Now and Yesterday (27 page)

It was a big day at the office: Important clients were everywhere. Peter nodded to a colleague, a creative director, who rushed past him with a delegation to greet an A-list television star waiting in the reception area with an entourage. A new series, Peter thought, or a voice-over for some high-profile campaign. Upstairs, in his own private warren of offices, where Peter was headed, key members of McCaw's communications team were spending the day with Peter's top people, led by Tyler, going through an inaugural series of conceptual explorations.

The great work begins.

Peter loved it when the office felt this electric. The sheer energy of being inside a major ad agency at the dawn of the Age of Truly Global Mass Culture was like a drug. Madison Avenue was now the undisputed control room of civilization, whereas Washington and Hollywood were only its rec rooms. Actions like voting and going to the movies seemed quaint, now that the purchase and consumption of the right soft drink or the right body wash promised to put the experience of Life Right Now into focus. More than in politics and entertainment, the higher processes fibrillating the top levels of advertising were charged with the full juice of vast national and global conversations, of the collective unconscious itself; and the people involved in these processes, even when not actually working, existed in a higher orbital, spiritually, than everyone else; they inhabited a better place than Earth, a possible planet where the abundance of everything good was a given. For not only were these young ad execs among the best and the brightest, the most creative, self-actualized, and best-paid individuals of their generation, they could depend on the daily exhilaration of work and play at the font of contemporary civilization, the source of ideas that functioned for consumers like answered prayers.

Being in this line of work, wielding its lightning, was an ultimate privilege, Peter often mused—ten times better than riding to a party in a limo with Nick's one-time friend Madonna and her crew. At the agency, Peter got to create campaigns—movements!—that would sweep whole continents with messages about products and services so beneficial that people would spend trillions of dollars on them; and along for the ride, in that traffic of wants and needs, aspirations and means, came fresh ideas about self and family and nation and world, which brought life on Earth forward, upward. Talk about illuminati! Here was the true elite. Tyler and the rest weren't hoodooing around with naïve, medieval travesties of so-called secret, ancient wisdom. They were serving humanity by generating enlightenment from moment to moment, conjuring new values and powers and orders and blessings—which was the chief thing, Peter felt, that separated him from Jonathan and the gentlemen of their generation, who had devoted themselves to older values and powers and orders and blessings. Those guys were a little less aglow.

In the Den, one of the largest work spaces in Peter's offices, he found things running smoothly. The meeting was the second of two that morning, before lunch. The McCaw team, numbering seven, headed by Sunil, the chief strategist and adviser, and Katy, the speechwriter, were comfortably installed in the room's funky collection of mismatched chairs and sofas, and in oversized beanbag cushions on the floor. Interspersed were key members of Peter's staff. The room's décor, meant to trigger creative thinking, was accented with an array of toys, board games, and indoor sporting goods that would have been at home in the
Brady Bunch
house. With a minimum of fuss, Peter slipped into the back of the room and perched against an old-fashioned stereo console, just as Tyler was beginning.

“What is a big idea?” said Tyler. He was dressed that day for the kind of authority clients expected of him: in an olive-drab suit, much more expensive than it looked, with a pair of Jack Purcells and a plain T-shirt. “We say that brown is big this season—which it is, by the way—but what do we mean by that?” On a flat-screen monitor in back of him was a slide with the phrase,
BROWN IS BIG RIGHT NOW
.

“It's popular; people are feeling it,” said Katy.

“The fashion industry is giving us a lot of it,” said Sunil.

“All true—fashion, home décor, product design,” said Tyler. “People are feeling brown. But we can go deeper. The truths we're looking for are wide and deep—that's the bedrock we want to build on.” He flipped to a new slide, featuring three words:
VERITIES, EQUIVALENCES,
and
VALIDITIES
. “So I want us to keep in mind these three kinds of truth, as we think about our goals.” Then he launched the group into a discussion of relevant definitions and differentiations.

Peter had seen Tyler conduct this kind of exercise before, with other clients, and it was always a success. And sure enough, the McCaw people were rapt and soon contributing freely and fruitfully. They seemed a friendly enough bunch, Peter thought—not New Yorkers, most of them, but clearly sophisticated and, of course, very smart; no more “other” than other clients, all of whom are teammates until you remember they are also exacting employers. No one on the team was any more of a monster than McCaw himself; there wasn't a wacko, wingnut, or dingbat among them. And as far as Peter could see, there were no doctrinally fueled disconnects in anyone's thinking. Was the monstrous sound of McCaw's “Take back America” message more a product of the media than of the man and his supporters? Was there a more useful way of framing the underlying question—“Whose America?”—than as a backward-or-forward thing, in the context of a posthege-monic nation coming to grips with an approaching nonwhite majority?

