Ways and Means: A Novel

by Daniel Lefferts

Genres: City Life

Synopsis

“Deadly serious in ambition, wildly entertaining in execution, Ways and Means is a remarkably accomplished debut . . . Every line of this gorgeous novel glows with Lefferts’ intelligence and compassion.” ―ANTHONY MARRA, New York Times bestselling author of Mercury Pictures Presents and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
      
“A work of enormous wit, humor, and passion that captures life in turbo capitalist America with compassion and grace.” ―GARY SHTEYNGART, New York Times bestselling author of Our Country Friends
      
“Totally absorbing . . . Lefferts delivers The Great Gatsby for the 21st-century: irreverent, sexy, and sharp. A major event.” ―JESSI JEZEWSKA STEVENS, author of The Exhibition of Persephone Q and The Visitors
      
A searing debut novel about a striving finance student, the line between ambition and greed, and the disordered politics of our era
          
Alistair McCabe comes to New York with a plan. Young, handsome, intelligent, and gay, he hopes to escape his Rust Belt poverty and give his mother a better life by pursuing a career in high finance. But by the spring of 2016, Alistair’s plan has come undone: His fantasy banking job has eluded him, he’s mired in student debt, and in his desperation he’s gone to work for an enigmatic billionaire whose ambitions turn out to be far darker than Alistair could have imagined. By the time Alistair uncovers his employer’s secret, his life is in danger and he’s forced to go on the run. 
            
Meanwhile, Alistair’s paramours, an older couple named Mark and Elijah, must face their own moral and financial dilemmas. Mark, nearing the end of his trust fund, takes a job with his father’s mobile-home empire that forces him to confront the unsavory foundations of his family’s wealth, while Elijah, a failed painter, throws in his lot with an artist-provocateur whose latest project transforms the country’s political chaos into a thing of alluring, amoral beauty. As the nation hurtles toward a breaking point, Alistair, Mark, and Elijah must band together to save one another and themselves.
             
Propulsive, exuberant, and profoundly observed, Ways and Means is an indelible, clear-eyed investigation of class and ambition, sex and art, and politics and power in twenty-first century America.

 

Release date: February 6, 2024

Publisher: The Overlook Press

Print pages: 400

Sample

PART ONETHE BLUE LIGHT

The first thing Alistair thought about was the money. At seven that morning he’d left Palladium and marched to the Citibank ATM on Union Square. The total in his account was $600 and change, even less than he’d figured. If he’d known he’d have to flee the city and disappear he would have been more economical in his spending. But you couldn’t give a poor student $10,000 a month and expect him to be entirely shrewd, even if he’s a finance major who’s spent four years learning how to be shrewd if nothing else. It seemed appropriate, in light of this, that he wouldn’t even get his degree.

When he’d returned to his dorm, cash in back pocket, he’d stood dumbly in his room, wondering if he could overdraw his checking account (he knew he couldn’t), wondering if his credit card had a cash-withdrawal option (he knew it didn’t). Mostly he was buying time, another thing he couldn’t afford, until he had no choice but to accept the obvious. Before he left the city he would have to pay a visit to Mark Landmesser and Elijah Pasternak, the couple whom he’d been sleeping with for the better part of a year and whose relationship he was all but certain he’d destroyed.

The night before, after cutting his ties with Nikolai and accepting his final payment from him, Alistair had met up with the couple, hoping to mark the end of his dark days with mind-voiding carnality. Mark and Elijah knew little about Alistair’s job, but Elijah had proposed going out to honor the occasion—in Elijah’s mind quitting a job was more of a reason to celebrate than getting one—and, given the unseasonably warm May air, Alistair had left his jacket, containing his last $10,000, on their couch. At dinner, though, rather than toasting him, Mark and Elijah fought, fought like they never had, and after the bill had been paid Alistair judged it too indelicate to return to their apartment for his cash. He figured he’d go back when the smoke had cleared. But when he returned to his dorm he found Nikolai on the street, waiting for him, walking back and forth beneath the NYU flag. He told Alistair that the groundskeeper was dead, that they were surely next, and that they needed to vanish immediately.

“Keep it on,” Nikolai said, referring to Alistair’s burner. “I will find you soon. I will come up with a plan. Oh—my friend!”

“Where am I supposed to go?” Alistair said.

“You ask me?” Nikolai said. “What do I know? This is your country! Your crazy fucking country!”

Before Alistair could think to ask him for anything, Nikolai turned and walked off down the street.

