Now and Yesterday

by Stephen Greco

  Advance praise for Now and Yesterday

  “Now and Yesterday is both an up-to-the-minute dissection of contemporary Manhattan and an old-fashioned nineteenth-century novel with all its pleasures—big set pieces and a rich cast of characters. With great skill, intelligence, and emotional wisdom, Greco paints an indelible portrait of The Way We Live Now.”

  —Andrew Holleran

  “An unexpected treat. Greco’s big, juicy, triple-decker has love, sex, business, and death, as well as ethical and décor questions galore.”

  —Felice Picano

  NOW AND YESTERDAY

  STEPHEN GRECO

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Advance praise for Now and Yesterday

  Title Page

  1975

  2012

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Teaser chapter

  A READING GROUP GUIDE - NOW AND YESTERDAY

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  Copyright Page

  So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—

  Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres

  Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

  Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

  Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

  For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

  One is no longer disposed to say it . . . .

  —T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets (“East Coker”)

  1975

  When Harold first saw the apartment, the week before, it was painted in hideous colors that someone had obviously thought groovy. The living room and little alcove looking onto the back garden were electric yellow, while the bedroom, on the street, was neon orange and dominated by a five-foot-high, freestanding structure of two-by-fours and plywood, like a play fort, in royal blue. The previous tenants had kept their desk inside the thing, the realtor said, and their mattress on top. By the time Harold returned with Peter, two days later, the fort was gone and the whole apartment had been painted white. The place looked bigger and, while possibly less groovy, more like the charming abode that the boyfriends instantly agreed it could be—the parlor floor of a handsome old Brooklyn row house that was meant to be their home.

  They were at one of the large windows facing the street, rigging up an improvised window treatment of old bedsheets and flimsy tension bars they’d brought with them from Ithaca.

  “Steady, please,” said Peter, standing on a stepladder, adjusting the tension bar to fit snugly inside the window frame.

  “I’m trying,” sang Harold, crouching below and holding the bottom bar in place.

  It was early on a summer evening, their first in the new place. There were screens in the windows, and as they worked the sounds of neighbors walking by filtered in genially from the street. They’d spent the day moving and settling in with the few possessions they had—boxes of books and records, several lawn-and-leaf bags stuffed with clothing, a pair of mismatched director’s chairs, a thirdhand steamer trunk they planned to use as a table (“We can sit on the floor, Japanese-style. . . .”), some kitchen items they’d picked up at a neighborhood stoop sale, and an old mattress that had been sitting unused at the apartment nearby where they’d been crashing with Cornell classmates who’d moved to Brooklyn before them, that spring.

  Peter stepped down from the ladder and gave the improvised shades a final smoothing.

  “So how long do you think we’ll have to suffer this mess?” he said, regarding his handiwork. The beige-and-white-striped sheets, which had looked so sophisticated when new, a few years before, were now threadbare.

  “Oh, c’mon, it’s fine,” said Harold, straightening up.

  “Think we’ll ever have real drapes?”

  “Of course we will, eventually. Maybe even soon. I mean, if that’s what you want. But what about blinds, baby—wouldn’t wooden blinds be nice?”

  Peter hooted.

  “Can you imagine how much wooden blinds would cost for windows this big?” he said, slipping his arm around Harold’s waist. “Probably a month’s salary—and remember it’s your salary we’re talking about, sweetheart, ’cause I don’t have one.”

  “One of those interviews will pan out, don’t worry,” said Harold. “Meanwhile I think it’s extremely cool to use a trash bag as both a dresser and a chair.” From the floor Harold grabbed the mug of wine he’d been sipping and flopped down on one of the bags full of clothing. To celebrate the housewarming they’d opened a bottle of Boone’s Farm apple wine and were drinking from drab-ware mugs that Harold’s sister had given them as a gift.

  “Honey, no,” said Peter, pushing Harold off the bag and fluffing it back into shape. “That’ll wrinkle everything. I hope those were your clothes. . . .”

  They laughed and Peter looked around for his wine.

  “It’s a very pop, very now way to live, don’t you think?” said Harold, moving over to the mattress on the floor in the middle of the room and making himself comfortable on it.

  “Yeah?” said Peter. “Andy Warhol? You wanna live like that?”

  “Could be cool,” said Harold.

  “Might get cold in here this winter, without drapes.”

  The stereo had gone silent, and Peter was about to flip over the record they’d been listening to, Judy Collins’s Wildflowers, when Harold stopped him.

  “Oh, play that last song again, please. It’s so beautiful.”

  Peter set the needle down on “Lasso! di donna,” Collins’s take on a fourteenth-century Italian ballata, then he got down on the mattress beside Harold.

  Lasso! di donna vana inamorato

  Son che pur mi lusinga con inganno,

  Dàmmi speranza non mi toglie affanno.

  Perch’ è fallace ‘l suo ben disiato.

  Kcch-pop.

  I’ mi doglo che tanto su’ amor fello. . . .

