Of course, I didn’t know what this all meant—just that I must be gay, and therefore that my relationships with women, including Madeline, were naturally defined by platonic boundaries.
Lacking the insight to consider a more nuanced understanding of ourselves and our own attraction, Madeline and I faced little trouble assuming our logical roles—we were destined to be best friends, what else?—both of us unaware that the buds of attraction between human beings could blossom beyond the crudely fenced-in constructs of conventional categorization.
By October of our Fall-Winter semester as freshmen, we were content to enjoy the breadth of intimacy afforded to us by our conveniently sexless arrangement. We were in love, in our unique way, and although it glowed with a childlike aura, years of quiet disaffection for our respectively un-Romantic peers had given us each the maturity to perceive the rarity of our intense bond.
Inwardly, Madeline and I were like twins who had been separated at birth. The main difference, of course, was that Madeline had been raised over a grand piano by parents who attended benefits and wore expensive parfums, while I—well, I simply didn’t talk about my upbringing. It was regarding this subject alone that I withheld my true self from her, and the fault of Madama Butterfly that Madeline uncovered the reason.
In the early months of our friendship, Madeline heard the new season of the Metropolitan Opera in New York would include a modern adaptation of her favorite Italian tragedy. As opera was one of her greatest pleasures, and I had yet to see one, it was clear enough that we should go together; however, Madeline wanted us to buy orchestra seats, the most expensive, maintaining that I would never be able to relive my first opera, and “you just won’t feel the music from a cheaper seat.” I might have afforded a discount ticket on a balcony, behind some giant column, but never the seats which she insisted on, and neither could my dignity afford to tell her. “I have an exam that week,” I said. “We’ll go the next,” she said. “I get sick on trains.” “We’ll take the bus.” And so on, just a series of excuses, increasing in ridiculousness, until at last Madeline’s baffled face lit up with realization: “It’s not the money, is it?”
It was the first and last time she ever directly posed such a question to me. My flushed cheeks and hollow intake of breath were answer enough for her, and the next day she said to me, “We’re going next Saturday. My treat.”
From then on, it was always this from Madeline—“My treat,” or “You can pay next time”—followed by a masterful demonstration of her unsurpassable social grace: a giddy laugh, then a harmless diversion (commentary on classwork, or the weather). In this way she ensured that there would never be a pause, that I would never have the opportunity to suggest a repayment, or express my gratitude, or demonstrate in any way that her gesture was a cover-up for some inherent inequality about which only I was distressed.
More so than the money itself, these gestures of consideration for my dignity distinguished Madeline as possessing the truest generosity I had ever known. Hers was a special kind of thoughtfulness that was rare in the twenty-first century—attesting her commitment to the manners of more chivalrous times. Therein, ironically through her unselfish view of money, the institutional upholder that she often derided, was her nonconformist spirit most pointed.
Madeline willingly took on the role of my benefactress—my governess and ward in one—who despite my halfhearted protests went to great lengths so I could share with her the fine life which was so clearly our mutual destiny, never knowing the full extent to which her charities fulfilled my lifelong yearnings. Every weekend it was tickets for the opera, and the ballet, and the Philharmonic—experiences denied by my life in provincial Corpus Christi, which she knew I would honor with my hands gripping the armrest and my body leaning toward the stage in wide-eyed appreciation. Following Tosca, or Verdi’s Requiem, would be surprise reservations to dimly sconced West Village restaurants for aged cabernet and croque monsieurs, and miniature cheesecakes topped off with sea salt, syrup, and twisted lemon slivers.
Pledging to include me in every aspect of her rarified life, Madeline even had her parents upgrade their donor’s package at the Metropolitan Museum so that I could accompany them to events, and when, on the opening night of the Baroque Legacies exhibit, she discovered a small hole in my thrifted tuxedo trousers, her reaction was tiered as such: a wounded expression, a string of choked-up words (“But why wouldn’t you feel comfortable just telling me?”), and a compulsory shopping trip to Bergdorf Goodman. There she had me try on a dozen black tuxedos—Dolce & Gabbana, Calvin Klein, Dior Homme, each more exquisite than the last—until finally she conceded that the three-piece from Giorgio Armani was good enough for me.
