfriend!”

  Peter didn’t know what to say. Though dementia wasn’t exactly an either/or thing, he realized Jonathan might be cycling into another episode.

  “You didn’t listen to him well enough, Peter,” continued Jonathan. “But you still can. Here, let me ask him.”

  What?

  Jonathan closed his eyes and was silent for a moment. Then he opened them and spoke with oracular clarity. “He says fine.”

  The words struck with the force of a supernatural pronouncement, even if they’d been meant partly as a joke.

  “Good. Thank you,” said Peter. The response was reflexive, yet he searched Jonathan’s eyes for something beyond the bewilderment and fatigue that had taken hold there. He remembered this kind of moment from twenty-five years before and other friends. Can the dying see more clearly than the rest of us? Did being close to death afford a view of aspects of life that are normally hidden or ignored? Jonathan might well have connected mystically with some spirit or energy of Harold, and Peter, fighting the urge to ponder the metaphysics of it, thought he should stay open to that possibility.

  “Now promise me something,” said Jonathan.

  “Of course,” said Peter.

  “Forgive the boy his stuff. People do cra . . . cra . . . cra-zy things.”

  Whatever that means.

  “OK.”

  “Remember.”

  “I will.”

  “OK.”

  Suddenly, Peter was afraid he might be wearing Jonathan out. The visit had gone on for some time and must be extremely taxing.

  “Jon, when can I come and see you again?”

  His friend didn’t answer.

  “Jon?” Peter said.

  But Jonathan had fallen asleep again and Peter didn’t want to wake him.

  CHAPTER 24

  As Peter drove back to the city, his thoughts roiled like the storm clouds of a sped-up computer model of bad weather. Jonathan would soon die, and so, for that matter, would everybody else. The variables governing the weather in which Peter found himself were few and clear: Life is dangerous, people are fragile, the clock is ticking. Of course, while one computer model saw blobs of darkness swirling messily to engulf everything, another saw them dissipating. Depending on how one chose to weight the variables, a storm could turn out different ways. Oddly, during inclement moments like this, Peter had always been able to “choose” faith in his own survival. Not that he believed he’d outlive anyone or evade his share of suffering; he simply found himself grateful for being called to witness life’s true nature, including its menace, and that gratitude helped sustain him. He found it easy at such times—necessary, actually—to remember what a yoga instructor once told him: Blessings are like solar winds; they just keep blowing from the direction of God, no matter what shape the planet or its people are in. You could always lift your head and smile into the wind.

  At the age of almost sixty, Peter understood his ability to carry on as a kind of optimism he’d been born with—and yet, almost comically, this now seemed a tinier part of the human drama than he’d ever imagined. Who cared if he could carry on? What did it matter if he did? Humanity was more fucked than ever. The torture on Jonathan’s face continued to haunt Peter, as he drove. Should he have stayed in Hudson to hold his friend’s hand, or would that have hindered the symphony of palliation Aldebar had programmed? Should he try to hope, since there was no other hope, that an end would come soon? Most Americans sheltered themselves from these kinds of thoughts, anymore. That was their optimism. Death had been banished from sight, and the blessings we create for ourselves—entertainments and amusements, products and media, totems and fetishes—had pulled our attention away from the eternal flow from the beyond.

  Funny, thought Peter. People were horrified by the massive planetary transformations of the so-called Anthropocene era, yet weren’t the biggest changes not in the environment, but in the species itself? “Lifestyle” was replacing “life,” and that was shifting the nature of human nature itself. In the computer model of human evolution, the substitution of variables like “the wrong accessory” for “death,” and “the eternal bemusing present” for “time,” were transforming everything. When run today, sped-up, the model resulted not in swirling blobs of darkness but pretty pinwheels, and daisies, and paisleys that effloresced hypnotically until . . . they flickered into nothingness.

  And gays are such a willing part of it!

  Even as a child, in the 1950s, Peter knew what he was and understood the fucked-up messages about it that were coded into sitcom characters, neighbors’ jokes, and books he found in the adult section of the public library. Coming out in the ’60s was therefore not only a personal act, but a critique of civilization, too. He’d marched through the streets with hundreds of others, in the first wave of gay liberation, his fist thrust high in the air, so he shook his head now, at times, to see a world in which gays were not only accepted but rushed into contract for scoring top Nielsen ratings on reality TV shows in which they did things like pick out colors for their big, fat, gay weddings.

  “Peach or apricot? Bra-ad, help me . . . !”

