Now and Yesterday (15 page)

“All right, then,” he said, “so let me ask you what stories you propose to tell.”

“I am hoping you will help me figure that out, Peter. I mean, I have a few ideas to put out there—you've probably heard many of them—but you're the guys who can create the most powerful platforms for them, the most powerful engines. I came to listen to you.”

Was this flattery? Was it true? Laura seemed to take McCaw's statement as a good sign, and looked confident as she took a demure bite of a cheesy breadstick.

“Listen,” said McCaw. “Some people call ‘Don't tread on me' stupid. Fine. Some people call me stupid. Fine. But some people call the folks who listen to me stupid, and that's not fine, not at all. Because I happen to know that America is intelligent in about seventeen new ways. And that's what I call a real opportunity for our culture, and for us, here in this room.”

It was a shock for Peter to see how canny McCaw was. People looking inward, acting on what they “know,” rather than some external “truths”! It was exactly why his form of “take back America” populism was so popular, Peter thought, and what made it so close to the fundamentalism of Islamic terrorists. The entire conversation couldn't have been farther from the common-denominator talk that Peter and Laura had agreed to stick to, when they went over their goals for the lunch. Specific truths and doctrines? Completely extraneous to the conversation—and Peter could just hear Laura reminding him that this was the case, too, with plenty of other clients.

The main course arrived: steamed branzino, with oyster mushrooms, scallions, ponzu, and cilantro. The presentation was worthy of a photo shoot.

“They told me you like seafood,” said Laura. “So we got one of the chefs from the Lure Fishbar to come up and cook for us today.”

“Looks yummy,” said McCaw. “Is everyone as hungry as I am?”

Polite enthusiasm burbled around the table, as they tucked in.

“Your point about new kinds of intelligence intrigues me,” said Peter, presently. “I saw the interview you did a week or so ago, with the senator.”

“Ah,” said McCaw. Laura opened her mouth, then closed it without saying anything.

“Now, with all respect, Hendy, this is not a very intelligent woman,” said Peter. “She has very few solid points to make, and she can't seem to make them in any detail.”

McCaw smiled.

“I know she is extreme,” he said. “But I felt it my duty to let my audience see that. The senator and her positions are actually very compelling, though she may have a ways to go yet, as a candidate for higher office.”

“Higher office? The only thing higher is the presidency, and she's completely unqualified for that.”

“By what standard?”

“By any standard. Could she negotiate a trade agreement? Can she handle the subtleties of foreign policy?”

“She might not have to, is the point. She might be more effective as a symbol, like Reagan. Or Obama. This is one of the seventeen new kinds of intelligence that I'm talking about.”

“OK, so . . . you want us to help you find better ways of making Senator Miss Congeniality look good?”

“Peter, what I think we're hearing . . . ,” began Laura.

McCaw stopped her by pressing a hand gently on her arm.

“I need help in putting across my messages in as fair and persuasive a way as possible,” said McCaw. “That's all. Why? We're expanding into print, cable TV, the Web—with an integrated media complex, just like Oprah and Martha.”

“Also retail and events,” added Sunil.

“So strategy and branding,” said Peter.

“Strategy, branding, content, programming, product development and design,” said Sunil.

“It's a bold initiative,” said Laura.

“I just . . . wanna make sure people
get
it,” said McCaw. “If we can just speak their language.”

Peter chuckled.

“You know, in a way,” he said, “what you're saying is a variant of that old saying, ‘Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.' ”

McCaw nodded.

“That's right,” he said. “I am saying that. And I embrace that statement with love and respect for the American public—which is, by the way, not how Mencken meant it or anything else he ever said.”

“Mencken was a cynic,” said Peter.

“Yes, and I am not,” said McCaw. “And, Peter, I venture to say that you're not, either—when you so ably assist a client like Procter & Gamble to sell a hundred million units of a shower gel that makes people smell like good, clean sex; when you make them realize they
want
to smell like good, clean sex.”

“Uh, true,” said Peter.

“All I wanna do is rent your brain, my friend,” said McCaw. “Can I ask you to think about that?”

The comment made everyone laugh and lightened the mood at the table.

