The invitation did not arrive at a good time in my life. I could see why Will, my ex-boyfriend, might have been led to believe that I was happy, settled, and emotionally mature enough to attend his birthday party. Surely I had moved on, harbored no petty resentments, observed no childish prohibitions against becoming friends with former lovers, could see the appeal in a healthy rapprochement. This was what he must have assumed, understandably. In the three years since we’d broken up I’d crafted an online image tailored to the perpetuation of this fiction. I posted smiling selfies from trips to Provincetown and the Pines, I retweeted thoughtful articles from The New Yorker and the New Left Review, I updated my LinkedIn page with puffed-up job titles and fallacious date ranges, I sent Venmo requests with notes of shrill and robotic good cheer: Negronis and nibbles—no regrets! Will could have no way of knowing I was the same person he’d exiled from his luxury apartment in Midtown West. And I wasn’t the same person. I was worse.
My theory about why Will had invited me to his second home in the Hudson Valley was complicated, however, by the invitation itself. The email, sent to a BCC list of unknowable recipients, came from both Will and Patrick, Will’s fiancé, and while I had little idea what Patrick sounded like—only what he looked like, where he was from and where he’d gone to school, roughly how much he made: fruits of my stalking and interrogations of friends—the writing didn’t smack of the Will I knew. Will was a corporate lawyer with a kielbasa between his legs and he acted like one: laconic, modest, easygoing, allergic to drama. These, on the other hand, were the words of a florid gay sociopath.
Dearest friends,
At long last we’ve completed the renovation from hell, and now we’d like you to help us make our upstate home a heaven. Join us in celebrating Will’s thirty-fifth year—it promises to be the best yet, but only if you grace us with the fairy dust of your presence. Bring nothing—only good spirits, laughter, empty bellies, your beautiful selves. We’ll take care of the rest.
X & O,
W & P
Below the email was a picture of Will and Patrick in front of an old two-story farmhouse with fresh white paint, new casement windows, a handsome stone chimney, and a front porch outfitted with svelte wooden rocking chairs and a firewood holder stacked with perfect blond logs. I zoomed in on Will and Patrick. Will was making his usual face: smirking with one side of his mouth, looking away slightly, waiting for the picture to be over. Patrick, however, was staring right at the camera, smiling violently, radiating a glow borne of Botox and expensive serums, a layered intensity in his eyes. The more I studied the picture the more I felt he was staring directly at me.
Will could have no way of knowing I was the same person he’d exiled from his luxury apartment in Midtown West. And I wasn’t the same person. I was worse.
Monster, I thought. I shot back from my desk, scaring a pigeon from my windowsill. From my bedroom I could smell one of my roommates pickling something in the kitchen. Will might have had a casual interest in patching things up, but it was Patrick’s idea to invite me: of this I became convinced. Patrick knew Will and I had been together for six years, he knew I was Will’s first love, he probably tormented himself imagining happy memories his own would never replace. But he’d won. He had a ring on his finger, a place in Will’s bed, a country house, and a wedding to plan. He had triumphed, and he wanted me to know it. He’d invited me to certify his victory and my defeat.
I first thought about not replying at all, then about how to reply: exactly how long to wait, how exactly to word my no. But eventually I landed on the decision that I’d only been delaying: I would go. Only in the flesh could I make sure the lie of my perfect life convinced, only in the flesh could I remind Will of what he’d given up, and only in the flesh could I challenge Patrick’s supremacy.
Getting to the party would be onerous. The closest Amtrak station, Hudson, was almost thirty minutes from their house, and from my few trips upstate I knew Ubers there were hard to come by. I’d already have to pay for lodging; the cost of a rental car would put me even further beyond my budget. But then it came to me. I called my friend Adam.
“Are you going anywhere the weekend of the seventeenth?” I asked.
“No,” Adam said. “You want to do something?”
“I need your car.”
Adam and I had met in a PhD program that we’d both quit. Our fortunes since then had sharply diverged. While I kept myself alive with adjuncting, SAT tutoring, delusions of novel writing, and gaycations that I paid for on credit and drank too much to remember, Adam had taken a cushy job in corporate communications and settled down with a grotesquely likable pediatrician. I tried to quell my resentment as best I could. Aside from a few friends from my Will days, whom I only kept in touch with so as to keep tabs on Will, Adam was the only friend I had.
