Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style

by Paul Rudnick

Genres: Literary Fiction; LGBT Gay; Humorous Fiction

Synopsis

“A case study in elegant, honest tragicomedy…by the genuinely hilarious Paul Rudnick” (Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author) that follows the decades-long, rule-breaking romance between the son of one of America’s wealthiest families and a middle-class aspiring author.

Devastatingly handsome and insanely rich, Farrell Covington is capable of anything and impossible to resist. He’s a clear-eyed romantic, an aesthete but not a snob, self-indulgent yet wildly generous. As the son of one of the country’s most powerful and deeply conservative families, the world could be his. But when he falls for Nate Reminger, an aspiring writer from a nice Jewish family in Piscataway, New Jersey, the results are passionate and catastrophic.

Together, the two embark on a unique romance that spans half a century. They are inseparable—except for the many years when they are apart. Moving from the ivy-covered bastion of Yale to New York City, Los Angeles, and eventually all over the world, Farrell and Nate experience the tremendous upheaval and social change of the last fifty years. From the freedom of gay life in 1970s Manhattan to the Hollywood closet, the AIDS epidemic, and the profound strides of the LGBTQ+ movement, this witty and moving novel shows how the world changes around us while we’re busy doing other things.

Written with “engaging wit, side-eyed perceptiveness, and barbed elan” (Michael Chabon), this modern classic proves that style has its limits, love does not.

Release date: June 6, 2023

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

Chapter 1

1
When I arrived at Yale, I had no idea who Farrell Covington was. In 1973, as a middle-class kid from the New Jersey suburbs, I had no idea who anyone was.

As the child of an office manager mom and a physicist dad, I’d been encouraged to apply to Ivy League schools but with Jewish fears attached. I should strive to succeed but expect obstacles. As a gay kid, my image of Yale was based on Cole Porter songs, satiric novels with upper-crust characters named Tad and Muffie, and photos of any university, from Oxford to Harvard, with stalwart brick buildings surrounding leafy, sun-dappled courtyards strolled by students wearing button-downs with Shetland sweaters knotted around their hips, along with news footage of fist-pumping, shaggy-haired undergraduates of the sixties staging die-ins atop the steps of the law schools they were attending.

I was installed in a dormitory suite shared by Breen, a tall, scowling über-Republican who’d already draped an American flag outside our window, and Walt, an affable and outgoing guy from Connecticut who, while sheepishly enjoying golf, also played bass in a band called the Wild Stockbrokers. I’d never lived with anyone but my family, and I was dimly aware of my freakishness, from wearing thrift store gabardine shirts to sporting the blow-dried, feathered mall hair of my Jersey heritage.

My exposure to gay life consisted of the following artifacts: best-selling Gordon Merrick paperback novels, where dashing, strong-bodied men, often surgeons and senators, would rut lustily with each other in penthouses on champagne-colored silk sheets; After Dark magazine, which, while not officially gay (so it could be sold on newsstands), detailed every aspect of show business with an eye to placing seminude male ballet and Broadway dancers on the cover, shielding their crotches with, say, a straw boater or a violin; and porn magazines called Inches or Blueboy or David’s Thing, which I’d buy at fluorescent-lit Times Square smut shops and tuck into the lining of my fake-fur parka for the train ride back to Piscataway, a town named for the Piscataqua River in New Hampshire. Not making sense doesn’t bother anyone in New Jersey.

I never felt guilty about my reading habits. I adored these varied publications and took them as proof that glamorous, sexual gay lives existed. Gorgeously lit black-and-white photography, along with stapled pages of raunchier, hard-core doggy-style couplings, were delicious promises.

