List of All Possible Desires: A Novel in Stories

Book 0: The Rainey Royal Cycle

by Dylan Landis

Genres: General Fiction; City Life; Coming of Age; Family Life

Synopsis

A dazzling novel in stories following Rainey Royal—a young artist coming of age through the tumult of New York City in the ’70s and ’80s—and her family across generations of obsession, betrayal, and reinvention, written with the trademark beauty and precision of Dylan Landis. For fans of Mary Gaitskill and Lauren Groff.

In postwar Paris, over the course of one fateful day, a boy’s crush on his nanny ignites into a destructive passion that burns into his memory and reveals to him the disquieting world of adult secrets. In 1950s New York City, a naïve caretaker struggles to protect her charge, a married woman paralyzed by her recent stroke, as new bruises appear each day on her body. In the 1970s, a fragile cousin wanders into the Royal family’s chaotic jazz-filled townhouse, where music, sex, and ruin intertwine. And at the heart of these stories is Rainey Royal herself, coming of age in Greenwich Village, inventing herself as an artist through the tumult of the ’70s and ’80s.

By turns shocking, erotic, and deeply humane, List of All Possible Desires is a haunting portrait of family and history. It is joined by the expanded re-issues of the novel Rainey Royal and the novel in stories Normal People Don’t Live Like This to create the Rainey Royal Cycle. Each book stands on its own, yet together they echo and amplify each other, creating a world of almost unbearable richness and intensity.

Release date: May 5, 2026

Publisher: Soho Press

Print pages: 304

Sample

La Nounou
1947

Howard Royal, eleven and two months, sat on his parents’ bed and watched his nounou at his mother’s dressing table draw a ruby lipstick over her opulent lower lip. His own mouth hung open, a chalice of joy and shock. A Saturday in July: His mother was out browsing the Champs-Élysées.

It was not just the appropriation of his mother’s prized makeup that had Howard in thrall but the willowy spine of his babysitter, the low opening of the silk butterfly-print robe she had so easily assumed from his mother’s bedpost, the tumble of her gingery ringlets. His mother was ecstatic to have found a nounou in Paris whom her son seemed to like, who did not steal, or arrive late, who was satisfied with her modest wages and also with, his mother said affectionately, her difficult charge.

Howard didn’t see what made him difficult. He was just a boy bored to death on summer break, except in the late afternoons when he got to play the downstairs neighbor’s upright piano, which wasn’t the same as the grand piano at home in New York but was better than no piano at all. His nounou took his boredom as a challenge. Odile Odile Odile. Her name ran through his brain as he watched her lining those unblinking doll-like eyes with a pencil in the vanity mirror.

Odile swiveled on the velvet stool. Lavishly wrapped in the robe, she planted her knees apart. It gave her an alarming authority. She had just finished her lycée, so Howard guessed she might be eighteen, grown enough to tell him what to do. Her skin was bright, her eyes had the clarity of penlights, and she had the strangest notions about how to spend their days. She took bubble baths in his parents’ tub after his father had gone to the cafés and his mother left on her daylong excursions. Often she kept the door open, invited him in to talk.

“’Oward,” she said, “we are going to have a delicious afternoon.” She held in her palm a crystal bottle of his mother’s perfume, Réplique.

He sat frozen on the bed. Sometimes she made him lie down on it. He didn’t always want to. This was not what people did. Would this afternoon involve the removal of the robe? He prayed that it would; he prayed it would not. The robe looked very different on his mother, who pulled the lapels close to her neck. He was supposed to speak French to Odile, though she always answered in her perfect lycée English. His parents and he had moved to France for a year so his father could make a name here in jazz, which was having a renaissance in the cabarets and nightclubs. A houseboy was taking care of the townhouse on West Tenth Street. Howard struggled a moment with the future tense, then said, “Que ferons-nous?” as he had learned in the American school. What will we do?

Odile pulled the lapels of the robe even further apart, tipped the perfume bottle and righted it, plucked the wet stopper, and touched it to the furrow between her bosoms. Her black brassiere served as a shelf for two astonishing globes. “Une balconette,” she said mysteriously, seeing him try not to stare, as if answering a question he had not asked. She dabbed again. A little balcony? What was that? He had often seen her raid his mother’s chest of drawers; to whom did this brassiere belong? Hopefully not to his mother, whose own balcony mysteriously protruded and was always well covered. Whereas Odile’s bosom seemed the more magnificent for being only partially concealed.

Howard was too young to stay home alone, especially in a strange country: That was what his mother said, though his father believed he could handle himself just fine, radio being good amusement whatever language it spoke. Howard might learn some French from it, he said. But Lala had won out over Buddy, a jazz trombonist who left around noon each day to drink in cafés with his fellow musicians till it was time to rehearse and then play in the clubs after dark, which was how Howard had ended up with la nounou. He had a vague idea that next fall he’d confide in a boy from school he thought he trusted, or perhaps the idea was to brag—there might not be much difference.

Odile rose from the dressing table. She sank a front tooth thoughtfully into her scarlet lower lip. “’Oward, do you love me?”

A dab of scarlet had imprinted on the tooth. Did he love her? He feared and adored her. But this was not a thing he could begin to explain. He looked at the floor. “Kind of,” he said. What was that in French? Comme ci, comme ça?