On the day of the party I met Adam outside his building, where the car, an inheritance from his recently deceased grandmother, was parked inside a moat of loose trash. “Go easy on her,” Adam said, tapping the hood.
The car was a Volvo sedan from 2006 and looked every year of it. Its front fender was cracked, its rear right window was lined with duct tape, and its body panels were mottled with creeping rust. “Why do you keep this thing?” I said. “You can afford a new one.”
Adam shrugged. “Sentimental value.”
I peered inside and noticed that part of the car’s ceiling had become detached. “But is it OK to drive?”
Adam tilted his head as he stared pityingly at the windshield. “Within reason,” he said. “Where are you going, anyway?”
I told Adam my plan. Tonight, at Will’s birthday party, I would give the performance of a lifetime. In Brooklyn I might be a gig worker with no feasible path out of my abjection. But in the Hudson Valley I would be someone of vague but discernible promise, a person who was in talks and having meetings, a talent with his whole future ahead of him. And even though it would sting to return to my real life I could take comfort in having ensured that in the minds of Will and Patrick I lived a different one.
“Very Oscar Wilde,” Adam said. “Ernest in the city, Jack in the country.”
“Which one is Jack?”
“The bad one,” Adam said.
This was February. Within an hour I was on the Taconic and in a new climate. What had been rain in the city had been snow up here; the woods next to me were carpeted in clean white. The forecast predicted high winds and possible squalls, and every so often a cold gust heaved against the car and rattled the duct tape lining the rear window. The Volvo really was a piece of shit. The only thing that worked well was the seat heater, which made my groin feel like a toaster oven and which I couldn’t find the button to turn off. But I would brook no distractions; I would not be deterred. I sped around smooth curves and up and down gentle slopes, the temperature dropping, the landscape opening around me, thick gray clouds beckoning me north. I was unstoppable.
Will and Patrick’s party was not my only appointment in the Hudson Valley. I had another stop to make, one that I believed was crucial to my performance. Beforehand I would meet up with my friend Benji, who had just bought his own place upstate, not thirty minutes from Will and Patrick’s, and fuck him. I’d called Benji a week before to confirm that he wasn’t also attending the party, which to his high-pitched dismay he was not.
“How did they invite you and not me?” he asked.
“The Devil works in mysterious ways.”
“When I moved up here they said we’d hang out all the time. They barely return my texts. But I’m not surprised. I’m not in their league.”
Since buying their house, Benji explained, Will and Patrick had wasted no time establishing their place in the Hudson Valley aristocracy. Their friends in the area included a Rockefeller, a Disney executive, the heir to an Italian shipping fortune, and Alison Roman. On weekends they attended dinner parties where they feasted on locally murdered animals, discoursed on the scarcity of contractors experienced in wainscoting, and bemoaned the late frost that had killed that season’s plums. They all drove Land Rovers and rarely went into town.
“You can see why I didn’t make the cut,” Benji said.
“Are you free Saturday?” I asked. “I can think of one way to vent your frustration.”
Benji demurred for only a moment; gay coquetry moves at light speed. “I’ll be around,” he said. “You can come see my dirty little house.”
“I’m sure I’ll love it,” I said.
When I crossed the bridge near Hudson I noticed that all three of my stops were located along the same country route: my Airbnb to the north in Cairo, Benji’s house to the south in Saugerties, and Will and Patrick’s smack in the middle in Palenville. I arrived at the first of these shortly after one. It was a refurbished detached garage behind the home of an older couple and was, I confirmed upon entering, decorated in the characterless style of Airbnbs everywhere: framed nature scenes bearing little resemblance to the local landscape, metal end tables and plastic drinkware, bright throw pillows on stiff tufted chairs. I set down my bag, poured myself a glass of wine, did a bump of ketamine, and sat on the couch.
Benji, annoyingly, had texted me on the way up to tell me he was painting and couldn’t hang out until five-thirty, rather than three o’clock as we’d agreed. I need need NEED to finish this room, he’d written. But then I’ll be ready for my reward 😉. This threw a wrench in plan but only a minor one, and in fact possibly worked to my advantage. I had the idea that a pre-party fuck would settle my nerves, imbue me with confidence, assist me in radiating a kind of slatternly, devil-may-care self-satisfaction. And while I’d planned on returning to my Airbnb and showering before arriving at Will and Patrick’s at seven I now thrilled to the thought of heading to the party directly from Benji’s, remnants of his saliva still on my neck, a coating of lube still on my dick, the heat of our exertions still in my cheeks. No problem, I wrote to Benji. Paint away.
