Now and Yesterday (52 page)

“Ya got me.”

“I don't even want to know. I want that to remain eternally dark matter.”

Will smiled, but Peter didn't see, since he was watching the road.

“Aldebar and the power of life and death,” mused Will. “Could be.”

Outside, infinite shades of black that were really hidden greens.

Peter realized he'd fallen in love with Will as part of a story that began before Will ever set foot in his house that night, to bartend. It began, as far as he could tell now, at Jonathan's housewarming, when he was standing right there beside Will and ordered a drink from him, without knowing the guy would become his boyfriend. He'd asked for a vodka from the most extraordinary person in the universe and got no particular vibe from it.
So much for my intimate acquaintance with Fate,
thought Peter. And then Jonathan and Will hooked up; and Jonathan took Will up to Hudson, but they had no more sex. And then there was that weekend in April . . . when Will
already knew the house
! It was the same for the little towns they were passing through—abandoned by industry or flooded by new waves of antique-shoppers. How could even the wisest city or regional plan scale up to counter massive forces slouching in full view—
like one of these hills
—but invisible, impossible to know?

They'd agreed on monogamy, but for different reasons. Peter wanted to avoid dangers he said he knew well; Will said he wanted to avoid those he knew nothing about. Each referenced “experience”—and that was as much as they ever said about the so-called generation gap between them. Marriage, children, and old age might require some further discussion, but not yet. And about the other parts of the story that could also be looming invisibly in front of them—illness, random accidents, acts of God—there was little planning to be done. They agreed only to create a story together.

“Music?” said Will.

“Sure,” said Peter.

Will fiddled with Pandora on his iPhone, and after a minute found “Moments in Time,” by N'souciance.

“Don't laugh,” he said.

The car was filled with a wash of lush synths, uplifting a heartfelt female vocal. It was as much a lovely, warm bath as a song.

“Ooh, I love this,” said Peter.

“They were a duo back in the nineties, eurodance. I interviewed the girl once, when she was trying to make a comeback. The guy had already died—plane crash. I know it's supercorny. But gorgeous, the way Prince is gorgeous.”

“It's totally effective.”

By the time the song arrived at the final chorus, which modulated up a half-step, to amplify the splendor, Peter and Will were singing at the top of their lungs, “These moments of love that I make for you, that you make for me; the moments in time, my darling, that we make eternity. . . .”

They were still giggling about their performance when they pulled into a gas station convenience store, a little while later. The exterior was mundane, but inside was a kind of Oz. Obviously brand new, the place was clean and brightly lit, with aisles of pretty snacks, sparkling banks of refrigerated drinks and frozen foods, vivid display shots of pizzas, tacos, and burgers. Far cheerier, Peter thought, than such places used to be when he was a boy. Gas stations were tawdry then. They all seemed to have the same beat-up aluminum-and-glass dispenser from which, for a nickel, you could get a handful of stale cashews. And it made Peter proud on some level—as a self-proclaimed hick—that that little patch of upstate, only forty-five minutes from where he grew up, had not missed out on a half-century's progress in roadside culture.

He was looking at magazines when Will brought an energy bar over to the register.

“That it?” said the register guy. He was a mild, plain-looking man of a certain age.

“It's all together,” said Will, indicating Peter. “He's getting some stuff.”

“No problem.”

“Where's the men's room?”

“Back there,” said the guy, pointing and reaching for the key.

After a moment, while Will was still in the men's room, Peter stepped up to the register with two bottles of water and a copy of
Elle Décor.

“Hi,” said the counter guy.

“Hey there,” said Peter. “How's it goin' tonight?” Peter instantly thought the guy might be gay. There was a certain softness about the eyes, even a womanliness.

“Great, thanks,” said the guy.

“Just this,” said Peter. “The water and the magazine.”

“All righty. And I think your son wanted the Clif Bar.”

“Oh, sure. But . . . he's not my son. He's my boyfriend.”