I was a virgin in so many ways, innocent of physical sex (except for constant masturbation), Brooks Brothers madras patchwork blazers, natural blonds, and, especially, the seriously wealthy. The richest person in Piscataway was a contractor and low-level mobster who’d built his own stucco-drenched, faux Mediterranean compound with an in-ground pool and a three-car garage to hold the van enameled with flames, the Chevy station wagon, and a few mammoth Harley-Davidsons. In New Jersey, money meant not taste but more stuff. For my family, money was something to be strenuously fretted over, encompassing mortgages, used cars, and two August weeks at a beach house far from an actual beach; none of this could be debated in front of me and my older brother. I was the recipient of student loans, which I had no real grasp of. I knew we weren’t rich, but I’d never lacked for anything except a Barbie doll, which a well-timed tantrum eventually achieved.

Glossing over things, and hurriedly ending adult conversations when a child wandered in, was my family’s rule for anything monetary, sexual, or grim (for example, illnesses and deaths). This agonizing politeness and denial could be suffocating, but weirdly helpful for a gay teenager: no one was asking me any squirm-inducing questions.

Knowing no one, I spent my first weeks at Yale investigating the campus, walking everywhere and wondering if I’d ever make any friends. I had vague theatrical ambitions, as an actor or playwright or simply someone who’d call other people “darling,” so I pushed myself to attend a freshman orientation at the Yale Dramat, the largest and most well-funded drama club, which availed itself of a gloomy but full-sized theater ordinarily the province of the illustrious graduate drama school. (Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver were enrolled at the time, and yes, just from watching them in misbegotten Chekhov and midnight cabarets, everyone predicted where they were headed. People who’d never met them, and never would, were already referring to these performers as “Meryl” and “Siggy.”)

As I perched on the arm of a battered leather greenroom couch, two seniors introduced thirty assembled wannabes to the joys of painting scenery, taking box office ticket requests, hand-laundering costumes, and other forms of grunt work. “We have a proud history here at the Dramat,” chirped the female senior, a perky administrative type in a Fair Isle cardigan, kilt, and knee socks. “And we also have a heckuva lot of fun,” added her more bohemian male counterpart, wearing white Levi’s and a stretched-out black cotton turtleneck, aiming for James Dean in moody rehearsal wear and landing as a preppie who dared to smoke pot in his parents’ finished basement.

“Oh my,” said a voice that had the oddest and most elegant calibration of Midwestern graciousness and crisp New England diction. It was a voice that could only be classified as mid-Atlantic, that invented MGM mode of sounding unplaceably fancy, as if the person was forever flinging open the double doors to a well-appointed drawing room. The voice was maddeningly but somehow naturally affected, as if the person had been raised by a bottle of good whiskey and a crystal chandelier.

“Look at all of you,” the voice continued, and the crowd swiveled to see someone vanish from the greenroom doorway, a WASPy blur in khakis, a navy blazer, something hot pink, and something Kelly green, like a well-bred magic trick.

A week later I was splayed across an armchair at the cross-campus library, pretending to read Aeschylus, when the same person materialized from the stacks, like a ghost in a cornfield, coming off as disoriented yet regal, a pedigreed hound sniffing the breeze for a hint of fox or hare. He stared at me and flung himself onto an adjoining armchair.

“You must save me,” he said, in a lower, raspy octave of his impeccably modulated voice.

“From what?”

“From myself, of course.”

For the first time in my life, I felt like I might have a life. No one in Piscataway talked like this. Or took my hand like this. Or lowered his chin like this and gazed directly into my eyes.

“I saw you,” he said, “at that theatrical organization, at whatever that was. I was intrigued yet afraid, of all that yearning for aesthetic grandeur and all that bad skin.”

“Who are you?”

“Farrell Covington. And I may very well be in love with you. Madly in love. Hopelessly in love. Whom would you like me to kill?”

I didn’t know how to take any of this: Was he joking? Was he mocking me, or fabricating a conversation because someone else was following him? His gaze held and he seemed sincere or deranged or both, all of which struck me as seriously sexy. Although at a virginal eighteen, the touch of anyone not related to me could become instantly arousing.

“We need to have sex,” he said.