Our first “fight” unfolded shortly before Christmas, when I promptly declined her invitation to join her extended family on a holiday in the Swiss Alps.
She had already done too much for me. As much as I wished to share every moment with her, to accept from Madeline’s satin-lined pocket a fully paid vacation seemed an abuse of our love. Furthermore, if there was a single lesson my proletariat parents had successfully passed on to me, it was to never indenture oneself; for all of the grief conferred on me by its beige walls, my parents had often remarked with pride that they had accepted no loans in the purchase of their house. As a result the back of my head had already been spinning for weeks with insurmountable calculations as I tried, despite Madeline’s fiscal nonchalance, to tally the dizzying debt I felt would be my duty to somehow repay.
When I voiced my initial protestations, we were lunching under vaulted ceilings in Berkeley Hall as sunshine from arched windows filled every mahogany corner. Madeline put down her spoon, her silver tray bearing her typical lunch fare: a bowl of organic Greek yogurt and a cup of strawberries, with an abundantly annotated photocopy of a Noam Chomsky essay at her elbow.
“How presumptuous of me—of course you should spend Christmas with your own family,” she backtracked, “I didn’t mean to be insensitive, it’s just you never talk about them, and—if you want to come, we’ll just schedule your flight out of Texas on the twenty-sixth,” she said. “That way you can have Christmas with them, and stay for New Year’s with us. It would be a short holiday—I don’t know, ten days, but then we can catch the flight back together. Do you think that would be all right?” She raised a strawberry to her lips, and if I weren’t so embarrassed I could have laughed at her sweet, ridiculous assumption that I would oppose her perfect Swiss holiday because I preferred a miserable Noche Buena with pathetic presents and only my rowdy family as a consolation, with everyone spilling Coronas around a dried-up evergreen.
“It’s not the dates . . .” I started. “It’s just—” and of course I froze, and turned the same color as the last time we had broached the issue of money—symptoms easily diagnosed by Madeline as an offense to her time-honored benevolence.
Her whole countenance dropped with the weight of a hundred acorns shaken from a tree. “For the love of God,” she spat. She tossed the half-bitten strawberry onto a napkin with disgust, and raised her voice: “The money again? You’re going to make me lose my appetite.”
Grant Goodwin passed us with a smile. He was trying to catch Madeline’s eye, but had to content himself with my halfhearted grimace on her sour behalf. “Please,” I said, reaching over the wooden table, “not so loud, I just—”
“Why are you so crass about this?” she hissed, and I had never heard such vitriol in her voice, not even in all her political condemnations of The Institution. “All I want is a vacation with you, and you have to act like a regular philistine about it—I mean, do you want to come with me or not?”
“Of course I do, but—”
“But nothing!” She jabbed her spoon through the jiggly surface of her yogurt bowl. “Jesus, you make it seem like money is important. It’s nothing you wouldn’t do for me, and what else should it get spent on? So what if you can’t pay me back? Who cares? One day you’ll be rich too, and it will all even out.�
� She let the handle of her spoon clatter with abandon against the side of the bowl—“Really, you’ve ruined my appetite.”
The display of embarrassment on my cheeks moved her to a reformation of her tone. “Listen to me, darling,” she said with delicate persuasion, her hand on my forearm and the aroma of her perfume activated by a slight lean toward me, “who ever knows what’ll happen to people’s money? It’s all made up—one day we could wake up, and it’ll be gone! Don’t you think we should spend it while we have the chance? If our society is lucky, everyone will come to their senses soon—” With Chomsky in agreement on the table, she made a grand blossoming gesture with both hands, like she was spreading confetti in the air. “Then we won’t even need vacations, or ballets, anything! People will be picnicking around naked, how God intended—like in a Manet painting!”
Coming from Madeline, it made perfect sense, and of course I ended up with her in the Alps, among the cable cars and powder snow and chalet-style towers over bird’s-eye panoramas, and on Christmas Day we all exchanged presents and drank too much génépi and Madeline and I waltzed to Mozart around our suite at the Gstaad Palace.