He still hadn’t decided where he’d go. Their boss, Herve, had extended his operation far and wide, and he had people everywhere. Alistair’s plan was to get on a Greyhound to California and get off at whatever place seemed halfway suitable for lying low. But no matter where he got off he would need, he was sure, more than $600 and change.

He paced his tiny bedroom in Palladium, five floors above Fourteenth Street. He checked the time—eight-thirty, too soon. He needed to head off any nosiness about his sudden departure, and if he called the men too early and asked after his jacket with undue desperation they would certainly nose. Plus, having worked barely a day in their lives, Mark and Elijah tended to sleep late.

He went to the window and looked up at the sky, into the windows of the office building across the street, down at the sidewalk. The day was bright, the century young, the city rich, the trees abloom. From below came the familiar indecipherable din of cars, cyclists, buses, workers careering their way east and west, each trailed or preceded by a morning-long shadow, each figure appearing from Alistair’s vantage happy, unguilty, free. He looked at the old Consolidated Edison Building across the way, at its colonnade and its clockface. Every night the tower’s electric blue glow shone through his blinds. For years, as he’d drifted off to sleep, Alistair had projected all manner of desires onto this light, had organized all manner of erstwhile cathexes around it. But the light was extinguished now, and, along with it, possibly, him.

He stood over his desk and composed a note to his roommate, who’d left already for their Financial Modeling seminar.

Vidi—

I’m going on a work trip. Can’t-miss opportunity. Won’t be back for graduation. Good luck at Morgan Stanley (not).

Alistair prided himself on having lied not too outrageously. He really was going on a work trip, insofar as he wouldn’t need to go off the grid if it weren’t for the work he’d been unwittingly drawn into, and he really did have a can’t-miss opportunity to avoid being exterminated by Herve.

He began packing. He planned to leave behind enough of his possessions to give credence to his work-trip story but not so many as to overburden whichever custodian had to clean his room. He’d leave behind most of his toiletries and the majority of his clothes and shoes. He’d leave behind his textbooks. Advanced Corporate Finance, Investments, Distressed Securities, Risk—these would be of no help to him now.

He opened his JPMorgan Chase duffel and loaded it with clothes. He wished he had a different bag to use. After he’d left his internship at the bank the previous summer, in his offerless shame, he’d buried the duffel at the back of his closet and pledged never to look at it again. But his only other piece of luggage was a large suitcase his mother had given him as a high school graduation present, and he couldn’t bear rolling around so cumbersome a reminder of her, and he thought it best to pack lightly.

He had to call his mother, of course. But the task of heading off her nosiness, of navigating the laser maze of her skepticism and worry—of, maybe, talking to her for the last time—was so daunting that he hadn’t let himself really contemplate it, not yet.

He laid in polo shirts, button-downs, chinos, half zips. He would have liked a cruddier, more attention-deflecting getup, but all he had was his Patagonia, his Brooks Brothers, his Club Monaco. He loved this wardrobe, had put himself in debt to amass it, for the very reason he knew it would serve him poorly as a fugitive: it made him bright, made him conspicuous, made him seem like a someone (or rather like an everyone else, but in the most enviable way). He needed clothes more nondescript, drab, unimposing, more befitting of his actual economic station, of the lower-middle-class nothing he’d taken every step over the past four years to leave behind. Instead, wherever he went, he would look like the finance bro that he was, or that he’d wanted to be. Who he was really, who he wanted to be now: these were questions he would deal with later.

When he finished packing he sat at his desk and opened his laptop. He looked for a last time at his student loans: $100,325. (Alistair found it cruel that a mere three-hundred-odd dollars should mean the difference between his being five figures and six figures in debt. The distinction between these orders of magnitude was too psychologically enormous to be decided by so piddling a sum.) One incidental benefit of disappearing, he’d realized that morning, was that he would no longer be responsible for his loans. He was free of his debt, free of it! For how long had he dreamed of this day? Yet his reprieve brought him none of the joy he’d expected it would, and his impatience for it, his fixation on it, now seemed to him myopic and mean. Cancel your debt, lose your life: he seemed to be living out the definition of a Pyrrhic victory.

