Bitterfeld (sharply satirical but deeply felt)
CHAPTER ONE
Carver Novack had been trying to avoid thinking about Scott McCaffrey for eighteen years.
Scott replied, in a green Android bubble: “thanks man :)”. Carver let himself spend four minutes wondering about the smiley face before remounting his campaign of avoidance.
But when he got a save-the-date card for his cousin Letty’s wedding the following May, he knew what it meant.
Scott had been friends with both Carver and Letty growing up.
Letty had stayed friends with him, in fact, because they were both into motorcycles.
He would be at this wedding. He would be set loose on their hometown of Bitterfeld, New York, strutting around in disreputable clothes and pretending he didn’t come from its wealth.
“Maybe we shouldn’t bother with my cousin’s wedding,” Carver said to his wife Lillian one Saturday afternoon as they rode their individual Peletons, spaced five feet apart so they didn’t sweat on each other.
Their home gym overlooked Manhattan, so they could see the city while they pedaled frantically, as if biking toward the edge of a roof.
Lillian gave him a look of cutting disbelief. She fired disbelief at people willy-nilly like a small-town cop. They were on minute forty-four of an hour-long workout, but her blonde ponytail remained pristine. “Why not?”
“We’re so busy at work,” Carver said lamely. They worked together as the two managing directors of the healthcare division in the private equity group at Blackbrick, and they were wrapping up two major acquisitions. “It’s bad timing.”
“Oh, please,” Lillian said. “Work hard, play hard. Saying no would be rude, and I love weddings, they’re just high-stakes parties. Are you good? You’re clenching your teeth.”
Carver clambered off the Peloton. “It’s my shoulder,” he lied. He had torn his rotator cuff during his brief high school football career, and although he’d long since gone numb to the intermittent pain it caused him, he still used it to escape certain situations.
“You know how to not engage your shoulder when you bike,” Lillian said in a distracted voice, already back to looking at her phone.
“I’ve said before, it’s the Peloton, it locks you into one position for the whole ride. I’m gonna go lie down for ten minutes.”
Lillian laughed at her phone. “Wait, look at the tweet I just sent you.”
“I don’t want to look at anything.”
“If you’re sore, get in the red light booth. I’ll meet you there in fifteen.”
But Carver didn’t want to get in the red light booth — he didn’t like wearing the goggles.
He went upstairs to the cavernous master bedroom of their Tribeca duplex, got into bed and pulled the covers over his head.
After a few minutes of this, the bedroom door opened and the vacuuming sound from the hallway suddenly got much louder.
“Sorry, Mr. Novack,” the maid called. “Do you want me to skip the bedroom today?”
Carver just groaned in response. She kept vacuuming.
A lifetime ago, Scott McCaffrey had taken his virginity from him. Later, after things soured between them, he had half a mind to get it back, like it was a stolen lawn ornament or bike. Like he would see Scott out and about wearing his virginity like a bandana, and be able to snatch it off of him.
Scott wasn’t the last man Carver had sex with, but none of them lived up to him.
In fact a lot of them were piece of shit Wall Street guys who were the type to suck your balls one night, then call you a retarded faggot in the bullpen the next day after you misplaced a decimal point in an Instant Bloomberg message.
That wasn’t Scott. Scott was a musician, and sensitive. Scott had written him songs back in high school. Carver was mortified to find this out, and wanted the sheet music destroyed.
“But I know them by heart,” Scott told him when he said this, and strummed his guitar for emphasis. He looked like Skeet Ulrich then — he still did. Sloe-eyed and handsome with big teeth. “I know all my songs by heart.”
“Then I’ll kill you,” Carver snapped, because he was insane and at that time was extra insane as the result of waiting to hear back from colleges.
Scott just laughed. He knew how Carver was.
Around that time, in unguarded or sleepy moments, Carver kept fantasizing about forgoing college and running away with Scott. Then Scott bought a motorcycle and said he was driving it to California after graduation and Carver could come if he wished. And Carver had wished, but he had not come.
Carver went to Duke, then Goldman and then Blackbrick, where he met Lillian, the most gregarious and confident member of their whole cohort of first-year associates.
