Ways and Means

by Daniel Lefferts

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.

“I love a dog that can kill,” Jay said. “He sits, he stays, he waits for his treat. But his genes remember. Ancient aggressions course through him. It’s a little like the gays”—he flicked Elijah’s arm—“don’t you think? They lie around listening to Diana Ross, drinking their vodka sodas. But they lift, they run. They have bodies made for war.” Elijah imagined how Mark would respond to this statement. Probably with the same bug-eyed inhalation with which he responded to all Jay’s theses about gay men: that they were the cruelest human beings on earth, that this was the source of their beauty, that in their adoration of money and material objects they made for the ideal capitalistic subjects, that their instincts nevertheless went beyond this, that at bottom they were authoritarian, lovers of hierarchy and harsh rule, that in their irony and jollity they intuited the truth about the world—that it was unserious, all surface, all entertainment, all play.

To make peace with her life she had to believe that she had everything she could ever want, that she suffered no happiness-precluding privations or deficiencies. To countenance her exploitation would be to invite in a disgruntlement that her exploitation had rendered her powerless to do anything about. Alistair had observed this same dynamic, this same self-deluding, self-sparing contentment, in practically every middle-class person he’d ever met. But to observe it in his mother, the most intelligent person he knew, was particularly painful.

Already he had the premonition that some of his less smart but more socially graceful classmates would have no trouble glad-handing their way into jobs: that affability was a bigger factor than he gave it credit for. But the idea of being affable for affability’s sake ran counter to the grain of his purity. He prized his intelligence, clung to it as his ticket to a better life, and he felt that to entrust his success to mere schmoozing would be to insult his own talents. He’d gotten this far on his own and he was determined to thrive on his own. So he took Kirit’s suggestion and recast it as a challenge.

Success, he saw, would require more than mere talent. It would require him to depend on others, crawl out of his shell, sully himself in intangible, immaterial fraternizing. But his shame and resentment had made him unreachable, had made him alien, and he’d clung to them stubbornly, self-lovingly, all the same. He’d believed them to be his greatest asset, his greatest motivator, his greatest fuel. But his greatest asset was beginning to look like his greatest liability. His self-love was beginning to look like self-defeat. Yet to recognize this was not the same as to rectify it. He feared the stubbornness lay too deep.

“And they would have discovered the secret of gay sex,” Jay said. “It’s really a shame more people haven’t learned it.” “What’s the secret?” Elijah said. Jay raised his chin and took a preparatory breath. “That there exists no better metaphor for the world we live in,” he said. “Top and bottom, lord and serf, boss and peon, victor and vanquished. A totally unnatural and therefore creative act. Two individuals inclined by instinct to dominate, locked in a struggle for power that brings even its winner sorrow and even its loser ecstasy.”

Like most financial scandals this one had escaped public comprehension and therefore notice. Crimes that should have incensed the plebeian masses went straight over their heads, cloaked in expert pedantries and stupefying jargon.

Alistair felt confirmed in his sense, formed during his years of pornographically researching billionaires, that online knowability was inversely correlated with wealth except at the very top end: that if graphed it would follow a skewed U. Most people in the bottom ninety-nine percent either publicized themselves of their own volition or were eminently findable, and the very richest people, your Bill Gateses and Warren Buffetts, were famous to the point of immortality. But in between was a nonnegligible slice of world-movers, heirs and investors and minor moguls like Herve, whom it was almost impossible to learn anything about. Like Nikolai’s scandal they evaded public comprehension and therefore notice—as was, no doubt, their strong preference.

Herve was only part of a larger trend, an increasing concentration of wealth

and decision-making power in the hands of an unelected few, a self-appointed peerage of benevolent billionaires. People put faith in these billionaires to grow the economy, advance innovation, preserve institutions, cure all manner of sicknesses and social maladies, believing their success to be a measure of their genius, of their efficiency, of their superiority to the lumbering, blundering government. But this faith was born of self-spiting optimism. It ignored the fact that these billionaires had accrued their wealth and power at the expense of the government and of the people themselves, that their genius and efficiency lay in shirking taxes, suppressing wages, militating against antitrust reform, busting unions. It ignored the fact that the problems they’d been entrusted to solve were often ones they themselves had created, and that very possibly they’d created them so as to solve them and thereby reorder society however they pleased. Not least it ignored the fact that these billionaires were, for all their benevolence, ultimately unanswerable to the people, mysterious in their intentions, inscrutable—that, really, no one knew them at all. Alistair was aware, as he sat slumped on the couch, that he might not have felt so dubious about this faith in billionaires if it weren’t for the billionaire that everyone did know, the real estate tycoon who’d pledged to return the country to its former glory, who convinced more and more people every day that he alone could do it, ...