I whiled away the intervening hours as I best knew how. I poured myself a second glass of wine, showered, dressed, poured myself a third glass and then a fourth. By the time I was ready to leave I was blissfully buzzed that I was practically leaping in balletic drifts through the Airbnb. I felt primed, determined, on the cusp of something, radiant. Only briefly did it occur to me that this state of freewheeling inebriation was precisely the one in which Will had found me—first on a weekly, then semiweekly, then daily basis—in the months before he’d told me to pack my things and go.
Outside I had to turn the Volvo’s ignition three times before it started—Adam really did need a new car. I hoped, at least, that the seater had given out, but soon enough I felt it roasting my groin, and I worried what this meant for my prospects of a blowjob: I’d show up to Benji’s with swamp crotch.
Because I would be passing Will and Patrick’s house along the way I saw no reason not to engage in some brief reconnaissance, and when I closed in on their address some fifteen minutes later I came to a near stop. Their stretch of road was almost deserted—I could see only one other house, high up on a hill across the way. Dense woods ran to the shoulder on either side, and cool evening light threw the tree branches into sharp relief. A little ways up I noticed the remnants of a stone wall, and on the slope above it I saw the flash of a deer. I wondered what this pastoral landscape would have to say about its increasing monopolization by city gays, with their Delta SkyMiles and synthetic lubricants. I peered at Will and Patrick’s house and was pained to find that it was evening more charming in person. I imagined the warmth inside, the marinating meats and pitchers of cocktails, the gentle music and narcotizing security. Then I saw a body in a window and sped away.
Benji’s house was a smallish ranch from the seventies with ugly brick siding and a roof in need of replacing. I parked, swallowed a piece of gum, and headed for the entrance. I would have texted him first to let him know I was outside, per standard hookup protocol, but on the country road I had no service.
Benji came to the door in a seasonally inappropriate tank top and a pair of tight sweatpants splattered with white paint.
“Lovely place,” I said to him.
“Take off your shoes.”
When I entered I saw that Benji lived in a construction site. The living room’s walls were bordered in painting tape and its floor was covered in a clear plastic tarp. The kitchen island was missing its countertop and the guest bathroom had been gutted, its plumbing disconnected and the toilet and sink removed from the wall.
“I know, I know, I know,” Benji said as he took my coat and threw it over the only chair in sight. “I covered the down payment and my parents said they’d cover the renovation. That was the deal. And now they’re furious at me. How was I supposed to know there was no hardwood under the carpet? Am I supposed to live with carpet?”
Benji was exactly as I remembered him. He had dense, dark hair, thick-framed glasses, and an ass of staggering heft and antigravitational buoyancy. He was pouty, sensitive, put-upon, entitled, a person assailed by the indignities of a world that did not adequately recognize his specialness, and in conversation these qualities made him a bore. But in a hookup context they made me want to rip off his clothes.
“I’m sure you’ll get your way,” I said, “if you cry hard enough.”
Benji looked away coyly. “I can show you my bedroom,” he said. “It’s the only room that’s finished.”
“It’s the only room we need,” I said.
In the bedroom Benji made a final attempt at evasion, explaining his choice of wall color, pointing out the spoils of his antiquing, and showing me the en suite bathroom with its floating tub. But it was already almost six, my erection was painful, and I had no interest in suffering the gloating of another landowning upstate gay, so I told Benji I wanted to test the softness of his new bed and lay back on it.
“Yes,” I said. “Very soft.”
Benji climbed onto the bed and sat up on his knees. “You haven’t grown up at all.”
“Is that a problem?”
“Not for my purposes.”
The hookup commenced, and Benji was as frisky as I recalled. I kept telling him not to mess up my hair, and when he began tearing at my shirt buttons I pushed him away and took off my clothes myself: I’d spent three hundred dollars I didn’t have on a new outfit for the party and didn’t want wrinkles.
