Now and Yesterday

by Stephen Greco

  “Jonathan hired you?”

  “Yup. Once.”

  “Really?”

  “A few nights after that party where we met.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah.”

  Peter thought for a moment.

  “So you’ve rent-boyed,” he said.

  “For about three minutes, yeah,” said Will. “Right after coming to New York.”

  “Wow. OK.”

  “With an agency, a top one.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You OK?”

  “Sure. Tell me everything.”

  “I was recruited one night. What can I tell you? The guys who ran the agency were very nice. I needed the money. They took precautions to keep us safe and healthy, blah-blah-blah. I met some boldface names. . . .”

  “OK . . .”

  “That’s it. Then it was over. I guess I just haven’t wanted to tell you.”

  “Hmm. Well, no problem.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I mean, of course.”

  And as the information began to sink in, Peter saw that the revelation probably didn’t present any problem for him, morally—though he might indeed need a moment to come around to granting Will the respect in that area that he made a point of granting freely to others he knew who’d also hustled successfully—that is, without letting it destroy them with ambition-killing easy money, or soul-killing drugs, or the thousand other dangers that were out there.

  “But now?” said Peter. “I mean, you don’t still . . .”

  “No, no, of course not,” said Will. “I have a job, I have a life. I only did it to pay the rent. New York is a hard place to get started.”

  “I hear ya. Cool. Believe me, I understand that there are always gifts coming our way, cosmically, and different possibilities for how to accept them.”

  “It’s good to hear you say that,” said Will. “It’s been torturing the fuck out of me, how to tell you. Whew! So you don’t think I’m soiled, then?”

  “Will! No,” said Peter. “Of course not. But I love the way you put that—soiled. We’re all soiled, aren’t we? And we constantly struggle toward cleanliness. You’ve certainly made me think a bit about the bed I have chosen to lie down in, which is pretty god-damned far from immaculate.”

  “I was so afraid to tell you.”

  “For Christ’s sake! I think Tyler’s hustled, and I told him I thought it made his work stronger.”

  “Well, that’s advertising . . . ,” said Will, with an impish grin.

  Playfully, Peter slapped Will’s arm.

  “All right, all right,” said Peter. “I’m trying, myself, to work toward something better. Just trying to figure out how to do it.”

  They were silent for a moment. The city was barely audible from beyond the periphery of trees.

  “You know, in a way, this doesn’t change anything,” said Peter. “In a way, it actually just makes the situation between us more clearly what it is. If that doesn’t sound too stupid.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” said Will.

  “But . . . back to Aldebar,” said Peter, suddenly more animated in a gossipy way. “Though wait. Now I’m dying to know now if you might have, um, dated anyone I know. . . .”

  Will smirked.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “I only did it for a month or two, and by now I know who you know.”

  Peter nodded.

  “Oh, except . . . ,” said Will.

  “Who?”

  Will leaned in, as if to share a scrumptious secret.

  “McCaw’s brother-in-law,” said Will.

  “Him?”

  “Yup—big fag. You must have gotten that.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Not very nice, on the inside. Not at all.”

  “Ew.”

  “I’ll tell you all about it someday.”

  “Interesting. Now that’s a whole story I cannot wrap my mind around: McCaw wanting to set me up with—what was his name ... ?”

  “Miller.”

  “Miller!” Peter cackled. “And Fiona! Can you imagine?”

  Will giggled.

  “She was terrific!” he said. “What’s that about? I mean, she must know everything, right? I assume she figured me out, that night—or maybe she keeps out of it. Who knows? I don’t really get it, but then again, I don’t have to get it anymore.”

  “OK, so back to Aldebar!” said Peter, gossipy once again. “So he’s much more than all that—you get it, right? A nurse, a marine, a connoisseur of opera—come on!”

  “I know. The minute I met him I knew he was beyond something amazing. We never connected on a sexual level—though I kinda wanted to—but I really saw he’s like this angel in human form, some entity from the Gorgeous Planet.”

