Now and Yesterday (9 page)

Most of the other bartenders were actors or models, so the hopes on which they pinned their escape from this life of servitude lay on the screen or the stage. If they didn't have a sense of where they were going, careerwise, at least their agents did. And the guests, Will felt, must have a sense of direction, too—but where did they get it? Will knew he fit in with them, in terms of looks, and style, and temperament, but what exactly did those people do, anyway, and how exactly did they come to do it? Were they all editors? The kind of editors who write, and choose their subjects, and have lunch with writers, and produce photo spreads, and plan issues? Did they come from literary backgrounds? Journalistic backgrounds? How did one become an editor? Who taught that kind of editing? How did you talk about your aspirations in the field of editing, in an interview? Was there anyone at the party, among those fifteen hundred souls, who might have read the interview Will did with Beyoncé—who might appreciate the skill and charm it took to get the star to reminisce about the smoothies she used to have for breakfast as a child?

It was nasty business, serving people. True, everyone in the room understood that cute bartenders were all bound for something else, that by the end of the following year half the party's bartenders might well be talking about some new project from the couch of a late-night talk show. Yet until the couch, what did they say and think about themselves? Nothing in Will's twenty-eight years—nothing in his comfortable upper-middle-class upbringing—had prepared him for this. God knew, he wasn't looking for anything fancy, just survival with dignity. As much as he liked New York, he resented this quality of the city that seemed to be both goading him to find himself and preventing him from doing so.

“Hey, buddy—four specials.” No tip.

“Beer.” No tip.

“Hi, there! Three white wines and one red, please—thank you. Eew—is that the end of the bottle? Could you open a new one, please? Is it a French wine, do you know? Is it very sweet?” No tip.

“Hey, Brent!” shouted Will, slamming down his corkscrew. “Do me a favor? Cover me for five minutes? I gotta pee. Literally—back in five.”

Will walked across the floor, down a roped-off corridor, and into the staff men's room. He washed his hands at a sink, then went into a stall and just stood there, breathing. The room was empty. He needed a moment to himself. From outside the men's room echoed the pounding DJ music and the roar of a thousand conversations. After a moment, Will peed, then checked his messages. He wasn't expecting anything; it was just an excuse to enter his private iPhone world and push a few buttons. On a whim he checked his Facebook newsfeed. Nothing special—then he saw a new picture from his sister, who was on vacation with some Italian friends of the family, in Paris. Will “liked” the photo and made a breezy comment, then he checked for any other Paris pix, of which there were a few.

Damn—I was supposed to meet them there,
he thought.
Why did I say no?
Then he remembered: He'd never really intended to go to Paris, this time. He'd decided that he had to concentrate on landing the job he'd come to New York to find.

Will kept scrolling. Also among his sister's shots were several from the previous spring, when Will's family had visited the vacation home of their Italian friends in Ischia. The friends had a large boat that was staffed both with hired help, for the sailing, and family retainers, Marta and Claudio, for the serving. There was Will, shirtless, in the sun, with Chiara and Sarah; Will, shirtless and squinting, on the beach of one of the tiny islands they stopped at; Will with Sarah and Elisabeth, on the beach; Will's parents with the Italian parents; all the kids gathered for lunch on the boat's aft deck over a fresh seafood salad, with Marta and Claudio in the background, beaming. The tablecloth was striped blue and white.

OK, great, so now
I've
joined the servant class,
thought Will, with a silent chuckle.

For some reason, he suddenly remembered a moment from that trip—the gracious answer their friends' mom gave when his mother asked, at the end of their stay, whether tipping Marta and Claudio was appropriate.

“Yes, it is done, if you like, and they will be so grateful,” the lady said. “They like you all so very much. But may I suggest . . . well, we have something in Italy we call
bella figura
—um, good form, I suppose you might say. This means you might select a little gift for them, something very small, and then also give them an envelope with some bills, if you choose. You see?”

Just then, someone entered the men's room, with the bang of a door, and Will put away the phone.

Back to work, commendatore.

Back at the bar, Will noticed that one of the guests was shooting smiley glances at him—a good-looking man in his late thirties or early forties, surrounded by a crew of younger cuties. He had the air of someone important, with prematurely gray hair and a pair of clunky, retro-style glasses. Will knew that at parties like this it was par for the course for the handsome bartenders to be flirted with and maybe invited to after-parties and such, but no way! Will's feet and lower back were screaming for help, and he was already dreaming of the steaming-hot eucalyptus bath he was going to sink into, the moment he got home.

The man stepped over to the bar.

“You guys are doing a terrific job tonight,” he said.

“Thanks,” said Will. Underneath the man's gray sport jacket was a tight purple sweater that showed off an obviously worked-out body.

