Now and Yesterday (21 page)

“He's not into me that way—
claro
. I must be grotesque to him.”

“Relax. It was only a second date.”

Around them, the gallery's scene-energy was escalating. Guests continued to drink, chat, and laugh ferociously, while the high-heeled models oozed among them, radiating exemplary focus. On hand to preserve decorum between the naked performers and New York's most entitled culture vultures was a squad of art-world security guards, heavy guys in ill-fitting uniforms, whose hovering presence was meant to allow everyone to feel comfortable and wild at the same time.

“Look how clean their feet are,” marveled Peter, as they inched through the crowd, gawking at the models in a pretend-blasé way. “Now that's good execution.” The boy models betrayed only a hint of the difficulty they were having with the high heels, while the girls looked more at home in the performance, owning their space fiercely on the polished concrete floor—a pretend-simple surface, Peter knew, that was colored in a precisely formulated shade of warm gray and had cost more per square foot than most Persian carpets.

“You're really into this guy, aren't you?” said Jonathan.

“God help me,” said Peter. “He's such a delicious blend of masculine and something else. And why am I being so shy, anyway? Why wouldn't I just put my cards on the table and see what's what?”

“Did you get into top and bottom?”

“I did not.”

“It could mean trouble.”

“Oh,
no,
darling. Boys are
all
bottoms, these days. You'd know that if you were dating. Anyone born after 1975 is a bottom. Besides, you know I was never into all that. I still don't know what to say when people ask me about Harold and me.”

Being free of top- and bottomness was, in fact, a big reason why Peter liked playing around with younger men, though they did wrestle, in their own way, with subtle gender identity issues—a battle that, in Will, seemed like a tension between the Inner Boy and Inner Girl, though not in an artsy way, as with Tyler, who used ambiguity to his advantage in his work at the agency and onstage, but in a more everyday way, with fashion accessories that referenced Affluent White Suburban Mom Realness: the scarves, sunglasses, and tote bag that Will sometimes used to mitigate his Cute Young Guy looks. The new terms of young men's identity exploration felt like progress, Peter told Jonathan: a step beyond the parodies of masculinity adopted by their own generation as a response to oppression. These kids had never known much oppression, which was not only nice for them but also made them nicer to be with. And no, Peter assured his friend, he and Will had not delved into gender theory that night, though Peter did admit being obsessed with a tender lilt that sometimes flecked Will's laughter and a delicate continuity between masculine and feminine grace that Will demonstrated when, for example, handling glassware and pouring drinks.

Was Peter really into the guy? Sure. How—as a friend? That would be nice. As a boyfriend? Maybe, if Will were into it and had no issues with age. But age wasn't a question that could simply be asked and answered. Will might not find Peter “grotesque,” just a sexual no-thank-you. Then again, Peter was as unsure about Will as he was head-over-heels. Who was the guy, really, and what would he become? Who was he raised to be, and how would he manage the gift of his parental programming? Tyler's mom, for instance, was only a career waitress, unmarried when she raised Tyler, but she was sharp and progressive, and had imprinted her son with the will to better himself, and that had motivated him deeply. Such imprinting was a kind of hidden color, too, which revealed itself only when the light was stronger.

“You're such a good friend,” said Peter, kissing Jonathan impulsively on the forehead. “Listening to me prattle on about boys.”

Jonathan rolled his eyes heavenward, which only heightened the fact that his eyes were slightly sunken.

When the performance concluded, the dancers bowed slowly, butoh style, then the evening's chairperson introduced the choreographer, who said a few words about nakedness and nature. Then, as the live auction began—on the block was the evening's artwork itself: a DVD of the performance, plus a pair of used high heels and a certificate of authenticity—Peter and Jonathan made their way to the bar.

The place was a museum of former flings, commented Peter. Julian was there, a journalist whom Jonathan used to see. So were Newsome, a gallerist whom Peter dated for five minutes, and Delia, a dealer Peter had made out with once on a banquette, many years before, when she was at Vassar and Peter got her and some extremely cute classmates, boys, into a hot club. Peter nodded to both, smiling as they passed, continuing to talk with Jonathan in a way that indicated that an interruption would not be cool. For Peter, nearing sixty, the city was never so full of former golden boys, many of whom he had promised the world and many who rejected it. What does one say to a boy who has rejected the world and also lost his looks and now seemed a poseur, a weakling, a dullard, or a fake?