The counter guy smiled warmly. The store's bright lighting made him look older than he probably was.

“Oh, sorry, buddy,” he said. “My mistake. Big age difference.”

“Yeah,” sighed Peter, handing over his credit card. “Like
that's
a big deal. . . .”

For moral support, cultural insights, and thoughtful conversations that helped me clarify many of the ideas that went into this book, my thanks to Matthew Bank, Victor Bumbalo, Anicee Gaddis, Philip Gallo, Deborah Gimelson, Sharon Gluck, Claude Grunitzky, Ted Henigson, Lesley Horowitz, John Jahnke, John Jenkinson, Frances Kazan, Eric Latzky, Sam J. Miller, Derek Nelson, MaryEllen and Dr. John Panaccione, Ira Pearlstein, David Anthony Perez, Michael Raver, Angela Rizzuti, Tim Smyth, and Sarah Van Arsdale.

For generous help in preparing the book for publication, my thanks to Larry Ledford and Steven Salpeter.

And for a wealth of guidance and patience without which I (and this book) would have been lost, my deepest gratitude to my editor, John Scognamiglio, and my agent, Mitchell Waters.

In loving memory of K. J. Dinnhaupt and Barry Laine.

Please turn the page
for a very special Q&A
with Stephen Greco!

 

How did this novel come about?

 

It's my fourth novel, but the first I've written to take its cue from events in my own life. For a while I was dating a guy who was much younger than I am. Actually, “dating” is the wrong word. We were hanging out a lot, doing stuff together, and I kind of fell in love with him, half secretly. I started the book as an exercise in wish fulfillment, to take some pressure off the relationship.

 

You were in love “half secretly”?!

 

I didn't profess my love as fearlessly as I would have done when I was younger. And maybe I should have done that, even though I suspected my feelings were unrequited. Anyway, I think the message got through.

 

You guys never went further?

 

No. Then one day he stopped taking my calls and never explained why. And I had tried
so
hard to be a good friend and not put my fantasy in front of everything!

 

That's so sad.

 

Yeah—disappointing. Then again, the book worked out.

 

Is it true, then, that like Peter, the character in the book who is around your age, you've had two long-term relationships, one of which ended with your partner's death and the other with your partner's drug addiction?

 

Yes. Though I would hope I'm not quite as wounded and twitchy as Peter is. And yes, I do date younger men—because, as the novel says, “that's who's out there”—but no, I'm not seeing anyone in particular, at the moment.

 

Why is that?

 

Why aren't I seeing anyone? I don't know—bad luck. Plus the fact that I had to learn how to do it all over again and how things work now. Love is the least immutable thing there is, in my view. In a way, adjusting to being older was a lot like coming out. Only it's not just about
who
I am, but who I am
now
. Thank goodness there are plenty of young guys out there who seem OK with an older man and are willing to go beyond the daddy thing—which is a perfectly fine fetish that I don't happen to like being squeezed into.

 

And the other aspects of the novel—the advertising world setting, the references to upstate New York—those are autobiographical, too?

 

Largely, yes. I was born upstate, I've worked in advertising, I used to write poetry.

 

Can you describe your journey into writing novels?

 

I studied architecture at Cornell in the late sixties, at exactly the same time that all those revolutionary forces were swirling about. I came out as gay, started writing poems about identity, and got into magazines when I arrived in New York, in the mid-seventies, to earn a living. But though my friends were mostly gay novelists and “serious” writers, I continued to stick with commercial pursuits—out of fear, I suppose, that I didn't have as much to say as they did.

Then, around 2000, I was partner in a media company focused on youth culture, and we needed someone to script out a serial animation we were planning. But we couldn't afford a writer, so I did it. I started inventing characters and situations, and a story began coursing out of me like lava. It was almost scary, yet I couldn't believe how good it felt—to have this story
erupt
and then to work on it, craft it, make it better.

 

What happened then? Did the animation get made?

 

No, but I kept going with the story and it became
Dreadnought,
my first novel.

