Now and Yesterday (7 page)

“Yeah—if they have it,” said Peter. “Watch him come back and ask if Dry Sack is OK.”

“It's so funny,” said Jonathan, sitting back in his chair and slightly repositioning his silverware. “You live through AIDS, Vietnam, 9/11; you eat well, you take care of yourself—all so you can live long enough to start facing the diseases that are waiting out there for old men, anyway. . . .”

“We're not invulnerable, are we?”

“But, darling, I thought I was! What's the point of buying a new house and doing it up, if not to live there blissfully and safely, forever and ever?”

A spray of midday sun, tinctured with a steely glare reflecting off the glass building across the street, was fingering through the latticework screens covering the windows. Traffic on Madison pushed uptown sluggishly.

The waiter arrived with the water, took their order.

“Did you know that Michelangelo was cured of kidney stones at Fiuggi?” said Jonathan.

“I did not,” said Peter.

“He was. Wouldn't it be nice to have the kind of ailment that one went to a spa to cure?”

Besides being a filmmaker and a collector of pots and manuscripts, Jonathan was a war vet. As a young man he'd been drafted and sent to Vietnam. He told Peter about it once, soon after they first met, in the '70s, without many details, and never mentioned it again. Jonathan had come from a poor family from Queens with low expectations. They hadn't been able to avoid the draft, like richer, better educated people did, and Jonathan vowed, once he returned home, to go back to school and find a path through life that exposed him to less risk and more of the blessings of American liberty. A thread running through all the documentaries he did, especially a well-known series probing the lives of living artists, explored themes of self-invention, self-permission-giving—self-liberation.

“I take it you didn't have any symptoms,” said Peter.

“Well, the back stuff,” said Jonathan. “And I've lost a little weight recently, felt a little under par. I chalked it up to work.”

“How's it going, by the way?”

“The film is going. We're set to start shooting in January—we
were
set. I suppose it's anybody's guess what's going to happen now.”

“You'll see how it goes.”

“Sure, but I've got to get this done, Peter. It took me twenty years to talk him into it.”

Jonathan's current project was a profile of Connor Frankel, the painter who'd attended his party the night before. A homosexual gentleman of the old school, Frankel was extremely private and had never come out publicly. He and another well-known artist had been lovers in the '50s, yet history books took little note of this fact, let alone of the influence that an emerging gay imagination might have had on the artists' revolutionary work. Frankel, now in his eighties, was finally willing to talk.

“You'll figure it out. You'll get some help. It's a very important project.”

The waiter delivered the appetizers and wished the men
Bon ap-pétit
.

“It's interesting,” mused Jonathan, picking up a fork. “My next film turned into my last film, this morning—
if
I'm lucky.”

In the hour that followed, the restaurant filled up, lunch got noisier, and one sherry turned into two. The two friends talked of politics, space exploration, and the number of cable TV cooking shows devoted to cake. The conversation raced from subject to subject, perhaps a bit more rapidly than usual.

Afterward, on the sidewalk, they hugged and said good-bye.

“So we'll talk,” said Peter. “I'll call you later.”

“Thanks, Pete—thanks for listening.”

“You're a prince and I love you,” said Peter, over the din of traffic. “We know how to take care of each other, don't we, our generation? We learned it the hard way.”

Jonathan nodded.

“Promise me one thing,” said Jonathan. “Help me do this right. I want to leave something behind.”

“Your work.”

“Of course, my work. But I need your help to do something else. I've been talking to friends in philanthropy. I'd like to endow a prize for film or some kind of institute. I'm going to need a board of directors.”

“Of course,” said Peter. “Anything I can do.”

“I don't want to be morbid, but they're already talking to me about this hospice that's associated with Sloan-Kettering. It's a very homey place, apparently—for when they're done being aggressive with me. Or maybe I'll go upstate—I don't know.”

Peter shook his head.

“No, really,” said Jonathan. “I wanna leave some mark, as my mother would have said. A few months is not enough time to do everything I wanted to do in this world. As of yesterday, I was still looking for someone to get married to and adopt kids with.”

“We'll figure something out.”

“Good.”

Peter put Jonathan in a cab, then began walking back to the office.

“My next film turned into my last film.”

The windows of exclusive Madison Avenue shops quietly beckoned with suggestions for a more comfortable life, expensive merchandise that had been freshly created for the season—not just fall, but
that
fall. An upscale cookware shop was showing some Thanksgiving china in a particularly fresh-looking shade of burnt orange. It occurred to Peter that he might stop in and pick up four dessert plates. And then he thought,
Poor Jonathan! Will this Thanksgiving be his last?