And then Peter saw Nick. He was walking toward them with a guy Peter assumed was a new boyfriend. They were going to say hello and there wasn't time to warn Jonathan, without looking obvious, that he didn't want a protracted exchange.

“Peter, hi,” said Nick, leaning in for a perfunctory hug. “Hi, Jonathan.”

“Hi, Nick,” said Peter. Introductions were made to Benny, the man Nick was with.

“Nice party,” said Nick.

“Having a good time?” said Peter.

“Great. Not sure I get the art.”

“There's not much to get. Naked young people in cute shoes. QED.”

Nick was a tall man in his early forties, with dark hair; huge, dark eyes; and a prominent nose. He had a permanent smile and sparkling demeanor, the latter which now, chastened by sobriety, seemed gentler.

As the four talked, Peter made sure his body language said that he and Jonathan had been on their way to another part of the gallery, and Jonathan, no slouch in social matters, even if at death's door, played along cheerfully.

“How was that?” asked Jonathan, after Nick and Benny had left.

“Fine,” said Peter.

“You sure?”

“Jonathan, we did three years of therapy, just to end it correctly. I'm good.”

“He's put on some weight.”

“Hasn't he, though?”

“But still cute.”

“At least he's still alive.”

“Who's the guy?”

“A chef, I think,” said Peter. “Benedetto.”

“Julian is looking well,” said Jonathan. “I wonder if he's still hooking.”

“What do you mean? I thought he was at
Rolling Stone
.”

“He was, back then. He was also taking clients, which is how he and I met.”

“Jonathan, you shock me,” said Peter. “I did not know that.”

“About him—or me?”

“Either of you.”

Jonathan smiled weakly.

“You know I've done a call boy now and then,” he said.

“I'm not making a judgment,” said Peter. “You know I have great respect for sex work.”

P
eter was more upset over seeing Nick at the gallery than he let on, and he was peeved to be that upset, given all the therapy that he and Nick had been through together, after the breakup. On his way home, as he and a zombie driver rattled down Varick Street in a gypsy cab, toward the Brooklyn Bridge, he kept going over those few seconds of banal party chatter in his mind.

“Not sure I get the art.” “There's not much to get.”

But Nick was so much smarter than Peter! He often saw more than Peter did in all kinds of art, from contemporary stuff to the masterpieces people knew since childhood. Peter always said so! Yet Nick's background wasn't intellectual. He hadn't undergone the standard art historical indoctrination at home or in school, and never seemed to want to learn more about what he was seeing, as Peter always thought he should do. Peter expected that anyone would want to do that, because . . . Well, all that was ancient history now. The therapist had helped them see that they were two different people, two different stories.

Peter shook his head.
Two different stories
. How to collate past and present, except to unclench and let them scrape against each other like colliding supertankers? Traffic on Varick was light, as usual for that time of night. This was the same route home that Peter had taken for decades, and the city flashed by in the sparse, shadowy, familiar frames of a black-and-white movie, except that almost all Manhattan streets were now hiding too much wealth to bristle with much noir, and the corner of Varick and Chambers, where a gang of bat-wielding children tried to ambush his cab in '78 or '79, now boasted an expensive bistro with sidewalk tables.

Yes, Nick was love, as much as Harold ever was, if love was the switching on of the body's full capacity to process every second of existence with every cell. The man had a great heart, as well as a natural eye for art and ear for music. But Nick was also disaster, because with him, heightened experience came at a high price. He turned out to be an emotional wreck for almost the same reason he was good company and great sex: a messy desperateness to please. Glibly, Peter, as he and Jonathan left the gallery that night, had compared the relationship to the fossil fuel economy: It deadened as much as it brought to life. Blotching Peter's memory of Nick was a massive oil spill that felt important historically, but not exactly a pinnacle of achievement.

