Now and Yesterday

by Stephen Greco

  Great apartment, though.

  The building was a well-cared-for, prewar pile of brick and limestone with a restrained Moderne feel, designed by an architect Jonathan called “the Candela of downtown.” On either side of the revolving door was a neat boxwood in a tapered, cast-stone planter. Jonathan, in fact, had referred to his new home only by the address number, the way people sometimes did with iconic buildings on Park and Fifth Avenues—740, 820, 960, 1040—and though the number didn’t automatically summon an image in Peter’s brain, it reminded him that West Chelsea had its iconic addresses, too. And it made sense that one of these would be where his fancy friend would relocate after years of renting a small but spectacular East Tenth Street penthouse, now an overpriced co-op.

  It was a mild October evening. A motley paseo of dog walkers occupied the sidewalk—mostly gay men and straight women in after-work mode, chatting amiably with one another and/or their pets, while a stream of sharply dressed, decidedly on-duty types strode through on their way to dinner on Tenth Avenue or a gallery opening beyond. The fall was still gentle enough for people to go without coats and everyone was talking about that—New Yorkers being often more focused on protection and shelter than on the elements themselves.

  It was 7:30 on the dot. Peter always timed his arrivals carefully. For fashionably late events, like the fashion week after-parties and cool-cause benefits he attended regularly as a New York fast-tracker, he still had to remind himself to translate the time stated on an invitation into a real hour at which an arrival could be made. Sometimes nine o’clock meant midnight. For this party, though, 7:30 meant 7:30. Jonathan and his crowd were not late-nighters. They were media execs and entertainment lawyers, mostly, whom Jonathan knew through his work as a documentary filmmaker, mixed with survivors of that original circle of artsy rebels in which Peter and Jonathan first met, in mid-’70s New York. The two had arrived in the city back then like so many other newly out young gay men, after a spin through college and grad school, ready to pursue serious agendas suddenly made possible by adulthood and revolution. For most, it was the start of a comfortable rut in law, or academia, or arts administration. And for some it was a historical moment that ushered in destiny.

  For Peter, it was destiny. Having come to New York to be a poet, after the publication of some overheated verses about life upstate, he quickly moved on to fashion journalism and eventually to advertising. Immersion in these fields had rendered him more fashion-forward than anyone else in Jonathan’s crowd—which is why, as he approached Jonathan’s building in his sober blue blazer, gray slacks, and white shirt, he felt an odd kind of pleasure in knowing that for once he’d be dressed absolutely right for a party. That pleasure was rare for Peter, since the hip that was required of him was anything but effortless. Some evenings, before going out, he had to think long and hard about just how young-and-trendy to go with his look. For a man of his age and position, the clothes should be neither too disheveled nor too put together, the accessories neither too fun-junky nor too fuck-you expensive—though, no, a perfectly formulated mix of Prada, J. Lindeberg, Y3, and Hello Kitty, donned in response to a constantly fluxing set of cultural meanings, never made him feel totally, absolutely, unflappably right when he stepped out of a taxi at the door of a happening nightspot. That line between right and pathetic was blurry, even for Peter, which is why he relied on Tyler for help.

  He passed through the revolving door, nodded at the doorman, and approached the desk.

  “Hi, there,” he said.

  “Good evening,” said the receptionist.

  Peter stated Jonathan’s name but before he could say his own, the receptionist nodded.

  “Penthouse 2-A. Elevator to your right.”

  The elevator was fitted elegantly with an upholstered bench. Peter’s late boyfriend, Harold, used to make it a point of lighting gracefully upon such benches, when available, even for short trips. When Peter, with a silent glance, would remark on his need to sit, Harold always responded with a face that made him look both content and quizzical, his lips pursed like Tony Curtis’s as Josephine in Some Like It Hot. It was the kind of subtle exchange, below the radar of elevator operators and most other people, that Peter missed keenly now, even twenty-three years after Harold’s death. In fact, this was exactly the kind of party that they would have gone to together—and going together would have been the right way to do it, since many of the guests would undoubtedly be long-term couples.