“This is how we begin to measure big,” continued Tyler. “Now, how big is brown? In what ways is it big?”

The group threw out ideas about what brown could depict or express, what it might be equivalent to, and how it might be particularly valid right now. Tyler carefully guided them to expand or focus their contributions. Katy traced a sequence of thought from “earth” to “dirty” to “natural”; Sunil traced one from “skin” to “humanity” to “diversity”; others suggested “wood,” “the environment,” and “activism”; “coffee,” “stimulation,” “self-indulgence.” Tyler recorded these ideas on large sheets of paper posted to the walls.

“From ‘dirty' to ‘self-indulgent'—not bad,” said Tyler, looking over the sheets, and the group laughed. “No, really,” he said, “very good.”

Even from his seat in the back of the room Peter could see, from people's body language, that they were enjoying working together and sparking off one another's ideas.

“And who, again, is thinking these thoughts about brown?” asked Tyler.

“Everyone,” suggested Sunil.

“Pretty much everyone,” replied Tyler. “Anyone with eyes and a brain, and a few screens or pages of print to look at now and then.”

“Can you say the same kinds of things about red?” asked Katy.

“Of course. Red is a huge story, evolving even faster than brown,” said Tyler. “Green, too—superhuge!”

“Evolving?” said Katy.

“With the headlines. Through daily experience. Our daily witness and subconscious thoughts. It's always churning. . . .”

“OK,” said Katy, “so for green: the environment, saving the rain forest . . .”

“Right. And one story that's emerging on top of that is about Brazil creating all this sustainable farmland in the Cerrado, which is their savannah. Plus, say, the continuing power of
Avatar
—the entire planet was green, remember; and the increasing use of LED displays on food carts and ATM machines; and the herbs they're cooking with on the Food Network; and yes, even our own nostalgia for lawn sprinklers and lazy summer afternoons during the Eisenhower administration. . . .”

Laughter.

“But can't you say this sort of thing about any color?” asked another member of the McCaw team.

“Sure you can, and each story is as deep as
Avatar
. But the point is that each one is as distinct from the others as
Avatar
is from, oh,
Gone With the Wind
. See what I mean? We need to know the full truths of the concepts we're dealing with, or we won't be able to accomplish our task. What is America? What is America
now?
Does anyone think that patriotism, or partisanship, or simple neighborliness, can function the same way now, among 320 million Americans, as it did in 1776, when we were less than one percent of that? These concepts are in constant evolution, even if the Constitution remains intact and we fence up our national borders.”

Buy-in, around the room.

“Peter will be getting to some of those concepts this afternoon,” continued Tyler, with a wink at his boss, “but for the moment, let's go on.” He flipped to the next slide:
HIGHEST COMMON DENOMINATOR
. And for the next forty-five minutes the group wrapped its collective head around the ideas of “good” and “normal” and the relationship between the two.

When they broke for lunch, everyone seemed buzzed. Several McCaw people made it a point of telling Peter how useful they were finding the day's program, and that pleased him, even if he was still uneasy about something undefined in his mind, regarding the assignment.

As the group headed off to the dining room, where lunch was being served, Peter grabbed a word with Tyler.

“Well done,” said Peter.

“Thanks,” said Tyler. “I think they're really getting it.”

“I'm proud of you.”

“I'm just doing what you taught me. I remember once you said, ‘Don't just think, think it
through
. . . .' ”

“I said that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Hmm.”

Peter couldn't remember ever saying such a thing, though he did agree with the thought. He wondered, as Tyler went off, if he had really uttered those very words—which sounded, actually, like Jonathan—or only something like them, which Tyler, in his own brilliant way, had processed into a maxim, giving the idea some added power. Mentoring worked both ways, Peter knew, with benefits for both parties. He had awarded Tyler a leadership role in this potentially career-making assignment and had given the boy some of the tools he needed to ace it; in return for such largesse he often received from Tyler the perfected version of a thought, that, while original, might not have been shapely enough to present to a client; a bit of intellectual refraction that functioned like a mutual gift, since it made them both look good—its exchange more appealing than sex (and perhaps something, thought Peter, that sex would have precluded).