Oh my God. Was I hallucinating, from loneliness and porn and those soft-core paperback romances, had I manifested this guy from so many nights of jerking off into an old pair of Jockey shorts, which had become my encrusted teenage equivalent of a toddler’s beloved blankie?

I called upon whatever courage I could fake and looked back at him. Looking Farrell in the eye became my first adult act, as if I was leaping the threshold from cosseted Jersey safety into adult desire. Farrell was ridiculously stunning; he was the male model whose photo comes with the sterling silver frame. He was a golden age movie idol who’d never made a film, an Arrow shirt collar ad come heartbreakingly to life.

He was too much, a luxurious prototype never meant to be manufactured, only dreamt of by collectors. His lush, dewy handsomeness disconcerted everyone, even himself. I’ve since noticed this effect in the truly beautiful, in men and women distressed by their own good luck, as if, through no fault of their own, they’d inherited billions and aren’t sure how to spend it.

To be more specific: Farrell wasn’t simply my cultural opposite, a blinding sun god to counter my pale, Jewish, brown-haired, generous-nosed eagerness. He was a genetic accident, a green-eyed, six-foot-three-inch, broad-shouldered gift, and yes, there were dimples when he smiled, something that, I later discovered, was an effective means of dealing with law enforcement. He didn’t own that blank, lacrosse-ready dopiness of a New England jock; he was something more sensual, alert, and generous. He was a dangerously friendly oil portrait of some blond Venetian prince, the picture everyone at the museum wants to date, or at least buy a postcard of.

“I must go,” he said, withdrawing his hand, as if it were dawn and we’d already had sex multiple times and his wife and children were waiting at their restored colonial in Greenwich.

He stood and left without another word, with the quick, shambling stride of someone still navigating a fabulous growth spurt. As I watched him go I registered his white polo shirt, with the collar carelessly and unevenly raised (a gesture that had undoubtedly taken many generations of Covingtons to perfect), his rumpled cream-colored cotton pants with rolled-up cuffs, and his exquisitely thin, perfectly battered, sockless, ivory-toned kidskin loafers, the sort called driving shoes, with pebbled soles—these are shoes for people who don’t partake of any blue-collar walking, shoes for people with a shoe wardrobe, and shoes for people who break their shoes in privately, to deflect being caught wearing anything crudely brand-new. These were, in short, the shoes of the rich and the damned. Just from Farrell stalking away I was absorbing so much, including the fact that at any given moment in history, and excluding nurses and brides, there are only at most three people on the planet who can get away with wearing all white, and Farrell was at least two of them.

I didn’t see him again until a month later when he pounded on the door of my suite at 2 a.m., waking everyone—the suite had two tiny bedrooms, and I’d moved my narrow metal bed into a corner of the communal sitting room rather than bunk with Breen. He and I were cordial but wary, and Walt had told me Breen was pretty sure I was at least a socialist, because I read People magazine.

I opened the front door and Farrell plummeted in. He might’ve been drunk, but as in our earlier encounters, Farrell was always wrestling with unseen forces, or maybe dancing with them. He stretched full out on my disheveled bed and freshman-fragrant sheets.

“I’m trying to get some shut-eye,” said Breen, at his doorway in a junior version of his dad’s freshly laundered and starched Christmas morning tartan pajamas.

“Everything okay?” asked Walt, bleary-eyed at his own door, in a limp prep school T-shirt and boxers.

“Are these your male lovers?” Farrell demanded, as I stood in between everyone, in my Piscataway High black-and-gold T-shirt and matching gym shorts; I hadn’t yet caught on to how such garments could be fetishized by gay men in their thirties, who often dress as their favorite porn archetypes. As a rule, the boys who despised gym class and intramural soccer will later prize and pay dearly for athletic wear, as if it was a more rugged, locker room–seduction Chanel.

“What did he just say? Are we your lovers?” asked Breen, offended by Farrell’s question on so many Christian levels.

