Now and Yesterday (50 page)

Peter decided he must be too preoccupied to concentrate. Anyway, the piece was over in a few minutes, and what hung in the air afterward was the delicious memory of a harp and a heavenly voice, not questions about a second-century bishop of Jerusalem who, according to the program note, was accused of committing an unspecified “detestable crime.”

At the reception, Peter and Will barely had a chance to speak privately, since there were so many of Jonathan's friends to greet.

“I didn't see your name in the program,” said a nice lady whom Peter didn't recognize.

“No, I wasn't planning to speak,” said Peter, reintroducing himself. “But then at the last minute Aldebar thought it would be nice to have something personal, to balance all the lovely remarks about Jonathan's work.”

“You spoke beautifully.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Can we get out of here, please?” said Peter, after she'd left.

“Sure,” said Will. “I'm only on a lunch break, though. I have to get back to the office, eventually.”

“I'll walk you to the subway.”

After making sure to have a word with Jonathan's family and with Aldebar, Peter and Will stepped across Central Park West and into the park. They agreed that was the nicest way to the R train at Fifty-seventh and Seventh. But seeing an empty ball field and a set of invitingly empty bleachers, they decided to take a moment to decompress. They installed themselves halfway up the bleachers, overlooking the field and the expanse of lawn between it and the mass of trees marking the park's edge, beyond, above which poked the towers of Fifth Avenue and Central Park South.

“You look good today,” said Peter. He noticed Will was wearing a new pair of stylish black shoes.

“Thanks,” said Will. “So do you.”

“You can't bullshit or get too fancy for a thing like this, can you?”

“No, you're right.”

“I'll tell ya who looked like a million dollars—Aldebar.”

“Man, didn't he? He must have inherited a million dollars.”

Peter laughed.

“I don't know,” he said. “I gather they won't be doing the will for a few days.”

“Amazing guy,” said Will.

The day was warm and they were in direct sun. Will peeled off his suit jacket and draped it neatly over his knee. Settling, he plucked his shirt away from his chest with characteristic delicacy.

“Why do you do that?” said Peter. “It's adorable. I've always meant to ask.”

“What—this?” Will plucked again. “It helps me feel neat. I hate feeling crumpled.”

“Ah—yeah, I know. So little in this world is neat. At least we can try to be, ourselves, neat.”

Will nodded and then betrayed a smile, as if there was something they should be talking about, but weren't.

“What?” said Peter.

“You,” said Will.

Peter smiled radiantly. “Me
adoring
you,” he said. “That's what you see on this face, if I may say so.”

“You may,” said Will. But he still looked hesitant.

“What?!”

“OK, I'm just gonna say it.”

“Say what?”

“Speaking of Aldebar—I knew him even before I knew Jonathan. He's how I met Jonathan.”

“OK. So?”

“He was taking clients on the side, besides his nursing gigs. I met him in a bar one night and got him to talk all about it.”

“Clients?”

“As in rent boy.”

“Oh—OK. You know, I kind of assumed that. I knew Jonathan hired guys. He told me once, but we never really talked about it.”

“Only the best, Jonathan would hire,” said Will, with a kind of sly emphasis and a boyish, expectant look on his face.

“What do you mean . . . you?”

“Yeah.”

“Jonathan hired
you?
”

“Yup. Once.”

“Really?”

“A few nights after that party where we met.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

Peter thought for a moment.

“So you've rent-boyed,” he said.

“For about three minutes, yeah,” said Will. “Right after coming to New York.”

“Wow. OK.”

“With an agency, a top one.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You OK?”

“Sure. Tell me everything.”

“I was recruited one night. What can I tell you? The guys who ran the agency were very nice. I needed the money. They took precautions to keep us safe and healthy, blah-blah-blah. I met some boldface names. . . .”

“OK . . .”

“That's it. Then it was over. I guess I just haven't wanted to tell you.”

“Hmm. Well, no problem.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I mean, of course.”

