Ari had been feeling itchy and bored of Elliot and his university friends. They were so achingly earnest. His affair with the professor satiated something, but it wasn’t enough. He longed for the rampant nihilism that he’d lost himself in at high school. So, one Friday night in the middle of fall semester, he arranged a reunion with some of the girlfriends he’d pretended to like back when they were in senior year together. They were to meet at an expensive Asian restaurant in the Meatpacking District. It was one of the places in Manhattan that didn’t ask for ID as long as the nineteen-year-olds kept tipping.
Dr Hines’s six o’clock eyebrow lift client had cancelled at the last minute, contributing to his tight mood, and he was pacing the living room with a Scotch, waiting for Ari to get in his way.
‘You’re seriously going out like that?’ he said.
‘I am,’ Ari replied, bolder than he’d intended, and Randolph smiled unkindly then ripped open Ari’s cream silk blouse. Pearl buttons dropped to the floor and scattered in the silence. Father and son made eye contact, by accident, and in that split second saw all the complicated corners of each other’s shame.
Ari knew better than to protest. He picked up his purse, flinging the gold chain across his body so that it held the two sides of his shirt together.
‘Don’t wait up,’ he said. He made his way to the elevator that opened into the reception room, pushed the down button, and waited, praying that this was where it ended.
‘Is that your mother’s purse?’
The doors to the elevator dinged open and he stepped in, willing them to close.
‘She gave it to me,’ he said, ‘for my birthday.’ Randolph’s spluttering, twisted face was the last thing he saw before the doors slid shut.
Downstairs, he leant against the wall of his building, panic fluttering at the top of his chest. He took a steadying breath and smoothed down his shirt where the buttons should have been, then walked quickly the six blocks to the Mark Hotel and without stopping glided straight through the glass doors and up to the black lacquered bar, where he sat on a red leather stool and ordered two vodka rocks from a server he’d fucked in the alleyway when he was seventeen. Slowly the very specific guilt he felt about leaving his mom alone with his consequences slipped into more of a general malaise.
Later, he was barely present for dinner with his old friends. Not that the harem of mean girls cared. He looked good and that was what mattered. He managed to eat two sushi rolls before a curdling feeling in his stomach stopped him from making any further dent in the feast they’d ordered, more to prove their wealth than to actually eat. The night ended, as nights with his high-school friends often did, in a hotel room with a pack of young Wall Street guys. Ari knew that his serving pretty was something straight men were comfortable taking ownership of. He was ‘one of the girls’. How far this went depended usually on how much cocaine he snorted off the corner of someone’s black card, and how much that made him willing to take off his self, as if it was a tuxedo jacket he could hang on the back of a chair.
Ari could be anyone’s fantasy if he felt like it. That night, he couldn’t remember exactly what happened in the build-up, but he knew he’d finished off the better-looking banker while Maddox was sick in a champagne bucket. He woke up the next morning on the back seat of Maddox’s town car in a garage under her building. His nostrils burned; his mouth felt like cotton wool. He flipped open his phone:
Lmk when ur alive, u looked so peaceful I figured I’d leave you there to sleep. Mx
Maddox had her housekeeper bring him down a toothbrush and toothpaste, which he took as his cue to peel himself from the car and out through the fire exit onto Park Avenue. Grateful that it was the weekend, and he didn’t need to run to a lecture, he walked slowly home along the perimeter of the park. He was anxious about the state he’d find his mother in.
Back at the apartment, he was surprised to encounter a scene of domestic peace. Randolph was sitting at the kitchen table reading the New York Times, Connie was making coffee. Ari had no time to unpick the atmosphere because Randolph slapped the newspaper on the kitchen table and declared that they were going to brunch, as a family. And could Ari at least try not to look like he’d escaped from the circus, and could Connie just fucking smile once in a while or didn’t they teach her that at modelling school?
It was a slate-grey November morning and Ari would rather have been anywhere else than sitting around a restaurant table with his parents. When he caught his mom’s eye, they both had to stifle a laugh and hide behind their menus, it felt so ridiculous. The place was sceney and buzzing with off-duty somebodies. It was all red leather and shiny brass fixtures, and Ari found the clatter of crockery coupled with the cacophony of show-offy chatter insufferable.
Randolph sent his eggs back twice. Once because they were undercooked. ‘Do you need me to come back there and poach them myself?’ he said, looking for a laugh from one of them and not getting it. And then again because they were overdone. ‘These are golf balls!’
The server, a guy Ari recognised from the scene, mouthed, ‘Wow,’ and when he took his plate, Ari whispered, ‘Save me.’ The three of them had literally nothing to say to each other, so they sat in uncomfortable silence until two men with gym bodies and faces that looked as if they’d been badly Photoshopped appeared at the table. One was clutching a small French bulldog, and they were both smiling as much as their frozen muscles would allow.
‘Jonathan! Peter!’ Randolph jack-in-the-boxed from his seat, suddenly dripping in charm. And then, to Ari’s horror, leant in to air-kiss them both. ‘You’re looking well, boys,’ he said.
‘Oh, and who do we have to thank for that, Doctor?’ said the one not holding the dog. They proceeded to loudly discuss their personal trainers, the closure of their members’ club’s rooftop pool, and where Randolph had his suits made.
‘You know, I said to Jonathan after our last appointment, I must get the name of Dr Hines’s tailor, he always looks so well fitted, didn’t I say that, honey?’
The man with the tiny dog cradled in his bulging biceps nodded enthusiastically. ‘You did, honey,’ he said.
‘Oh, you two,’ said Randolph. ‘Stop it, you’re embarrassing me!’
They laughed. Ari and Connie looked on aghast.
‘We’re seeing Pablo at two, so gotta shoot. Ciao,’ said Jonathan.
‘Ciao,’ said Peter.
‘Ciao, boys, bye,’ said Randolph.
Of course, he didn’t introduce his family, and neither of the men or their dog seemed to notice them. For the duration of the conversation, Connie and Ari had been sitting at the table staring up at them in disbelief. How bizarre it was to catch a glimpse of the man who terrorised them wearing this mask. ‘Gotta be one of the best married couples I know,’ said Randolph to no one in particular after they left. Dead to the
irony, he went on, ‘Really great guys.’
This incident compounded Ari’s belief that the homophobia his father directed his way was lacking substance. When he called him a pussy and a freak, it was like watching an actor at a table read: he wasn’t fully committed. Ari’s queerness gave Randolph something convenient to hang his hatred from, but the true source of his anger, the place it started, was something else, Ari was sure of it.
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From This Love. Used with permission of the publisher, Harper Perennial. Copyright © 2025 by Lotte Jeffs.