People either loved Lillian or hated her.
Men gathered in throngs to listen to her talk, then decided if they actually agreed with her once she went away.
Carver followed her around like a puppy and managed to draw her eye.
The guy he looked like, she told him, was Jared Leto in American Psycho.
Paul Allen, with the beautiful business card. Paul Allen, who gets murdered.
“Not the hair,” she said. His was dark and wavy. “But you have those fine features… big eyes. And you like to wear suspenders.”
It was late at night at a very rich client’s penthouse; drunk and sleeping people were strewn everywhere like the victims of a gas leak. They were lying together on a big off-white pouf. Rich people loved off-white and low lighting; it was like they were always all trying to fuck you.
Lillian added, “I’d like to take care of you,” and Carver got an erection from sheer relief.
He was very fond of Lillian. He wasn’t sure how attracted to her he was.
He knew she was beautiful in an ‘80s or ‘90s way.
She was blonde and buxom and as tall as he was, and always smiling and tossing her hair, showing her vigor.
Sometimes he grabbed her and groped her unexpectedly, and she would laugh happily, unless she was concentrating on something in which case she would snap his name at him like a whip.
He liked to admire Lillian as an objet d’art and watch other men desire her in public, and she didn’t bother him much.
He couldn’t relate when his adulterous and workaholic friends complained about their shouting, shoe-throwing wives.
His was controlling but almost terminally easygoing. Her heart rate never seemed to go up.
Whatever this aspect of her was, it was also what made her some sort of sociopath. The idea of misplacing millions of someone else’s cash, for instance, didn’t faze her at all. When deals got nasty, Carver leaned on her with impunity. She could handle anyone, even Russians.
So he married her and secretly fucked guys.
He suspected she knew this about him. She didn’t seem to care.
Carver figured she wouldn’t have been able to deal with a husband who didn’t have something wrong with him, who didn’t scurry around with men then come home still flustered with need because it was never enough.
Lillian needed someone she could put her thumb on. He was fine being that guy.
They even planned to have kids in a few years — they had frozen a bunch of embryos.
Carver just wasn’t sure either of them actually wanted kids.
They were into the second half of their thirties, and Lillian kept saying, “We’ll get to it.
” She sounded as calm then as she did when steering their sailboat.
But she had also once steered them into an algae bloom and stalled the outboard motor. We’ll get to it!
Carver suspected she didn’t like sex that much.
There was something cold and metallic about her which seemed to prevent this.
She was sweet, though. She knew what she was supposed to think and feel, and she did a good job pretending most of the time.
Carver suspected that she had her own extracurricular activities designed to satisfy her actual desires: watching through a two-way mirror as a guy in a gimp suit got whipped, or something.
So they only had sex a few times a year.
These days it was fun mostly for the novelty.
Part of the stain on Carver’s sexuality was the fact that he had bottomed for Scott. It didn’t matter how many subsequent guys he himself topped, or even bottomed for, because his first sexual experience would always be Scott introducing him to the delirious joys of his prostate.
Late one night in Carver’s bedroom, when his parents and sister were out of town for a volleyball tournament, Scott had found it inside him and rubbed it first with his fingers and then with his dick.
And Carver had moaned and then screamed through the empty house.
He couldn’t deny having screamed. A sparkling white ocean wave had crashed over him and carried him off in its foam.
The deepest muscles in his pelvis were throbbing with recognition, relief and joy.
They did this just a few weeks before Scott told him about California. They only did it that once before they parted ways on bad terms.
Carver had never really gotten over this. It was one of the most important sensations he’d ever experienced, and he would never feel it again. He could only fantasize about the memory, by now a copy of a copy of a copy. Other guys just didn’t feel the same way inside him.
During the act, Scott had kissed him in a bitey teenage way, like he couldn’t imagine ever needing anything else as badly as he needed Carver.
No one kissed like a teenager anymore. Even the teenagers weren’t teenagers anymore; between social media and everything else it felt like something in the world had died.
In Bitterfeld, Carver had been briefly alive. He was terrified to go back. Not only because of Scott but because he didn’t like seeing his parents. He loved them, but he liked them best over the phone.