And as the information began to sink in, Peter saw that the revelation probably didn't present any problem for him, morally—though he might indeed need a moment to come around to granting Will the respect in that area that he made a point of granting freely to others he knew who'd also hustled successfully—that is, without letting it destroy them with ambition-killing easy money, or soul-killing drugs, or the thousand other dangers that were out there.

“But now?” said Peter. “I mean, you don't still . . .”

“No, no, of course not,” said Will. “I have a job, I have a life. I only did it to pay the rent. New York is a hard place to get started.”

“I hear ya. Cool. Believe me, I understand that there are always gifts coming our way, cosmically, and different possibilities for how to accept them.”

“It's good to hear you say that,” said Will. “It's been torturing the fuck out of me, how to tell you. Whew! So you don't think I'm soiled, then?”

“Will!
No,
” said Peter. “Of course not. But I love the way you put that—soiled. We're all soiled, aren't we? And we constantly struggle toward cleanliness. You've certainly made me think a bit about the bed I have chosen to lie down in, which is pretty god-damned far from immaculate.”

“I was so afraid to tell you.”

“For Christ's sake! I think Tyler's hustled, and I told him I thought it made his work stronger.”

“Well, that's
advertising
. . . ,” said Will, with an impish grin.

Playfully, Peter slapped Will's arm.

“All right, all right,” said Peter. “I'm trying, myself, to work toward something better. Just trying to figure out how to do it.”

They were silent for a moment. The city was barely audible from beyond the periphery of trees.

“You know, in a way, this doesn't change anything,” said Peter. “In a way, it actually just makes the situation between us more clearly what it is. If that doesn't sound too stupid.”

“No, it doesn't,” said Will.

“But . . . back to Aldebar,” said Peter, suddenly more animated in a gossipy way. “Though wait. Now I'm dying to know now if you might have, um,
dated
anyone I know. . . .”

Will smirked.

“I don't think so,” he said. “I only did it for a month or two, and by now I know who you know.”

Peter nodded.

“Oh, except . . . ,” said Will.

“Who?”

Will leaned in, as if to share a scrumptious secret.

“McCaw's brother-in-law,” said Will.

“Him?”

“Yup—big fag. You must have gotten that.”

“Well, yeah.”

“Not very nice, on the inside. Not at all.”

“Ew.”

“I'll tell you all about it someday.”

“Interesting. Now that's a whole story I cannot wrap my mind around: McCaw wanting to set me up with—what was his name ... ?”

“Miller.”

“Miller!” Peter cackled. “And Fiona! Can you imagine?”

Will giggled.

“She was terrific!” he said. “What's that about? I mean, she must know everything, right? I assume she figured me out, that night—or maybe she keeps out of it. Who knows? I don't really get it, but then again, I don't have to get it anymore.”

“OK, so back to Aldebar!” said Peter, gossipy once again. “So he's much more than all that—you get it, right? A nurse, a marine, a connoisseur of opera—come
on!
”

“I know. The minute I met him I knew he was beyond something amazing. We never connected on a sexual level—though I kinda wanted to—but I really saw he's like this angel in human form, some entity from the Gorgeous Planet.”

“So do you think he pulled the plug on Jonathan—I mean, in a nice way?”

“Omigod, do you think so, too?!”

“I think he once tried to tell me that he and Jon had discussed the matter and decided something, and I was too obtuse or scared or immature to go into it with him.”

“Peter, I have thought about this again and again, and I have to wonder if maybe it was the most exquisite, loving, complete gift that anyone could have given Jonathan, in that situation. . . .”

Peter paused to think about this. Then he took a deep breath and exhaled calmly.

“I think you're right,” said Peter. “It was a gift. Wow. Sitting in a ball field in Central Park and discussing euthanasia.”

“And prostitution,” said Will.

“What Aldebar did or may have done, what you've just told me about—they deserve finer names than that, don't you think?”

Will reached over and took Peter's hand in his.