He checked his work email: [email protected]. (Alistair had come up with this alias by combining the names of his two favorite porn stars, Connor Maguire and Vadim Black, who, because the world was a cruel and godless place, had never been in a scene together.) He scrolled past emails from his likewise aliased confreres until he reached the last message the groundskeeper had sent. Next to the empty subject line ran a snippet of preview text: Last warning. And if you think I’m making an empty threat, then you are so fucking sadly

In a new tab he navigated to the groundskeeper’s obituary. He realized for the first time how similar the man’s name was to his own, and as he stared at the photograph, a formal Army portrait, he saw afresh their resemblance: blond hair, blue eyes, an expression of doomed Rust Belt naivete. He scanned the text:

. . . passed away unexpectedly . . . donations may be made to the Veterans Mental Health Crisis . . .

Utter bullshit.

All Alistair could remember right now was the groundskeeper’s fidgety niceness. Yes the groundskeeper had blackmailed him, yes he’d gotten himself in deep shit and dragged Alistair and Nikolai into it too. But in the end he was just an upstate kid looking to save his life by taking money from people who had too much of it, and Alistair understood this. In truth there was nothing he understood more.

He was about to return to the groundskeeper’s email, with its nightmarish images, when he stopped. He didn’t know much about the technological prowess of Herve or his minions, but if they could hack into his computer and determine his whereabouts they would surely try to do so now. He leaned away from his desk, stiff-backed, and picked up his phone. He could wait no longer.

He called Mark. Elijah was all jokes, enthusiasms, curiosities: he would ask why Alistair needed his jacket so urgently and, after the blowup at dinner the night before, he would likely inveigh against Mark, trying to solicit Alistair’s partisanship and affirmation, taking up precious time. Mark, by contrast, was all facts and short sentences: he would let Alistair into the apartment, he would give him his jacket, he would say goodbye. They were always like this with each other, Alistair and Mark. Their reticence was a measure of all the things they wanted to say to each other but didn’t know how.

Mark and Elijah had introduced Alistair to Nikolai, an acquaintance of Elijah’s old art school friend Jay, knowing only that Nikolai did something finance-adjacent and figuring that he could give their down-on-his-luck boy toy career advice. Since then the men had shown minimal curiosity about Alistair’s job, retreating instead into their sundry petty dramas. If this had irked Alistair before, if it had struck him as evidence of their self-absorption, he was grateful for it now. The less the men knew the better, and they knew next to nothing.

Mark answered after two rings, short of breath.

“Sorry,” Alistair said. “Are you busy?”

“Hold on,” Mark said. He lowered the phone and made some shuffling sounds. “I’m packing.”

“Packing?” Alistair said. “For what?”

Mark was still catching his breath. “I think last night settled things for me.”

“Where are you going?”

“Home. New Jersey.”

The Landmesser Palace, as Elijah called it. “For how long?”

“Not sure,” Mark said. “But I’m not renewing.”

During their fight the night before, Mark had threatened not to sign the June 1 renewal on their two-bedroom in the Eros Ananke, the blandly luxurious tower on Cooper Square where he and Elijah lived, entirely on Mark’s dollar. But amid the hundred other ultimatums and aspersions Mark and Elijah had exchanged, while Alistair had bowed his head and tried to stopper his ears, no single one, and certainly not this one, had sounded particularly consequential. “You’re not serious.”

“I think I am,” Mark said. “Maybe I’m not just a—how did Elijah put it—a suckling pig—something?”

Stuffed to death with his own money. When Elijah wanted to he could really draw blood. “Maybe you two just need a break.”

“I guess we’re about to find out.”

Alistair imagined the men’s apartment strewn with boxes, piles of clothes, the contents of disgorged dressers and shelves. He imagined his jacket, his envelope, his $10,000 in cash, getting lost amid so much upscale flotsam. “Is Elijah there?”

“Gone,” Mark said. “Fled to Jay’s. Naturally.”

Jay Steigen: his center part, his braces, his imperious gaze, his adolescent laugh, his empty contradictory provocations—Alistair couldn’t imagine anyone ever going to him for comfort. But then Elijah’s inclinations, his perverse affections and fascinations, had always puzzled him. He tried to think of a delicate way to broach the subject of his jacket, but Mark saved him.

“I’m glad you called,” he said to Alistair. “I was hoping to see you. Before I left.”

Alistair felt an illogical parental worry on Mark’s behalf. He was thirty and had seemingly limitless family money. Surely he could manage his own affairs or pay someone to manage them for him. Nevertheless Alistair wondered if he knew how to pack a box, hire a mover, terminate a lease. He’d offer to help if he weren’t running for his life. “Can I come now?”

“I’m a little sweaty,” Mark said.

“I’ve seen you sweaty,” Alistair said.

Mark gave a laugh, a single rueful exhalation, more like a sigh. “I’ll be here.”