 

Wait—I thought your first book was called
The Sperm Engine
.

 

The Sperm Engine
was mostly nonfiction, erotica—essays, reminiscences, and the like. Though I did need to knock out some fictional pieces to round out the book, and writing those was thrilling. That's what gave me the courage and curiosity to go deeper with
Dreadnought
.

 

And
Dreadnought
was self-published?

 

Not exactly. The publisher of
The Sperm Engine,
Green Candy, passed on
Dreadnought,
and I had no agent at the time. When I asked my younger writer friends who their agents were, they said, “Get modern. Publish it yourself.” And just then my friend Dave King, the novelist, helped get me into a pilot program with Amazon that he was part of, called Amazon Shorts, which published original short fiction for direct download. This was around 2005. Amazon took one of the parts of
Dreadnought,
since it was a novel composed of relatively independent sections; and then, once that began selling, they took the rest of the parts.

 

What is
Dreadnought
about?

 

Predictably enough, youth culture: who wins and who loses when a fictional biggest-brand-in-history stalks a planet-wide youth market of a billion souls. You see the workings of it in six tales, like Mount Fuji in Hokusai's
Thirty-six Views
. “Everybody loses, but the party's fun while it lasts.” I'm quoting jacket copy here.

 

Sounds interesting. How did the novel do?

 

You mean how did it sell? Not too badly, thanks. Some parts of it got up into the thousand-most-popular Amazon offerings during the weeks when they launched. I got two film options out of it, too, from an independent producer who found the novel online and liked it. So it was natural for me to do my next novels,
The Culling
and
Other People's Prayers,
through Amazon, too—though for the current one,
Now and Yesterday,
I wanted to go a more traditional route and give the novel the best possible advantages in design, marketing, distribution, etc.

 

It sounds like you came to writing relatively late in life.

 

I started writing fiction only after I was fifty, yes. But between twenty-five and fifty I kept a journal that's pretty good, I think—you know, hopes and fears, love and loss, thunderingly telling details of life during AIDS and the time leading up to it. Parts of that have been published.

 

Let's get back to
Now and Yesterday.
Am I right to feel the influence of Victorian literature in this work?

 

Yes, actually. I had
Middlemarch
quite particularly in mind, in fact: a supposedly little story of people in a little world, embedded in a larger world where society is lurching forward. I wanted the pace of my novel, too, to be stately and Victorian. I thought that would work well for the situation Peter is in—kind of
stuck
and crawling ever so slowly out of it.

 

In your novel, what kinds of things in the larger world are “lurching forward”?

 

Oh, new forms of consciousness and identity; the shift away from those noble, citizenship-driven values of Peter's father's generation, toward the consumerist, brand-driven values of today. The latter is what the younger character, Will, grew up with. Seems to me, that shift in values is just as seismic as the one in
Middlemarch
associated with railways and the Industrial Revolution. In fact, it was all I could do to resist lapsing into long, righteous passages like those in which Eliot halts the narrative in order to lay out another fifty yards of moral vision.

 

Whom did you have in mind as your reader for
Now and Yesterday
?

 

Well, to quote Richard Howard, who was speaking of poetry, the book is not for
every
one, but it's certainly for
any
one. That is, it's not just for gay readers. I had general readers very much in mind—including fans of what some people call “women's fiction,” where feelings and emotions and memories really matter.

 

Do you still work in advertising?

 

I do. I often consult with major agencies and am also a partner in a media company, in addition to my various writing projects.

 

Are you working on another novel?

 

I sure am. After
Now and Yesterday
I wrote a deliciously dark,
noir
ish science fiction romance set in 1947, a straight love story that I'm very proud of. It turns on a neat idea about World War Two and human evolution. Currently, I'm working on a new novel that takes off from the appalling gap between rich and poor in this country right now. The hard part is to keep the thing from becoming
The Grapes of Wrath
. I have something funnier and more buoyant in mind, but biting, like a Preston Sturges film. Wish me luck.