Now and Yesterday (35 page)

The late afternoon sun was making everything look golden. But Peter noticed that Arnie's teeth looked yellow, not because of the light.

“It would be great to catch up,” said Peter, “but we're running.” And he really did mean that it would be great, since he had always liked Arnie—in fact, had been very close with him, at one point. Inviting him back to the house, of course, wasn't an option.

“Well, look,” said Arnie, “did you say you were driving home tomorrow? I'd love to invite you guys to stop by for tea, on your way back to the city.”

Peter was surprised by the idea, but not put off.

“If there's time,” continued Arnie. “It's right on the way.”

“It's an idea,” said Peter. “We still haven't figured out the day yet. Can I let you know?”

“Of course,” said Arnie, and they exchanged phone numbers. “I'm home, working, all day.”

“Terrific,” said Peter. “I'll call or text.”

“Nice to meet you,” said Arnie.

“Same here,” said Will.

“Wow,” said Peter, as they walked to the van.

“Seems like a nice guy.”

“Omigod!” hooted Peter.

“What?” said Will.

Peter halted, grinning, taking Will by the arm and looking around to make sure they were alone.

“OK, here's why I didn't just say no,” he said, in an excited whisper. “Arnie and I used to be boyfriends!”

“No way.”

“Yes! A million years ago—for about six months, in college. Before Harold and I signed on the dotted line.”

“Wow.”

“So I didn't want to just blow him off.”

“Of course not.”

“What a surprise—Arnie!”

“Well, hell, we should have tea with him.”

“Oh, I couldn't ask you to do that.”

“It's fine with me. I think it would be fun.”

“Really? You wouldn't mind?”

“It would give me a chance to see what you saw in him.”

Peter snorted, as if he knew well that that could stand some explanation.

“He used to be so cute . . . !”

“No, I'm sure,” said Will.

“No, that came out wrong. Arnie's a good composer and a very decent human being.”

“He seems cool. Nice smile.”

“Well, here's the thing,” burbled Peter. “He was the most amazing kisser. Luscious kisser! It was Arnie who made me realize that sex could be sweet. I think it was the first time I'd ever giggled during sex—ya know?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Instead of that
grunting
thing—which can be nice, too, of course.”

“Very nice guy. Though definitely not as well taken care of, whatever, as you and Jonathan. But so what?”

“Right. So what?”

They settled into the front seat of the van.

“It's not like we're on a fixed schedule tomorrow,” said Will.

“I just don't want to get home too late,” said Peter.

“Catskill. Where is that?”

“Other side of the river.”

“Fine.”

“Actually, it might work. Lunch with Jonathan, tea with Arnie, and then we can hop on the Thruway. Which might be better for us, anyway—driving home in the dark.”

“There ya go.”

 

The drive suggested by Jonathan took them home on a scenic route that afforded a succession of splendid river and mountain views. Traffic was practically nonexistent, so Peter found real pleasure in negotiating the road's gentle ups, downs, and arounds unimpeded, at an appropriately stately speed. Contentedly they ambled over ridges and down into little valleys, along routes that were so well insinuated into the rolling landscape they could only have been built upon ancient paths. They glided through quiet junctions marked by only a house or two; past stretches of field and forest that gave way to grand vistas.

They said little, perhaps a bit talked-out for the moment.