After he hung up Alistair brought his laptop to the bathroom, ran it under the faucet until its screen went black, then stowed it in his desk drawer. He shouldered his duffel and looked at his suite, said goodbye to its bare walls and specked-tile floor, and headed to the elevator.

Downstairs he rushed out of the lobby and turned left toward Broadway. Technically it would be faster to take Third Avenue, but his hours in the city were numbered, and he wanted to treat himself to a true thoroughfare.

On Broadway he found a sidewalk dense with workers in the final footrace of their commute. He held his duffel to his side snugly, weaving, jostling, squinting in the brilliant morning sun. He kept to the curb, dancing around Citi Bike docks and volcanic islands of black trash bags. For a moment he forgot himself, forgot his emergency, forgot his panic, and zeroed in, as he always did, on the most fuckable men. He noted a tan bearded guy in a trim navy suit, two gazelles wearing black workout tops and leggings, a beefcake staring red-facedly into his phone. He spotted a twink who caught his eye and smiled. After a moment, though, his panic returned, and as he passed more men he became more worried that any one of them might be a lackey in Herve’s employ, a hired gun who’d been informed of his general movements and whereabouts and was now set on finding and disappearing him. He began to cruise with a new, terror-inflected purpose. He realized that keeping an eye out for potential assailants and seeking out biceps and succulent backsides were in effect identical activities: that he registered perusers and possible pursuers with the same hyperacute focus and the same libidinal force. It was as if his suspicion had, like a parasite, taken over the mechanism of his desire.

In his paranoia he shifted his attention to objects. He cataloged various instances of material splendor. He counted two Burberry jackets, two Moncler puffer vests, one pair of Persol sunglasses, three Goyard totes, and, on the street, four BMWs, two Range Rovers, and one Porsche. The buildings on either side gave to these objects a kind of vertically oriented velocity, a sense of accumulation and futurity, a climaxward charge. For years Alistair had subsisted on this charge, harnessed it to fuel his studying, working, fucking, fantasizing. But where in the end had all his dreaming led him? To a Greyhound. To nowhere at all.

He passed a woman wearing a Hillary pin and, a little later, a man wearing a STRONGER TOGETHER T-shirt and both times looked away. As much as this overearnest swag reassured Alistair—that Clinton was unstoppable, that she would squish Trump handily—it also rattled him. The last thing he wanted to think about right now was the election, increasingly the only thing on anyone’s mind. Best to keep his eyes on the sky: an errant cloud, a wind-smudged contrail, the spire of Grace Church, with its tiny sun-spangled cross.

He put a hand to his forehead, realized he was sweating, marched on.

As he was turning left on Eighth Street he felt his phone vibrating. He reached for it, worrying that it was Mark calling to rescind his invitation. But the caller wasn’t Mark. And before it occurred to Alistair that his phone as much as his laptop would offer up a digital breadcrumb for anyone tracing him, before it occurred to him that he hadn’t yet prepared his lie, he answered.

“Hi, Mom,” he said.

“There’s Alli,” his mother, Maura, said. “How’s Alli doing today?”

“Good, busy, on my way to class.” His mind worked furiously, but nothing plausible came to him. He’d been hoping to call his mother later, after he’d had a chance to construct a halfway believable explanation for why he wouldn’t be able to see or talk to her for a period of time he couldn’t specify. But who was he kidding? No such explanation existed, at least not one Maura would believe.

“Which class?” she asked.

“Futures and Options.” In fact this class had started a half hour ago.

“I’m assuming those words don’t mean what I think they mean,” Maura said.

“They’re types of derivatives contracts.”

“So no.”

Alistair heard the sounds of the SUNY Binghamton campus around her: trees shivering in the breeze, voices on the footpaths, possibly the pock of a serve on the nearby tennis courts. Maura worked as an administrative assistant at the university’s admissions office. She took every opportunity to step outside, breathe unfiltered air, abandon her needling colleagues, and call him. For the last few months, though, their conversations had become strained, punctuated by silences. Maura didn’t know what Alistair’s job entailed, only that she hated his secrecy around it and the profligacy it inspired in him, and she didn’t quite believe that he’d quit the job, as he’d told her he had, just as she was sure not to believe whatever fabrication he was soon to cook up for her.

“I guess you’re in finals season,” she said.

“Don’t I know it,” Alistair said. He made to cross Lafayette Street, in violation of the orange Stop hand, then jumped back at the blare of a truck horn.

“And how’s the job hunt?” she asked. “Any leads?”

