The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (30 page)

“Hey. Happy holidays.” It’s Farmer John. He’s here with his boyfriend, Jason. The two are wearing colorful, almost matching sweaters and neatly pressed jeans. I hardly ever get to see John in anything other than his barn clothes and muck boots. “I’ve seen the lights on in the mansion,” John says. “I didn’t think you were coming up till New Year’s.”

“We just wanted to leave the city,” I say. “It’s so horrible there right now.”

“Oh, I know,” John says. “Somebody was talking about it all at the Agway.” If they’re talking about Wall Street in the Cobleskill Agway, things must be really bad.

“So are people worried?” I ask.

“About what?” John says.

“You know…jobs, the market…” I nearly say “trade deficit” but even I realize how ludicrous the words sound in Sharon Springs. The closest thing to a trade deficit Sharon Springs has ever seen is when someone opened a rival roadside ice cream in nearby Cherry Valley two summers ago.

Of course these people are celebrating Christmas like they always do. There’s really no measurable difference between this Christmas in Sharon Springs and any other. There’s really no measurable difference between any two given days in Sharon Springs.

But Sharon Springs’ nonchalance stems from more than just being far removed from the epicenter of the financial maelstrom. Ever since Mayberry, we like to think of small towns as separatist utopias. But our small towns are not blissfully ignorant; they’re weary and pragmatic. Sharon Springs, once one of the leading spa destinations in the world, is, frankly,
over it
. It’s been collapsing—quite literally—for years, with nary a rebound. The town that once hosted the Rockefellers and Oscar Wilde was dealt its fatal blow decades ago when the train stopped coming to town and the thruway bypassed it. It had to deal with social, financial, and cultural ruin way back then, without any billion-dollar bailout packages. And after you’ve been essentially dead for fifty years, it takes a lot more than global market collapse to get under your skin. If or when this whole mess is over, life ain’t gonna be much measurably different here in Sharon Springs.

Garth’s mom swings by with a fresh pitcher. She makes them stronger as the night goes on. Everybody knows this. They’ve been coming to this party for years. This village of misfit toys will get drunker and drunker and drunker, until Doug, seated in his fuzzy pajamas, begins the annual reading of “’Twas the night before Christmas.”

And afterward, as they do every year, these two gay innkeepers will kick everyone out into the frigid wind of Christmas Eve, waving as everyone stumbles through the village streets, weaving in sync. God help any pregnant virgins wandering around.

Michelle’s lucky. She only has to walk a few hundred yards to get to her mansion on the hill—where only a few hours from now, she’ll wake with a hangover to host the same exact group of people at her annual Christmas Day brunch, which I’m sort of strangely looking forward to, I realize. Even in my dark, Grinch-like mood, my heart seems to be growing at least a couple of sizes bigger.

Maybe it’s the ritual of it all. Not knowing what will come of my life in the new year, any certitudes—no matter how fleeting or minor—are welcome.

Or maybe it’s just the margaritas.

“Hey, everybody!”
Michelle shouts into the night air as everyone stumbles out of Doug and Garth’s house. We can barely see her slight frame in the distance on the darkened tree-lined sidewalk.
“Don’t forget tomorrow! I’m making PINK STUFF!”

According to the thermometer in the truck, the temperature has dropped even further. Back in the Beekman, while I’m brushing my teeth, I notice that frost completely covers the
inside
of the window panes. After I’ve washed up and decided what would be my warmest sleepwear, I climb into bed where Brent is already lying half asleep. He rolls over, opens his eyes, and laughs. A puff of steam comes out of his mouth.

“You’re not really going to wear that to sleep in,” he says.

“Why not? It’ll keep my nose and ears warm.”

Brent gently traces the eyeholes on my ski mask, and picks his head up to give me a kiss on my barely exposed lips.

“Merry Christmas,” he says to me for the first time this season before closing his eyes.

Chapter Thirty-Three

“Check out this e-mail,” Brent says to me the morning after Christmas. I’m still a little hungover from Doug and Garth’s party two days ago, and Michelle’s follow-up brunch. It seems like the local strategy for dealing with the long, hard winters is to be blacked out for most of it.