The road, at one point, after curving along the shoulder of a little mountain, brought them over a bridge that spanned a lush ravine. The ravine fell away into a valley whose far side was a hilly landscape entirely of green. It was a view that was more than just pretty, Peter thought: It was deceptively simple, since it described the result of eons of erosion and evolution, ongoing processes that had been basically undisturbed by history. These were hills that had never been cleared or much occupied, and only sporadically visited, ever. They looked now the way they had for centuries. Anyone who had ever driven there, or hiked up there before the road was built, or walked along the Indian path that was there before the road—say, the young local artist who did a series of woodland sketches there in 1853, determined to make his native landscape as famous as Rome's; or the bootlegger who took shelter in a tent nearby, with a Bible and a bottle of whiskey, after abandoning a thriving business that was raided by state police in 1951; or the housewife who stopped there in a Chevy with another woman's husband in 1963, after dirty dancing to Perez Prado in a riverfront dive and deciding to drive far from town—all would have seen the same view. And Peter had always been clobbered by this sense of conflated eras and possible futures from the views he discovered on drives he made as a restless teenager and from similar views ever since. Rome's hills might be more marked, storied, mythologized, but these—ushering little streams down toward larger ones, and those, onward toward the Hudson—embodied some of the same glamour as those on the Tiber, suggesting that opulence can gestate among piles of earth even without something physical being built there.

The glamour of a ravine, or a water gap, or a stand of hills derives not only from beauty, after all, but from function—and function can be marvelously unpredictable. Who could have predicted that the hills where Peter grew up, which saw the coming and going of canals and trains and bowling alleys and beauty salons, would also engender Peter and his kind?

This kind of life, this kind of weekend!
he kept thinking.
How impossible it would have been for my parents to imagine such things, when I was a kid! Yet in some ways this life was always here and I was simply one of those who was able to see it.

A little upstate town overrun by antiques dealers, its main street a strip of shops where everyone spoke gay. Men like Jonathan living in great mansions, and still others in shacks.... Peter was almost afraid to imagine what Arnie's place was like.

“Should I text Arnie and say we're coming?” said Peter, breaking a genial silence that had lasted for miles.

“Sure, if you want to,” said Will.

“Maybe four?”

“Sounds good.”

After a few more miles they realized it was later than they thought.

“It's close now,” said Peter.

The sky was managing to hold on to a bit of its glow, but day had already left the depths of woods and hollows they were passing. They were on the final leg of their drive, before reaching the turnoff to Jonathan's road, when they rounded a bend and came upon another valley vista, only this one broader. Far below, in a village at the bottom of the valley, lights were coming on, shimmering through the dusk. A radiant strand of highway led from one end of the valley into a bowl of splattered, glittering filaments, and then narrowed again into a strand that disappeared into darkness at the far end of the valley. It was a view of suppers being cooked, homework being done, TV being watched. And Peter wondered, as they passed serenely above the scene, whether the van's headlights might be visible below, or the echo of its engine audible that far away, across the valley, from someone's back porch or bedroom window—someone, perhaps, who was conjugating Spanish verbs and wondering where his life would lead. Often as a child, Peter, doing homework at his desk or lying in bed on a spring night, with the window open, listened for the drone of vehicles shifting gears, coming from the highway a mile or so away. The sound, echoing over lawns and rooftops and treetops, was a seductive clarion reminding him of all those who must be traveling toward the main road a few miles beyond, which led to New York and untold, glorious possibilities. As he headed home with Will to dinner, the memory of this sound scalded Peter's heart with joy, in a crystalline moment suddenly outside of time, where things past and things to come were dazzling facets of a singularity all to be beheld at once. To be this close to love, in a rented van, on a spring evening, was splendor of a type that Peter couldn't remember the likes of, yet felt he had always known.

 

By the time they arrived home it was dark. They'd texted ahead, so they were right on time to have a cocktail and sit down to dinner. Aldebar had made roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and apple pie that was served with a locally made ginger-basil ice cream.

After dinner, they all spent a few minutes on the terrace, looking at the Milky Way and figuring out which stars were which, using an app called Planets that Peter had on his iPhone. Then they came in and watched Roman Polanski's
The Ghost Writer
in the “family room”—the other end of the kitchen. Jonathan dozed off in the middle.

“You realize, don't you, that I have to completely reinterpret the stars, because of you,” said Peter, when they were back in their room, done with the bathroom and getting ready for bed.

Will said nothing. He was stretched out on his bed, on top of the covers, in his boxers and a T-shirt, examining the seascape he'd purchased.