“Absolutely,” he said.

They sat there quietly for a moment, then Peter spoke.

“So we're fine here, Will, really,” he said. It was perhaps the caretaker in him speaking. “But just so I know, for the future: Who knows about . . . ? I mean, are you open about it? What about Luz—does she know? Your fancy magazine friends?”

“People know. Nobody cares. The magazine people think it's fun. God knows, some of them have done the same thing, or dealt drugs, or worse. I was only afraid to tell you, because . . .”

“Because I'm such a prude—I knew it.”

“When I began to feel the bar being raised with you, Peter, I wanted to play the game correctly. Why do you think I started therapy?”

More silence, then Peter piped up.

“Harold and I once went to a very fancy dinner party right there,” he said, pointing at the Sherry-Netherland, whose gracefully proportioned Gothic spire rose sublimely above the trees at the southeast corner of the park.

“You did?”

“Yes. A big-deal illustrator we knew, who did all the big-diva album covers in the seventies and eighties, invited us to a soirée hosted by his best girlfriend, a lady who was one of the first television weathergirls ever, in the fifties, who became a talk-show host and then married well.”

“Interesting.”

“A very elegant lady—a pioneer of live television, I learned later. The husband was long gone, of course. It was like, seven gay men and her—all formal, we gentlemen in tuxes, the lady in a long skirt and an iridescent metallic blue jacket, cropped just so.”

“Nice.”

“She had the most amazing enameled gold bangles—Schlumberger; she was impressed that I knew that—and a staff of two who looked like they'd been with her forever. I remember the guy's name was Pedro; he served dinner. I don't remember the wife's name, or even if we got to see her. No, wait: I think she appeared for a second in the dining room after dinner, so we could compliment her on the food. I still remember these crispy, miraculous tarragon potatoes.”

“Right there?” said Will, looking at the Sherry-Netherland.

“Right there,” said Peter, pointing. “Corner apartment, thirtieth or whatever floor. High up. For all I know, she's still there. She was probably sixty then, so maybe she's eighty-five now and still in the same apartment, wearing her fabulous bangles, no longer receiving guests.”

“Or maybe she's still receiving.”

“Yeah, maybe so, God bless her. And after dinner, Will, we all repaired to the living room and she wound up telling stories from her early days in television. I seem to remember her saying she was just a cute girl from Texas or Oklahoma, who happened to be smart enough to come up with interesting ways to fill hours and hours of live morning talk show. I think she invented the interview or something. Anyway, her stories were really funny, and at one point she laughed so hard she spilled her wine on her jacket. And I swear, the lady just stood up and excused herself graciously, and returned to the living room not five minutes later wearing another elegant little formalish jacket of
exactly
the same cropped design, only this one was, like, a stiff, transparent, magenta crinoline.”

“Amazing.”

“Yeah. Harold and I just looked at each other silently, our eyes bulging. She probably had six more where that came from!”

Will giggled silently.

The sky was bright; the day felt open. There were a few lunchtime strollers far beyond, on the lawn, but no one on the ball field.

“The lady really . . . valued herself,” mused Peter.

“Evidently,” said Will.

“It's a talent I could probably better cultivate in myself.”

“Oh?”

“It's been hard for me to . . . give myself the thing I wanted most. Needed most.”

Peter gazed at Will fondly, with a smile suggesting sadness but also a new hope for the possibility of relief. Part of what Peter felt at that moment—one of two little figures in a long shot of an otherwise empty set of bleachers—was what he always felt in Central Park: quiet elation in an open patch of land in the middle of a great metropolis. Not that the plot was natural, in the sense of being a part of the forest primeval that had survived until the present. In fact, the park had been constructed along with other great works of the nineteenth century, and some settlements were destroyed in the process. But the place—the
work
—did allow the earth and its inhabitants to breathe together, and it had been there, so often, on walks and picnics with Harold, that Peter had been able to hear the music of the earth and the other spheres.