“Guys? What’s going on?” asked a fellow freshman who lived across the hall, clustered with his own two roommates, all in the sagging terry-cloth, acne medication–stained bathrobes their parents had supplied. For many guys, freshman year is the last time they’ll ever wear a bathrobe, or underwear, or anything their mom sewed a name tag into.

“Is this a forbidden homosexual orgy in progress?” Farrell wondered. “Was there a sign-up sheet?”

“Everyone, it’s okay, go back to bed,” I said, and then, hearing my mom’s good manners in my head, “this is Farrell, he’s a friend, sort of.”

“Farrell Covington?” asked Breen, wide awake and galvanized. “Of the Wichita Covingtons and Covington Industries?”

“You may fondle me, gently,” Farrell told Breen, extending his arm, highlighting his undoubtedly real, substantial gold ring set with a chunky, elevator button–sized emerald. As Breen wavered between shaking or kissing Farrell’s hand, he held back, asking me, “How do you know him?”

“We’re about to sodomize one another,” Farrell confided, to the room. “Does anyone have a manual, or perhaps a brief educational film, with puppets, to help us go about this?”

The assembled straight boys had no idea how to respond, until Walt smiled and said, “Do you have a napkin and a crayon?”

This earned Farrell’s grin. He loved it when someone returned a volley. He stood and told me, “Get dressed. I’ve spent the past month summoning my courage, so we musn’t falter.”

I pulled on my jeans and a sweater, and soon we were hiking across campus. It wasn’t easy keeping up with the long-legged, determined Farrell.

“Are you drunk?” I asked.

“Never. But everyone in my family, going back eighteen generations, has consumed so much gin that I was most likely born pickled; my mother’s amniotic fluid was floating with an olive and a silver Cartier toothpick. So I may very well suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome, or to use the proper Latin terminology, inherited wealth.”

We left the campus, halting at a pale yellow brick townhouse in the wide-avenued, fussily landscaped neighborhood reserved for tenured faculty—had Farrell borrowed a room in a professor’s home? Were we shattering undergraduate bylaws? Were we really about to have sex, or was this all some elaborate prank or fraternity hazing—would I be spotted hours later, shivering naked and duct-taped at a downtown public park? I was torn between anxiety and adventure. Had my grandparents trekked through Poland and crossed the Atlantic in steerage so I could be degraded by some Mayflower pretty boy?

I’d always had a bubbling imagination, concocting the most extreme and malevolent scenarios in milliseconds. In my brain, I was forever being cornered at gunpoint, shoved flailing out skyscraper windows, and hounded into explaining the meaning of Chanukah onstage in a junior high school auditorium to three hundred gentile cub scouts (this last nightmare had come true).

But I was young, and I’d read somewhere that if anything scares you, the optimum solution is to tackle it head-on and grow stronger from the experience.

The townhouse’s carved oak door was opened by a youngish man in a dove-gray three-piece suit and white cotton gloves.

“Mr. Covington,” he said, in a decent English accent. He was, I came to know, a third-year acting student in the drama school, making ends meet and building a nest egg before hitting the audition circuit in New York.

“Bates,” said Farrell, nodding solemnly. Farrell’s essential morality was becoming evident. He later told me, “Respect all staff members. They’re usually the only halfway decent human beings in the house.”

The townhouse was surprisingly airy, with limewashed antique Swedish furniture and a gallery’s worth of modern art, including a wall-sized Hockney of a trim young guy diving into a Malibu swimming pool, with a lovingly rendered splash. I froze, because unlike the Chagall prints and Ben Shahn exhibition posters in my family’s tract home, this painting was real and valuable. This was the first time I’d encountered an A-list artwork outside of a museum, and it terrified me, because chances were I’d destroy it. I’d trip and knock the painting off the wall and the canvas would be sliced open by a lamp, or I’d dare myself to touch the painting’s surface with a forefinger and unfixably smear a brushstroke. Rich people, and certainly Farrell, could be comfortable with their vaults of irreplaceable goodies, with their heavily insured versions of teen bedroom pop star pinups; but like Farrell himself, the Hockney made me light-headed and ready to flee. But no, I told myself: Face your fear of luxury investments. You can do this. Bring on the Vermeers.

