To Paradise

by Hanya Yanagihara

For many years—so many years—he had wondered if there was something not just amiss with him but deficient within him. It was not that he was not invited to the same parties as John and Eden; it was what happened at them. This was back when they were younger and simply known as the Bingham siblings, and he was only identified as the eldest, not “the bachelor” or “the unmarried one” or “the one who still lives at Washington Square”: They would enter the party, ascending the low, wide stone steps of a recently built Park Avenue manse, Eden and John first, her arm looped through his, he bringing up the rear, and upon entering the glittering, twinklingly lit space, he would hear what sounded to him like a cheer, as John’s and Eden’s faces were kissed by well-wishers sighing in delight at their arrival. And he? He would be greeted as well, of course; they were well-brought-up, their acquaintances and peers, and he was a Bingham, and no one would dare be anything less than cordial, not to his face. But for the rest of the party, he would feel strangely elsewhere, as if floating above the room, and at dinner, where he would be seated not with the bright young things of the gathering but, rather, among their parents’ friends and relations—the father’s sister, for example, or the mother’s elderly uncle—he would feel the full force of his undeniable otherness, how what he had striven to conceal had been recognized and accounted for by everyone in their circle. From the other end of t...