  Mystical constructions like the gay imagination and ancient traditions of sacred otherness had been kicked to the
curb in the race for acceptance as a demographic; it was an old story. The mystical strain could always be dormant instead of dead, yet the point was that gay men, as a culture, had given up acting on that strain, except perhaps to mourn it on some deep, unconscious level, while the party chugged on.

  Not dormant here, though, Peter thought. All that critique stuff still feels pretty adult to me, pretty big. . . . These weddings are like elementary school social studies projects.

  Jonathan had stayed true, in his way. Peter felt so proud of him. Witnessing his decline, though terrible, was also somehow a blessing—the shock of it alone, a salutary thing. Didn’t the mind need to reboot periodically? Didn’t it evolve that way—reconstituting normal perception and cogitation time after time, following mind-smashing crises like famines and wars? Churchgoing afforded a weak version of the process through denatured, weekly ritual; so, in its way, did all-night dancing and drugging. Except for terrorist attacks and crashes of the economy—behind the fear of which was thus perhaps the wish!—we have precious few cataclysms to cue a restorative reboot nowadays, except the occasional death of a prince.

  Peter had only been home for an hour when Aldebar called to say that Jonathan had died.

  “It was easy,” said Aldebar. “He didn’t suffer at all.”

  Peter was shocked and he wasn’t. His face immediately screwed into a grimace.

  “What happened?” he said.

  “He . . . just fell asleep and didn’t wake up. I was with him.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “No.”

  Peter sank into one of the armchairs, as a wave of numbness engulfed him. He could hear Aldebar speak and he couldn’t.

  “It was very peaceful.”

  “Should I come back?”

  “No, no need. We can handle everything. I know he was very happy he was able to see you, at the end.”

  “Well, yes—I was, too.”

  “I’m very sorry, Peter. I know it’s a great loss.”

  “Thank you, Aldebar. I know the loss is yours, too.”

  “Thank you for saying that. I’ll let you know about the arrangements. As you know, he made a lot of the plans himself.”

  “Yes. But let me know if I can help with anything.”

  “Certainly.”

  After the call, Peter just sat there, with no music and no beverage, in a state that involved both thinking and not thinking. It was the beginning of adjustment to a world that no longer included his best friend—a process he knew, as with each of the previous friends he’d lost, would take the rest of his life.

  Presently, with a vehemence that reflected both rage and the tender memory of love, Peter reached up to the shoulder of his shirt and tore the sleeve half off at the seam, and in doing so popped a button off the front. The button flew across the room and landed on the floor with a soft tckk sound. And Peter continued to sit there, staring at the button, the torn sleeve hanging away from his shoulder like some kind of puny, vestigial, blue-and-green-striped wing.

  Will was on a photo shoot that day, in a studio complex in the far west Village. The subject was a nineteen-year-old ballerina Will had interviewed a week before, for a feature—a beautiful soloist in a major company, who was getting plum roles and said to be on her way to stardom as a principal. When Will arrived, five minutes late, he was chagrinned to find the shoot already behind schedule. The supposedly hot, new, up-and-coming photographer to whom Olivier had assigned the shoot was still futzing around with boxes on tripods that should already have been set by the time stated on the call sheet. The photographer was bossing around his two assistants imperiously, though with comments too vague to help them know exactly what he wanted, and he was doing nothing to create a collegial atmosphere among the others on set—editors and stylists, hair and makeup people—all of whom seemed uncomfortably idle. The poor ballerina was sitting in the studio’s kitchen area, in a robe, her hair and makeup done, waiting patiently to be called, talking with her publicist over little cups of espresso.

  “Max, didn’t we say we were eliminating the, uh . . . you know,” said the photographer, wagging his finger indeterminately at a wide swath of studio. “Isn’t there, I dunno, some dead over there.... ?”

  Max looked confounded, but countered with some specific suggestions that sounded right to Will.

  “I mean, seriously, boss. It’s the key there, the secondary there, and some backfill—right?” said Max, pointing. “Assuming she’s standing there . . . Is that where you want her?”

  The photographer, model-handsome himself, looked undecided—a bad sign, especially at the top of a shoot.

  “Christine . . . ?” said the photographer. But the stylist, who had the clothes ready for the first setup, wasn’t responsible for setting up the shot, nor did she seem happy to note the creative void left by the photographer’s lack of direction. She was French and made a very French expression that seemed to combine disdain with readiness to cooperate, once there was a plan.