Thank God I never thought it was love,
he thought.
Maybe we've both always known what it was.

It was funny, too, Peter mused, that as he had aged, his work had become a kind of substitute for romance. Career was the place where he was putting so much ardor, recently, so much of the attention and credulity he once lavished on lovers. But had he become stuck? Had he neglected to rethink his habits of affection as vigorously as he did those of clothing himself? Had the situation with Will uncovered a kind of amatory autopilot, set long ago in Peter's brain, when the population was smaller and men were different? Did his ideas about love need refracting for use in the current day?

Or was it time to just retire from the field? Romance itself had changed, too, after all, over the decades. Partly as a result of the social change pushed by Peter's generation, love and sex had shifted away from the sanctified spots where Peter first discovered them and were functioning now as wholly different kinds of common denominators, for a different kind of population. The America that Peter and his generation had built was a place where a rising young man with a Brown education, from a nice middle-class family, could openly use his experience as a rent boy and a performing artist to pull off a major advertising coup. Tyler was “ready to suck cock,” he'd said when they discussed the ethics of the McCaw assignment, before signing, “but in a good way.”

It was convenient for Peter to have someone like this on his team, of course, so the old man in him could have it both ways: caviling about doctrinal purity while hoping to serve the client well. And since Peter wasn't really ready to retire from romance just yet, he could maybe get a few good clues from Tyler about what kind of love was big this season, even if the boy's wholesome brand of who-rishness might have its detriments.

T
hen, as it got warmer, Peter and Will started seeing more of each other. They got together two or three times a week, for movies and parties, for dinners out and occasionally in, at Peter's place, though there were still no sleepovers. They weren't dating; they were simply sliding into a comfortable relationship as default hangout buddies, with all the back-and-forth texting and phone calling that such relationships entail—a bounty of not-so-idle chatter that Peter adored, since it had begun to subsume those little daily-witness exchanges he had once shared with Harold and Nick: the “I saw a funny thing at Starbucks today” and “I tried to exit at the north end of the Eighteenth Street subway station but it was closed” discussions whose spiritually sustaining nature Peter hadn't fully comprehended, before. He found that such witness had become fundamental for him, even without the connection to sex and other usual boyfriend stuff. It was palpable assurance that another human being, an ally, was huddled nearby and heedful, in the encroaching dark of a frigid cosmos.

Yet there was a casual physical intimacy growing between them. A brush of the lower back or caress of the neck, when they met in a restaurant or lounge, or a warm pat on the knee, as the lights went down at a concert—it was almost as if they were a very old couple or a pair of loving exes, Peter thought. Moreover, less and less, at a party, when the two of them clucked over a cute guy they spotted, would Will want to peel away and go enchant the guy, and less and less would Peter dread that he might do so. More and more, they knew each other's taste in men and enjoyed discussing this at great length, even as the pursuit for other men slipped into some kind of abeyance. When Will mentioned one day that Peter had become one of his “best friends,” Peter was thrilled and understood he had to accept this lovely gift for what it was, without wondering if it might lead to a greater gift. If the arrangement precluded Peter from pursuing someone else, so be it, he thought. A stalled romance was better than none.

Why had this comfort developed between them, instead of sex? Did it represent a stage on the way to becoming boyfriends? Who knew? The chief feature of the arrangement seemed to be that both of them accepted it tacitly, which itself sometimes pleased Peter as a very adult form of graciousness toward each other.

It was because of this arrangement that Peter, once more, felt the days pulse with the thrill that comes when tiny, normal moments are also special—the ordinary world of heightened everything, to which he'd found his way before twice in life, and from which he had twice been exiled, too. Now, with Will, for the first time since Nick, dumb little habits that sweetened reality were common again, like texting each other whenever one of them happened to set foot on Eighth Avenue, with messages like
Once more into the breach!
and
OMG, first tank top of spring!
Common were silly nicknames like “Chez Poubelle,” for their favorite dumpling joint in Chinatown, and “the presidential box,” for their preferred seats at the BAM Cinema; common were “study dates” at Peter's place, when Will would catch up on work reading with his Kindle, while Peter cooked dinner; the repetition of such habits cementing a common history that develops between two people, making the normal of life exhilarating, where it had previously only been tolerable. Suddenly, again, Peter felt he could grasp the full nature of reality in shared moments that would otherwise have gone unregistered: a child's delight in the fluttering of a pigeon he's charged on the sidewalk; the elegance of a lady with long white locks flashing by in the street on a vintage Schwinn; the drama of mid-afternoon shadows from sills and lintels in a row of brownstones on West Fourth Street, which runs diagonal to Manhattan's grid and thus affords, because of the angle, a different way for light to fall on city architecture.