By escaping to Europe, into opera and ballets and the never-ending Arcadia that was our shared dream, we never conceded that we were pantomiming the traditions of a stodgy upper class; rather, we were defending the truest essence of humanity, by thriving in the name of beauty, art, culture—everything crucial in life. We fancied ourselves bohemians. If other people were the herd, we believed we’d escaped the enclosure of their oppressive limits. Of course, at the age of nineteen, we were still cattle—idealistic cattle, but cattle all the same—safe within the protected confines of youth, but lingering at its outskirts and hoping we were actually outside of it.
Given this streak of romanticized rebellion, it was a surprise to no one that sophomore year, we decided to move off campus.
“Our own gypsy enclave,” Madeline called it. “I’ll pay the rent, and in exchange you can cook me eggs Benedict for breakfast.” (Equating a matter of considerable value like rent to a triviality like eggs Benedict had become a new trend, as Madeline had started suggesting these sort of compensatory clauses to offset my discomfort with her emasculating generosity.)
The street was called Lynwood Place, and although frankly it was as central to campus proper as any of the dormitories, rejecting the institutional safety of Yale property by residing in a quaint little house seemed a convenient act of defiance. Built in the Victorian style, the houses on Lynwood Place were painted in shades of white, pink, and powder blue, delivering in excess the charm required by our aesthetic standards. These dainty dwellings became the closest we had to a maternal influence. Amid a landscape dominated by the patriarchal shadows of a hundred Gothic towers, they resembled a cheerful parade of gingham-aproned housewives, who had marched through the turreted town on a pie-baking crusade only to stop, and stay there, after forming a chatty sisterhood with the oak trees.
Beneath canopying laundry lines of leaves that faithfully turned each year from green to gold, they toted party-hat roofs and sing-along porches, which served as a quaint backdrop for the sharply contrasting indulgences of our lost, but hopeful, generation; night after night of reckless undergraduate blundering, of everyone trying to “find” themselves in creative combinations of sex, sweat, and Sam Adams six-packs. The same echoes could be heard every weekend on Lynwood Place, as everyone yelled, stumbled, busted things up. We were swarms of entitlement embodied, and like all mothers, the houses endured us. They took pity on us, knowing well that while they remained there, semester after semester, trying to catch a breath as they wearily waved their dampened handkerchiefs behind us, we would have it worse when we left their unconditional shelter to enter the real world.
For all our prim and proper proclivities, Madeline and I crashed as thanklessly as any other hell-bent undergraduates through the halls of our splintering house. We were a discerning pair, but young—always so, so young; consequently, our discernment tinged all matters but our own carelessness. We filtered life through the kaleidoscope of a fever dream, determined that through the meaningful affluence of our everyday rituals we should recreate the thrill of some great romantic precedent.
Every morning, amid my racket of pots, pans, and half-scrubbed spatulas, it was the destiny of our kitchen to accumulate a new dimension of filth as my well-intentioned incompetence ensured the spatter of Madeline’s eggs Benedict onto some new surface, ushering in the beginning of another day. We fluttered out to class, and upon our return blundered around half-naked in flapping kimonos, blasting Mozart and Tchaikovsky over a thrifted gramophone, spilling Earl Grey from Wedgwood teacups stolen from the unloved recesses of the Dupres’ china cabinet.
In the evenings, we played host to our “bohemian” friends, floating constantly in marijuana smoke. We added chamomile or lavender to the joints, and when people brought a six-pack to share, we offered them plastic champagne glasses. Once, we painted gold curlicues on the walls so the poor, falling-apart place would look more like Versailles (willfully ignoring what befell its hedonistic inhabitants), and when, during the renovation of Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Madeline discovered a chandelier by a dumpster, I helped her carry it back and hang it from the dining room ceiling. For an impressive period of one month, we pointed it out to all our friends at dinner parties, and everyone admired it with the excitement of Robespierre confronting Marie Antoinette’s head. Reflecting the doomed life span of all beloved totems under our care, the salvaged chandelier fell after an inebriated Mary Poppins tried to dangle from it at our Halloween fete. In that apocalyptic moment, it had toppled into the punch bowl, its brass arms raised like the suntanned legs of a synchronized swim team—just a splash of pink pool water, and the sorrowful thwack! of lemon circles falling at people’s feet like mislaid swim caps.