The chef looked in briefly when dessert was served—a lemon soufflé tart. They thanked him warmly, then went on talking, over coffee. They agreed to talk again, in a few days. The aim was “a passionate new media brand with a clear point of view.” They were still arranging the money; March first was their deadline for having a plan in place. When they all said good-bye at the elevator, Peter realized that over the course of the lunch he'd come to see McCaw as a human being, which might prove useful in helping him decide whether or not to work with the guy. He'd even begun to have some respect for McCaw, though not, of course, for his politics—yet even McCaw's choice of steering largely clear of politics in an informal meeting like this seemed smart. What was most interesting was that McCaw welcomed provocation—it seemed to make him even keener to work with Peter.

“Like I said,” said Laura, a few seconds after the elevator doors closed, “ours to lose.”

“Are they talking to anyone else?”

Laura shook her head.

“Just us,” she said. “They want you.”

“So I gather. He's not what I expected.”

“I know.”

“He's smart.”

“Clearly.”

“It's a big project.”

“I've been working on numbers. You need to be thinking about your key hires.”

They started walking back to their offices.

“What he does in public is a performance, isn't it?” said Peter. “He plays a character.”

“Not unlike the rest of us,” said Laura.

“He seduces people.”

“I know! Did you see those hands?”

“Quite large.”

“Yes, large. And strong and gorgeous-looking.”

“Laura!”

“I think we both learned something today.”

W
ill started working at the magazine a week after Peter's party and soon found himself acclimatized to life in New York's media lane. In fact, by the time the office started emptying out for the holidays, a week before Christmas, he found he was completely addicted to the stream of unprocessed cultural news that poured into the office and onto his radar every day, via press kits, calls, and e-mails from folks wanting editorial coverage for the fab phenoms they hoped to position as hot and happening. A new movie! A new album! A new fashion collection! A new art show! And beyond the possibility of actual coverage was Will's new membership in the city's influencer elite. A score of invitations came across his desk every day, providing welcome fuel for his calendar, which was suddenly jammed with parties, dinners, openings, launches, previews, and the like.

The people behind these invitations were press and marketing types, who ranged from new-best-friends to full-on monsters. Though Will found them loud and pushy, he always tried to respond politely, evaluating requests for his presence or attention fairly, in terms of what could be best for the magazine. Most of his fellow editors, however, responded in a different way to supplicants: They promised nothing and demanded everything—entrée to the best parties, free gifts and travel, special access to stars and top models. Entitlement seemed to be their biggest talent, intelligence and creativity being optional, and Will suspected more than one highly placed coworker of some degree of incompetence or fraudulence. There was Olivier, the party-going and always-too-fashionable editor at large, whose pronouncements on style sounded weighty and empty at the same time; Sebastian, the extremely good-looking assistant to the editor in chief, who referred to the celebrities who called his boss by their first names; Kitten, the fashion director, who had once been a rock star's girlfriend and was now, thirty years later, styling herself exactly the way she did then; and Herman, the managing editor, whose calm and tact concealed a doggedness that emerged whenever deadlines were threatened—a quality that had earned him the nickname “the human pit bull.”

The editor in chief, Colin, was out of town so much—“he's with Karl, on Barry and Diane's yacht in the Aegean”—that Will had barely spoken to him since arriving. Will was determined to observe the lot of them without making judgments, before deciding who was actually human and who was not—though he did have a hard time imagining that someone as horrid as Herman could ever have cavorted barefoot and carefree, as a child, through a sprinkler on a lawn, on a late-summer afternoon, under the doting gaze of a mother. Whether life in the media lane required or produced such personalities, Will couldn't tell yet, so he kept his head down and worked hard. For the issue they were working on, April, Will had been assigned, in addition to his other responsibilities, a page on rain gear. Which meant working with the market editor to figure out what kind of great rain gear there was out there; and making sure the fashion director was happy with their choices; and getting a concept for the photograph and an idea for the breezy paragraph to go with it—several ideas, since the first few could be shot down—and then making sure that the plan could be adapted easily if, all of a sudden, someone decided to go with a hot young actor instead of a model, in which case the photo would need reshooting and the breezy paragraph would need turning into a mini-interview.