  “So do you think he pulled the plug on Jonathan—I mean, in a nice way?”

  “Omigod, do you think so, too?!”

  “I think he once tried to tell me that he and Jon had discussed the matter and decided something, and I was too obtuse or scared or immature to go into it with him.”

  “Peter, I have thought about this again and again, and I have to wonder if maybe it was the most exquisite, loving, complete gift that anyone could have given Jonathan, in that situation. . . .”

  Peter paused to think about this. Then he took a deep breath and exhaled calmly.

  “I think you’re right,” said Peter. “It was a gift. Wow. Sitting in a ball field in Central Park and discussing euthanasia.”

  “And prostitution,” said Will.

  “What Aldebar did or may have done, what you’ve just told me about—they deserve finer names than that, don’t you think?”

  Will reached over and took Peter’s hand in his.

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  They sat there quietly for a moment, then Peter spoke.

  “So we’re fine here, Will, really,” he said. It was perhaps the caretaker in him speaking. “But just so I know, for the future: Who knows about . . . ? I mean, are you open about it? What about Luz—does she know? Your fancy magazine friends?”

  “People know. Nobody cares. The magazine people think it’s fun. God knows, some of them have done the same thing, or dealt drugs, or worse. I was only afraid to tell you, because . . .”

  “Because I’m such a prude—I knew it.”

  “When I began to feel the bar being raised with you, Peter, I wanted to play the game correctly. Why do you think I started therapy?”

  More silence, then Peter piped up.

  “Harold and I once went to a very fancy dinner party right there,” he said, pointing at the Sherry-Netherland, whose gracefully proportioned Gothic spire rose sublimely above the trees at the southeast corner of the park.

  “You did?”

  “Yes. A big-deal illustrator we knew, who did all the big-diva album covers in the seventies and eighties, invited us to a soirée hosted by his best girlfriend, a lady who was one of the first television weathergirls ever, in the fifties, who became a talk-show host and then married well.”

  “Interesting.”

  “A very elegant lady—a pioneer of live television, I learned later. The husband was long gone, of course. It was like, seven gay men and her—all formal, we gentlemen in tuxes, the lady in a long skirt and an iridescent metallic blue jacket, cropped just so.”

  “Nice.”

  “She had the most amazing enameled gold bangles—Schlumberger; she was impressed that I knew that—and a staff of two who looked like they’d been with her forever. I remember the guy’s name was Pedro; he served dinner. I don’t remember the wife’s name, or even if we got to see her. No, wait: I think she appeared for a second in the dining room after dinner, so we could compliment her on the food. I still remember these crispy, miraculous tarragon potatoes.”

  “Right there?” said Will, looking at the Sherry-Netherland.

  “Right there,” said Peter, pointing. “Corner apartment, thirtieth or whatever floor. High up. For all I
know, she’s still there. She was probably sixty then, so maybe she’s eighty-five now and still in the same apartment, wearing her fabulous bangles, no longer receiving guests.”

  “Or maybe she’s still receiving.”

  “Yeah, maybe so, God bless her. And after dinner, Will, we all repaired to the living room and she wound up telling stories from her early days in television. I seem to remember her saying she was just a cute girl from Texas or Oklahoma, who happened to be smart enough to come up with interesting ways to fill hours and hours of live morning talk show. I think she invented the interview or something. Anyway, her stories were really funny, and at one point she laughed so hard she spilled her wine on her jacket. And I swear, the lady just stood up and excused herself graciously, and returned to the living room not five minutes later wearing another elegant little formalish jacket of exactly the same cropped design, only this one was, like, a stiff, transparent, magenta crinoline.”

  “Amazing.”

  “Yeah. Harold and I just looked at each other silently, our eyes bulging. She probably had six more where that came from!”

  Will giggled silently.