Once we were naked Benji became rabid—underneath the finicky princess was a beast. He put his face between my legs, he wrangled us into the sixty-nine position, he lay on his stomach and reached for the lube. Only when I’d slathered myself and initiated my approach did the princess briefly return.
“Go slowly,” he said. “It’s been a while.”
I nodded reassuringly but smiled to myself: he always said this, and within a minute he was always berating me for being too gentle.
I successfully penetrated the barricade, and we sighed together in satisfaction, and I would like to say that the next ten minutes were as uncomplicated and pleasurable as I’d hoped. I would like to say that Benji and I had a simple rambunctious fuck: worked up a sweat, orgasmed in near unison, and congratulated ourselves on our still robust carnal prowess. I would like to say that I left Benji’s house empty of cum and full of vigor, and that I arrived at Will and Patrick’s afloat on the current of confidence on which I’d predicted my romp with Benji would put me. And for the first few minutes I had every reason to believe my plan would succeed. Benji, per expectation, began demanding that I go harder. He helped things along by pushing back against my pelvis. He screamed into the mattress, clawed at his pillows, shrieked with delight. And it was delightful—it was the happiest moment I’d had in weeks—until it wasn’t. Suddenly the chemical makeup of the air in the room shifted. Benji and I both smelled it at once.
“Stop,” he said.
I already had. I was lying against his back, my head next to his, my eyes shut.
“Check,” he said.
I slowly raised myself up. I was hoping the spillage had been contained to unseen quarters, but this was not the case. It was, in fact, the worst I’d ever seen. It was all over my pelvis, all over Benji’s cheeks, all over the white duvet beneath us. I forced back a gag, and this sufficed as a confirmation.
“Take it out,” Benji said. “Get a towel.”
“I will,” I said. “But it’s already everywhere.”
“How was I supposed to know there was no hardwood under the carpet? Am I supposed to live with carpet?”
Benji carefully craned his neck and, when he saw the extent of the damage, let out a scream. In his panic he climbed forward, releasing my dick and freeing further quantifies of liquified shit, which fell to the duvet in thick drops. He saw these and screamed again and flew off the bed, letting fall more brown drops on the white shag rug until he disappeared into the en suite bathroom. He locked the door.
I eased myself off the bed, holding my breath as best I could, words of comfort at the ready. “It’s fine,” I called to Benji. “It happens! What can I do?”
“You can shut the fuck up!” Benji cried. I heard him turn on the faucet and then plop down on the toilet, where he made sounds that the faucet failed to mask. “You can shut right the fuck up!”
Benji was once again a princess, affronted at every turn, and I let him be while I inspected my body. The spillage had reached as far as my upper thighs and my navel, and my groin was absolutely caked—I looked like I’d made love to a pot of mole. I glanced around for tissues, towels, fabrics that could be ruined without causing strife, but I could see only blankets and, in the closet, extra sheets that Benji had surely paid too much money for. I decided to wait until the bathroom was free, but the faucet continued to run. After five long minutes I called out to Benji:
“Just let me know when you’re done in there.”
“Oh my God,” Benji wailed. “You’re still here?”
“Of course I’m still here. Where am I supposed to go?”
“Away!” Benji said. “Go away!”
“Benji, I’m covered.”
“I don’t care!”
“I need to shower. Take as long as you need, but I need to shower.”
“Go back to your Airbnb! Shower there!”
“Benji, I don’t have time.”
“I am humiliated,” Benji said. “Do you understand that? You ruined my bed, you ruined my day, and you want me to rush?”
I disagreed wholeheartedly with his assessment but decided to let him preserve his pride. “I’m simply saying that when you’re done—”
“I am not coming out of this bathroom until you leave!”
“Benji.”
“Go away!” Benji said. “Get your stuff and go away!”
I stepped out of the bedroom. I decided that I didn’t need a shower and could manage well enough with a sink. But when I reached the end of the hall I remembered the guest bathroom had no plumbing, and when I looked at the kitchen sink I saw that it was crowded with painting gear and too high up: I’d have to stand on my tiptoes and even then I couldn’t be sure of cleaning myself thoroughly. I used paper towels to wipe away what I could but my pubes and happy trail were still saturated with feces. I stood for a moment, trembling, considering my options. And then I decided to comply. I would carefully put on my underwear, making sure not to soil my clothes, drive back to my Airbnb, shower, and arrive at Will and Patrick’s fashionably late.
