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running fifteen-minute errands for which he blocked off whole afternoons.
Alistair’s vigor and ambition reminded him, with a titillating masochistic pang, of his own complacency.
“Imagine the last time you had a weekend when you didn’t do any of the things you planned to. Now imagine that weekend lasting eight years.”
All his adult life he’d believed that deep down inside him lay the kernel of one greatness, one glorious offering, and that when he found it and formed it and brought it forth to the world it would make up for all his cowardliness, his paralysis, his passivity.
his sense, which rose like debris from his subconscious and emerged more fully as the minutes passed, that Alistair had been afraid of something.
when his mouth wasn’t hung open in boredom or arranged into an impish grin it was wrapped around his USB-chargeable vape.
Who could begrudge him his vanity, he thought, when he had so little else going for him?
the carte was blanche.
I have no sympathy for people who pooh-pooh the supposedly evil enterprises that they’re completely parasitic upon. Make your choice!”
When he was with Mark he longed for Jay’s weirdness, his heterodox freedom, and when he was with Jay he longed for Mark’s conformity, his humdrum goodness.
“Oh no,” Jay said as they reached the top floor. “I don’t fall in love with people. You have to be careful, if you’re serious, about where you direct your libidinal energy. Always into the work, never into people.”
Jay
He had his own streak of perversity, and though he’d committed himself to suppressing it, though he’d spent the years since his humiliation at Vassar playing nice guy with Mark and distrusting his aesthetic tendencies, he took vicarious pleasure in watching his friend let his own streak run free.
Elijah
He came to sense that the path to great art was paved not with “amazing” but with something darker, more mysterious, more alien and more menacing, and he came to believe that all great art had to account for this fact.
For Elijah, the clearest sign that he’d arrived at a moment of genius was that he’d come to it by way of a happy accident.
the cause of his depression happened also to be its only alleviant: he wanted to go home, back into the humid warmth of Mark’s arms.
It was if the wealth of the city, in pushing west, in squeezing into this last strip of land, had been forced to take on increasingly contorted shapes to express itself. The sun blazed.
With him as with no one else Elijah was allowed to be his deficient self.
How he hated Nikolai. How much he missed him already.
How easy it was, from the safety of his apartment, to forget that his parents and brother were real, that they moved through space and time every day just as he did. And how wearying, his belated realization that he would now have a front-row seat to their lives.
His father’s whole persona consisted of a booming, blustering sympathy for people ensnared by problems he felt himself superior to.
“Maybe I like looking at what’s in front of me,” Maura said to him. “Maybe that’s all I need.”
She possessed the unusual quality of not feeling the need to prove herself. And this unsettled her. She felt vacant, like she was missing something, something human, and maybe specially American.
Their talk of investigation and retribution implied a future, a forward continuation of days, and at that moment Maura could imagine no future, she felt that this day was the one she would live in forever, and they never found the driver anyway.
His deteriorating mind found no refuge in a deteriorating world.
But such principles enabled Alistair to understand the phenomenal world, to penetrate it and, by and by, to feel a power over it, as if being able to gauge the price of something offset the pain of not being able to buy it.
Wasn’t clear, once his cravings had been dispatched and the result of his efforts lay globbily on his chest, whether he was feeling the satisfaction of a joiner or victor or lover.
He was keen not to feel sorry anymore, was keen to find out who he’d be and what he’d do without the yoke of this sorriness.
What Maura failed to see was the poetic thrust of this trajectory. Put in your years of striving and struggling until you found yourself in a twenty-foot-ceiling PH and could once again feel as light and carefree as a little kid. The grueling hours and furious competition and relentless jockeying, the bitterness of all this, was a means to an end that actually was quite sweet.
“Just promise me,” she said. “Promise you what?” She smiled through her tears. “I don’t know.”
He also counted five quite evidently gay boys, identifiable by their princely posture or the feline angle at which they held their heads or, in the case of two, their freshly bleached hair.
Even as he presented his lips for the kiss he felt the dawning of a mysterious deficiency.
The machete he’d used to bushwhack his way out of Binghamton was still in his hand, and every day he discovered new nettles and brambles against which to use it. But even as he swung and slashed and lopped he wondered if his bushwhacking might one day outlive its original purpose, might become an exercise born of habit rather than a survival strategy born of need. He wondered if his defenses, which he’d always assumed would be temporary, might in fact never come down.
Perhaps, if he’d paid closer attention to the ongoing Tea Party antics, he might have sensed that this era of stability was nearing an end: that the fury of the class he’d escaped, spurred by resentment of the class he was angling to enter, would reach a breaking point. He might have sensed that this fury, for so long powerless against elite consensus, would soon enough, as it were, trump it.
Alistair’s first weeks with Mark and Elijah would later strike him as some of the happiest of his life, though he would never have called himself happy at the time.
Elijah shook his head, as if both to agree with Mark’s assessment and to clear the air of Mark’s dolefulness.
Elijah beheld the spectacle of frenzied capitalistic ambition that had consumed Alistair for the better part of his life and laughed at it. He didn’t understand it, so he could see through it. He might have sensed this thought gathering in Alistair’s mind, because he leaned forward and got to what was apparently his point. “When are you coming over again?”
Sometimes they fucked, it seemed to him, only so as to lend the rest of the evening a sense of carnal pertinence.
he began to see how Mark judged his own life in terms of theirs: his chimeric “creativity” in terms of their practicality, his wastefulness in terms of their industriousness, his failures in terms of their stunning successes.
What vexed Alistair was that each man was allowed to be only one person, to occupy only his one defined self, while he, in order to satisfy both men’s desires, had to be two people—upstanding or degraded, kind or cruel, gentle or hard-charging as the moment demanded—without any clear idea of which person he really was.
“The tragic dimensions are in place,” he said. “The promise, the yearning, the great hunger unsatisfied. The beautiful boy enchanted, the beautiful boy crushed. The more I think about this idea, the more I see it in everything.
“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.”
Elijah ridiculed the food, which he’d found too farm-to-table (“More needs to happen in the ‘to’ part, I think”),
To turn the means by which he’d hoped to escape his shame back onto the source of that shame: this was intriguing.
He felt as if his excitement about the job and his reservations about it were mixed together in the same chamber, and that if he opened the chamber’s valve too wide he might not be able to control what came out.
“He didn’t make his billions all by himself,” Alistair said. “No,” Nikolai said. “But somehow they ended up in his pocket.”
All he knew was that, even freed, he wanted to go back to his cell.
She had an attractive person’s ability to take in her reflection without fear.