  The sky was bright; the day felt open. There were a few lunchtime strollers far beyond, on the lawn, but no one on the ball field.

  “The lady really . . . valued herself,” mused Peter.

  “Evidently,” said Will.

  “It’s a talent I could probably better cultivate in myself.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s been hard for me to . . . give myself the thing I wanted most. Needed most.”

  Peter gazed at Will fondly, with a smile suggesting sadness but also a new hope for the possibility of relief. Part of what Peter felt at that moment—one of two little figures in a long shot of an otherwise empty set of bleachers—was what he always felt in Central Park: quiet elation in an open patch of land in the middle of a great metropolis. Not that the plot was natural, in the sense of being a part of the forest primeval that had survived until the present. In fact, the park had been constructed along with other great works of the nineteenth century, and some settlements were destroyed in the process. But the place—the work—did allow the earth and its inhabitants to breathe together, and it had been there, so often, on walks and picnics with Harold, that Peter had been able to hear the music of the earth and the other spheres.

  Spring was turning into summer, and Peter wondered what the season would bring. Would he go to Fire Island this year? He hadn’t yet rented a house, but there were openings he knew about. Would Will want to go, or would they by then be creating their own summer style in a different place—Provincetown? Upstate New York? Some lake in the Berkshires that Harold had never heard of? Travel plans made via text or Facebook or some other medium that Harold never knew? Something primal was indeed asserting itself that day in the park, even if it were cloaked in the innocent possibility of ball games and picnics and strolls across the lawn.

  Peter squeezed Will’s hand.

  “I have grieved for Harold so long,” he said slowly, his voice suddenly shaky. “This service made me realize what a high-functioning widow I’ve been, all these years. In a way, I think I was afraid to love someone again, because that would destroy him. So I went on achieving, and grieving, and being very proud that I was carrying on.”

  “You did the best you could,” said Will. He saw how serious Peter was.

  “But Harold died a long time ago, didn’t he?” said Peter, his face contorting as tears came.

  “Yes, he did.”

  “And now is the time for something else, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  Will gave Peter a peck on the cheek, and Peter’s words gave way to soft tears. Peter brushed Will’s lips with his, but they both knew that it wasn’t the time for that kind of embrace. That would come soon.

  For a few minutes longer they sat on the bleachers, as Peter recomposed himself and they clucked over the drably formal outfits the musicians wore, and then they walked to the R train, arm in arm.

  CHAPTER 26

  “And as Peter says, it will be business as usual,” said Laura. She punctuated the sentence with a practiced executive smile that no one in the room could have mistaken as heartfelt. Still, she was doing her best as a corporate officer to project confidence; and the point of meeting was, beyond logistics, to rekindle confidence in all the factors required for the success of the McCaw project other than the one once deemed most important: Peter.

  Sitting around the conference table in Laura’s office, besides her and Peter, were McCaw, Sunil, and Tyler. The latter two said little, though Tyler’s new title of creative director conferred new clout that he’d be expected to start exercising immediately. Now that the group had acknowledged Peter’s bow out, they all had to affirm that they wanted it to work, that they were sure it would work, and that until now the results had been splendid. The unspoken assumption was that, anyway, they had no choice, since the project was so far along.

  “Business as usual,” reiterated Laura. “Except, of course, that Tyler is your man now.” She smiled at Tyler briefly, and in doing so looked at him for probably longer than she had ever done before. Laura was pouring on the charm aggressively, and had dressed for the task in another of her power lady outfits—this one, a blue pinstriped skirt suit that shouted “Alexis Carrington.”

  Where does she get these things? thought Peter. He was doodling discreetly in a notebook, as the meeting progressed. There were really no notes to take in a meeting like this.