I shuffle over to his beanbag, wrapped in the comforter from our bed.

“She’s from the
Times
?” I ask.

“That’s what it says.”

“And she wants to come up here?”

“December thirtieth.”

“That’s the day before the damn party.”

The idea of hosting any guest, let alone a reporter, seems completely unfeasible. We were barely surviving ourselves. All we want to do is open up the Beekman for visitors one last night for the promised New Year’s Eve party, and then pack up to head home. We needed to sit down first thing in the New Year and face the fact that we were income-less. We had some tough decisions to make—not just about the Beekman and our finances, but about ourselves. Us.

“Should we do it?” Brent asks.

“Brent, I can’t,” I say. “We brought ourselves to the brink of insanity this year trying to create bright shiny Beekman World. We lost. I don’t want to do it one last time for old times’ sake.”

“Well, we obviously did a good job if the
New York Times
noticed us,” Brent says.

“
You
did a good job,” I say. “I just complained a lot.”

“And you were very good at that,” Brent confirms. “But this could be a really big opportunity. Our biggest since the
Martha
show.”

“I don’t know, Brent.”

“Look, it was your idea—”

I immediately cut him off. I can’t do this again.

“So help me God, Brent—”

“
No, no,
wait a second,” Brent continues. “It was your idea to find a way to live up here full time. And I tried—
we
tried. We really did. Walking back into this empty house last week felt like the biggest failure of my life. But it wasn’t. My biggest failure was not making you happy.”

“Come on, Brent. Don’t make it such a big deal.”

“No, it is,” he went on. “That night when I broke down in the garden? Do you know why? It was because I wanted to make your New Year’s resolution happen for you. I thought I could do it, and I couldn’t. I never fail. You know that.”

It’s true. Through high school, med school, and business school, Brent has never received a grade lower than 4.0. And he had perfect attendance to boot. “Perfect.” There was that word again.

“It was my fault too,” I say to Brent. “Mostly my fault. I told you what I wanted, you kept trying, but I couldn’t keep up with you. No one can keep up with you. Then somebody went and broke the whole world and there was nothing either of us could do about that.”

“This
Times
piece could be our last chance.”

“I dunno.”

“It’s still your resolution. And it’s still the same year.”

“It’s just that when I said I wanted to live here full time, it was because I wanted to do something
real.
You know?”

“I don’t know what you were doing, but I was doing real work.”

“No, we were creating images—images of the perfect farm, the perfect life, the perfect couple. It wasn’t anything different than I do in advertising…just more of it—and with the added punishment of torn ligaments and sunburn.”

“That’s just how the world works,” Brent says. He’s genuinely confused about what I’m saying.

“No, that’s how Martha World works. I wanted to live in Oprah World. The world where you chase your dreams, strip away all the bad energy, get in touch with your real self, and Live Your Best Life.”

“What if the ‘best you’ is putting a shiny, happy spin on the world.”

“No, that’s the advertising me.”

“
And
when you were doing drag,” he adds. “Back then you pasted sequins on reality so that everyone would want to party with you, to have what you had, to be sparkly.” He paused. “Face it. Making things sparkly and seductive is what you’re good at.”

“But I’m tired of that. That’s work. I just want to dig in the dirt.”

“Look. When William Beekman got tired of being a farmer, do you think that there was some ye olde Oprah telling him to chase his dreams? To ‘be the best Beekman’? No. He was a farmer with eight kids. You can’t feed eight kids on self-help maxims and dreams. Oprah World is just as false and shiny as Martha World.”

He had a point. I could dig in the dirt all the way to China and I still couldn’t save the farm. We have neighbors on both sides of us digging in the dirt eighteen hours a day trying to make a profitable living from their farms. And they aren’t. We were making more money off of our dwindling soap sales than they were off of their hundreds of acres of land. There’s an old local joke around here: What’s the best way to make a million dollars? Invest three million in a farm.