I MAINTAINED, UPON GRADUATION, THE NOTION THAT LIFE would continue in this fantastic fashion; that the most difficult parts of it would resemble cramming for midterms and the rest would be the same grand party, where everyone continued to get showered with champagne and swing from light fixtures. Except instead of dorms and off-campus houses, the setting would be a West Village loft, or a nightclub in the Meatpacking District, or somewhere else bigger and more glamorous.
The first indication to the contrary was my apartment search—a wake-up call. Following my interview with Sabrina, I spent the evening copy-pasting an apartment-hunt template to a hundred friends’ e-mails. Somewhere in the beginning of the body text was a “personal touch” (“I heard you got a job in finance, you must be really excited!!”); a little later, the revelation of my true purpose (“I’m looking for a place to live!!!”). The exclamation points were a bad habit, which I had many years ago gotten into my head as a way to “shine through” the impersonal nature of e-mail, and which George eventually derided upon his receipt of an e-mail concerning the delivery of a garment rack to the Art Department: “Ethan, what are you so goddamn excited about?”
The first apartment suggested to me was located near Bergdorf Goodman and the Plaza Hotel, which I had read about in The Great Gatsby. “Is that for a year?” I responded, referring to the rent. “I’ll take it!” Of course, it was soon revealed that what I thought was a yearly cost was monthly, and after that came a sickening chorus of corpse-like thuds as the heavy numbers dropped into my poor, unsuspecting inbox. Others had warned me that Manhattan was “expensive,” and I had always rolled my eyes: Any detractors of mythological New York City didn’t deserve its golden glories and should take their leave to a sadder, merely mortal, corner of the world.
After two nights of increasingly desperate copy-pasting—and eventually, phone calls—I concluded my entire savings would scarcely cover a month’s rent in any of these legendary areas of Manhattan, and the hopeless thought crossed my mind that if Régine didn’t work out, it would be my own life subjected to sub-mythical misery, after a plebeian-class flight to Corpus Christi ensured the fading of my limitless p
otential into dust.
Of course, Madeline had offered to put me up. “You can even choose which guest room,” she implored. “My parents would be delighted”—and I knew that she was right. The Dupres had loved me since our Christmas trip to Gstaad, especially the perpetually narcotized Mrs. Dupre, who got an adorable thrill from introducing me at events as “my daughter’s co-conspirator, Mr. St. James.” But by that point, things with Dorian had already complicated matters, and the lines between Madeline and me had blurred. Were we just friends, or something more? And if the latter, what would it mean if Dorian came back?
That Dorian had dated Madeline muddied the crystal waters of possibility between us; although it had only been after Dorian had “ruined” our lives that I learned the truth about myself—that all along, I wasn’t gay or straight, really. I craved neither male nor female company specifically, but rather a deep, existential bond, which I had found in Dorian and Madeline alike. After that, it was glaringly obvious: I was in love with my two best friends, while they had fallen in love with each other.
When the reality of my financial situation set in, the desperate thought passed through my head that maybe Madeline’s guest room wasn’t such a bad idea. I would only stay a week—a month, maximum, until, I thought, I got a job at Régine, and was drenched in fame and fortune. But then Aaron, from my friend Li’s sailing team, got me in touch with his older brother, Michael, who advised me to call his girlfriend, Catrina, whose best friend, Veronica, from Cornell had a “loft bedroom” she was looking to rent in Soho. To explain its supernatural cheapness, Veronica did mention its “unusual proportions” in the optimistic tone of a broker who noted the benefits of fine company and nutritious daily platters while renting out a county prison cell. Veronica said the guy before really liked it—“found it cozy,” was her exact phrase—and I mean, so did I for about five minutes, until crawling up the ladder to inaugurate the mattress with my own blue-and-white striped bedsheets, I smashed my head against the tin ceiling for the first time.
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