Alistair suspected this question was mainly a test of his assurance that he’d extricated himself from his previous mysterious employment. When it came to his future his mother didn’t care whether he landed a good job or made good money: she cared only whether he was good. He crossed Lafayette, scurried around the Astor Place Cube, and set off down Cooper Square. He tried to suppress his heavy breathing. “I’m taking things one day at a time,” he said.

“Well, I’m certainly on board with that.”

Maura had never understood Alistair’s ambition. She resisted his obsession with money, she resisted his interest in a profession that she fuzzily judged to be evil, she resisted most of all his insistence on doing well for himself so that he could do right by her. Alistair’s father had died when he was six, and almost ever since then he’d exerted himself in the hope of one day supporting Maura, giving her a better life, rescuing her from her sad widowhood and all-but-poverty, whisking her away from the admissions office, away from Binghamton, for which she was much too smart, much too pretty, much too special. Now he’d failed, utterly and irreversibly.

“Are you OK?” she asked. “It sounds like you’re running.”

“I am running,” Alistair said.

“Are you late?”

“I really hope not.” Mark and Elijah’s building rose before him, a bluish glass obelisk soaring frictionlessly into the sky.

“You sure you’re OK?”

“Yes,” Alistair said. He listened all the more keenly to the background sounds around her: a coach’s whistle, cars cruising along campus roads at leisurely speeds, birds chattering in branches. As a rule Alistair thought of Binghamton as a postindustrial sinkhole that it had meant everything to him to escape. Yet there was no place he’d rather be right now than his hometown, three hours north and worlds away from New York City, no one he’d rather be with than Maura.

“I’ll let you go,” she said. “You’ll call me later?”

“Yes,” Alistair said.

“You promise?”

“Yes!”

“Love you.”

He said he loved her too and hung up.

At the Eros Ananke he gazed up at the fourth floor and located, in a corner window, the silhouette of the other person he was about to lie to, the other person whose heart he was about to break. He could see Mark’s broad shoulders, his tousled hair, his sturdy jaw, his endearingly rigid posture. He was waiting for Alistair, faithfully as always. After today he’d be waiting for a long time.

“I’m sorry,” Alistair whispered to himself on the sidewalk.

He crossed the street, breezed into the lobby, and gave the doorman his name.

──────

Mark stood at the window, looking down Bowery, waiting for the blond wonder, the improbable object of his desire, resplendent—Alistair McCabe.

He’d woken up shortly before seven, though to say he’d woken up would be to overstate seriously the depth of his sleep. Really he’d spent the night replaying his argument with Elijah. He’d run through Elijah’s attacks on his impotence and passivity, he’d run through his counterattacks on Elijah’s hypocrisy and sense of entitlement, he’d pictured Alistair’s look of petrified embarrassment. He seemed to believe that if he stayed up long enough and went through the script enough times he could solve the mystery of his unhappiness. It didn’t escape his attention, as he fought off dreams, that one of Elijah’s more memorable charges against him was that he’d slept his life away.

After they’d returned from the restaurant Elijah had made clear, with quick imperious gestures, that he would be spending the night on the couch. When Mark had finally sat up in bed and looked at his phone he’d found a text from Elijah saying that he’d gone to Jay’s and would be back that afternoon (“maybe”). In another era, one more suited to Mark’s temperament, this message might have come in the form of a physical note and possessed the romance of longhand. Instead the text appeared between a news alert about a proposed monument to the gay rights movement and another about a body that had washed ashore in Brooklyn with its feet submerged in concrete. Mark had swiped away the alerts along with the text and decided to leave New York City.

In the three hours since then he’d frankly shocked himself by his resoluteness. Every step he took to realize his plan was a riposte to Elijah’s contention that he was ineffectual and indecisive. He’d gone to the UPS store as soon as it opened and bought a dozen variously sized boxes. He’d hired movers, at a rush premium, to come for his things later that day. He’d called his mother, Janet, and told her that he and Elijah needed a break and that he would be living at home “very briefly.” He’d decided not to make much of the fact that she’d fielded this news matter-of-factly and without asking questions. Maybe it wasn’t surprising that things between him and Elijah had gone south. Or maybe, for all her professed naivete on the subject of money, Janet suspected his reasons for giving up his apartment weren’t strictly connubial.

He kept his gaze trained out the window, half in hope of spotting Alistair on the street and half in fear of facing the disordered room behind him. For all his adamancy he felt it hovering at the edges of his mind: a whimpering panic, a creeping regret, a weakening of his conviction. His life with Elijah had come to nothing, but this fact did little to shake his terrified sense that it was the only life he had any claim to.