How to think about this man? The memory of Nick, which was ultimately a manageable thing, was not the same thing as the human being itself, in the flesh, walking around, showing up at parties. Peter had no other exes, except this piece of living, breathing evidence of a nine-year-long mistake. He had learned in therapy not to think of it that way, but on some level he couldn't help doing so. A dead partner was far more convenient than a living ex! The memory of countless irksome Harold issues that for years had contributed to the normal amount of day-to-day friction between him and Peter dissolved, over that final year, in a voluptuous bath of caregiving and care-getting. Harold's success as a husband was burnished by retrospect and crystallized, after his death, into myth. And what helped the process was the fact that lots of other widows shared similar myths, as after other wars.

The memory of Nick, by the same token, fit into no narrative that Peter could work out. In the story of Peter's life, Nick was a chapter without a number. Even as he told people he was looking for his “third and final marriage,” counting Nick as the second, Peter continued to compare all candidates to Harold, admitting only nominally how unfair this might be to himself and others. Nine years? Even that was a point of contention between Nick and him. Nick measured the relationship from the first stay-over sex, which happened a week after the two first met in a public park, late at night, when Nick blew Peter and they exchanged numbers. Peter measured from the first declaration of de-facto boyfriend-hood, which took place almost a year later, after a prolonged sex-only thing morphed into friendship and the two started going to parties and clubs together, as each other's first-option dates. It was a status, claimed Nick, that was long overdue. The relationship didn't seem real enough to Peter even then, absent a lightning-strike moment, but he did recognize that a certain momentum had built up between them. And since old friends kept reminding Peter that it was OK to quote-unquote move on with his life, he tried to relegate the Harold figurine to a niche and keep shuffling forward.

At first, Peter was impressed by Nick's embrace of a new life. When they met, Nick was still living in the suburban New Jersey town where he'd grown up, and had just emerged from a relationship with a woman, though since his late teens he'd been sneaking into the city by bus to suck cock. After meeting Peter, and succumbing to sermons about eros and identity, Nick came out and immediately became fabulous. He moved to Chelsea, signed up at David Barton, rethought his hair and wardrobe, and found a job at a top interior design firm that hired him away from the suburban decorator whom he'd been working for since he was seventeen. He was handsome and affable, and for two or three years he did well in his new stratum. He and Peter met each other's families, took some trips together, and started talking about buying a place together upstate. Then Nick became
too
fabulous. The gym and new haircut led to parties and clubs, and then to certain parties that were all about drugs. Nick started hanging out with the wrong people: attractive men who seemed cool and affluent, but weren't as smart as they thought they were—members of some of the pseudo-A-list circles that are always there, eddying with debris, on the edge of the New York social gyre. Peter warned discreetly and smiled when introduced to new faces, but Nick couldn't get enough of these people, nor they him.

And for a while, Peter tagged along with Nick in some of these circles and actually liked being a tourist there. Beyond the clubs and parties, it was drug and sex scenes that Nick brought him to, and there Peter gratefully called Nick his Beatrice—though Nick, of course, hadn't read Dante. On a little K, or coke, or snortable heroin, after an all-night party, Peter glimpsed another side of the city he thought he knew well, a darkly seductive refraction of gay life that felt lusciously poisonous: the hazy, twelve-hour fisting scenes, laced with the acrid-sweet reek of burning rock; the endless and apparently fruitless nipple tugging and cock jerking; the piles of cash and pots of lube and scatter of sex toys; the calls in sick and follow-up messages to people who had
more
and could be there within thirty minutes; the uncertainty whether it was dawn or dusk, and indifference to either.

And as a social observer Peter valued many of the insights he took away from that world: a secret about America's hunger for amusement, yielding one night from a moment of stupid congress with a decorative, sparkle-flecked wall panel inside the elevator of some party-stranger's building; or a discernment between looking and real seeing, such as Peter found crooning one morning, upon exit from a popper suck marathon, from the greenish tinges of a rosy dawn sky. But Peter also liked the social observer's distance he was able to maintain from all that, the permanent outsider position he tended to enforce. More than once—bored, or simply ready to return to reality—he said good-bye to Nick and left him at one of those scenes. Then he stopped accompanying Nick on such expeditions altogether, his ability to do so partly the result of sober parents who'd drastically overwarned against all sorts of evils, during the '60s.
Heroin—it's too good to try even once!
Nick would have heard that tagline as an unironic invitation to party. Monstrous partying for him, in those days, meant monstrous partying again and again and again; and Peter continued to warn gently, again and again, though he also decided that Nick's partying was a parody of the heroic and thus more interesting than mere addiction.