  Peter was single now—“famously single,” according to Jonathan—but he’d always thought of himself as the marrying kind. He and Harold were together for seventeen years. In another era, black-tie evenings together at the ballet or opera, and dressed-up dinner partying and entertaining at home, in couples, were de rigueur; then AIDS fund-raisers and memorial services were; and then that whole way of life passed into eclipse. Harold and Jonathan’s partner, Roberto, died the same year, as did fifty-three other men whom Peter knew well—men who might have become tennis partners, or housemates at the beach, or fellow members of a benefit committee. An entire foreground of assuring, if only penciled-in, history-to-come was erased in an instant, leaving everyone in that generation of gay men not only to mourn individuals but to scramble for entirely different, assuring histories-to-come. Peter scrambled all right, right into a new profession that allowed him—well, required him—therapeutically to reinvent himself.

  For a long time he kept track of the dead by carrying around a list of their names, meant to honor them, but also to help him remember who was alive, including himself. In fact, Peter now sometimes thought of jacket-and-tie gatherings like this one, perhaps ungenerously, as reflective of a list not written down, of the men who’d survived not necessarily because they were lucky, but because they were indifferent to the pleasures and heresies of their own social revolution. They squeaked by and went on to become model gay boomers, and they paid their taxes and voted for the right candidates and were now really getting married; and that was all perfectly lovely. Yet their very respectability sometimes struck Peter as tinged with a certain smugness resulting from their choice of a new, safe, penciled-in history over things like pleasure and heresy—a choice that Peter inoculated himself against defiantly with fashion, as well as with continued, if modified, erotic adventure.

  Famously single. The thought made him chuckle. He was secretly proud of being known for showing up at parties with men half his age. His hair was still dark; his face and body looked much younger than his age. (Thank you, Uncle Malcolm’s side of the family! ) But he was also sad to be exiled from the kind of respectable-and -adventurous life he had carefully designed with Harold and expected to have forever. He had tried to recapture that life subsequently but to no avail, for two decades, with a string of guys he dated during his Merry Widower phase, which started a year after Harold’s death; then with Nick, a nice man he partnered with for nine years, who developed problems with alcohol and drugs; and now with a whole new crew of sweeties, who tended to be younger, because, well, that’s who was out there and available.

  And that included Tyler, who went out with Peter sometimes “for fun” when his current boyfriend, Damiano, a fitness model, was out of town—though Peter well knew that a gig like Jonathan’s would hardly be fun for anyone of Tyler’s generation, which is why he’d decided to go alone. Jonathan’s crowd registered genuine boyfriends and boyfriends-designate, and authenticated exes, and just-plain-friends of an appropriate age. Younger persons were seen as boy toys, or fashion accessories, or hustlers—generally not as peers, at least not until demonstrably on the path to a suitable career and/or a solid relationship with one of the clan.

  When the elevator doors opened Peter found himself standing in a little hall where Jonathan was greeting arrivals.

  “Darling!” said Jonathan, noticing his friend and sending a couple into the apartment. He was shorter and heavier than Peter, and had started shaving his head a few years before, when he began going gray. And he was looking a little mo
re tired than usual. Peter chalked that up to the move.

  “Welcome to my little shack!” Jonathan was wearing a green velvet jacket with pressed jeans, and an embroidered red cap that looked customary for the tribesmen of some mountainous region of Central Asia. He was enveloped as usual in a resinous and smoky-sweet fragrance that had been his favorite for the past few years.

  “Wow, gorgeous,” said Peter, stepping with Jonathan into the foyer and looking around. The walls were finished in persimmon enamel and hung with a series of Donald Sultan prints of black lemons. Beyond, through a graceful archway, was the living room, crowded with guests—a sea of gray suits and dark blue sport jackets. The room itself was elegant and inviting. Pieces of Jonathan’s collection of American antiques were mixed with understated midcentury basics, upholstered in soft celadons, mosses, and jades. The rugs were contemporary.

  “We did what we could,” said Jonathan, in mock-exasperation. “What can I get you—some wine? I want to hear all about this ‘brand mind’ business.” W had recently published a piece on Peter, calling him “one of the most persuasive architects of the planet’s emerging ‘brand mind.’ ”

  Then the doorbell rang—more guests.

