Now and Yesterday (29 page)

I can't see myself. Use my eyes. They're too small.

Risible, yes. And also maybe not. Another sip of vodka.

He remembered adapting willingly to all stages of Harold's decline, and finding new kinds of life and fullness in each one. Then Harold was gone and nothing more seemed possible, at all, ever. And yet . . .

The air-conditioner grinding had stopped. It suddenly felt colder. Peter got up to go in. From outside, across the garden, the interior of the house looked like a promised land of warmth—lamps, books, artwork, furniture, stuff collected over what was now almost a lifetime. Inside, he shut the door and adjusted the blinds, then fluffed the pillows on the daybed and put them back in the arrangement he liked. The help hadn't got that just right. A group of Tyler's friends had been sitting there for practically the whole party. Peter wondered if Tyler, who knew, mentioned that someone had died on that very spot.

Harold and he hadn't actually shared death, Peter knew—only what led up to it. Some things can't be shared. Of course there were things that Peter and Will would never be able to share—and what of it? Sharing everything implied certainty about what everything
was,
yet life was the ultimate contingency—a terrain whose features looked fixed until the light source changed.

Our issues are not generational at all—they're existential!
Peter smirked.
Oh, won't that be fun to discuss!

It was definitely time for another round of therapy, he thought. This was something he'd been considering for a while. The round of couples therapy he'd done with Nick, lasting three years, had done more than allow them to maintain some civility during and after the breakup. It had allowed Peter to see that the major themes of his life—which he'd examined during past rounds of therapy: a short one in high school, another in college, a long one that started just after he arrived in New York—were still evolving. Suddenly, he was curious: Am I a success as a human being, after working on myself for six decades? What's going on with me and money? Does my mother still matter?

Golly, what's therapy for old people like, anyway?

“H
iya, babe,” chirped Will, as he emerged from his magazine's building, around one.

Luz was perched, along with several other people, mostly tourists and shoppers, just outside the door, on the ledge formed by the thick wooden frame of the plate-glass window of the luxury-brand shop that occupied the building's ground floor. With a view into the shop past thirty faceless mannequins lined up in neat ranks, like soldiers in summer dresses, their heads all inclined leftward, the window commanded much of the appeal—and some of the import—of the art that used to hang in the gallery that occupied the same space for decades, before SoHo became SoHo-land. That stretch of Broadway, from Houston down to Canal, was now as crowded with shoppers as Madison or Fifth, though the crowd there felt more hungrily hip than uptown, and the collective mood that April day was particularly ravenous, as it was the first time that season when a bright, warm day had unleashed everyone's appetite for new clothes.

“Hey, sweetie,” said Luz, finishing up a text message and rising. They shared a little kiss.

“Amazing, eh?” said Will. He took stock of the street, shielding his eyes from glare with his palm, though he was already wearing a pair of wraparound sunglasses, which he'd donned in the elevator.

“Gorgeous. People are nuts,” said Luz.

Will unwrapped the little scarf he'd arranged around his neck before leaving the office and undid the top buttons of his jacket—a crisply silhouetted, black military number he'd been given by a stylist after a shoot.

“Do I need this?” he said.

“It's cooler than you think,” said Luz.

“OK.”

“See how you feel. We're walking, right?”

“The dumpling place.”

“If that's OK with you.”

“Baby, I'm all about a dumpling,” said Will, and they began walking southward, as SoHo's grandest flight of nineteenth-century commercial-palatial façades canyoned before them—though in his eagerness to stay close by Luz's side Will inadvertently jostled a guy in a gray suit, talking on his cell phone, planted in the middle of the sidewalk. The man accepted Will's apology wordlessly, while continuing to converse haltingly in German. The roar of Broadway traffic made it difficult both to hear and be heard.

“I'm starving!” yelled Luz, veering right and squeezing between a vendor's cart and a family of tourists clumped in front of it. She half glanced back at Will, who was following.

“What?” he said, trying not to bump into more people.

“I said, ‘I'm starving,' ” said Luz, when they were near each other again. Staying close meant negotiating the flow of bodies rushing at them—a flow made distinctly less laminar by the effects of glare and the protective eyewear everyone was wearing. A herd of blond boys pressed past in shorts and flip-flops, with matching backpacks. A Swedish high school trip, Will guessed.

“Springtime in the Big Apple!” said Luz. “Ya gotta love it.”

“What? Yeah . . . and it's a first for both of us, isn't it?”

“I know! Last spring . . . we were both in L.A., and you don't really feel . . . the seasons. . . .” She was piloting while talking.

