Now and Yesterday (41 page)

Will was dozing. Peter would have to wake him when they arrived at his house.

It was a place to visit, McCaw's world, but not necessarily to live in, Peter decided. If there were really insights to be gained there about power and influence, and how these meshed with talent and intelligence, then fine. It would be a growth experience—and how nice to have such a propulsive one, at the age of almost sixty! And there to help him think clearly, and help protect him, if necessary, would be Will....

L
aura was furious when Peter told her he'd taken Will to McCaw's dinner party.

“What were you thinking?” she squawked.

“It was a social invitation,” said Peter.

“C'mon, honey. There's no such thing as social. This is business.”

She was standing at the door of his office, having stopped by to ask how the evening went. As it happened, she knew the Sandersons and some of the others, and was thrilled to hear about Sunny's spectacular earrings.

“It was fine,” said Peter. “Will was a big hit.”

“You should have taken me,” said Laura. She was dressed in one of her power outfits: a black suit whose jacket buttoned rakishly on the diagonal.

“I wasn't aware we were dating,” said Peter.

“Seriously,” she said dourly. “You represent this company when you attend things like that.”

“Don't lecture me, Laura,” said Peter. “I wasn't
attending
anything. I was a guest in someone's home. Besides, Will said something over dinner that really tickled McCaw's fancy—something about the simple versus the complicated.” He didn't want to tell Laura the exact phrase, for fear of hearing her thoughts about it.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“It was just dinner talk, but McCaw's been really hyping on it.”

“Simple versus complicated—what is that?”

“This is one of the directions that we've been working with, that his team really likes. Will hit on a formulation that really adds strength to what we're doing.”

“What is it again?”

“We're cooking it, Laura,” said Peter. “I'll put it in our weekly thing.”

“All right,” she said, knowing she had little choice but to let the creative star be the creative star.

“He called Will ‘brilliant,' ” said Peter.

“And this kid's a bartender or something?”

“Laura, I told you—he's an editor.”

“Oh, right,” she said, suddenly interested, after Peter reminded her which magazine. “Do we need to hire him?”

“Go away and let me work. You look great today.”

Actually, what McCaw had said to Peter, earlier that morning in a video call, was, “That date of yours was brilliant! I like the way he thinks.” Which made Peter feel proud and icky all at the same time.

 

“Gee, I thought that if anything would get you to say something, it would be McCaw,” said Will.

The therapist smiled in a kindly way.

“You want me to say something?” he said, after a suitable silence.

Unlike the psychotherapist in Santa Barbara that Will saw briefly as a child, a friend of his mother's who spoke lots and kept asking him if he was comfortable in a bathing suit, this therapist said very little. Still, Will liked the guy, who'd come very well recommended through a friend of Luz's. Will felt he could say anything in his presence—though, despite his best efforts to concentrate and not waste time, Will often heard himself filling sessions with babbly, inconsequential bullshit. His initial account of the McCaw dinner, for instance, had been a list of magazine-article details—the crystal decanters in the bar of the limousine, the daring décolletage of an older guest's dress, the book-matched, veined marble slabs of the powder room wall....

“He's an asshole—a world-class monster,” said Will. “Isn't he? Also, little feet. Perfect little shoes—loafers, pumps, whatever. Pristine. Ya know what I mean?”

Silence.

“And Peter is working for the guy,” said Will.

“Yes,” said the therapist.

“What a
jerk
.”

“Peter?”

“McCaw. Despite all the, you know, money and power. I dunno. He treated me well enough, though.”

“Peter did?”

“No, McCaw.”

“Ah.”

“Made it a point of asking me stuff, listened to what I said.... Still—he's
hugely
evil. I could feel it, all night. From all of them. And I couldn't
say
anything. . . .”

“Right.”

“I kept wondering if Peter felt it. . . .”

“And?”

“Well, we couldn't exactly talk about it then and there.”

The therapist gave Will an inquisitive look.

“Did we talk about it later?” offered Will. “No. Not yet.”