  The track had a bad skip in it—the result, Peter thought, of his having lent the album once to a friend who, like everyone else, handled records far less reverently than he did. The skip always made Peter wince, though the expectation of it had become oddly satisfying by now, and he could almost savor the fact that perfection had given way to an experience of the song that was his in a special way. The embrace of flaws and particularities could apparently bring unexpected consequences that were welcome and sometimes even glorious. At least, that was the way he explained his relationship with Harold—how they had gone, during the previous year, from being acquaintances to friends to boyfriends, to this larger thing they were now exploring. They were committed to each other now, they said, and wanted it to last indefinitely—and they said this because they didn’t know what else to do but say it, while moving in together and vowing to accept each other’s particularities and make up life as they went along.

  “The street is quieter than I thought it would be,” said Peter lazily, in the silence aft
er the song ended.

  “Mm-hmm,” said Harold.

  The day’s work was done, and it felt good to be temporarily beyond the reach of family and friends. The phone wouldn’t be installed for another couple of days. They’d already decided against rushing out to a dance performance that Harold thought might be interesting, in favor of a quiet night. “Important things are happening,” Harold always said, and that was exciting, even if some of those things, like the Lou Reed songs they’d heard a few nights before, at the latest incarnation of Andy Warhol’s Factory, were a little scary for a couple of nice gay boys with middle-class dreams. Now that they lived in the big city and were gobbling up culture, they were encountering plenty of stuff that they admitted to each other was mystifying, even intimidating—avant-garde theater, experimental music, performance art and the like. Yet Harold, ever the advanced thinker and now a promising journalist, maintained that mystifying was good and exposure to it healthy. So they’d face it as a team. And it thrilled them that Harold was beginning to get comp tickets to these events, as a newly hired stringer for the Times—though it wasn’t clear exactly what a guy who’d written his master’s thesis on the “hagiographic, eremitic, and Biblical traditions” in an Old English poem about Saint Guthlac would bring to the coverage of contemporary culture, nor indeed how Peter, who’d never had a clue what to do with his life, could survive by writing poetry. They’d figure out something.

  “What are we gonna do about dinner?” said Peter, propping himself up and setting aside his mug conspicuously at arm’s length from the mattress.

  “Well, let’s think about that, shall we?” said Harold, setting aside his mug, too. “We could go to the falafel place.”

  “We could . . .”

  But before they could decide they were kissing and pawing each other, and the sound of them laughing and rolling around on the mattress was echoing from the freshly painted walls of their empty new house. And as the day faded they realized they could still see each other’s faces in the darkening room, since the old sheets did such a feeble job of shutting out light from the streetlamp that came on right outside their window.

  “First fuck in our new home,” said Harold, as he rolled on top of Peter and kept covering his boyfriend’s face, neck, and ears with hungry kisses.

  “I know,” burbled Peter. “Consecration of the house.”

  “The first of many, many!”

  Peter was giggling, pretending to shield himself from the barrage.

  “Hey, hey, Harry—I’m referencing Beethoven over here . . . !”

  “I know what you’re doing. I love you anyway.”

  2012

  CHAPTER 1

  “Whaddya think?” said Peter, modeling a new gray hoodie underneath his Brooks Brothers blazer.

  “You could,” said Tyler, looking up from his texting. They were at the agency, in Peter’s office. It was just before lunchtime. Tyler was sitting in Peter’s desk chair.

  Peter tried to catch a reflection of himself in the glass of a window that looked onto the agency’s multistory atrium lobby.

  “It’s good, right?” he said.

  “I dunno. Simpler might be better.”

  “Do you ever put up the hood?”

  “Maybe at the beach, if it’s cold.”

  “I’m talking about tonight, Tyler—this thing I’m going to.”

  “Oh.” The boy made a face. “I wouldn’t.”

  Only in his mid-twenties, Tyler was one of the agency’s brightest comers—a terrific conceptual thinker, a gifted copywriter. And it didn’t hurt that he was shockingly blond, had electric green eyes, and commanded the megawatt smile of a born entertainer.

  “No?” said Peter, trying the hood up.

  Tyler shook his head.

  “That Mad Men thing you’ve got going on today is fine,” said the boy. “Don’t mess with it. It’s a good look for a man your age.”

  Peter smirked. It was a joke between them, his age. So was referring to Tyler as a boy, except in front of clients. The “thing” Peter was preparing for was a housewarming hosted by his friend Jonathan, whose circle consisted mostly of decorous homosexual gentlemen of his and Peter’s generation, whom Peter sometimes referred to as “best-little-boys-in-the-world-of-a-certain-age.”

  “Note custom-made,” said Peter, demonstrating the blazer’s working buttonholes.

  “Swell,” said Tyler.

  Back in the ’50s, when he was a kid in a small town upstate, people wore sweatshirts to keep warm when they actually did something to work up a sweat, Peter said. The main references in his mind to sweat clothes were early-morning drills on frost-covered playing fields and after-school games in smelly gymnasiums echoing with the scuffle of boys and the bark of gym teachers who’d seen action in Korea. Back then, he said, the hooded sweatshirt was an immutable building block of American culture—resistant, like a Brooks Brothers blazer, to shifts in quote-unquote meaning.