The waiter brought the wine. He poured Nikolai a tasting sip and then filled their glasses, explaining as he did the wine’s flavor notes. Alistair found the waiter pretentious and sad, a victim of an economy in which the number of elite brains exceeds the number of jobs requiring them. He described the specials with a verbosity better suited to the defense of a thesis. Alistair glanced at Herve and saw that he was barely suppressing his annoyance. They all ordered the same nonspecial steak.

Alistair recalled the speech Jay had made about gay sex at the Die Kinder. Now that he wanted to be good Alistair wanted something gentler, something more tender, but Jay was right, and Alistair was never sorrier to be wrong. There seemed no way to fuck Elijah without violating him, and Alistair rued this, however much this violation was desired. Their body parts were such that their congress was never without the quality of domination, of submission, of war. Straight sex was life, beauty, and nature, but gay sex was history: it was dialectical. Inheritances of male aggressions and humiliations, conquests and invasions, takeovers and dispossessions, seemed definitely to be at play. He brought to the act the same single-minded rapacity that he’d brought all his life to his studies, his work, his upwardly mobile grasping, but he wanted just one place to exercise different instincts, to spread the wings of his better angels, and he wanted the bedroom to be it.

Trump, by now the presumptive GOP nominee, continued to inundate the country with deranged invective, and the media, fascinated in its indignation, continued to magnify his voice.

Mark had revisited his boarding school novel exactly once since moving home and been reminded afresh of its awfulness. It struck him as a dense, occasionally pornographic retelling of A Separate Peace. Paragraph upon paragraph clogged with ten-dollar words and impenetrable unnecessary subclauses. Everywhere the fusty odor of E. M. Forster and Henry James. For pages at a time not a concrete noun or active verb in sight—just terrible. He doubted he’d ever write again, but if he did he suspected a plunge into John Grisham might be useful. Maybe that was the way forward. Maybe he could put his antiquated prose into the service of a crude plot, throw together his tortuous abstractions with cheap thrills and stir, risk being rude and stupid.

Mark poured himself wine and lingered awkwardly by the kitchen table. Where to sit, where to stand? How close to the woman and how close to the men? All his closeted youth Mark had staged this debate with himself. Mostly, as now, he’d staked out a neutral position, a no-person’s-land of gender equidistance, where he could be neither woman nor man and where, as an added benefit, he could be alone.

As he walked up the main road he passed lot 51, of the Trump sign, and this time saw the owner outside, hunched over a lawnmower. The man was young, shirtless, and exquisitely built. When he noticed Mark he stood and revealed unexpectedly patrician features. They nodded at each other and Mark walked on. He fought off a tingling in his groin. He’d seen such men on previous visits, rakishly handsome, fatless and firm, sheathed in veiny muscles. They were gods to their fellow residents, idols to the men, blessed botherations to the women. They enjoyed an esteem within the park’s limits that they enjoyed nowhere else: went to their jobs and suffered the humiliations of a corporatized economy and then returned here, where they ruled according to an older system, a politics of virility, an erotics of martial law. He wasn’t surprised that such a man would display such a sign, swear his loyalty to such a person. Trump alone promised, however emptily and self-servingly, to extend his dominion back into the wide world.

Alistair was sincere in his belief that Mark and Elijah belonged together, in his hope that by convening them here he’d set in motion their reunion, and he felt that weariness and resignation were surer signs of love than fascination. Mark and Elijah no longer enchanted each other, and that was for the best. In the absence of enchantment they would build something more enduring. And after Alistair had gone away he could comfort himself with the image of them.

Alistair looked out the window at One World Trade, looming imposingly before them. Beyond it the Hudson flowed with geologic aplomb. Everywhere you looked the dumb earth had been stamped out, but it was possible to imagine, on a day like today, when the sun shone brighter than anything, this place as it had been centuries before, wooded and quiet, when the first Europeans (Maura’s father’s forebears among them) had arrived. All the business that had been undertaken since then seemed to Alistair like a great beautiful error.

Add up everything you’re willing to give, subtract what you might get back, and whatever’s left over is the measure of your soul.

In fucking there was only ever unfairness.

Renounce, renounce! It was the hardest and simplest thing to do. Renounce your object, abandon your singular infatuation, give up whatever yearning blinds you to everything but its endpoint, diverts your energy away from everything but your pursuit, justifies whatever harm, whatever waste, your quest entails. Renounce, renounce, and see how your love flourishes.