“This is not a night sky I have ever seen before,” continued Peter. “Everything I have ever thought or felt or known about the stars is suddenly off, because of you.”

“Yadda, yadda, yadda,” said Will. Then he looked up from the seascape and beamed Peter an angelic smile.

“Joke if you want to,” said Peter, “but now when I look at the Milky Way, I hear celestial harmonies I've never heard before. And I'm not sure if this is part of a feeling or a memory or something else.”

“Mister, if I had a nickel for every time I heard that one . . . ,” said Will, playfully. And then he turned the seascape around, so Peter could see it. “C'mon, seriously, come and look at my picture. It's good, no?”

“It's gorgeous. You did well,” said Peter, sitting down on the bed next to Will and regarding the watercolor with him, though the picture most vivid in Peter's mind at that moment was of his friend's muscular legs, casually crossed, and bare feet—possibly the most beautifully formed feet, by the standards of Renaissance sculpture, Peter thought, that he had ever seen.

“Oh, and by the way,” said Will, twisting around and reaching down to the floor to grab a paper bag from inside the green plastic one he'd been carrying all afternoon. “This is for you.” He handed Peter the bag.

“Wow,” said Peter. “For me?” Inside was a handsome old volume whose title was floridly embossed in oxidized gilt on a brown cloth cover:
Our Deportment
.

“Will, I . . . wow,” said Peter, beginning to look through the book, surprised and gratified.

It had been published in 1882 and was dedicated, according to the title page, “to manners, conduct, and dress of the most refined society; including forms for letters, invitations, etc., etc. Also, valuable on home culture and training. Compiled from the latest reliable authorities by John H. Young.”

“Couldn't resist,” said Will. They had looked at the book briefly in one of the shops they visited, but put it down when Jonathan and Aldebar decided to press on.

“It's beautiful,” said Peter.

“Look at the stamp inside the front cover,” said Will. “ ‘Number 79' in the library of one E. A. Bacon. ‘Purchased in 1884, for 1.25.' That's dollars, I presume.”

“Probably, yeah . . . !”

“I went back and got it for you. I knew you had to have it.”

“Will, I'm . . . overwhelmed. This is so thoughtful.”

“Look,” said Will, drawing closer to Peter and flipping pages to a place he had marked with a postcard. “There's a section on calling cards.”

“Very helpful,” said Peter. With both his pulse and his thoughts racing, he wanted to embrace his friend in thanks, but thought better of it, in case he was too overwhelmed to control the impulse.

“And look,” said Will, “ ‘Receptions, Parties, and Balls'!”

As Peter gazed at the chapter heading, with its extravagant illustration of a silver ewer, and at Will's chunky fingers, holding the book open to the right place, he tried to remember the last time there was so much going on in his mind and body.

“Well, thank you,” said Peter. “The, uh, best I can do to express my gratitude is make a reflexively gracious, though hopefully not too embarrassing, gesture.” And with that, Peter slid over, took Will's right foot into both hands, and kissed the instep with exaggerated courtliness.

A charge went through both of them, even if both wanted to remain calm.

“Charming, sir,” said Will, wiggling his toes.

Peter straightened up.

“Now look, we're not going to make love tonight, are we?” he said, rising from the bed to place the book over on the table, with his laptop. “ 'Cause I'm pretty well bushed after all that antiquing.”

“Me too,” said Will. “I guess we should turn in.”

Peter flicked off the desk lamp, then gave Will's hair a tousle and kissed the top of his head chastely.

“You're a sweetie, you know that?” he said.

“So are you,” said Will.

Peter went to his bed and sat down, and slowly pulled off his pants and socks.

“But just to be serious for a second,” he said, “ 'cause we're both so avid about truth—you do know that I'm head over heels about you, right?” He paused, then went on. “I guess maybe I don't want to joke it
all
away. I mean, I know that what we have is special and we're dealing with it in a special way. You're putting aside the games you play and I'm trying to put aside mine. . . .”