  “I’ll find the bar, baby,” said Peter. “You go. We can do the tour later, when I’m fortified.”

  “Connor’s here,” added Jonathan. “Say hello to him.”

  As he entered the living room Peter was embraced by that sense of well-being associated with so-called “good” prewar buildings; a feeling enhanced, certainly, by expensive decoration and lighting—and Peter knew that Jonathan had splurged on both—but created in the first place by architects like Candela through the subtle play of volumes, the careful planning of circulation, and the canny deployment of details. Together, these help express the difference between affluence and mere money. Jonathan’s place was as different from the comically indeterminate, open-plan apartments in the shiny new glass tower across the street as a poke in the ribs was from a nice massage, and perhaps the New Yorkers who lived in each kind of place were as different from each other, too.

  The party was already bouncy. Two dozen conversations mingled in a gauzy din, while the recorded piano stylings of Oscar Peterson jazzed away in the background. Among the artworks were several large abstract paintings by Connor Frankel, a world-renowned artist in his eighties who was a friend of Jonathan’s. Outside the double-glazed windows a glinting city shone resplendently.

  With practiced geniality Peter began greeting people—men he rarely saw now, whose names he sometimes misremembered. “Sam, good to see you.” “Charlie, how’s that pretty puppy?” “Draper, congratulations—I saw you were nominated.” “Kevin, hi! Gimme a sec so I can grab a drink—I mean ‘Keith,’ sorry! What am I saying?” The crowd included a lawyer for a large bank, the development director of an art museum, the vice president of an orchestra, several people from the film community, a few authors and journalists, a poet from a long-prominent family. It was early in the evening and navigation was still easy. As he squeezed through the crowd Peter nodded cordially at Connor Frankel himself, who was seated on the sofa with a much younger man. The two were talking with a small group of very respectful-looking people standing in front of them. Peter wasn’t clear if Frankel saw him, but he wasn’t going to intrude. He had met the artist a few times before and found him intimidating. There was Frankel’s lofty spot in history as one of the grand masters of twentieth-century art and also the fact that he’d always been somewhat closeted, which Peter had mixed feelings about.

  “Good to see you,” said an art dealer Peter had known for years.

  “Hey, Lawrence, you too,” said Peter.

  “Isn’t your boyfriend with you tonight—the blond?”

  “Tyler? No. And he’s not my boyfriend.”

  “That’s what you always say about your boyfriends!”

  Peter gave the man’s shoulder a warm squeeze and kept moving.

  I keep coming to these things thinking I’ll meet someone “appropriate” who’s available and hot, he thought. But I never do.

  He was grateful when Tyler did accompany him to events like this. With his young friend at his side, Peter felt less trapped by the habits of his generation; he had a conspirator against the thundering babyboomerishness of it all. He’d been thinking a lot about the baby boomers lately. They were looming large in a brand audit and study of “relevant signs in the mediasphere” he was doing for a client hoping to target the aging-but-active-boomer market for a body wash that was already a best seller among twentysomethings. Where are we with concepts of “young” and “clean” these days? Does clean mean fresh? Is fresh still sexy? Is sexy still good? Good in what way? And what about Canada? This is what Peter had been thinking about all day.

  “All I wanted to do was look at her hair!”

  “It was the star of the movie.”

  “And the wardrobe!”

  “The off-the-shoulder thing?”

  “Brill-iant.”

  A foursome was discussing Charlie Wilson’s War. In passing, Peter attempted a contribution.

  “And then ten minutes later she’s wearing a burkha,” he said.

  “Yes!”

  “You know,” continued Peter, “I’ve always marveled at the way he uses that rich-lady Texas Baroque style to create the character visually. . . .”

  One of them took a sip of wine.

  “He?”

  “Mike Nichols,” said Peter. “The director.”

  There was a second-and-a-half of silence, then genial laughter. The discussion was about stars, not directors.

  Peter smiled, nodding.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Bar.”

  OK, got it—no one here for me tonight.