Mark and Elijah had been together for eight years. They’d met in late fall 2008, when they were both twenty-three, at an East Village gay bar whose walls were painted Communist Party red. Elijah, having graduated with a degree in studio art from Vassar, was working as a graphic designer at a Midtown advertising firm. Mark—English, Hamilton College—was the oldest and least competent unpaid intern in the editorial department at the New York Review of Books. Some things Elijah and Mark bonded over that night were their enthusiasm about the newly elected Barack Obama, their inability to match quite the enthusiasm of their peers, their possession of jobs proximal to but in substance fatally remote from the careers (artist and writer respectively) they actually wished to pursue, their anxiety about the recession, their complete ignorance about its causes or the extent to which it would affect them, their tribe-betraying dislike of pop divas and drag queens, their fondness for gin, and their mutual gin-fueled opinion, which gathered force as the night progressed, that they’d just never met another person so fun and good-looking. In retrospect Elijah must have left the bar believing the boy he was going home with was a full-throated creative aspirant who shared his entry-level poverty. In fact, until Elijah’s moony gaze had prompted an attempt to impress, Mark had never told anyone that he wanted to be a writer, and had given no thought to what a career as a writer, or any career, would even look like. And if Elijah wondered how an unpaid intern could afford the newly renovated West Village one-bedroom to which Mark brought him, he didn’t ask questions.

For six months, there were very few questions. They accepted each other’s circumstances and habits as only twentysomethings separated by a wide economic gulf can. Elijah spent fifty hours a week at his job and an additional ten hours airing grievances about it. He spent further hours complaining about having neither the time to paint nor money for a studio space. He sought refuge at Mark’s apartment and availed himself of its comforts, its large liquor supply, the steady assembly line of fine takeout food that fed into it. Mark, after failing to receive a full-time offer at the New York Review of Books, tried to lend credence to his profession of writerly ambition by submitting to journals lightly revised creative writing assignments. He kept up with his dwindling supply of female friends from college and boarding school. He attended the noisy, energy-sapping, gastronomically repellent dinner parties that Elijah and his roommates hosted at their cramped, sticky Alphabet City apartment. He organized his weeks around every free, sexually exploitable hour in Elijah’s schedule. Every chance he had to get his hands on Elijah’s body, to bury his face in his ideally furred ass, to press his chest against his delicate back, he seized.

On the fucking front, they were certainly a match. What Mark didn’t understand then, what he grasped only now, was that in the early days of their screwing they were fleshing out, quite literally, their future roles. Elijah knew the way to turn Mark on was to be sweet, reliant, impertinent, and pliable. Mark knew the way to turn Elijah on was to be sturdy, quiet, empty-headed if not quite dumb, and domineering. Evidently Elijah saw Mark as an all-American golden boy of mind-altering and will-demolishing virility. In certain heated moments he said as much. This surprised Mark, who’d never thought of himself this way, and who derived no personal meaning from his masculinity. His alpha male appearance was more like a costume in which he was shocked but largely content to find himself trapped. Something else Mark found surprising was the extent to which Elijah seemed to depend for his arousal on feelings of intimidation and even fear. He seemed, as he knelt, as he spread his legs, as he moaned, to be working himself into a state of awe, fascination, and worship. Mark suspected Elijah’s desires and ideas about sex were more complicated and interesting than his own. He took this as a sign that for all his unproductivity Elijah was a genuine artist, or at least a more genuine one than he. And for all his surprise Mark fulfilled his assigned role, consented to be the power-wielder, the tab-payer, the pants-wearer: agreed to be, for lack of a better word, the man. He wanted Elijah, if for no other reason than he felt obligated to want something and knew of nothing else to want.

Rising from this strong foundation of sexual chemistry was their much flimsier shared identity as “artists.” Mark told Elijah exactly nothing about what he wrote (a reflection as much of his shyness as of the fact that he wrote little), and the descriptions Elijah did offer Mark of the art he’d made in college tended to be too threaded with abstractions and defensive obfuscations to make much sense of. All Mark gathered was that Elijah had done a series of paintings at Vassar that had made him, for reasons they both agreed were dubious, into a pariah. The problem, he told Mark, was that he was still in the early phase of “building” his “practice,” which involved “constructing” his “sensibility,” which required large swaths of time. If he had a clearer grasp of his vision and purpose (and some studio space!) he could put his few free hours to better use. But to “construct” his “sensibility” he needed months, possibly a year, actually ideally a few years, of complete focus. Hobbling his progress, he said, was the fact that he had no real community. His one good friend from Vassar, Jay Steigen, had moved down to Richmond and in any case wasn’t a “connection to brag about.” His other artist acquaintances he mostly resented for having parental money enough to work part-time or not at all (this last point, Mark felt, was made with strained delicacy). Elijah’s parents, both schoolteachers out on Long Island, could offer only their sincere, uncomprehending encouragement.