“OK.”

“Maybe . . . I wanted him to protect me? Maybe . . . I wanted to protect him, through this dinner?”

Silence.

“He says I'm ‘immense,' ” continued Will, “and I have no idea what that means.”

“McCaw says this?”

“No, Peter. ‘Immense.' He said it again, just the other day.”

“It sounds like he sees a lot in you.”

“Yeah. Or maybe he's blowing smoke up my ass. Like he does with his boss.”

“Do you really think that?”

Silence.

“No,” said Will.

“
Could
he see a lot in you?”

Will shifted in his seat, a well-worn leather armchair that faced the matching one his therapist was sitting in, at a slight angle.

“You mean,
is
there anything in there
to
see . . . ?” mumbled Will, with the generic sarcasm of a sitcom character.

“C'mon, Will,” said the therapist. “Don't play games.”

“Sorry. I dunno. I guess so.”

 

The screening of Jonathan's work-in-progress took place on a Monday evening at a new boutique hotel in Tribeca. The hotel's facilities included a 100-seat screening room attached to a luxuriously appointed foyer, which is where a reception for the invitation-only audience was taking place when Peter arrived at the suite upstairs that Jonathan and Aldebar had also booked for their stay in New York. Because of his condition, Jonathan had decided to go down to the screening directly, and bypass the reception.

Aldebar greeted Peter warmly at the door of the suite and led him into the living area, where he was readying Jonathan for the event.

“Everything set?” said Peter, giving Jonathan a kiss.

“Absolutely,” said Jonathan. He was in his wheelchair, where he would obviously be remaining for the entire evening. He was emaciated and looked weak. He was dressed in jeans, a black blazer, and a crisp white shirt, open at the neck. Though his face showed a subtle bit of enhancement from the makeup Aldebar had applied, the toneless flaps of flesh under his chin told a truer tale. Wordlessly, he nodded his assent when Aldebar showed him a foulard pocket square, and sat passively as the nurse inserted the square in his breast pocket and gave it a tender foof.

“We're all organized,” said Aldebar, with a kindly wink toward Peter.

“You look great, Jon,” said Peter. “I don't know where you get the strength to do this.”

“Entertaining a hundred people? Easy,” he said, though an attempted laugh was more of a facial expression than a sound—and, actually, the facial expression more a sketch than a fully executed thing.

“Is Connor Frankel coming?” asked Peter.

“He's downstairs already, at the reception,” said Aldebar. “They thought it would be better if he . . .”

“He's playing host, so I don't have to,” said Jonathan.

Nearby on a table with a tray of mineral water and some glasses was an invitation to the screening—a beautifully designed and printed card whose cover featured a stark and probing portrait of Frankel that Jonathan had taken, plus the film's working title,
Shacks and Mansions
. That probably wasn't going to be the final title, Jonathan had said, since it sounded too brainy for a movie. Then again, he admitted, the film was never intended to be commercial, but something more intellectual: an investigation, through words and images, of the life and work of one artist through the creative lens of another, and perhaps something of the times in which they lived. The title derived from a series of snapshots and magazine photos they were using as a kind of armature for the film, to trigger Frankel's recollections—pictures of him in the various houses, studios, and other places where he had lived his life and done his work. Thus the film, as Jonathan explained it, was “about the physical structures and mental constructs we inhabit until the next ones are built.”

Gay identity, of course, was one of those constructs.

“Look,” Jonathan had once told Peter, “I may not have much to contribute to high-speed rail, or clean energy, or the space program, but I can damned well make America think about the gay culture we got stuck with.”

Connor Frankel was an unlikely subject for a project like this, since he'd spent most of his life being discreet—or in the closet, as Peter's friend Arnie had pointed out. Having always been famously taciturn in interviews, though, Frankel was now unreserved. The decorum he'd always observed because of his class, his upbringing, and/or his generation was now out the window. When Peter asked why Frankel had agreed to open up, Jonathan said only, “It was time.”