“I’m leaving,” I called to Benji after I’d dressed. “It was great to see you.”
“Oh my God,” Benji howled.
I walked back to the car as if my legs lacked joints. The sun had set, the wind had picked up, and the forecasted squalls had arrived: sparse snowflakes blew by in the dim light. I had to turn the Volvo’s ignition five times before it started, and as I eased onto the country road it let out a terrible machine cough. “Please work,” I said to it prayerfully, still trembling. “One more day. Please.”
As I headed up the road the Volvo did indeed work, and in one respect I very much didn’t need it to. I felt the warmth under my lap and smelled with renewed acuity the spillage on my groin and let out a moan. The seat heater, I realized, was literally cooking Benji’s shit and suffusing Adam’s dead grandmother’s car with its stench. I made it a mile before I began gagging, my eyes welling up, my vision blurring. I put down the window but this helped only a little. I kept my focus on the cones of the headlights in front of me, accelerating the Volvo as much as it would allow, its windshield wipers useless against the snow.
When the car began mysteriously to slow, on a stretch of country road that I remembered with terrible clarity, I first thought it was skidding, or that one of its tires had become caught in a groove, and I turned the wheel to see if this would make a difference. But it continued to slow, from forty miles to thirty, then from twenty to ten, until it was crawling. Some rational instinct separate from my willpower and prayer told me to pull it closer to the shoulder—some part of me knew. And then a minute later the car came to a stop and the display on the dashboard went dark.
I turned the ignition twenty-five times. I pressed random buttons. I pulled out my phone and confirmed that I had no service. I banged my head against the steering wheel, I pounded the console with my fist, I screamed so loud I created a ringing in my ears. But there was no one to hear me, and there was nothing to do. The car was dead, I had no feasible means of fixing it, and I had no way of summoning help. I was stranded, and the only thing I could see, some two hundred yards away, was the soft light of Will and Patrick’s house.
No. It was the simplest, most obvious, most rational option but no, never—I would find some other way. I thought about walking but I was ten miles from my Airbnb and roughly the same distance from Benji’s, and I’d seen no gas station, hotel, or restaurant along the way where I could wash myself or use a phone. I thought about spending the night in the car but the temperature had dropped and I worried I would die of hypothermia. And then I remembered.
On the way down I’d noticed, across the way from Will and Patrick’s, a lone house high on a hill. I would ask the owners if I could use their phone to call a cab or—depending on the kindness of these particular strangers—see if they might be willing to drive me to my Airbnb. Clearly, my performance at Will and Patrick’s wasn’t happening, and maybe that was for the best.
I walked along the shoulder until I saw the neighbor’s house through the trees, a single window glowing in the darkness. The driveway was long, curved, and steep, and I wondered how any car ever made it up. I picked my way along the winding asphalt, the new oxfords I’d bought for the party slipping and sliding on the snow, the woods black and silent around me.
When I reached the house, a newly built Craftsman, I saw that the lone lit window was actually the transom over the front door, behind which a ceiling light had been left on, and I felt my stomach sink. I rang the bell and listened to the echo of the chime. I rang again, waited, rang again, waited, but my sinking feeling was vindicated. The house was empty. The owners, probably more gays with more interesting places to be, had left the foyer light only as a deterrent.
I made my way back to the driveway in numb resignation. The only option now was to wait for a passing car, and I thought of everything working against me—the low visibility, the conventional wisdom against picking up hitchhikers, the fact that I hadn’t seen a single pair of headlights yet—as I began my descent. And it was probably owing to my numbness, to my unwillingness to raise my head and face the blasted terrain around me, that, while stepping around a hairpin turn at the top of the driveway, I slipped.
I tried to catch myself but my new oxfords offered no traction, and when I threw my weight in an attempt to counterbalance myself I slipped further. I lost my balance, tripped on a root, tumbled onto the slope, and then for ten long seconds rolled—catching branches in my face and snow in my mouth and mud in my hair with every turn—to the bottom of the hill, where I came to a stop.
I lay on the ground, wheezing. I was thoroughly wet with snow and mud, and when I stood I found that I was limping—I’d twisted an ankle. I bent forward and caught my breath as I looked up the blank road, at the woods on either side of me, at the snowflakes bulleting down from the sky. I felt my hair freezing, my bones chilling, my body quivering, my lungs aching. If I waited any longer I would collapse.