“Where exactly are we?” I asked.

“My home. Darling, you can’t possibly imagine that I’d live in one of those, what are they called, dormitory cells? Those undergraduate hellholes? With other people, carrying their sad little mesh bags bulging with drugstore grooming products into some hideously mildewed petri dish of a shower?”

“But…”

“Bates?” Farrell called out, and Bates returned with a brass-handled mahogany tray set with a crystal pitcher of orange juice, slim cans of imported sodas, and small, crackled Japanese ceramic bowls of cashews. It was now almost 3 a.m., but no one appeared sleepy. I was wired by the situation so far, I wasn’t sure if Farrell ever slept, and Bates was either incapable of fatigue or a really good actor.

After depositing the tray on a molded bronze coffee table/award-winning sculpture, Bates withdrew and Farrell motioned for me to sit beside him on a modular Italian leather sofa facing a Lichtenstein, a benday-dot comic strip of a heartsick secretary whose thought bubble read, “If I can’t have him, I’ll die! I’ll just die!”

“When I pictured you,” Farrell told me, “trapped in that squalid freshman abattoir, engulfed by those hormonally deformed boys—I thought only of rescue. I couldn’t leave you there.”

Freshmen were required to live in the dorms, to ram them into social collisions with a range of fellow students. Undergrads could only choose their roommates, or move off campus, as sophomores, and this rule was absolute. As Breen had stoically related, “Everyone needs to live with someone they hate.”

“Of course I’ve been assigned to some reeking, fetid attic,” Farrell went on. “But I’ve never been there. And this building is in my father’s name, so even if some, I don’t know, snitty little freshman advisor reports my absence, Yale has no interest in losing the Covington Rare Book Library, the Covington Contemplation Courtyard at the divinity school, or the under-construction Covington Center for the Study of Global Economic Theory, which, according to my father, boils down to ‘tipping 5 percent is far more than enough.’?”

“So you live in this whole house by yourself? With your—staff?”

“Why are you looking at me like that? As if this is any sort of choice? I need cedar closets, a butler’s pantry, and a billiards room. The basics. Believe me, I’m roughing it.”

“You’re roughing it?”

He steeled himself, raised his palms, and with difficulty, admitted, “No gift-wrapping room. None. Unless I convert the solarium.”

On some level Farrell was always kidding, but not deliberately. This was how he talked, in a glittering tumult of satire tinged with social history and cocktail chatter. He relished conversation; he celebrated and savored anointing a shimmeringly pleasing word or phrase, treating the English language as a treasure trove to be plundered. Or more plainly: he loved to talk, and made sure he was good at it. Talking, he’d later inform me, “isn’t just my career—I’ve been called to it. The Lord spoke unto me, and I interrupted Him.”

I was undone, by the house, the presence of Bates, and Farrell’s swirling attention. To anchor myself, I asked, “What are we doing here?”

“Eek. No. I can’t. I’m… all right. Don’t you understand? All of this, my home, my chitchat, the artful swoop of my hair—it’s all subterfuge. Avoidance. An immaculate cover for blind, shrieking alarm. Have you ever had sexual intercourse?”

“You mean, am I a virgin?”

I deliberated, should I do what most virgins do and mumble, “Define sex” or “Not totally” or “That’s really personal,” which are synonyms for “Of course I’m a virgin. Look at me.” But Farrell, for all his expensive exuberance, was being direct, or as direct as he was capable of being. And I didn’t want to continue being a virgin. And my brain was pounding, “Now. Now. NOW.”

“Yes. I’m a virgin. But not by choice.”

“Exactly. Me too. Which is ideal, because we’ll have no basis for hurtful comparisons. We won’t be thinking, well, he’s not Sam or Roger or the Carlsberry twins. Good. Yes. So—how shall we do this?”

“Is there a bedroom?”