“Busy,” said the man.

“That's the way we like it,” said Will.

“Oh, I'll bet you do.”

“Drink?”

“Got one, thanks. Say, are you an actor, or a model?”

“Sorry?”

“An actor, right?”

“Oh—sorry, no.”

“Damn, that was my best guess. May I ask what it is you do or intend to do when you grow up?”

“This,” said Will, chucking out an empty wine bottle and opening a new one with pretend disgust that wasn't so pretend.

The man made a frowny face.

“When you're not here, I mean,” said the guy.

“Sorry, I don't mean to be a jerk,” said Will. “I'm looking around. I just got to New York.”

“Oh, yeah? What are you looking for?”

“Something in magazines, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“No—in magazines. I write; I've done some editing.”

“You have clips and strong references, I assume?”

“Sure, why?”

“This is magazine world, my friend,” said the man, with a gesture indicating the entire party.

“I know,” said Will, “but . . .”

“I happen to know someone in HR. Have you been over there yet?”

“No.”

“Well, what's the delay? They should see you.”

“OK.”

“Maybe Condé Nast has made you a better offer?”

“No,” laughed Will.

They introduced themselves and shook hands.

“Here's my card,” said the man. “Call me tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” said Will, examining the card. “What's an ‘editor at large'?”

“I hope, my friend, that by this time next year, when you are making six figures and wielding vast power, you will find a question like that comically naïve.”

Will was confused, but he giggled.

“Sorry,” said the man. “I do a little bit of everything. But seriously—call me. We'll see if we can hook you up with something.”

“I will.”

“Magazines always need good people. Are you good?”

“As a journalist?”

“Of course, as a journalist.”

“Yeah.”

“Great. So call me tomorrow. E-mail me, too, OK?”

“Thanks,” said Will, as the man walked away.

There was still a huge throng of guests at the bar, all waiting for a drink.

“Excuse me, can I get a vodka with tonic?” Tip.

“The rum thing, please. Actually, no—can you do just the rum, straight up?” Tip.

“Club soda. One ice cube. Twist of lemon
and
a twist of lime.” No tip.

T
he law firm where Will was temping was a relatively small one: just three partners and a handful of other counsel and associates, headquartered in a generically modern building in lower Manhattan. Will was filling in as executive assistant to the head partner, while the regular assistant took a brief matrimonial leave. The duties were simple—answering phones, running the office, and receiving clients and other visitors—and the boss was pleasant. He was an older man with a milky complexion and white hair, whose mildness underlay a fiercely competitive intelligence that Will enjoyed observing in action when he happened to overhear the man's phone calls. As temp jobs went, this was heaven. The desk even had a view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the beautiful borough that lay beyond.

At around ten-fifteen on the morning after the magazine party the caterer arrived—fifteen minutes late!—with coffee and platters of pastries and fruit that Will had ordered for an eleven o'clock meeting the partner was hosting in the conference room. Will signed the bill and scurried around the room, setting things up and making sure the chairs were neatly arranged around the large oval table. He was just about to zip away and make a call when the partner looked in.

“Are we set?” asked the older man.

“We are,” said Will.

“Good. We'll only be an hour, an hour and a half.”

“All right.”

“Shouldn't be much blood. These are the folks who serve with me on the board of the dance theater I told you about.”

“OK,” said Will. “I'll be ready.”

On his way back to his desk, Will ducked into the file room, which was relatively secluded, and made a call from his cell phone.

“Stefan Turino's office,” said a British man's voice.

“Hi,” said Will, and he gave his name in a hushed voice that was meant nonetheless to sound confident. “Is Stefan in, please? He asked me to call today.” Will was holding the card that Stefan had given him at the party.

“I'll see if he's in. Please hold.”

Will had wanted to call just then, around ten-thirty, which he felt would be not too early, which might seem desperate, nor too late, which could look lax. The seconds ticked away, then the British man returned.

“Will, please hold for Stefan.”

“Hello, Stefan?”

“No—please
hold
for Stefan.”

“Oh, sorry.”

More hold. Then Stefan came on.

“Hey, buddy. How's it going?”

“Hi, how are you?”

“You survived our little party. I hope you didn't stay out too late.”

“I went straight home to bed. It was a school night.”

“Oh, too bad. There was a thing afterward and I thought about calling you. Then I realized, Wait, I don't have your number. You have mine.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“So . . . since you were kind enough to offer, I thought I'd ask you about . . . we spoke about an interview, or . . .”

“Oh, absolutely—very good. Will, tell you what. E-mail me your CV right now, will you, and let me get back to you very shortly?”

“Yeah, sure.” Will was glad he had stored a copy of his resume in his Gmail account not long before, when he started looking for jobs.