Jesus!

For too long Peter was resigned to the tirades and bad behavior. One morning, when Nick showed up at Peter's house at dawn, he called Peter a “big loser” for having bolted from the party earlier. Peter was hurt, but responded by making breakfast. Nick was swinging wildly from elation to depression by then, and Peter gamely tried to engage with the ills and issues that Nick brought up during those moods. Peter was a caregiver, after all; it was his duty to endure. When Nick became enamored of a whole group of strung-out, steroided, bodybuilder-hustlers, endlessly distracted by their own meth-fueled narcissism, Peter tried to help his so-called boyfriend see the changes in his own personality: Affability turned to pushiness, generosity to insistence, judgments and preferences to belligerence and intolerance. But attempts to question Nick's choices led to shrieking accusations of betrayal. Then Nick started missing work and making excuses; suddenly he was fired. Peter knew the relationship was over when he started hearing through the grapevine about Nick's scuffles with club security and his demented late-night phone calls to friends, to borrow money.

Thank God we never moved in together,
thought Peter.

How to talk about Nick? What to call him?

My “ex”? How pedestrian
.

In couples therapy—which they entered after Nick's second rehab, as an alternative to demonizing each other for the rest of their lives—they salvaged what they could of the affection and respect they originally felt and started re-parsing their story as a friendship or a family thing. Everything had to be different, if they were to survive healthily, and Peter welcomed the questions that arose for him personally, in therapy, about the premises and purposes of romantic bonding—even if it bothered him that caretaking was so closely related to codependency, that till-death-do-us-part could be as much a rut as a heavenly path.

The cab driver hadn't uttered a word since picking Peter up at the gallery—not even a “yes” when Peter told him his destination. As they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, Peter sat up and forward, in case the driver should need help negotiating the turnoff at Cadman Plaza, as some did. But toward the end of the bridge the driver pulled smoothly into the right lane, and veered quickly left after exiting.
Obviously the guy knows what he's doing,
thought Peter, sitting back. The plaza was named after a radio preacher from the '30s. It was so safe now, quiet and trim, without the massive bushes that bristled with nighttime cruisers and their predators back in the '70s, let alone the trolleys and elevated trains that bustled up from the waterfront on Old Fulton Street, decades before that....

Old stories—perhaps not so grand, at that.

Since Harold's death Peter had been the sole custodian of their romantic history. Of the mess with Nick, though, there were two custodians, which was much less convenient—especially when it came to Peter trying to tell Will or anyone else where he had come from and where he thought he was going. Maybe the thing to do was coalesce the best parts of one's past into as nice-and-trim a present as can be confected, while wrestling the nastier chunks into a box, jamming down the lid, and hoping for the best.

Anyway, maybe the age of thinking about love the way I do has passed,
thought Peter, as the cab pulled up in front of his house. He paid the driver, stepped out of the cab, and watched it tear away. The vestibule of the house was the most inviting one on the block, with his landlady's toile-pattern wallpaper, in crimson and white, visible from the street through double doors that featured large windows. As he mounted the stoop he couldn't help thinking, as he often did—
maybe too often?
—of the day in 1975 when he and Harold entered the house for the first time, after a realtor took them there on a summer afternoon, and of the autumn night years afterward when Harold left it for the last time, his body in the hands of a funeral director.

Love is probably more pedestrian nowadays,
thought Peter
. No ascent of Machu Picchu, but an episode of
Will & Grace
. Fine—I guess. Except what if my boy Will and all other gay men under forty really do think of love that way—pedestrian? What if he says “yes” to me someday, but “yes” means only “OK for the moment,” fine for an episode or two, and not “yes” the way I wish he would mean it: “I have been joyously aware of your presence in the universe since the dawn of time and will love you completely until the end of eternity”?