And suddenly Peter found himself wondering whether he, himself, would ever enter that store again. Of course he would; there was no reason to think he wouldn't; it was one of his favorite stores. Yet what if the previous time he was in there, a few months before, had been the final time—if, for instance, he was about to be clobbered by a bus on his way back to work, or die in a subway crash on his way home? Wouldn't that be sad—a middle-aged gay man, on an August afternoon, contentedly comparing pepper mills for the last time and not even realizing it?

Even before reaching the corner of Sixtieth Street, Peter was thoroughly unsettled by the onrush of old memories. The idea that the next anything, or the previous one, could be the last had been a panic-point for him ever since the '80s, when people got sick on a Friday and were dead by Monday; when author friends told him that the books they were working on were turning into their last ones; when Harold realized that the job he was aiming for and being groomed for at the
Times
would never be his. Those days!—when Harold was home again after his long ordeal in the hospital and Peter wondered whether
this
would be the last time Harold tasted his beloved yakitori or
this
the last time he heard the overture of his favorite ballet,
Giselle
. With a sting of sadness mixed with thrill, Peter remembered the last time he and Harold made love, just before Harold got really sick. They didn't know it would be the last. It was on a long weekend in London, where they'd gone to see the Royal Ballet. They'd napped in their hotel room, after shopping and tea, and were dressing to go out, when a squeeze past each other in the bathroom turned into a kiss that overtook them thunderingly. He remembered thinking that Harold was as sexy that day as when they'd met, almost twenty years before—his eyes as true, his laugh as entertaining, his touch as reassuring.

And a walk down Madison Avenue could always be one's last, too.

Peter stopped for the light. He noticed that a perfectly coiffed gray-haired woman in front of him was sobbing lightly as she spoke on her cell phone. He couldn't hear what she was saying. She was dressed like an executive, in a black suit, and carrying a briefcase. She was wearing a pair of gold earrings in the shape of turbo shells—a gift from someone? A splurge for herself? Then the light changed and he moved on with the crowd.

It was beginning again, the oppressive awareness.

And this time it's for keeps. We're all going into our sixties, those of us who managed to survive.

It helped, back when people were dying, to know that the thrum of mortality was premature, forced by too many deaths out of natural sequence, like those of a plague or war. Plans and dreams dissolved, but not the ability to plan and dream. People were young. The ones who didn't die recovered. Yet Peter had always known the thrum would return, on the day when deaths were expected to arrive more seemly, in sequence. And here it was again, that thrum, which, quiet as it was, threatened to drown out—what a laugh!—the hope for Husband #3, whom Peter dreamed of so fervently.

T
yler was performing that night at a place in Bushwick called Rico's Party House, and Peter had promised to attend. So around ten, Peter stepped out of a cab in front of what looked like a decommissioned church, on a desolate block lined with one- and two-story warehouse buildings, fenced vacant lots, and a run-down brick apartment building whose original window openings had been plugged by smaller windows bricked into place with unmatching bricks. The church's door also looked like a replacement: a battered glass-and-steel thing that had seen long service at a supermarket or gas station. Over the entrance was a spotlit sign that said “Rico's” in a graffiti-like typeface, with a halo over the
R
.

Peter paid the $10 admission and went inside. There was no line and the place seemed fairly empty and lifeless, which somehow made it seem wrong to mention to the door guy that he was on the list that Tyler said would be at the door. Actually, if Rico's was always this empty the place didn't need a list, Peter thought. It was a dark and cavernous space in which only a handful of people were walking or standing about, holding plastic cups, doing their best to vibe with the Latin house sounds that were blasting from giant speakers. The choir loft was the DJ booth, the sanctuary, a stage. On the arched wall in back of the stage a rotating projection of the haloed
R
cycled slowly through a spectrum of gaudy colors. Above the entire space, soaring rafters were picked out in flashing spotlights of blue, pink, and purple.

It was only when Peter got a vodka and checked a flyer at the bar that he saw ten o'clock was the “doors open” time for the event. Had Tyler mentioned this? Had Peter misunderstood? The bartender said the show would probably be starting around eleven. Since Tyler was backstage, preparing, Peter resigned himself to hanging out for a while in a corner and trying unobtrusively to return a few e-mails.

Like a lot of young men and women of his generation, Tyler maintained an artistic practice in addition to a professional career. Having studied dance and performance while he was up at Brown, Tyler was currently a member of a performance art collective run by a friend, and he performed with them once or twice a year, in places like Rico's. The group's work combined visual art installation with elements of theater and dance; it was high on concept and grounded in a queer-inflected, nouveau burlesque aesthetic. It was play and it was cool. And doing art on the side like this was not at all uncommon for kids at the agency or in other creative professions around New York; Peter heartily approved of the practice. Far from detracting from Tyler's work at the agency, the exploration of concept and performance only enriched it, and made Tyler better as both a person and a worker. For Peter, the situation was not so very different from that of his own generation during the '70s, when so many well-educated, middle-class twentysomethings with respectable but low-paying jobs maintained sidelines as hustlers, call girls, and drug dealers. It wasn't talked about very much, and business was conducted in quite a genteel way—there was no truck with street people or tawdry stuff like weapons. It was all for the fun of it and, of course, for the money.