Mark listened and nodded and shook his head but couldn’t sympathize: he shared neither Elijah’s sense of urgency nor his financial pressures. And this made him feel guilty. He had an embarrassment of time but no genius, no afflatus, fueling him to take advantage of it. He had started a novel, based none too loosely on his years at boarding school, but on a typical writing day he spent the bulk of his time changing punctuation, auditioning different typefaces, and searching Thesaurus.com for simpler, less vampiric word choices. In sixteen weeks he wrote twenty pages. Mostly he read premodernist novels, went on walks, and lived in his head. He began to suspect that he’d designated himself a writer only because it was the most obvious occupation for someone who liked to read novels and who lived in his head—qualities that did not seem to him particularly unique and certainly not unique to professional writers. He began to suspect that he was an ordinary person who would be leading an ordinary life if he didn’t have money and that Elijah was an extraordinary person who would be leading an extraordinary life if he weren’t broke. He wondered if the least he could do, while he wasted his potential, was lend a helping hand to Elijah, who was certain to nurture his own. And so, one night, at the end of six months, he disclosed some information that Elijah had surely been trying to suss out. The information was that he, Mark, was rich, that he didn’t work because he didn’t have to, and that if he and Elijah, well, if Elijah was open to it—he shrugged, lowered his eyes, smiled with one side of his mouth and then snapped his lips flat—well, if Elijah was open to it, maybe he didn’t have to work either?

That they didn’t have to work at all was actually an overstatement, born largely of Mark’s poor grasp of math. After Mark had graduated from Hamilton College, his father, Arty, had opened a trust fund for him in the amount of $995,000. Mark had known this money was coming to him. His older brother by two years, Eddie, had received the same sum upon graduating from Boston College. He’d also known the number was intentional, a lesson as well as a winning example of Arty’s broad sense of humor. Arty himself had earned every dollar he had, and while he was happy to give his sons a lift he wanted them to be responsible, as he’d been, for crossing the million-dollar threshold themselves.

Arty was the founder and CEO of a chain of trailer parks (“manufactured housing communities,” in industry parlance) called CommonWay. Mark knew little about the parks, only that the company had many of them, scattered across the country, and that despite the impecunious state of the people who lived in them they generated, in aggregate, a lot of money. According to guesstimates by Eddie, Arty brought home four million a year. The company itself appeared to be worth twenty times this. Mark was unsure, morally and logistically, why the meager lot rents paid by blue-collar workers and Social Security beneficiaries should make one family so very rich. Certainly, growing up in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, he’d been shielded from any unsavory details about the feudalist arrangements on which his comfort depended. Even after he’d gone to college, absorbed the progressive creed, and committed himself, if perfunctorily, to progressive ideals he found it hard to summon any serious opposition to his family’s wealth. In part this was because all his life he’d been fed a saccharine and exploitation-excusing tale about a boy named Arthur Landmesser who’d grown up poor in Passaic, exercised shrewdness and discipline, and reaped the riches available to any hardworking American. In larger part it was because he very much wanted his trust fund. Leading up to graduation, as he wrote final papers on Henry James and Charles Bukowski, he worked through a maze of self-recriminations and defensive counterarguments that in time became so convoluted he could hardly make sense of it and that in any case led, when the day came, to his accepting his father’s gift without reservation. After that, the only meaningful question was what to do with it.

For an instructive example of how to spend his $995,000 wisely, Mark could have looked to his older brother. Eddie was a private equity associate whose animating ambition was to achieve an equivalent level of success as his father and then, in oedipal fashion, surpass him. Upon graduating he’d sunk part of his own gift into a one-bedroom in Murray Hill and invested the rest aggressively. During the recession he’d taken a rather devastating loss on his positions, but in the time since his fortunes had risen along with the phoenix of the US economy. He was now the sort of mid-seven-figure millionaire who dated models and, when the spirit moved him, traveled by chartered plane. Being an investor with a proven track record as well as a supreme jerk, Eddie would have been glad to dispense condescending advice to his feckless little brother. But Mark hated Eddie, and he hated math and making plans, so instead he parked his $995,000 in his checking account and lived expensively without monitoring his funds.