  “Well, that’s just not right anymore,” said Tyler, impishly. “It’s not even wrong.”

  Peter smirked. It was like Tyler, who’d studied semiotics at Brown and found his way into advertising as obliquely as Peter had, to work a quote by a famous physicist into a conversation about fashion. And it was like him to do so flirtatiously. There was a bit of a crush between the two, the youngish fifty-nine-year-old and the precocious twenty-five-year-old, though Peter had decided that nothing romantic should come of it. He had scruples about fooling around with employees and reinforced these frequently by pontificating about a worker’s right to be valued for his work, not his flesh—though flirting, he maintained, sometimes catalyzed the work because “it deepened the ongoing conversation among members of a creative team, who need to address not only a client’s needs but their own feelings about those needs and the creative process itself.”

  “We love it when you talk fancy to us,” Tyler once cracked, during a staff meeting.

  Still wearing the hoodie, Peter continued to paw through the items he’d picked up that morning at Barneys—a knit cap with earflaps, a pre-wrinkled plaid scarf, a woven leather bracelet-y thing that was a little bit butch, a little bit femme. So many options! Peter tried to stay engaged with fashion’s fun, but sometimes longed for a time with clearer rules. The whole idea of dressing right was like a religion back in 1961, when he first visited Brooks Brothers, he told Tyler. His uncle Malcolm took him there to buy his first suit; they came down to the city in a chauffeur-driven car. And Malcolm—a kind of gay godfather, who owned, with his wife, Aunt Ida, the fanciest hair salon in the Mid-Hudson Valley—had done nothing less that day than usher a boy into the palace of wisdom.

  “He showed me what to prefer in a cuff and a buttonhole,” said Peter, “took me to lunch at the Brasserie—which must have only just opened, at that point—and explained to me why Mrs. Oliver Harriman’s book of etiquette was superior to Mrs. Emily Post’s. Dear Uncle Malcolm. Oh, and he told me that a hairdresser he knew named Kenneth, who was ‘a great artist, only a few blocks away,’ had pulled off ‘the culture-shaking triumph of big hair over hats.’ Can you imagine?”

  When Tyler giggled at this last bit, Peter recommended he look into the history of modern millinery and the career of one Mr. John. The agency was scheduled to pitch a luxury fashion brand the following week and the information would come in handy.

  They were always talking about small but seismic matters like this, Peter and his team, and Peter knew that many outside the industry, including the worthies of Jonathan’s crowd, looked down on this type of inquiry as trivial. Yet he found it natural to puzzle over questions like “What should I wear?” and “What should I drive?” as practically philosophical matters and some of the biggest questions of the age. How do you construct a personal look that says everything you want to say about yourself—or at least enough about your taste and personality to be specifically you—while avoiding clichés determined by, for lack of a better word, class? It was a question at the root of a certain discomf
ort that Peter felt with Jonathan’s crowd, despite his falling squarely within their class, since they seemed to embrace every cliché that grown-up, well-mannered, best-little-boys could—cultural, political, sartorial. And the question was central to Peter’s career, too, since the boutique agency he founded and ran required a leader who both saw beyond old-fashioned class boundaries and appeared as though he did.

  Especially now that Peter had become a star in the world of “creative,” appearances mattered. He was the celebrated author of a series of video spots for a talking car that had become a national mascot, and of a campaign for a new energy drink whose tagline had gone globally viral. High-profile clients paid well to absorb wisdom in Peter’s presence, which meant that in meetings and presentations, and even in videoconferences, he was expected to wield his entire persona like a Broadway star does during a performance, fusing the right lines with the right moves, in the right costume.

  “Are we done, boss?” said Tyler, tucking away his phone. “I gotta run—Damiano’s downstairs.”

  “OK, go,” said Peter. “Thanks, Ty.”

  “You look terrific,” said Tyler, bolting up from Peter’s chair and scooting for the door.

  “Mr. John!” said Peter.

  “I’m on it!” sang Tyler.

  OK, so maybe I do do just the blazer tonight, with no funny business, thought Peter, trying to find his reflection again in the window. It would be sort of ironic to go decked out strictly in Brooks, if I’m not just to fit in with a bunch of old men, but to explore the idea of my fitting in.

  He smirked.

  Anyway, drag is fun, whether it’s Brooks or Patricia Field.

  That evening, when Peter turned onto Twenty-fourth Street and saw the elegant green canopy, he immediately knew which building must be Jonathan’s.

  Oh, that place, he thought. Once, long before Jonathan moved in, Peter had endured a tedious dinner party there, seated next to a thin-lipped know-it-all whom he realized, midway through the broiled trout, had been specially invited for him. For three hours, the guy stifled conversation with opinions delivered like proclamations. The host seemed disappointed when Peter left early and alone.