Was his performance artwork one reason why Tyler was so good with clients? Earlier that day, when they were pitching their prospective client in their Den, Tyler had shone and probably won the account. The product was Triumf, an artisanal vodka made on Long Island. Present at the meeting, besides Peter and Tyler, were Triumf's CEO, a rich, young immigrant from Russia; his marketing director, who acted a lot like his girlfriend; and a few other members of their team. The brand traded heavily on the idea of “Russian revolution.” Tyler went through the usual PowerPoint slides, unpacking concepts like “subversion” and “seduction,” then he paused the presentation, stepped away from the head of the conference table, toward the clients, and spoke with fervor about social progress and how smart brands today did more than move units, they fomented positive social change.

“And really,” he said, “this is where commerce merges with progress, which is what the twenty-first century is going to be all about.”

The Triumf people were all nodding enthusiastically.

“
This
is why we started the company,” trumpeted the CEO.

“It's about the passion for a better world,” purred the marketing director.

“We get that, because we have lives outside this office,” said Tyler, gazing just over the heads of his audience, as if out into the expanse of a great arena, then making eye contact with each of them. “We get it because we're paying attention.”

The words might have come from a script being used anywhere to pitch clients on Madison Avenue that day, but it was the way Tyler delivered the lines that added the punch. And the slide where he had paused had been cannily designed to serve as a backdrop for this specific point: no words, just a dynamic abstract design in black, white, and red, with a neo-Constructivist feel. It looked as if Tyler had tossed aside the script in a fit of inspiration, but the whole moment had been conceived as theater. His posture, too, at that moment, had been choreographed to subtly echo the dynamism of a Constructivist sculpture: a little curvy and a little angular. And the entire performance led deftly into Peter's well-oiled spiel about why his agency was the right one to do this work, blah-blah-blah.

The handshakes that concluded the meeting felt ardent, conspiratorial. As the clients went off toward the elevators, Peter whispered “Well done!” to Tyler, and the boy rolled his eyes heavenward, with a shrug.

And Tyler had something else, too, that worked for him, in meetings and out of them: a vibrant girlishness that had never hardened during youth into bitter, defensive flamboyance, the way it had done for many men called “effeminate,” of Peter's generation. Neither did this quality obscure a scrappy, can-do masculinity that Peter always associated with Tyler's upbringing in a small midwestern town, where the boy's dad had both served as mayor and owned an automobile repair shop. Tyler bragged of driving a pickup truck at fourteen, the engine of which he had rebuilt himself. Perhaps the ability to grow up with slightly less need to defend your sexuality was producing new generations of boys in which gender qualities coalesced in interesting new ways. Some of the top-or-bottom warriors among Peter's friends found this confusing; Peter found it delightful—even if it rendered the constructs of his generation, by comparison, sadly monochromatic.

Slowly, Rico's began to fill up. When he was done with his e-mail, Peter grabbed another vodka and began to loosen up, smiling at people, swaying with the music. He was the oldest person in the club, by far, but the place had an extremely friendly vibe and there was nothing to suggest he didn't belong. Occasionally, he felt the need to pull at the tight shoulders of his Ben Sherman jacket—purchased a size too small, because Tyler said it looked better and “you won't be doing any gymnastics in it.”

It was nice to be out. Late-night club scenes were less and less Peter's thing, anymore. In the old days, he had gone out five or six times a week, sometimes to four and five events a night, often with celebrities who were part of his fashion-y crowd. This was just after Harold died, during his Merry Widower phase. Back then, he might start at midnight and stay out until dawn or later. It was a time when Elton, or Mariah, or Gianni, after partying all night, might suggest jumping on someone's private plane, so they could all be on a private beach in the Dominican Republic by lunchtime—the kind of invitation that Peter always declined in favor of heading off to work by way of Barneys or the Gap, where'd he'd pick up a new shirt to replace the sweaty one he'd been dancing in. Nowadays he felt a little less loyal to the ongoing party scene and sensed a bit of Fabulous Old Timer syndrome setting in, a condition he'd first observed years before among Andy Warhol's playmates, just after Andy died. You're nostalgic for the fabulous parties they used to throw back then and dubious about the music they're playing nowadays, yet you're game to keep going out and pretty sure that some of your great old party clothes still look timeless. But for the first time you don't mind missing some of the supposedly essential parties you hear about in the media, even if you
are
a bit lonely. You have a theory about why social life in the city peaked ten years ago, which may or may not have something to do with the fact that your work is more important to you than ever—which means you like to get to bed at a reasonable hour and may even watch more TV than you've ever watched since childhood. And sometimes you find yourself telling people that “television writing is getting better and better . . . !”