As New Year's Eve approached, Will found himself invited to several parties by people he didn't know. A fashion designer was hosting a thousand people at the Chelsea Piers; a recording executive was taking over the Rainbow Room; an aging party queen was re-creating the Roxy circa 1991, all of which sounded like fun. But the party Will chose to attend was the one hosted by Stefan Turino in his penthouse on top of a new tower on West Forty-second Street, which everyone said was spectacular. Stefan said he was inviting the crème de la crème of New York's scene and social types, plus a sprinkling of celebrities, which sounded great to Will—like something he could bring Enrico to. Will owed Enrico a fabulous party or two, since Enrico had taken him to events like the benefit opening of the Winter Antiques Show and the housewarming of a fifteen-million-dollar loft in SoHo that Enrico had decorated. Moreover, Will just wanted to have fun that night, with no strings, and Enrico was good party company, especially because he wasn't utterly fascinating or the next forever boyfriend.

“He's kind of a placeholder,” Will told Luz, when she asked what was up with their relationship. “I like him, he's a nice guy. But friend chemistry, not boyfriend chemistry.”

“He on the same page about that?” said Luz.

“He kinda likes me, I guess—maybe more than I like him. But it's not about sex at this point, and he seems fine with that.”

Stefan had said his party would be a
real
party—that is, not a corporate function. And sure enough, when Will and Enrico arrived, around eleven, at the sprawling, glass-walled duplex penthouse that Stefan shared with his lawyer boyfriend, the place was abuzz with three hundred well-cared-for gay men under forty who clearly knew each other and seemed intent on making a memorable evening for themselves. Will led the way through the foyer and into the double-story living room, which boasted massive, can't-look-away, sixty-sixth-floor views of the thicket of skyscrapers that bristled just beyond, in Midtown, glittering for the occasion. Stefan's interior lighting was dim and club-like, which served to accentuate the views and flatten the guests standing in front of them into silhouettes. Low, minimalist furniture made the place look like the sky lounge of a new four-star hotel in Shanghai, as did the DJ balcony that overlooked the living room, halfway up a stairway that was thrillingly yet frighteningly free of any sort of banister.

After finding Stefan and making introductions, Will and Enrico circulated. They passed by the bar and buffet, said hello to a few acquaintances, and wound up in a corner of the living room that overlooked Times Square, a block away. The scene down in the square looked anything but scary. From the sixty-sixth floor—an elevation more than twice as high as the tower from which the ball was dropped—the mess of tourists, police, and broadcast trucks at street level looked magical, like an incandescent, three-dimensional simulation of Times Square Land, shimmering with coruscades of photo flashes and glowing under wheeled-in TV lighting. The scene looked like a stellar explosion, a slow-motion supernova.

“Great, huh,” said Enrico.

“Yeah,” said Will.

To the north, beyond sleek avenues shooting into the distance, was the George Washington Bridge, draped for the evening in diamonds.

“Think we can see thirty miles?” said Enrico.

“I dunno, I guess so,” said Will.

“So maybe there is some teenager up in the hills there, in the attic of his parents' house, gazing out the window, over the treetops, at the skyline of New York, and dreaming of a party like this?”

Will looked quizzical.

“I thought we said no drugs tonight,” he said.

Yet it was fun for Will to be at the party, even if his awe of Stefan's home was mixed with distaste. He was reminded of the New Year's Eve party, two years before, that Rob had hosted in the Century City apartment. By then, the relationship had gone sour and all of Rob's fake-nice, fake-important Hollywood friends had begun to grate on Will. That life was just one big reality-TV show.

Will had never taken to glass-walled living, either. He didn't feel relaxed, up in the sky. Being there felt more like air travel than being at home. Underlying the fascination with views was an unpleasant consciousness of movement, departure, threat—resulting, in part, from the greater distance from one's home planet and a forced trust in the skill of engineers who build towers and the competence of bureaucrats who write building codes. It was exactly like the trust you need to fly in airplanes, Will thought, which draws on quite a different emotion from the primal comfort of curling up on the tamped-earth floor of one's tidy grass hut.

Each tower is its own universe,
thought Will, gazing at Midtown. It was a view of many such universes, entailing a subconscious acknowledgment of all the other people in all the other towers, and the practically astronomical journey by which those others could be reached: by descending to earth, navigating the perils of people-choked streets, passing through another membrane of security, witnessing another corrosive show of lobby luxury, and ascending into another part of the sky. Living like that was a permanent spacewalk. Will didn't care for it at all. He'd grown up on a ranch—well, a luxury estate that was called a ranch, because it was on the edge of town, on land that had once been part of a real ranch. He was no farmer, but he had grown up with feelings about the earth and its cycles, which was another reason why he'd never clicked with Rob. Century City always felt generically urban, generically luxurious. The relationship felt generic, too.