  Funny, he thought. The phoniness of Laura’s warmth reflected exactly the kind of robotic state of mind that the designers of the office complex had sought to counter, a few years before, when they transformed the agency’s floors in that building from cubicle farms into “an inspiring hive of nontraditional work spaces clustered around a multistory atrium in which creative connections can take place serendipitously.” Laura’s office and the rest of the executive suite, on the top floor of the complex, though, had ironically been left out of the hive. Her office was the standard fuck-you glass corner, with generically expensive furnishings like those to be found in every four-minute-old glass tower in new business centers from Berlin to Shanghai. Yet the place did seem to suit Laura’s style, which Tyler once called “Executive Medusa Realness.” And compared with the agency’s other “environments,” Peter knew, Laura’s office was indeed the correct one for a sober occasion like this, where the participants should probably not be enveloped in overstuffed bean bags or trying to balance on giant koosh balls.

  “The good news is that Peter’s most critical input is already part of the process,” said Laura. “And these guys are running with it.” Tyler smiled modestly. In addition to the new title he’d received, he was now making a lot more money, some of which had been earmarked for Peter.

  “We value our clients, we honor our contracts,” added Laura. “But the point is, we’re only thinking about what’s best for you.”

  Afterward, there was a cordial send-off by Laura, and a brief, gentlemanly good-bye among Peter, McCaw, Tyler, and Sunil, at the elevator.

  “Just keep me posted on the date for the next review,” said McCaw, making it a point to address Tyler.

  “I will,” said Tyler, shaking McCaw’s hand firmly with his own kind of Boy Executive Realness.

  “I know you believe in this one a lot,” said McCaw, to Peter.

  “He’s the rising star here,” said Peter. “For me, that’s one of the discoveries of this project. I know it’s going to work for you both.”

  “You’re gonna be so proud of me, boss,” said Tyler, after McCaw and Sunil had gone.

  “I’m already proud of you, Ty.”

  “We’re gonna kill.”

  “I have no doubt.”

  And it felt to Peter like the drama of the entire McCaw encounter had unfolded correctly. Tyler deserved the title and the money. He was unmistakably a rising young star and was poised to lead the McCaw project to success. It was go
od that his ascension hadn’t been blocked, even a minute, the way such young-star ascensions can sometimes be, by their so-called superiors. Gladly, Peter had suggested the financial arrangement to Laura—giving up a bit of his own McCaw take and adding it to Tyler’s. The happiness of their young star and his success in the mission would only increase the value of Peter’s financial stake in the company, anyway.

  The meeting had been routine, but the real drama had taken place in the days leading up to it. After deciding to step down, which he did on the day of Jonathan’s service, Peter did what he considered to be the manly thing and called McCaw. The conversation, via videoconference, was brief and friendly. Peter said he couldn’t continue for creative reasons and was handing the project over to Tyler. After an expression of disappointment, McCaw accepted the news with the kind of old-fashioned WASP coolness that Peter had expected.

  McCaw only pushed back a little, at the end of the call.

  “Nothing I can do to change your mind?” he said.

  “Henderson,” said Peter, “I want to be honest with you. Part of me just doesn’t believe in what you’re doing, and my faking it would be a bad idea. This business is like acting. The audience can detect the slightest funny business. Tyler . . . knows better how to give everything to the project. I thought I could do it, but I can’t. Simple as that.”

  “I appreciate the honesty, Peter.”

  “Well, thanks for understanding.”

  “Let’s stay in touch.”

  Whatever that means.

  “Sure.”

  Then Peter went up to Laura’s office and told her. As he expected, she went ballistic.

  “That’s totally irresponsible!” she shrieked.

  “Don’t tell me what’s responsible,” said Peter. “I’ve brought millions in billings to this company. I’ve done my best to make this project work, and it’s totally secure, because of me. Now I need you to do your part.”

  They went back and forth on it for half an hour, then Laura came to accept the situation. She had no choice, really. Grumbling, she even suggested they lie to McCaw and concoct some explanation around a personal or medical issue—which Peter found unconscionable and also reminded him that Laura didn’t really understand the nature of the work itself. Which is why he had called McCaw first.