Rico's entire bill that night was devoted to nouveau burlesque, gay- and tranny-style. It looked like Tyler's crew was scheduled to go on last. The show opened with Foxy Love, a group of girl and girl-like dancers working hard to keep their Vegas-tribute-type moves synched with the naughty energy of Kelis's “Got Your Money.” Sloppy dancing begged the question of unison and symmetry. Then came a tall, leggy male diva named Momus, who did a kind of strutting and posing routine to Jonté's “Bitch You Betta.” A backup duo of dancing twins, a boy and a girl in matching miniskirts and pageboy wigs, did a series of tight, angular moves that paralleled a noisy, electrically colored anime that was projected on the wall behind them. Then there was Mister Mad, an act led by an angry ringleader-type character in a black plastic helmet and boxy yellow suit emblazoned with expletives. With the help of some henchmen in black suits and shades, Mister Mad cleared a runway from the stage into the middle of the club's floor and “punished” a series of selected guests by making them dance to jagged excerpts of vintage German electro. Then there was Cherie La Bête, a squad of tawny fembots in total-body-workout gear, who parodied a Jane Fonda–type aerobics routine from the '80s, accompanied by a vocodered version of “Life Is But a Dream.”

All quite diverting, in a way,
thought Peter.

By then, Rico's was buzzing and the place was packed. Peter was about to head to the bar once more when a cute Asian girl standing next to him asked if he was gay.

“What?” he said, beaming. He had just been thinking that it was nice to be in a room with so many cute girls who looked like they were having fun. Some of them would look at him, occasionally—a man standing alone.

Who knows?
he thought.
Maybe some of them find an older guy attractive.

“My friend thinks you're hot,” said the girl, indicating a slender twink who was dancing with some of the other girls in their group. The kid was pretty, in a high-school-student way, but Peter hardly knew what to say.

Maybe it's a joke?
he thought—and then he wondered if he should feel flattered, though the kid himself didn't seem aware of what was going on.

“Let's talk later,” said Peter. “He's cute but I need to be drunker.”

Then Tyler appeared onstage. The troupe he was performing with was called Davidsbündler. The stage was set with cardboard flats depicting the fountains, balustrades, and topiary trees of a formal garden. Characters in a low-budget sort of eighteenth-century French royal attire entered and milled about, greeting each other with bows and curtsies; then they were joined by a towering, ten-foot-tall gentlewoman—part performer and part puppet—in panniers and a powdered wig. This was Tyler. The lady paraded, ponderously, greeting the audience and those onstage with gracious arm gestures—controlled with two sticks by Tyler from underneath the massive skirts. Then the lady lowered her arms and turned her back to the audience; she bent over, hiked up her skirt, and revealed a mammoth vulva, lovingly articulated, puppet-style, in quilted pink satin and tufts of shiny black ribbons. The lips moved, of course—somehow Tyler was working them. With her vagina the lady lip-synched the aria “O Mio Babbino Caro.” Afterward, the lady stood up again, smoothed her skirts, and bowed.

The crowd went wild. They applauded madly, then the DJ went back to the Rico's house groove.

“You were awesome,” said Peter, when Tyler came bounding up to him, half an hour later.

“I was? Did you like me?” Tyler gave Peter a peck on the cheek. The boy was in jeans, T-shirt, and a scarf—far more casual than Peter had ever seen him. And he smelled both sweaty and clean.

“Brilliant,” said Peter. ‘The best singing vagina I've ever seen.”

“Isn't the costume amazing? I want you to meet Mandy—she's the genius behind Davidsbündler. She'll be out in a second.”

“I kinda actually better get going, Ty,” said Peter. “It's late.”

“Oh, no you don't, mister,” said Tyler, playfully. “You have to have a drink with me.”

“The most amazing thing happened to me, just before you went on,” said Peter, when they were at the bar. “Some girl came up and asked me if I was gay.”

“Was she into you?”

“No. It was for her boyfriend. She said he thought I was hot.”

“Are they still here?” said Tyler, looking around. “I wanna see.”

“I don't know where they went.”

“Was he hot?”

“Not really.”

“I'm jealous.”

“Right.”

“I am.”

“Tyler.”

“No, really,” said the boy, getting closer and attempting to plant another, more serious kiss.

Peter noticed a couple of other men standing nearby—gay and somewhat older, too, than the rest of the crowd. They saw the attempt at a kiss and appeared to find it charming.

“No, c'mon—we're not doing this,” said Peter, pushing Tyler away gently.

“We're not?”

“No. Are we?”

“
Are
we?”

“No. But you know I adore you and think you're the biggest star in the universe.”