Frankel's work—always abstract and now very large, often with titles that alluded to history and classical culture—was top-of-the-line, blue-chip modernism. It was included in most of the world's major museums and private collections, and was said to embody the freedoms that figures like Rauschenberg and Johns had found in chance, serendipity, and, according to one critic, “the space between reality and imagination.” Much ink had been spilled over the relationship between the homosexuality of artists of that generation and their creative strategies. Yet even now that he was talking, Frankel maintained he had nothing to add to this particular discussion. He could only talk about his life.

A native of Bar Harbor, Maine, Connor Frankel was born into a proud German-American family that had been prosperous for generations. Then his father, an insurance executive, lost most of his money in the Crash of '29, just before Frankel was born. And soon gone, too, was the sprawling house on a bluff overlooking great lawns and the water, where Frankel spent the first few years of his life—a place that was always the site, until it became impossible to maintain, of great gatherings of family and friends, long dinners capped with amateur musical and theatrical performances. Frankel's mother was able to keep the family going on her salary as a teacher, and though they moved into a much smaller house in the same town, she and her husband made it a point of preserving for their children—Connor and his four sisters—a sense of family pride that was now largely fueled by their continuing pursuit of music, art, and literature. It was a family priority to secure art lessons for Connor, once he started showing the interest and the aptitude; and sister Fanny had her dancing and sister May her poems. Thus, the formative struggle of Frankel's early years, Jonathan told Peter, was parallel with that of our nation in the world today: to work out a method or an illusion of holding on to privilege.

The film was an artsy project for sure, but since it was widely rumored to be the coming-out story of a major American artist, it was already generating buzz. Senior press types had been applying pressure to get invited to the screening, yet Jonathan and Frankel had insisted the event remain private, only for their friends, families, and colleagues.

“Nice place,” said Jonathan, as the three of them went down in the elevator.

“It is,” said Peter, who had never included the hotel on his regular circuit. Its “New York–style” trendiness seemed formulated more for out-of-towners than for anyone else. The elevator, with windows onto a grand atrium several stories tall, sounded a sedative chime as it passed each floor.

“Scorsese showed a film here, once,” said Jonathan. “The screen's good.”

“Uh-huh,” said Peter.

“Though I can't say much for the upho-ol . . . upho-ol . . .
upho
-olstery.”

Had Jonathan just stammered, or slurred a word? Privately, Peter shot Aldebar a querying look, since Jonathan never did that, but Aldebar shook his head tightly, as if to say, “Not now.”

They went straight to the green room to wait while the doors of the screening room were opened and the guests took their seats. Connor Frankel, who had attended the reception, joined them there, accompanied by his quietly genial, middle-aged companion, Wallace, whom Peter had never met.

“Well, they've had their wine and now they want a movie,” quipped Frankel, after introductions. At eighty-three, despite the presidential aura he'd taken on as one of the grand old figures of American culture, he still retained the dark twinkle of the dryly quizzical teenager he was in the 1940s, back when such creatures were perhaps stranger to their neighbors than they are now. He hadn't kept much of his hair, but what he had was bright white and smartly cut and combed. Except for the attire of a public intellectual—the shapeless-but-expensive suit, worn with a plain shirt, suspenders, and a pair of pristine trainers—he might have been a retired executive.

“They're gonna need another glass, when they see what we've got in store for them, eh, Connie?” said Jonathan.

“Everybody came,” said Wallace. “The house is full.”

“Good, we want that,” said Jonathan.

Wallace named a few of the celebrities he'd greeted—a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, a reigning Broadway diva, a Hollywood action star who'd just formed a production company to make “quality” movies, as well as several boldface artists, dealers, and collectors. Mondays were the preferred evening in New York for a supposedly private little star-studded event like this one, since busy celebrities often had heavier commitments later in the week, and Mondays were usually the only evenings when theater actors and other performing arts types were free. Peter knew that Jonathan's brother and other members of his family were out there, too, as well as Will, whom Jonathan had made a point of inviting, and Luz.