They came upon the latter one Sunday afternoon when they were walking to a restaurant for a late brunch. They turned a corner onto West Fourth and
boom
. Kindred spirits paused to look, remark, triangulate the sun. And for Peter this kind of thing wasn't just a nice change from the soul-deadening stretch of generic clock-ticking that had filled the days since Nick; it was a reentry into the life of full agency that he'd always desired from the world, since as far back as he could remember, as the baby in a highchair, eager for the thrill of feeding himself; the toddler on a preschool morning, determined to dress himself without Mommy's help; the young adolescent, lying facedown in the grass in the backyard, arms outstretched, desperate to embrace the world's splendor. And the world had given him plenty of splendor, in spurts, over the previous six decades, though each time the cause was an actual person there had been challenges—as there were this time. For one thing, kindred didn't mean “identical.” Will had his own mind and didn't necessarily aim to assimilate Peter's. Their first argument, which was perhaps to be expected at this new stage of their friendship, was about a performance they'd recently seen.

It blew up at a party that Peter threw at his place—a big “men thing,” as he called it, for friends of a gay writer around his age, who was visiting from out of town and with whom Peter had originally planned only to have a drink. The plan grew into cocktails for sixty, on the second Sunday of daylight savings time—a party also to welcome “the return of the Sun” (said the invitation), with fancy hors d'oeuvres and a staff of three, much more elaborate than the get-together at Peter's that Will had bartended, months before.

After working from home that day, Peter closed his laptop around three and texted Will, as he began to prepare himself for the party.

I can't see myself,
wrote Peter.

Use my eyes,
wrote Will.

They're too small.

Peter giggled as he threw off his gym clothes and stepped into the shower. The lines were a bit of conspicuously banal dialogue from the performance they'd seen and hooted over, a few nights before.

Peter looked forward to afternoon showers at home, at that time of year, because the sun was again high enough to shaft through the bathroom window and directly onto the shower's white tile walls, making them glow pearlescently through billowing clouds of steam—and, if you looked carefully in that light, you could see clouds casting fleeting, almost imperceptible shadows on other clouds. For Peter, showering midday like that was more than just hygiene; it was therapy—and it was amplified that day by the earthy, medicinal scent of an expensive bar of soap he unwrapped, from a venerable Florentine
antica farmacia
employing a 500-year-old botanical formula originally meant to be “sanitory.” Steamy clouds buoyed a grassy, resinous freshness that evoked the healing science of a gentler age. Was it still a science that worked? Peter loofahed his body, exfoliated his face with some costly grit. In a way, the thing he was holding out for, with Will, was therapeutic. Love would be the single most healing thing that could happen in his life—that is, a relationship that included loving sex. Too long, after Nick, he had sex with people he didn't care about, just because it was easy. Sex on the side of something like Harold or Nick was recreational; not on the side of anything, it felt empty. So he had stopped prowling craigslist and Manhunt, though abstinence was far from a satisfactory situation. Too long he'd nursed crushes on younger men he knew could have turned into proper lovers, given the chance—but the chance never happened. Again, sometimes, he felt like he was back in high school, jerking off to the fantasy of guys he liked, with scarcely the prospect of a real sexual experience with any of them.

For a moment, in the shower, since his cock felt full and heavy, he considered jerking off, thinking about Will—something he'd never done. Then he decided against it.

The help arrived at five.

“You can do drinks from here,” Peter told the bartender, showing him the kitchen. To the others he gave instructions about clearing glassware, answering the door, passing hors d'oeuvres. Soon they had placed votive candles around the apartment and in the garden, and deployed the food and flowers that had been delivered earlier in the day. Peter had splurged on crab and caviar, since the McCaw account now permitted such extravagance—as it did the new custom-made palomino shoes he was wearing with a pair of old Levi's and a white button-down shirt, untucked. He had yet to find the courage to wear the shoes in public.

