Now and Yesterday Read Online Free Page A

Now and Yesterday
Book: Now and Yesterday Read Online Free
Author: Stephen Greco
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another archway was the dining room, where an elaborate buffet had been laid out, and beyond that the bar, which had been set up in the kitchen’s breakfast nook.
    Then again, he could be here and I wouldn’t even know it. Harold always said I have this oblivious side....
    The bartender was a tall, dark-haired young man in his mid-twenties, dressed in a black button-front shirt.
    â€œHi, there,” said Peter.
    â€œHey, what can I get for you?”
    â€œA vodka would be terrific, please—ice, twist of lime. Actually, make it a double. I won’t have to bother you so soon.”
    â€œNo bother.”
    The bartender made the drink and handed it to Peter.
    â€œBrilliant, thanks,” said Peter. It was the slight awkwardness Peter was feeling at the party that kept him from registering the warmth of the young man’s smile and the sparkle of his gray-blue eyes.
    â€œEnjoy,” said the bartender.
    Peter peered across the crowd.
    â€œThe, uh, library?” he asked.
    â€œJust on the other side of the living room,” said the bartender, pointing.
    â€œAh, thanks,” said Peter, raising his glass in a little toast. “I’m on the tour. I know there’s gonna be a quiz.”
    That was a lame thing to say, thought Peter as he walked away. Why did I say that? It sounds so ungenerous toward Jonathan—not that the guy was really listening to me or would even take it seriously. Why the hell do I say these things?
    Twenty-plus years after Harold, Peter still found socializing as clunky as he had before Harold, when he was a small-town teenager with scant social grace. Years of experience had done little to make him any smoother, he felt, especially in gay circles like this. And the gay men of his age who were single? In addition to incurious, most of them were wounded, exhausted, or bitter, settled into an imperturbable equilibrium of self-acquaintance that seemed to preclude the mad, transformative ardors and intoxicating, pop-music highs that he still craved. He remembered, too, the shock, one day before meeting Nick, of realizing he knew essentially nothing about men—certainly not what everyone else seemed to know: that whether straight or gay they could be untrue. Before Harold, Peter had not dated at all, not even a high school sweetheart. He and Harold met in college, in the early ’70s, just as both were coming out, and it was love at nearly first sight—“a marriage made in heaven,” as his grandmother had always described her own long and storied marriage. And Peter and Harold’s relationship did turn out to be a kind of heaven—not unbumpy, but elevated, resonant in a metaphysical way that made it feel, then and since, like myth. They framed pictures together, read Foucault together, attended protests together, boiled lobsters together, traveled to Machu Picchu together, blessed newborn nieces and nephews together. And still, in memory, Harold was the great love of Peter’s life, his seductively wicked smile caught in the halcyon glow of an undying late-spring afternoon in Venice, the saint and prince with whom no mortal, perhaps, could ever compete.
    Certainly not Nick, who craved drugs more than love, and certainly not the boys whom Peter saw now. And about the future, who could say? Failing heaven’s help, Peter would gamely soldier on, trying to do what he imagined other people do: talk about yourself when asked, ask questions about the other person, find points of mutual interest, like Mike Nichols—or rather, Julia Roberts.
    More greetings, as Peter kept navigating, then he entered the library, a gentleman scholar’s retreat lined with custom-made bookcases holding artwork and objects, as well as books upon books. Displayed beneath two large windows on a bank of built-in cabinets, spot-lit from the soffit above, were some of Jonathan’s prize possessions: a commedia dell’arte mask, a miniature window from a
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