Sadly, I’ve learned that farming is probably the least viable way to save a farm.
Farming!™
, however, just might be our best, last chance. Could I really get it up one more time? Create the sparkliest version of Beekman for our visiting reporter? Could
we
, Brent and I, present the press-worthy version of ourselves as an endearing couple? Having grown apart for the better part of a year now, could we really be able to fake it well enough?

I’m entirely conflicted. And a little dizzy. These three weeks of almost near inactivity have lulled my brain into a slushier mess than goat pee in the snow. Since I walked away from my job I hadn’t had a single marketing twitch, not a single spark of sparkle.

Maybe Brent’s right. If we’re going to save the Beekman, we’re going to have to sell harder and smarter than ever before. It’s obvious that the last thing this 206-year-old farm needed to survive was another farmer—and especially not two gay New York City ones. Maybe what it
did
need was a good PR agent, a decent ad campaign, and more blinding sparkle than a drag queen under a disco ball.

I thought I wanted to leave advertising for life at the Beekman. I didn’t realize advertising was how I could save it and, in turn, possibly save myself.

“Okay,” I tell Brent. “We can invite the reporter.”

“Really?”

I take a deep breath and put on my invisible wig and high heels.

“And let’s not leave a single sequin unpolished.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

“Josh?”

I hadn’t seen the reporter approach. The Albany train station lobby was crowded with people traveling to New York City for New Year’s. The few arrivals from the other direction were easily lost in the crush.

“Hi!” I say beaming. “Welcome!” To help her find me, and to create just the right impression, I’m wearing my best gentleman farmer costume—neatly pressed jeans, stylishly plaid flannel shirt, and shiny Agway barn-mucking boots. It’s my farm drag.

I’d agreed to pick the reporter up at the train station by myself. Brent needed to stay behind to let the musicians set up in the wide center hallway and rehearse for tomorrow’s New Year’s Eve concert. The caterers would also be dropping off their tables, along with other people who would be traipsing in and out of the house to set up folding chairs and decorations.

Having strangers invade the house while entertaining a reporter from the
New York Times
is neither Brent’s nor my ideal scenario, but since it’s unavoidable we decide to play off the chaos with a certain manufactured insouciance, as if hosting formal holiday concerts for seventy-five people was just another simple fact of country living.

On the ride back to the Beekman I regale the reporter with stories of how Brent and I stumbled on the Beekman and how we fell under its spell from the first moment we saw it. I tell stories about its long impressive history—the visits from a young James Fennimore Cooper, the savage Indian attacks, and its years as a safe haven for runaway slaves. By the time we reach the Beekman, I’m worried that perhaps I may have colored the picture too brightly, or as we say in advertising, I’d “failed to manage expectations.”

But as we drive over the hill and the Beekman comes into view, I couldn’t have manufactured a more perfect beauty shot. The gray snow-laden clouds had parted just enough to bathe the mansion in bright late-afternoon winter sunlight. The white clapboards shone even brighter than the snow drifts surrounding the house.

“Wow, this place really is stunning,” the reporter remarks as we pull into the driveway—freshly plowed by Farmer John. We pull up behind the caterer’s van, which is behind a station wagon, which is behind a pickup truck full of folding chairs.

“Who are all these people?” the reporter asks.

“Oh, we’re just having a small get together,” I explain, with just the right soupçon of insouciance. As if cued by a television commercial director, Brent appears on the side porch, also dressed in his best gentleman farmer drag.

“Hi!” he hollers with his broad TV-appearance grin. “Welcome to the Beekman! Sorry about all the ruckus,” he says, gesturing toward the men carrying folding tables and chairs in through the porch’s side door. I can’t believe he just used the word “ruckus.” If he “reckons” something next, I’m going to have to get him to tone it down a little. “We’re having a little New Year’s Eve concert tomorrow. We’d love it if you could stay.”

“I’d love to,” the reporter answers as she pulls her overnight bag from the backseat. “But I have to get back into town to finish another story.”

“That’s a shame,” Brent says. “We were going to open the first bottle of Beekman hard cider at the stroke of midnight.”

Brent’s so
on
that he’s not even shivering while standing in the 5-degree weather wearing just his flannel shirt.