“Decorating a place like this is always about the view,” said Enrico.

“You can't fight it, can you?” said Will.

“It becomes a theme, but you have to use it the right way, or the apartment winds up looking like every other apartment.”

A guy with thick black hair and a flashy smile, standing next to Enrico, said he agreed. He had overheard Enrico's comment to Will.

“It
is
a very commanding view,” said the guy.

“Yes,” said Enrico.

“Great jacket, by the way,” said the guy. Enrico was wearing Commes des Garçons.

“Oh, thank you,” said Enrico.

Will craned to get a glimpse of their new friend, not knowing what, if anything, to do. Introduce himself? Expect Enrico to present him? Ignore the guy?

“Are you from the city?” said the guy, in a way clearly meant for Enrico alone.

“Not originally,” said Enrico.

The guy's sparkling eyes and body language said it all: He was totally into Enrico, and either unaware of Will or uninterested in the fact that Will and Enrico had been talking together.

What's up with that?
thought Will.
We're not boyfriends, but we could be
. Was the guy being flirtatious or merely friendly? Rather than threatened, though, Will felt curious.

What
are
gay men, anyway?
he thought.
Do they just sniff around randomly, like puppies?

It was Century City all over again. Stefan's party was a portal to exactly the kind of trophy life that Will was determined to avoid. No more Robs!

“You OK?” said Enrico, after a word or two more with the smiley guy, then an emphatic turn toward Will. “What are you thinking about?”

“I'm thinking about portals,” said Will. “Parties as portals—as in, the portal to hell.”

Enrico smiled in a quizzical way.

“Now who's on drugs?” he said.

 

Meanwhile, fifty blocks south of Stefan Turino's party, Peter was spending the evening with Jonathan, at a three-star restaurant in Tribeca that did a festive, price-fixed New Year's Eve dinner for forty people. Both friends wanted to be with each other that night, and had sent regrets to exes and others who proffered various invitations. Moreover, Jonathan had told Peter that he wanted to be with someone who understood his need to be absolutely in the moment that evening, while Peter, for his part, wanted to make the most of the time he had left with his friend, which he knew might well make this New Year's Eve more memorable than the ones he'd spent with Nick on the beach in Bali in 1999 and at Madonna's mansion in Beverly Hills in 1991, or the one with Harold aboard the Orient Express, somewhere in Switzerland, en route from London to Venice, in 1985.

Jonathan was moving slowly that night because of the various pains and tenderness he was suffering—he said his clothes hurt!—but in spite of that, he said, he had been looking forward to a night out. He and Peter had decided to dress in black tie, and found that most of the other men in the restaurant were dressed that way, too; the ladies were in nice dresses or fancy jackets and pants. It was an older crowd, obviously, and as on past evenings in the restaurant Peter and Jonathan noticed that theirs was not the only same-sex table. Across the room was a table of two venerable-looking women, one of whom Jonathan recognized as the head of cultural giving for one of the nation's top charitable foundations.

“So,” said Jonathan, once the first glass of champagne had been poured and initial toasts made between them. “Clintonian.” He was making a valiant effort to keep the conversation going, despite his discomfort.

“That's the only way I can describe it,” said Peter. “He's this big guy who commands the room. He's razor sharp and totally seductive, and there's this need, this urgency, in back of all that skill and intelligence, to be believed, to be liked.”

“Huh.”

“It was so weird to find someone not evil, whose views you believe to be, in fact, evil.”

“I'll bet.”

“And like I say, we didn't talk politics at all, practically.”

“No home schooling? No Texas seceding from the Union?”

“It was as if he'd decided to steer clear of all that.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“And what we did talk about—you know, the nature of credulity and mass-media messaging—it was as if he'd cooked up those bullet points just to engage me, ya know?”

“To fool you or something?”

“No—I think he believes it.” Peter took a sip of Pellegrino. “No, it was more to snow me, or seduce me into working with him.”

“Really?”

“I definitely felt my buttons being pushed, in a nice way.”

“He knew that much about you?”

“I'm sure his guy Sunil did a file on me, just like I asked Tyler to do one on him.”