“I'll take a day like this—it changes everything!” shouted Will. “It's like, you can see how nice the city is. . . .”

“What?” squawked Luz. The current had squeezed her over a few feet.

Will caught her eye.

“Let's . . . ,” he said, indicating the next left. Arm in arm, they steered each other onto Spring Street, where the traffic would be lighter and the noise lower. Then they'd head down Lafayette.

“So your meeting . . . ,” said Luz, breathlessly.

“Yeah, it was great! So I met with Colin, who now loves me, and Herman got raked over the coals, because he let my story get cut. . . .”

“The singer from Senegal?”

“Yeah—though that was kinda my fault, too. . . .”

Just then, a blue-and-white police car turned into Spring Street and sped by, its siren wailing. Then more speeding sirens: a second blue-and-white, followed by a dark, unmarked sedan. Will sighed theatrically.

“I'll tell you over lunch,” he said.

And adding to the hellishness of Spring Street that day were two or three idling trucks opposite Balthazar, double-parked for deliveries and roaring—though for a tanned, older woman with flaming orange hair, sitting in a parked limo, it was not hell but picnic time. The limo's rear door was open and the woman, seated half out of the car, in a flouncy peasant skirt somewhat too youngish for her, her sandaled feet planted on the sidewalk, was peeling an orange and breaking it into sections. As she fed herself with exaggerated finesse, she barked intermittently in Portuguese at her driver, who was standing nearby, translating into English into his cell phone. Because the limo door was open, a deliveryman needing to navigate around it, at the curb, had to wait for a moment with his bulkily loaded hand truck while some people passed by, before he pushed on. The lady remained oblivious, her massive gold cuff glinting in the sunlight.

“You know what I'm seeing a lot of?” said Luz, after they'd passed. “Fake genteel.”

“Sister! How about no genteel?”

“Ya know? They're rich—fine. They come here to shop—fine. But they're completely absorbed in themselves, and they're fucking in the way.”

“Yes! Say it!”

“And the women are the worst,” continued Luz. “They have this vacant, amused look on their face, like ‘I only brake for Chanel. Doesn't everybody?' ”

Will hooted.

“What's up with that?” said Luz.

“I dunno,” said Will. “Pride in the distance you've put between yourself and your peasant roots? Pride in living the international luxury-brand lifestyle?”

Luz laughed.

“We're in a mood,” she said.

“We're hungry,” said Will.

Tucked just below Canal Street on Lafayette, between a sandwich joint and a restaurant supply store, Excellent Dumpling House was a one-story building not much larger than Will's bedroom suite in the house he grew up in, in Santa Barbara. The place wasn't fancy, but Will loved the good food and cheap prices, as did a zillion other people; and indeed, when he and Luz arrived, the place was hopping. Outside, in front of a window neoned with a steaming bowl and chopsticks, one of the restaurant's delivery guys was locking up his bike to a rack, while another guy, laden with bulky white plastic bags, was unlocking his. Inside, customers jammed the tiny reception area, having given their names to the hostess and resigned themselves to a wait—which was always shorter than expected, since the pace of both the serving and the eating at Excellent Dumpling House was so very brisk.

Tables for four lined the periphery of the room, while three communal tables for eight occupied the middle. In the narrow squeeze between tables a team of servers was constantly in motion, delivering food to tables, clearing plates, while customers being seated maneuvered gingerly past those trying to exit. The room was always full at that time of day, and the fluorescent-bright décor seemed to amplify the commotion: a band of mirrors along three walls, above panels of white Formica wainscoting; a series of luridly colored photos of dumpling platters; several China-red plaques embossed in gold foil with some manner of sinographic inscription. Near the cashier's desk, a double-wide, glass-doored, Coke-red refrigerator held, along with soda, unmarked carafes of white wine, desserts pre-packaged in clear plastic take-out containers, and tap water in plastic pitchers so well used that their surfaces had gone from shiny to matte.

Within five minutes, Luz and Will had accepted a pair of seats at one of the communal tables. Within seven, they had been given their water, tea, tableware, and a menu full of pictures; and within fifteen, two of the plates they'd ordered had arrived: house special scallion pancakes and steamed, juicy little pork dumplings.

“I adore this place,” said Will. “I come here with Peter all the time.”

“You and your boyfriend?” said Luz.

“Not really.”

“Really.”

“We're like... best friends.”

“You've been saying that for weeks.”

“Uh-huh.”

“While you're going out with him and talking about him all the time. . . .”

“And your point is?”

“Fucker.”

Will giggled.