“Will you do that for me?” said Stefan.

“Of course, right now,” said Will.

“Good. Buddy, listen, I'm glad you called but I'm getting pulled away here. Let me go, but I'll get back to you very soon. Promise.”

Back at his desk—surreptitiously, while his boss was on a call—Will looked over his resume before sending it.

Not too bad for a guy in his twenties,
he thought. He'd been meaning to check Mediabistro for some advice on whether or not to mention your prep school on a resume. Will decided to leave it for now.
And what's the difference between a CV and a resume, anyway?
But there was no time to check.

Also in his head were other questions that the call had prompted.

He thought about calling me last night? Is he always that familiar with strangers? His assistant used my name right away, as if I were a known quantity. Do they do that for everyone, in that world? But is it real thoughtfulness or just a trick?

A little before eleven the dance theater board members arrived. Will took their coats and showed them into the conference room. They seemed a lovely bunch of somewhat older people, nicely but not formally dressed. One of them asked where the ladies' room was and thanked Will graciously.

They reminded him of his parents and his parents' friends: cultivated folks who were obviously affluent, but genial, unpretentious, understated. Will was glad to know there were enough people like that in New York to comprise a social stratum. Sometimes it seemed the city was all flash—money and accomplishment detached from taste, modesty, service, and other higher values that Will's parents observed and tried to teach their children. His father was an aerospace executive with big defense department contracts, and his mom the head of the English department at the prep school he'd attended. They were active in Santa Barbara politics and donors to the arts, and had always encouraged Will to do and be anything he wanted. Even their brand of Episcopalianism was warmly permissive. And indeed Will had come out as gay without drama practically as an adolescent, and was never encouraged, particularly, to go into aerospace or education. He often wondered whether this amiable, laissez-faire upbringing had left him lacking in a certain kind of pushiness, or just clarity of purpose, that people needed in New York. People always asked, “What do you do?” with such fervor; and when he told them, “Temping and catering-waitering and looking around,” and they asked what he really wanted to be doing, career-wise, he always felt the question premature. Though of course it wasn't. He was almost thirty.

As another of the ladies asked for the ladies' room, Will felt his phone vibrate. It could be Stefan. Quickly, he surveyed the conference room and saw that his boss and guests were installing themselves smoothly at the table, then he sped back to his desk, managing to grab the call as he went.

“Will here.”

“Will, Stefan.”

“Hey.”

“You're in luck. Can you come in on Thursday morning, nine-thirty sharp?”

“Uh, yeah—Thursday morning?” If Will sounded tentative, it was because he knew he was scheduled to work that day at the law office.

“I suggest you just say yes, buddy,” said Stefan. “It only sounds like a question.” He went on to tell Will whom he'd be meeting with, and where.

“Thanks a lot,” said Will. “I really appreciate it.”

“Cool, cool. We'll see where it goes.”

 

The Paul Smith store on Greene Street in SoHo was one of Peter's favorite shops. It was a temple of cool. The cheeky merchandise; the store's elegantly quirky design, incorporating quaint artworks and vintage fixtures; the whole smarty-pants-British-art-school point of view—all was in synch with Peter's reverence for tradition and standards but devotion to wit. For some, shopping at Paul Smith entailed as sincere a form of worship as existed in the twenty-first century, and Peter had long been a member of the cult.

Often, during the '80s, when Peter and Harold spent long weekends in London, to see ballet or theater, they would make it a point to visit the original Paul Smith shop on Floral Street. They were always amused by the sharply seasoned-up versions of the menswear classics they found there, and sometimes would pick up a striped plastic belt or woolen scarf on sale—the kind of small purchase they could comfortably afford then. Later, Peter began buying shirts and suits at Paul Smith's first New York location, on lower Fifth Avenue, and then, on returns to London, at the new flagship store in Notting Hill. To this day, Peter continued to wear a cherished pair of socks he splurged on in 1985—in navy blue, with a woven-in grid of white Bodoni numerals. They must have cost $30 or $40—then an absurd amount that Peter paid willingly, thinking the socks so very cool, and bolstered by a vague impression about the value of design and workmanship. Twenty-five years had done much to strengthen that impression, as good design and workmanship had proved enduring and were now the kinds of things that were more important than ever to Peter.

He had felt a little twitchy in Rico's, in his slightly undersized Ben Sherman jacket. Besides, that jacket was a year or two old. So a few days later Peter went to Paul Smith in search of a few things to help him through the coming round of holiday parties. Tyler came along to help, as usual. The two of them stopped in after a meeting not far away, with a graphic artist who was helping them create new visuals for a client.

“You could do this,” said Tyler, plucking a boldly striped jacket on a hanger from a hook and holding it up to Peter's body. “Hmm, no, maybe not.”