Two years into dating, Mark and Elijah relocated to the Eros Ananke so that Mark could have a second bedroom in which to “write.” In time this second bedroom became a mockery of his aspiration. He spent his days whipping up the courage to work, procrastinating, recovering from his guilt at having procrastinated, and running fifteen-minute errands for which he blocked off whole afternoons. Things weren’t much different for Elijah. After quitting his job at the Midtown advertising firm he secured a small shared studio space in Gowanus, but he visited it infrequently and when he did he returned home with a dim, distracted expression that made Mark reluctant to ask about his progress. Elijah also set up a one-man, very part-time freelance graphic design business. Though he never asked how much money Mark had, and though Mark never told him, he appeared, by availing himself of this small income stream, to be hedging against the possibility that it wasn’t illimitable.

Nevertheless, many of Elijah’s daily expenses were charged to Mark’s account. And though their outlays were substantial, and though he understood the basic principle of subtraction, Mark never agonized about the southward trajectory of his funds. On the semiannual occasions when he snuck a peek at them, the figure—$800,000-something, $700,000-something, $600,000-something—was always so large that it registered in his mind only as a hazy, nonnumerical muchness. And as the years went by and his and Elijah’s problems mounted, this muchness came to feel like the one thing he could depend on, even as the figure hurtled inexorably toward zero. Amid all the things that troubled him—Elijah’s failure to find his artistic footing, his own failure to do much of anything, the sputtering out of their sex life, the readiness and twisted logic with which they blamed each other for their unhappiness, the dawning realization that the roles they’d agreed to play were false and constricting and no longer sustainable, the steady existential drumbeat of time passing, years passing—this muchness was the one thing he didn’t worry about.

Now, nearly a decade after they’d met, the fruits of this muchness lay in disarray around him.

So far he’d filled three boxes with clothes, four with books, and one with liquor. He considered the hand-cut crystal whiskey glasses but didn’t feel like wrapping them. He considered the ebony-and-boxwood chess set he’d bought with the intention of learning to play but decided he didn’t want to be taunted by reminders of his inertia (he suspected he would be taunted enough on this front at his parents’ house already). He considered his various exorbitant kitchenware purchases but conceded that he hadn’t actually used any of them—the exception was a sunset-colored Le Creuset Dutch oven that he’d once peed in when a diarrheal Elijah was camped out in the bathroom. He thought about the wall hangings but most of them had been Elijah purchases. He stared for a moment at the framed vintage poster of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light, which for all the trouble it had caused him at Vassar remained Elijah’s favorite film. Mark saw in Leni’s expression an echo of the way Elijah had once looked at him: fearfully, with fascination, with awe.

He looked, for the hundredth time that morning, at Alistair’s jacket on the couch. He went over to it and, for the tenth time that morning, raised it to his nose for a sniff. The jacket was a lesser Barbour but a recognizable Barbour nonetheless (olive quilting, gold press studs, brown corduroy collar), which may have explained why Alistair, who safe to say hadn’t grown up with Barbour jackets, was still wearing it in May. Its scent was a rich olfactory concentration of the boy Mark had come to think about nonstop: he detected Old Spice, coconut shampoo, and sweat. He had the idea to bring the jacket with him to New Jersey, where he could raise it to his nose all he wanted. He brought it into the bedroom and stowed it in an open box of clothes, hoping Alistair wouldn’t remember that he’d left it. When he returned to the living room he looked afresh at the havoc he’d wreaked and wondered what Alistair would make of it when he arrived, if he would be as surprised as he himself was by his resoluteness.

The sad fact, Mark knew, was that he and Elijah would have continued on in their way, spending and dithering and piling up resentments forever, were it not for three developments that occurred in quick succession and that altered irrevocably the delicate chemistry of their mutual hostility and dependence. The first was the arrival of Jay Steigen. Jay had come to New York the summer before on the dollar of Howie Gallion, a bashful North Dakota zillionaire whom Jay had met in Miami and who’d agreed to support Jay’s art practice in exchange for some form of companionship that Mark tried not to think about. Everything Mark hated about Jay—his bloviating denouncement of the contemporary art world, his glib contrarianism, his merry insistence on ruffling feathers and bolt-stunning sacred cows—Elijah found perversely alluring. Elijah and Jay had begun to spend more and more time together and, despite Mark’s repeated protestations, Jay had become a permanent, ...