  Will knew he had to act. The words of his former employer, the publishing company head, about stepping up with one’s own authority, rang in his head. After a few words with the ballerina, he marched over to the photographer and introduced himself.

  “So, Mark, are we ready?” said Will.

  “It’s not quite working . . . ,” moaned Mark, watching Max shift a light slightly to the left.

  “What’s the setup?” said Will.

  “We’re almost there . . . ,” mumbled Mark.

  “The blue Versace,” said the stylist. “This is what we talked about. . . .”

  “Thank you,” said Will.

  “OK,” said Mark.

  “OK, you know what, people?” said Will, clapping his hands. “We’re starting.” He stepped to the center of the studio and spoke loudly enough for everyone to hear. “I want a ladder set up right here—see? Let the shot include those windows. Max, no seamless, and get some kick underneath—I guess from the right. Otherwise we’re fine, OK? She’ll climb up to the second or third rung and hold on with one hand, and maybe do something balletic with the other one. Everybody got it? We’re shooting a beautiful ballerina who’s contemplating the top.”

  Will turned to the ballerina and asked if she were comfortable doing that, and she said yes.

  “A ladder?” said Max.

  “Yes, right there,” said Will, pointing to the corridor. “There’s one right outside the door.”

  A minute later, the ladder had been set up and Max was perched on it in the spot where the ballerina would be, so the light level could be metered.

  “We go in one minute,” said Will. “Mark, are you clear on what we’re doing?”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Mark, as the other assistant quickly handed him another camera.

  Will detailed the shot to the ballerina, while the stylist got her into the dress—a frothy blue thing that riffed on the tutu dress of romantic ballet. Then he walked her over to the ladder and helped her up the first few rungs.

  “All right, darling, now you’re breaking into heaven, yes?” he said. “You’re an outsider, you’ve always been an outsider, and now you wanna be on the inside, and suddenly you see a break in the clouds and you know you’re gonna make it up into heaven. . . .”

  The ballerina smiled. She totally got it.

  The shot went well, and after that one they did two more, which Will also set up with scenarios: “Your luggage has gone missing, but you have to look like a million dollars when you get off the train at Monte Carlo.” “The prince who comes backstage after the performance is not the cute one, but his boring older brother.” In the latter shot, Max, a skinny hipster with ill-kempt clothes and hair, played the prince, while the ballerina, with obviously lavish theatrical gifts, made the scene come alive by playing against him royally. The contrast worked brilliantly. At the same time, the ballerina made a pair of ridiculously trendy shoes from a magazine advertiser look like the most important footwear in history.

  After
ward, Will and the photographer were looking at the results of the shoot on a laptop, with some of the others, when the text came from Peter.

  Thought you should know, wrote Peter. We’ve just lost Jonathan. Missing you. Call when you can, if you’d like.

  Proper spelling and punctuation, thought Will. The correctness was probably in deference to both the occasion and the gap since their last exchange.

  Good.

  So so sorry, texted Will. He was sad to hear about Jonathan, of course, and concerned about Peter. For days, he had been looking for the right opportunity for rapprochement, and though he wished he didn’t have to make his sympathy do this kind of double duty, he accepted Peter’s text as a cue to start talking again. Anyway, it was time. He had begun to see who Peter really was, and why, and how the two of them might coexist. With the help of his therapist, he’d seen through the shadow issues of age and McCaw, to the real one, which was, as he described it to Luz, Peter’s awesomeness.

  “Seriously,” he told her. “Can I use that word in a nonhumorous way? I was in awe of the guy, but in the wrong way. That wasn’t good. I was trying to be cool. The awe was, I dunno, too generic.”

  “Generic awesomeness,” she said, trying to parse the concept.

  “You know—” said Will, “the agency, the parties, and all that. But now I think I’m in awe for the right reasons. We should be a little bit in awe of the people we love, right? He’s an amazing human being.”

  “OK,” said Luz.

  “He is!”

  “I know.”

  Will had come to appreciate a part of Peter’s history that continued to affect his nature: his childhood as an outsider. And though Will had learned about Stonewall and AIDS through history books, he’d never really grasped what it meant to be a gay outsider in America. It was a mind-set that continued to interact inside Peter’s brain with its antidote, the insistence on breaching the inside or redefining the outside as the inside or the middle, or something. It would obviously affect his work. The therapist, who was around Peter’s age and gay, helped Will see this—as well as how decidedly unchallenged Will himself had been, as a gay child and a young gay man.