“No?” said Peter, inspecting the jacket, after Tyler stuck it back on the hook.

“Crazy, but not the right kind of crazy,” said Tyler, already looking elsewhere. “How about this?” He had another jacket, in a vibrant green herringbone—a nice twist on tweedy.

“Huh,” said Peter, as Tyler pushed the jacket upon him.

“That's hot,” said Tyler. “You're trying that on.” Tyler added the jacket to the armful of garments Peter was holding and moved on. “Sweaters, shirts—we'll look at those later. OK, let's see what we have. Dressing room.”

The store was not particularly busy that day. Five or six customers were milling about, looking at things in a casual way, or chatting amiably with salespeople. Inside the dressing room Peter put down his briefcase, hung his things on some antique hooks, and decided where to begin. When he stepped out of the room in his first look, the green jacket, with a green T-shirt and a pair of black jeans, Tyler was a few steps away, looking at sweaters.

“Ty, what do you think of this?”

Tyler came over and they both studied Peter's reflection in the dressing area's mahogany cheval glass. The image had the power of a page in
W:
The right silhouette and the right background brought everything into focus for
right now,
even as the mind felt connected to a truth about life that one yearns to hang onto—something that's larger, more important,
eternal
.

“Awesome, I knew it,” said Tyler, holding a sweater. “You should definitely get it—the jacket.”

“And the jeans?”

“Ehh. I'm just not seeing you in a black jean—sorry.”

The jeans had been Peter's idea. Black jeans had been one of the staples of his first decade in New York.

“I know they're showing them and all,” continued Tyler, “and they're really well done, but I'm just not feeling it.”

“Meaning . . . Paul Smith made a mistake?”

“Meaning . . . I'm just not feeling it.”

“He's just not feeling it,” said Peter to the salesperson, a slender, dark-haired young man, who was standing nearby, watching.

“I'm not feeling it for
you,
mister,” said Tyler, pointing with the hand that was still clasping a sweater. “I could get away with them
easily,
no doubt.” And Tyler tossed the sweater at Peter playfully, which amused the salesperson and a straight couple who had also been looking at sweaters.

To a stranger, they might have looked like boyfriends—or some modern version of uncle-and-nephew, or perhaps call-boy-and-client. A few months before, at a charity concert that Peter took Tyler to, they had run into a former fling of Tyler's, a tattooed, puppyish young stylist who not long before had been the boyfriend of a famous fashion designer. The kid was also, notoriously and somewhat proudly, a hustler; the fashion and media press had been full of stories, nominally celebratory but steeped in contempt, about the bad boy who'd captured the designer's heart. Before the concert the boy barely acknowledged Peter as he chatted and giggled with Tyler, and during the concert he continued to text Tyler. Afterward, they met again on the sidewalk and Tyler declined to go off with the kid and his friends, to some supercool after-party.

“He says he wants to hook up again,” said Tyler, as he and Peter strolled off to dinner. “I have no idea why.”

“Because you're such a hottie,” said Peter.

Tyler clowned a smile.

“But you're not into him,” continued Peter.

“There's not enough
there
there.”

“Cute, though.”

“And extremely sincere.”

“Oh, that's nice.”

“Hung,” said Tyler.

“Of course,” said Peter.

“He asked me who the john was, who I was with.”

“What?”

“Yup.”

“Me?!”

“I said you were my friend.”

“And your boss.”

“Well, I didn't say that.”

“He thought I was a john?” It was the first time this picture of himself, though he often went out with younger men, had entered his mind.

“What about me?” said Tyler. “That kinda makes
me
a hustler.”

“Yeah! And you're a fucking important creative director.”

“Not that I have anything against being a hustler.”

“Nor do I against being a john—I guess. Though shouldn't the kid know better? Is that the way he sees the whole world?”

The incident made Peter realize exactly how uncharted the waters were that he had been sailing into, by dating such young men and purposefully looking for love among them, as he had been doing since the breakup with Nick. There were new balances these days among love, money, manhood, adulthood, and the like. To overlook these new balances or neglect to account for them in one's behavior—to ignore the fact that everything had shifted in the previous generation—could make the going treacherous. On the other hand, Peter was as curious about these new balances as he was about new developments in art, fashion, and music; and in this way he had felt for a long time more in synch, taste-wise, with people under forty. As an editor, early on, he was expected to stay in touch with the new. And as with committing to the gym, he simply got into the habit of listening regularly to new pop music and taking seriously what he saw in store windows. Then the loss of Harold and all the rest of his friends within twenty-four months jolted him free, in a way, of an entire generational trajectory he'd been programmed for, and the new was all he had. He was free—or lost, depending on how you looked at it.