“OK, so meeting,” said Luz, shifting her chair and elbow so as not to be crowded by a large man to her right. The man glanced in her direction reflexively, but remained focused on his dumplings.

“You ready?” said Will.
“I have a cover story!”
He boomed the news in an Oprah voice.

“No way—dude, that's awesome!” said Luz. They high-fived.

“September issue. The singer I was telling you about—Xiomara.”

“Get out!”

“Sixteen pages.”

“Fuck me. That's huge, right?”

“Huge.”

As Will related the story, his relish was obvious. The meeting had taken place that morning, in the spacious corner office that Colin, the editor in chief, inhabited when he was in town, which was rarely. At other times the office—which was built out in an elaborate and expensive faux-industrial style, like the rest of the floor, with a heavy steel-and-glass-paneled door and beautifully framed transom windows onto adjacent offices—looked like a giftware showroom, stuffed with the gaily wrapped packages, floral arrangements, and other tribute that arrived for the editor daily. In the corner, near a window, a large, antique worktable that served as a desk was laden with piles of manuscripts and stacks of new, oversized books on art, fashion, and photography. On the walls hung several contemporary paintings—a Condo, a Marden, and another one by an artist whose name Will could never remember, from the private collection of the publisher, who also owned an art magazine that was housed on the same floor. A wall of books and back issues included a shelf of citations and awards, the latter including the American Society of Magazine Editors' “Ellie” award, in the form of an elephant-shaped stabile designed by sculptor Alexander Calder. The Ellie had been won for general excellence in its category a few years earlier, after the publisher had fired the editor in chief's predecessor and brought in Colin to update the magazine.

Will, whose office was a few feet away, had heard Colin arrive on the floor, hours before. He was used to the commotion Colin's presence caused, even when the editor was working behind closed doors. People constantly streamed in to see him from the art department and publisher's office; photographers dropped by, who had been assigned projects for the magazine or wanted one; celebrity actors and musicians appeared, to be shown into the inner sanctum with quiet ceremony by Colin's unnaturally handsome assistant, Sebastian. That morning, though, things had been quiet, when Sebastian summoned Will.

Will knocked on the door and was waved in. He found the editor in chief installed in a cozy seating area with Herman, the managing editor, who seemed far less pit bull-y, even deferential, that day. Open before them on a low table was the magazine's current issue, containing Will's piece on Assetou.

“There you are. Join us,” said Colin. He was dressed expensively in a manner once known as casual, before people started confusing sloppiness with nonchalance. On his wrist were two watches—a gold one that Will knew was a gift from a luxury brand advertiser, and a cheap plastic one that the editor kept set to L.A. time.

“Herman and I have been talking about the fact that this story should have been longer.”

“OK,” said Will, settling into a chair.

“That's right,” said Herman.

“You did a great job, Will,” said Colin, “but why on earth did we ever cut the thing so drastically?”

“Thank you,” said Will. Herman, looking chastened, kept his eyes on the magazine on the table and said nothing.

“And so what did we lose?” said Colin.

“When we cut it? Detail,” said Will, without missing a beat. “Nuance—and, you know, the punch that comes with that.”

Herman nodded weakly.

“We talked for two hours, the first time we met,” continued Will. “We had a great conversation. She's incredibly well read, incredibly curious—she knows tons about art and classical music, so yeah. . . .”

“You talked to her more than once?” said Colin.

“We did the main interview here—the thing we set up with the publicist—but then she and I had lunch together, a few days after that. I don't even think the publicist knew. She asked me about cool places in New York. I told her I knew where to get some good
cheb-ou-jen
—that Senegalese rice-and-fish thing. . . .”

“Mm-hmm.”

“And we're still in contact,” said Will. “I just went to this big thing at her friend's place, the other night, a listening party. . . .”

“Good for you,” said Colin. “And that's what it means to be an editor, right?” The editor in chief picked up the magazine and looked at the portrait he had commissioned for the story: a beautiful girl in profile, smiling, a graceful hand alight at her sternum, with her head raised heavenward but eyes closed, as if she were savoring the moment privately or perhaps giving thanks. “Well, everybody's talking about her and the album,” he continued, “so it's great that we have her, and the issue is on the stands. But, gentlemen, we should have put a few more chips on this square—ya know?”

“Well, I . . . ,” started Will.

“We should have tried harder to keep those pages,” said Herman, dutifully.

“It was planned at two, right?” said Colin.

“Four,” said Will. “That was what I thought, when I first brought it up.”

“We said four at first,” said Herman, “and then it was two, for months. . . .”

“And then one,” said Colin.