  Through another archway was the dining room, where an elaborate buffet had been laid out, and beyond that the bar, which had been set up in the kitchen’s breakfast nook.

  Then again, he could be here and I wouldn’t even know it. Harold always said I have this oblivious side....

  The bartender was a tall, dark-haired young man in his mid-twenties, dressed in a black button-front shirt.

  “Hi, there,” said Peter.

  “Hey, what can I get for you?”

  “A vodka would be terrific, please—ice, twist of lime. Actually, make it a double. I won’t have to bother you so soon.”

  “No bother.”

  The bartender made the drink and handed it to Peter.

  “Brilliant, thanks,” said Peter. It was the slight awkwardness Peter was feeling at the party that kept him from registering the warmth of the young man’s smile and the sparkle of his gray-blue eyes.

  “Enjoy,” said the bartender.

  Peter peered across the crowd.

  “The, uh, library?” he asked.

  “Just on the other side of the living room,” said the bartender, pointing.

  “Ah, thanks,” said Peter, raising his glass in a little toast. “I’m on the tour. I know there’s gonna be a quiz.”

  That was a lame thing to say, thought Peter as he walked away. Why did I say that? It sounds so ungenerous toward Jonathan—not that the guy was really listening to me or would even take it seriously. Why the hell do I say these things?

  Twenty-plus years after Harold, Peter still found socializing as clunky as he had before Harold, when he was a small-town teenager with scant social grace. Years of experience had done little to make him any smoother, he felt, especially in gay circles like this. And the gay men of his age who were single? In addition to incurious, most of them were wounded, exhausted, or bitter, settled into an imperturbable equilibrium of self-acquaintance that seemed to preclude the mad, transformative ardors and intoxicating, pop-music highs that he still craved. He remembered, too, the shock, one day before meeting Nick, of realizing he knew essentially nothing about men—certainly not what everyone else seemed to know: that whether straight or gay they could be untrue. Before Harold, Peter had not dated at all, not even a hi
gh school sweetheart. He and Harold met in college, in the early ’70s, just as both were coming out, and it was love at nearly first sight—“a marriage made in heaven,” as his grandmother had always described her own long and storied marriage. And Peter and Harold’s relationship did turn out to be a kind of heaven—not unbumpy, but elevated, resonant in a metaphysical way that made it feel, then and since, like myth. They framed pictures together, read Foucault together, attended protests together, boiled lobsters together, traveled to Machu Picchu together, blessed newborn nieces and nephews together. And still, in memory, Harold was the great love of Peter’s life, his seductively wicked smile caught in the halcyon glow of an undying late-spring afternoon in Venice, the saint and prince with whom no mortal, perhaps, could ever compete.

  Certainly not Nick, who craved drugs more than love, and certainly not the boys whom Peter saw now. And about the future, who could say? Failing heaven’s help, Peter would gamely soldier on, trying to do what he imagined other people do: talk about yourself when asked, ask questions about the other person, find points of mutual interest, like Mike Nichols—or rather, Julia Roberts.

  More greetings, as Peter kept navigating, then he entered the library, a gentleman scholar’s retreat lined with custom-made bookcases holding artwork and objects, as well as books upon books. Displayed beneath two large windows on a bank of built-in cabinets, spot-lit from the soffit above, were some of Jonathan’s prize possessions: a commedia dell’arte mask, a miniature window from a Victorian dollhouse, a collection of antique Japanese pots; on a table nearby was a draft manuscript of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, mounted under a Plexiglas cube. While most folks in the room were chattering away about things like Broadway openings, beach houses, and skin treatments, some were focused on a TV newscast flickering from a screen tucked into a bookshelf, showing the fleshy, college-boy face of Henderson McCaw, the nation’s newest demagogue. It was a broadcast that had been promoted for days in the media. A radio-talk-show-host-turned-TV-personality-and-populist-hero, McCaw had recently emerged a self-appointed champion of what he called “America’s God-given right to listen to itself.” He was interviewing a newly elected conservative senator from the Midwest, a former beauty queen who was rumored to be considering a run for the presidency.