He liked to admire Lillian as anobjet d’artand watch other men desire her in public, and she didn’t bother him much. He couldn’t relate when his adulterous and workaholic friends complained about their shouting, shoe-throwing wives. His was controlling but almost terminally easygoing. Her heart rate never seemed to go up.
Whatever this aspect of her was, it was also what made her some sort of sociopath. The idea of misplacing millions of someone else’s cash, for instance, didn’t faze her at all. When deals got nasty, Carver leaned on her with impunity. She could handle anyone, even Russians.
So he married her and secretly fucked guys. He suspected she knew this about him. She didn’t seem to care. Carver figured she wouldn’t have been able to deal with a husband who didn’t have something wrong with him, who didn’t scurry around with men then come home still flustered with need because it was never enough. Lillian needed someone she could put her thumb on. He was fine being that guy.
They even planned to have kids in a few years — they had frozen a bunch of embryos. Carver just wasn’t sure either of them actually wanted kids. They were into the second half of their thirties, and Lillian kept saying, “We’ll get to it.” She sounded as calm then as she did when steering their sailboat. But she had also once steered them into an algae bloom and stalled the outboard motor. We’ll get to it!
Carver suspected she didn’t like sex that much. There was something cold and metallic about her which seemed to prevent this. She was sweet, though. She knew what she wassupposedto think and feel, and she did a good job pretending most of the time. Carver suspected that she had her own extracurricular activities designed to satisfy her actual desires: watching through a two-way mirror as a guy in a gimp suit got whipped, or something. So they only had sex a few times a year. These days it was fun mostly for the novelty.
Part of the stain on Carver’s sexuality was the fact that he had bottomed for Scott. It didn’t matter how many subsequent guys he himself topped, or even bottomed for, because his first sexual experience would always be Scott introducing him to the delirious joys of his prostate.
Late one night in Carver’s bedroom, when his parents and sister were out of town for a volleyball tournament, Scott had found it inside him and rubbed it first with his fingers and then with his dick. And Carver had moaned and then screamed through the empty house. He couldn’t deny having screamed. A sparkling white ocean wave had crashed over him and carried him off in its foam. The deepest muscles in his pelvis were throbbing with recognition, relief and joy.
They did this just a few weeks before Scott told him about California. They only did it that once before they parted ways on bad terms.
Carver had never really gotten over this. It was one of the most important sensations he’d ever experienced, and he would never feel it again. He could only fantasize about the memory, by now a copy of a copy of a copy. Other guys just didn’t feel the same way inside him.
During the act, Scott had kissed him in a bitey teenage way, like he couldn’t imagine ever needing anything else as badly as he needed Carver. No one kissed like a teenager anymore. Even the teenagers weren’t teenagers anymore; between social media and everything else it felt like something in the world had died.
In Bitterfeld, Carver had been briefly alive. He was terrified to go back. Not only because of Scott but because he didn’t like seeing his parents. He loved them, but he liked them best over the phone.
He’d turned out to be the most successful of all of his siblings, and no one expected him to. He grew up as the black sheep for no real reason, despite sharing his parents’ values and drive for success. They all wanted the same thing as a family, yet a pall fell when Carver reminded them of this. Something set him apart from them — something so massive he felt it couldn’t possibly just be that he fucked men. There had to be something else wrong with him just to account for the sheer weight oftheir confusion. His parents were both lawyers, and they looked at him like he was the other side’s last-minute exculpatory evidence.
Rather, they had done so for most of his life. They looked at him differently now that he was successful. Now they were more proud of him than his siblings and so the inexplicable friction between them had eased. When he hadn’t seen them in person for a while, Carver started to wonder if he imagined the friction to begin with, but then he’d come home for a holiday and in a moment of stress it would flare up like eczema.
His older brother was called Chip, because they were country club whites (his real name was Preston) and all the big hopes were originally pinned on him. His sister, Conway, got lesser female hopes pinned on her and had largely evaded them. Carver thought sometimes that he was the oddball because his parents had planned on one boy and one girl, a fact they were open about, and he had stepped into existence between them and Conway — abrupting their ideal family.
Chip had the sports career his parents wanted, in both high school and college, but never quite matched Carver for brains and drive. Chip wasn’t as smart as he was cocky, with vices like girls and booze. He made it through law school but got mediocre grades and had failed the bar five times. Their dad had to secure him a pity job at a friend’s firm. He had two kids and a rocky marriage. Carver vibrated with perverse satisfaction when he heard about Chip’s setbacks while on the phone with his parents or Conway. “That’s a tough break,” he would say, forcing himself not to grin.
He did love Chip, and he wanted him to have a nice life. But first he wanted life to break Chip down until he felt bad enough about himself to understand what Carver had gone through all those years, and finally sympathize.
So it was not just Scott at issue. Even seeing Letty was an issue — she was a lesbian, and this was a gay marriage, and Carver didn’t need the reminder.
They went, of course. Lillian insisted, and no force in heaven was strong enough to untie his tongue so he could honestly explain to her why he didn’t want to. She got a kick out of Carver’s family, and they liked her back, because she was like an atavistic throwback to the aristocrats they admired.
Carver found he often gave in to the demands of his life almost without realizing. He was strong-willed but ultimatelysubmissive, he’d been told. He knew it was true, which was why he hated being told about it. It was embarrassing enough to be this person at all. It was downright untoward that other people could also see the way he longed to surrender himself.
Lillian let him drive them out of the city on Thursday night after work so she could use her laptop and phone for the hour-long drive, wrapping up final pieces of business so they could drink in peace all weekend. They took the Maybach, which had an absurdly roomy and white cabin that made him feel like they were a pair of far-future astronauts.
Carver kept glancing in the city in his rearview mirror until it disappeared over the horizon. There was a comet passing by this week which would, thanks to a lucky confluence of celestial factors, be very visible from Lower Manhattan on Saturday night. Their friends loved an excuse to host or attend watch parties, and they sounded surprised that Carver and Lillian would miss drunken rooftop comet-watching for a hometown wedding. “Just send them a nice gift,” multiple people said. “They’ll forget you weren’t there.”
“I got you some Xanax,” Lillian said as they sailed down 95.
“You did?” Carver said, barely paying attention, watching the dark road. “But I’m out of refills. You meanyougot Xanax?”
“No,” Lillian said, sounding equally distracted as she reviewed a 10-K. “I called Dr. Rick and lied to him that you had air travel coming up and needed more but kept forgetting to call. He called in more for you.”
“That’s so unethical.”
“Yeah, he’s a terrible doctor. That’s why he’s on the payroll, baby.” Lillian extended a manicured hand. “Here.”
Carver stretched his palm out across the creamy expanse of the front seat. Lillian dropped a pill bottle into it. He tucked this into the jacket pocket of his suit and said “Thanks, honey,” not bothering to pretend he didn’t want it.
“I know you get antsy being around your parents,” she said. “Honestly, I think you just take them too seriously. They’re desperate strivers, but they’re alright people. They just worry about you making your way in the world, and it comes out as all this pressured and compulsive stuff.”
“But why do they worry about that? That’s kind of the point.”
“I don’t know,” Lillian said, licking her finger so she could turn a page in the 10-K. “Because you aren’t blonde? It doesn’t matter when you know you’re a success, Carver. You really aresosmart. You know I don’t lie.” This was true.