The warm light of Will and Patrick’s beckoned me forward instinctively. I was in survival mode now. I had nothing else to cling to. I’d lost my pride, my vanity, my anger, and my fear: everything, in other words, of which my self as I understood it consisted.
My plan was to ring the bell and, assuming Will came to the door, usher him outside, explain my situation, and plead with him to sneak me to a bathroom unseen. As I approached the house I heard voices and music and saw silhouettes moving merrily in the windows. I turned my gaze to the ground, found the bell with my hand, and waited.
The body that appeared in the doorway belonged to Patrick. Somehow, despite my circumstances, I had the clarity of mind to observe that he was shorter than I thought and also heavier: he had a ring of pudge around the base of his stomach that had remained mysteriously absent from every photo of him I’d ever seen. I expected his eyes to bulge with dismay, but he only squinted and smiled, and I realized with alarm that the light from the doorway was too dim to illuminate my muddied body. He could see only the contours of my face.
“Come in!” he cried.
“Hi,” I said. “Hello. If you could just—”
“Hurry!” he said. “You’re letting in the cold!”
He was talking loudly enough, I sensed, for the other guests to hear him, and I worried continuing this conversation would only increase my exposure. I saw a staircase behind him. Maybe once I’d stepped into the light and he’d seen my clothes he’d spirit me to the second floor. I entered.
During their renovation Will and Patrick appeared to have knocked down walls, and the entryway was in full view of the living room. Gathered therein was a small crowd of people in smart country dress, holding cocktails and glowing expensively under the room’s sputnik chandelier. I saw eight or so men who were manifestly gay, a few heterosexual couples, and a woman refilling her drink from the punch bowl on the sideboard who, turning, revealed herself to be Alison Roman.
Will walked in from the kitchen holding a tray of cured meat. When he saw me the tray slipped in his hands. “Neil,” he said.
A man in the living room said, “Yeah?”
Patrick, beholding me with dawning horror, gestured at me and said softly, “No, this is the other Neil.”
Some sixth sense began to whir in my mind, and I felt a prickle of understanding pass up my spine. Everyone in the room was now looking at me, and in a perverse display of respect someone had turned down the music. On the near end of the coffee table a three-wick candle was burning, and I inhaled its aroma happily, detecting vetiver and fig, grateful to be relieved of the stench of the spillage. But I suspected the other guests were having the reverse olfactory experience, because I saw several of them, Will included, moving their eyes up and down my body and taking small investigatory sniffs. It was then that I noticed a mirror by the staircase and, summoning the last of my courage, looked at my reflection.
I was a monster. I had twigs in my hair, brown needles on my face, smears of mud on my forehead and down my coat. I was mortified, and yet it would be a lie to say that I didn’t recognize myself. The person in the mirror was me, more clearly than I’ve ever seen him.
Patrick, scrunching his nose, said, “Do you need to refresh yourself?”
“I fell,” I said in a whisper. “I fell very, very far.”
“Let’s go upstairs to the bathroom,” Patrick said. He turned to the other guests chipperly. “Eat—please! We’ll be right back.”
Upstairs Patrick guided me into his and Will’s bedroom. I readied myself for a space of taunting luxury, but the decorating scheme was surprisingly subdued: a queen-size bed with a green linen duvet, a wooden chair with a white blanket thrown over its back, a trunk with faded black leather straps.
“You shower,” Patrick said to me. He was looking at me frankly now, without alarm or judgment, and speaking in a tone of collegial respect. “I’ll lend you some of my clothes, and I’ll put all this”—he gestured at my outfit without looking at it—“in the laundry.”
“That’s not necessary,” I said. “If you could just give me a bag. A trash bag.”
He tilted his head but said nothing, and then he nodded and fetched me a towel and new things to wear. “I’ll be right here,” he said. “Take your time.”
Will and Patrick’s shower was tiled green like their duvet, and it had a rainfall head that I would have sneered at if I didn’t find it, at that moment, so lovely. I felt as if I were undergoing a baptism. Afterward I put on the clothes that Patrick had given me: a navy blue button-down with a subtle gold pattern, dark jeans, oxford shoes of which my own looked like a cheap prototype. The articles were understated but I could tell from their textures they were upscale—even the socks and underwear felt marvelous in my hands—and later I would look up each item online and discover that I’d been wearing a $780 outfit. I left the bathroom and found that Patrick had waited for me as promised. He was sitting on the bed and I joined him.