When the guests started arriving, around six-thirty, the first cycle of the musical program Peter had devised for the evening, with classic jazz, had already given way to the second: downbeat deep-house stuff like alexkid and De-Phazz—music that was a little composed, a little found, a little designed; more organic than technological, despite its genesis on a computer. One of the servers, a cute guy with a blond crew cut and an Australian accent, commended Peter on the music. Gratified, Peter thanked the guy warmly. He knew the guest of honor might prefer Sarah Vaughan, but he wanted to follow through on a feeling he'd had all day not only about the arrival of spring—the door to the garden was open and the early evening was unusually warm—but
this
spring, when it seemed like something unprecedentedly marvelous might happen. Maybe it was already happening! China was building gleaming new cities every day! Civilizations and boyfriends were always possible! For Peter, laptop music offered the truest, if still hazy, views of the exciting Present, by showing it as a lush, if underappreciated, Past, from the point of view of some wise and opulent Future. It reminded us where we were in history and where we weren't.

Friends arrived and Peter greeted them warmly, bringing them in to meet other friends, then returning to the door. Will arrived with Luz and, after grabbing kisses and drinks, scooted into the garden. By seven both the apartment and garden were jammed, producing an amiable din that rendered the music practically inaudible. The party was a hit! And when Peter saw that food and drink service was flowing smoothly, he began to relax. After what he decided were the last of the introductions, he took a club soda and sidled over to Tyler.

“These all-gay things are as hard for me to host as they are to attend,” he confided.

“What do you mean?” said Tyler. “There are plenty of women.”

“Plenty?”

“Some.”

“You know what I mean. It requires a whole other kind of thought.”

“I thought the party was about springing forward or something.”

“Ty, did you know that daylight savings was invented by this entomologist from New Zealand . . . ?”

“Stop,” commanded Tyler, with a finger to Peter's lips.

Peter chuckled and took Tyler's hand and kissed it.

“Have you talked to Will at all?” said Peter.

“A little,” said Tyler. “I
love
Luz.”

“She's great, isn't she?”

“Can I have one of those?”

People went on chattering, drinking, laughing. If the evening air was a little cooler than ideal, no one seemed to mind. As daylight waned, and the votives and houselights took over, the party assumed a warm glow.

Peter talked with the guest of honor for a while, standing on the porch overlooking the garden, and as he did so he happened to catch Will, near one of the hydrangea bushes, sharing what looked like a sparkling word with the Australian waiter, who was circulating with a wine bottle.
No biggie,
thought Peter.

“Nice party,” said Will, a few moments later, when Peter joined him.

“I've been trying to get over here for twenty minutes,” said Peter.

“Fun crowd.”

“Yeah.”

“And what are we wearing on our feet today?”

“Oh—Belgian Shoes.”

“New?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“They're new,” said Peter.

“I thought you hated that stuff,” said Will.

“Love-hate, darling.”

It was party talk and meant lightly, so Peter thought better of asking Will to define “that stuff.” Moreover, he suspected Will had an issue with all the money Peter had been spending recently. The week before, Will had declined Peter's invitation to dine at the city's best Japanese restaurant, claiming a work deadline but also calling the price of a meal there “obscene”—which struck Peter as odd, since Will had never shown an aversion to life's finer things before. Quite the opposite. When Peter reminded him that he could afford it, Will responded with mock-society-lady breeziness that felt barbed: “How nice
for
you.”

It was around eight-thirty when Peter found himself standing with Will and Luz near the bar.

“And then she says, ‘Use my eyes,' ” said Will. He was describing the performance he and Peter had seen.

“And the guy goes, ‘They're too small,' ” said Peter. They all laughed.

“It was ludicrous,” said Will.

“Crazy,” said Peter. “But, you know . . . there was kind of a point to the thing.”

“Yeah,” said Will, “a point in the middle of such intensely unwatchable bullshit that it hardly mattered.”

“That bad?” giggled Luz.

“Worse,” roared Will. He and Luz laughed.

“Really?” said Peter.

“It keeps
haunting
me,” said Will.

“But wait, c'mon,” said Peter. “Sure, it was stupid—we made fun—but there was something a little valid about it. . . .”

“Valid!” said Will, incredulously. Then, for Luz's benefit, he went on to describe the performance. “It was totally without shape. There was a little dancing, a little text, a little music, and these projections on the walls of the set—you know, live shots of the street outside and a loop of waves, lapping the shore—all sort of thrown together in a sludge that just kept sludging along, until it stopped.”