“There are five.”

“Your bedroom?”

“Yes. Of course. Spot-on. But first—just one thing. Because I want to get this right. Shall we kiss?”

“Yes.”

Farrell was flustered, which lent me an unexpected confidence, as if we were collaborating on a science project. As if I had input.

I’d never kissed anyone romantically. I’d nurtured the standard crushes, on clueless swimmers and hunky young English teachers with acoustic guitars and rolled-up sleeves (to show off their nicely muscled forearms), and a tattooed, rawboned ex–heroin addict who’d lectured a bored high school assembly on getting clean, while I fixated on the sinewy thighs barely constrained by his upright-citizen beige polyester pants. I was so young that I didn’t have a type, not yet. That’s the real gift of being young: You have no taste. You’re indiscriminately horny. You want to fuck everything.

But I’d never kissed anybody, not out of timidity, but from a sheer lack of prospects. I’d had no interest in dating, let alone kissing, even the most appealing, most willing, and most understanding girls. This would have been not just deceptive but exhausting. But try as I might, I couldn’t locate any other gay people (this was long before hookup apps or even single earrings on men). Years later, via Facebook, I unearthed similarly disgruntled gay classmates, some now married to each other, but in high school we were isolated and unaware of secluded corners of public parks or tribal original cast albums. We were New Jersey teenagers before the advent of volcanically publicized gay everything. We were huddled in our bedrooms, in the murk, before the invention of gay electricity. It hadn’t been agonizing, just frustrating, puzzling, and lonely, which are common symptoms of teenagehood.

So I’d gone unkissed. Until now. And this heartbeat of hesitation, of preamble, was delectably maddening. Farrell and I were preparing to kiss, moistening our mouths, but it hadn’t quite happened. We stood hunched on our starting blocks, goggles and swim caps in place, ready to race.

As Farrell moved toward me, his face blurred, in the most wonderful way, as if pre-kissing was warping our senses. He put his arm around me. He smelled so great, from either soap hand-milled by nuns in a Florentine abbey, or one of those light, dry, fresh-washed-linen colognes, or more likely, just from being Farrell Covington.

He smelled like beauty and money and youth; he was every high-end marketing goal in one, but beyond that, he smelled like someone I really wanted to kiss.

Then Farrell did something heart-stoppingly clunky. He shut his eyes and puckered his lips, in the modest manner of a pinafored, sausage-curled girl on a vintage “Be Mine” valentine. I thought about pursing my lips and having them brush against his, so we’d be like two of those tiny plastic Scottie dogs you can buy from boardwalk vending machines, who rush toward each other, due to magnets encased in their doggie snouts.

Farrell opened his eyes, conscious of a roadblock. He smiled and put his hand on my neck and we both stopped thinking so much and we kissed. Our lips met, which was really nice, and then they opened, which was even nicer. As our tongues collided I thought, I’m kissing someone, I’m joining an ancient, ongoing, boundless yet still exclusive club, of people who kiss. I’m no longer a kissing virgin. And best of all, I’m kissing Farrell Covington, who, for some reason, even in my thoughts, I referred to by both names, maybe to antagonize Breen. I was figuring out that sex includes both the physical event and the story you’re telling yourself; kissing Farrell wasn’t only mindless euphoria, but added a potential love interest and a plot twist to the page-turning yet critically acclaimed novel I desperately needed my life to become. My brain didn’t die when my hard-on ached. They worked together.

Farrell pulled away and we considered each other, as if we were strangers accidentally entwined on a swaying subway, and then we lunged back into kissing, because now we were experts. The heat rose from Farrell’s body, and as I unbuttoned his white oxford-cloth shirt he said, “Upstairs.” Passing a hall mirror, he grabbed me for another kiss, so we could witness ourselves kissing. This turned me on even more, because I was costarring in a movie about two guys kissing on a townhouse landing, but Farrell had already taken my hand and was yanking me up to his bedroom, which occupied the entire third floor.