“My car died,” I said. “And then I . . . tried walking.”
This was a laughable lie of omission, and I could tell Patrick knew. The gravity of his expression, the kindness of it, expressed as much. “We’ll call you a cab,” he said. “They take an hour to get here, so just let me know in advance.”
“You can call it now,” I said. “I won’t stay long.”
“Please,” he said. “At least enjoy the party.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I wanted to.”
I was mortified, and yet it would be a lie to say that I didn’t recognize myself.
Patrick said nothing for a moment, and I met his gaze. I hadn’t been fully wrong in my digital assessment of him. He was a shrewd, competitive, surface-obsessed gay, and I saw these things clearly in his eyes. But I felt the last of my enmity dissipating, because I also saw other things. Patrick wasn’t evil, I realized. He was just happy and rich. And I could no longer muster the energy to hate him for it.
“We’re glad you came,” he said. “For however long. Under whatever circumstances.”
I sensed that he was trying to get back to the party, but first I had a question—the sixth sense continued to whir in my mind. “Why did you invite me?” I asked. “There can’t be more than twenty people here. You must have dozens of friends in the area. I haven’t seen Will in three years, and I’m not even a friend.”
Patrick opened his mouth to speak, but I could tell he was about to lie and he could tell I could tell. He remained silent for a moment, during which he seemed to decide that I deserved the truth.
“It was a mistake,” he said. He tightened his face hearing his own words. “We meant to invite the other Neil—the one downstairs. He’s really more my friend, but we were sending the email from Will’s account, and I guess your name came up first.”
I had nothing to say; I had nothing to feel. The bank of my shame was empty.
“We thought about emailing you to explain,” Patrick said. “But we couldn’t. And then we decided maybe it was a happy accident. Time for you and Will to see each other again. Time for me to meet the person he still talks about constantly.”
“Will talks about me?” I asked.
Patrick nodded. “‘The smartest person I ever met.’”
“Will isn’t that smart.”
Patrick laughed. “You,” he said. “That’s what Will says about you.”
In the intervening silence the sounds of the party drifted upstairs. I ran my hands over my knees, enjoying the softness of Patrick’s jeans, the heat of his shower still warming my limbs.
“I’ll call the cab,” Patrick said.
“Thank you,” I said.
Patrick and I joined the party, and for the next hour I moved around the room, making mostly failed attempts at small talk. I did my best to avoid falling into conversation with Will, but eventually he cornered me, and for a few minutes we talked blandly and politely. Six years of my life, the happiest I’d ever known and perhaps ever would, looked down on me through his gentle brown eyes. And though I smiled and nodded at appropriate intervals I hardly listened to anything he said because I was too busy watching as my last delusion died. There was no lucky break awaiting me. Fortune favored some people and passed over others. The fact that happiness had eluded me for so long did not mean that it was on the horizon. The sooner I accepted this the sooner I would know peace. I continued to smile as the knots that had held me together for the last three years came undone. And then Patrick whispered to me that the cab had arrived, and I said my goodbyes and left.
When I returned to the Airbnb and had cell service again I called Adam and told him about the car. I said I was sorry, that there was nothing I could do, that I’d make calls in the morning and have it towed to a shop. I said I’d pay for the repair, that I’d do anything to make it up to him, really. But he interrupted me.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Just tell me where it is and I’ll have it taken to the nearest pound.”
“The pound? Adam, no, please—”
“It’s time,” he said. “That thing is well past its expiration date. At a certain point you have to let go. You know what I mean?”
I didn’t answer him. We said good night and I put down the phone, and for a while I simply sat on the stiff Airbnb couch, staring at the nature prints on the wall. And then, for the first time in three years, I put my face in my hands and sobbed. It came and went quickly, as it had three years before, and while I remembered the ugliness of it I remembered, too, the unexpected sensations that followed. The colors around me were brighter, the objects in the room nearer, the silence absolute and not displeasing.
The next morning I called a cab and took the train back from Hudson. Patrick never asked about the clothes he’d lent me, and I never returned them.