Free Now and Yesterday by Stephen Greco

company,” trumpeted the CEO.
    â€œIt’s about the passion for a better world,” purred the marketing director.
    â€œWe 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.