“Bon.” Soberly, she kissed her index fingertip and pressed it to his mouth, a gesture that seemed designed to seal his silence. Then she stepped out of his mother’s robe and hung it back on the bedpost. He could not look directly at her, lest it blind him, yet he saw that her garters dangled, bereft of nylons, and her skin was the glass of milk he drank that morning, the curves of her hips the mountain-pass switchbacks his father had driven with them in the Alps, the Fiat Topolino adhering tight to the camber of the road.

“Allons-y,” she said. “I am taking you someplace from un cauchemar. A bad dream. Go! Get ready.”

Fantastic, Howard thought in his bedroom, yanking up his knee-high socks, lacing his shoes. A place from a nightmare—surely not another cemetery? They’d twice been to Père-Lachaise, but that was hardly the gates of hell. His favorite grave had a little piano on it, and the creepiest one had a bronze man holding up the head of his dead wife. Well, it was a mask, actually, Odile had said, but it looked like her actual head. Howard was not a believer, though the American school had chapel twice a week. His parents were dissolute, as his father, Buddy, had said, laughing.

He presented himself in the foyer for inspection and Odile checked behind his ears, making a scoff of displeasure but saying nothing. She had zipped herself into a full-skirted, black-and-white-checked sundress, not unlike the dresses his mother brought home but copied in a watered-down way, the skirt less extravagant, cotton with a petticoat instead of taffeta. A run in her nylons had been stopped with soap. Her shoes were pink and white with a curvy heel, and on second look Howard recognized them from his mother’s closet. She took his hand and did a twirl, and he wondered if in some way he did not entirely understand la nounou might be his sweetheart.

With the money that Lala Royal left for them each week, they took the Métro to the Pont de l’Alma. He knew that all through France people scrimped by on ration cards, but Lala had money from the States—Howard’s grandfather produced a top children’s-shoe brand called Kiddo Kicks. Howard wore Kiddo Kicks. He liked them fine. A lot of his grandfather’s money flowed down through Lala and put cake on the table, as she liked to say, and let Buddy live his life in the arts, as he liked to say. Howard’s mother bought delicacies on the black market, much to Cook’s delight, but unless his parents were arguing about it Howard never paid much attention to money. The only thing he had asked for in France was piano lessons, and his mother had immediately found him a respected professeur de piano.

They got out of the Métro on the Right Bank, and as they crossed the Seine on foot, Odile pointed out four massive military statues on the stone piers under the bridge. “That one,” she said, lifting her chin, “is the Zouave. When the river comes to his ankles, everyone knows it is not safe to walk on the path. If it comes to his”—she patted the top of her thigh—“even the boats don’t go.” They walked a block on the quai Branly, under canopied trees with benches beneath. He could still glimpse the Eiffel Tower behind them. Odile glanced at a notepaper from her purse, turned a corner, and led him into a small street-front office. A long crack in the window was held fast with brown tape; brass bells jangled as they opened the door.

Two American soldiers leaned against one wall, smoking filterless cigarettes. A bald man with gold-rimmed glasses sat behind a scarred oak desk. Howard could not believe his luck when he read the sign; Odile had taken him to another walking tour, all right, but not of any dumb bridge, not of a cemetery again. “Deux billets?” the man asked, and swept Odile’s notes and coins into a cashbox. Then the brass bells jangled, and a boy in knickerbockers from Howard’s American school walked in, accompanied by a woman whose hat bore a tilted clutch of violets and whose hands were sheathed in embroidered white gloves. Roger Bullock was two grades ahead, presumably thirteen—a minor god, with neat dark hair except for one unruly hank that fell onto his forehead. Howard knew Roger only by sight from assemblies and chapel, and standing next to him in his short pants, Howard felt absurdly young, and small. The older boy was taller than his mother—he’d clearly had his growth spurt—and his topaz gaze ranged, with oblivion, over Howard’s head, as he studied everyone else in the room. Finally, Roger deigned to notice him, and curtly nodded. Howard took this as permission to mutely wave.

A man in coveralls and rubber boots clomped in from a door behind the desk, his face long and shining, his mustache celebratory, upturned. He looked around. “Français? Anglais? English?” English, the soldiers said, and no one objected. “My name is Monsieur Aubert. I am an engineer in the sanitation system. Follow me, please. You will need vêtements de protection.”

Howard experienced a floating bliss. They were going to walk underground through the sewers of Paris and get spattered with shit. Even better than the Catacombs, where he and Odile had looked at millions of stacked skulls in dark and dripping silence, the bones of dead people mosaicked into radiant designs. He glanced at Roger, whose studious face gave away neither loathing nor excitement. It dawned on Howard that he was witnessing a model of how to be in this world. He must show no enthusiasm, he decided, and stilled his face, though he sensed Odile watching him, smiling and hopeful.

Their little crowd shuffled into a second chamber with faded sage-green walls and two long benches where they could sit and thrust their arms into the oilcloth raincoats that Monsieur Aubert pulled from two lockers.

Odile slipped into hers easily as if it were the latest style from Le Bon Marché. Mrs. Bullock looked down at hers with dismay as if trying to keep it from her skin, then fastened its metal toggles with elegant, persnickety fingers. It hung about her, flapping at her knees, making her look ridiculous. Did she know that her son was a young Apollo, that he would be an object of beauty even in the dankest depths of Paris? Howard enthusiastically jammed his socks into the rubber boots. This, he thought with glee, is going to stink, and the smell is going to stick. This made him think about needing a bath, and about the chance of Odile nipping in to wash his hair, getting herself wet in the process—something that both mortified and excited him, something that would never, ever happen to the older boy.