The Altruists Page 4

  His twenties. A decade of sexual internships with attractive, interesting men he should’ve counted himself lucky to date—men who saw in him a handsome vessel to be filled according to their wishes.

  The first boyfriend he lived with, years before Carroll Street, was by all accounts a catch, fresh off the Theatre Arts track at Brown. Long-limbed and gorgeous, Shawn sported a high-and-tight undercut long before the white nationalists reclaimed it, his excellent grooming inspiring heretofore-unseen bouts of jealousy among Ethan’s female coworkers. Shawn was on flirting terms with every bartender in the borough and brought Ethan to club nights with no digital fingerprint, events you had to hear about the old-fashioned way, by living in the world. That he’d grown up poor in Appalachia made his commitment to the privileges and follies of his cosmopolitan contemporaries permissible—more than that, he was a veritable success story. Being poor in pastoral Pennsylvania was not the same as being poor in New York. To be poor in New York was still a form of “making it,” especially to bitter family back home, who, when asked, would simply say of Shawn, “He’s in New York,” which never failed to explain everything.

  They met when Shawn mistook him on the sidewalk for an actor friend. “Oh, whoops,” he’d said as he turned to face Ethan on the street.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, I—thought you were someone else.”

  “Oh. No,” he said. “I’m me.”

  Shawn’s eyes twinkled. “Hey. I’m on my way to this thing . . . it’s at a restaurant. A bakery, actually—a boozy bakery, you know? But at night it turns into an after-hours place. Do you like dancing?”

  Ethan was too startled to respond.

  “Oh, come on, it’ll be fun!”

  And that was that.

  Ethan was more escort than boyfriend. When Ethan wasn’t out of town for work, Shawn brought him to screenings, galleries, and block parties, unable to comprehend why anyone would live in such an expensive city if they weren’t going to get their money’s worth. Shawn thought youth was for hoarding experience; Ethan found most experiences draining and ephemeral. Nonetheless, two months after they had met, Shawn’s apartment was fumigated and he spent one awful week at Ethan’s then-place in East Williamsburg, where it became clear that Ethan lacked the energy to keep up with him on weeknights, which Shawn treated like weekends, in part because he was a half-employed stage manager and in part because Ethan suspected that Shawn, shark-like, would die if he ever stopped moving. Shawn returned home a day early, eager to get back, to get away, even though the exterminators had cautioned against it, advising he wait until the toxins had aired out.

  Teddy, two years later, was a better match. He was short and olive-skinned with whey-enhanced triceps and legs like matchsticks. All ambition, he’d landed a prestigious job clerking for a judge Wolfe, who was known for his staunch utilitarianism and his belief that the so-called adoption racket could be improved if couples selected children via auction.

  The job gave them plenty to talk about. “Oh my god,” Teddy would shout above the braggy din of a Financial District pub. “You would not believe what Judge Wolfe said today.” He worked insane hours that almost rivaled Ethan’s. When they did share a bed, every other weekend, Teddy, who thrice mentioned his “kinky side” during their first date, would lose himself in a Fleshjack while Ethan gave him a shoulder massage, after which he’d pass out, blaming his exhaustion on work and leaving Ethan in a state of rebuffed arousal. “I’m sorry, babe,” he’d say, drooling into his pillow. “Next time, I swear.”

  The relationships soon soured. Ethan’s passivity, which had allowed his partners to project such dazzling colors on him in the first place, did not make for easy cohabitation. A canonical family anecdote concerned the time that a young Ethan was sitting on the ground, drawing with crayons, when a family friend stepped on his hand. But the man didn’t notice, and stood there a good minute while Ethan suffered quietly, trying to keep his face from publishing his pain.

  “You’ll never see me again!” Shawn cried the day he left for good, appropriately theatric, lingering at the door of Ethan’s place. He stood there a while, waiting to be called back. “You’re never present, Ethan. You’re all hung up!” Ethan sat on his tufted love seat, toes pointed out at mirrored angles, staring at the V between his shoes.

  He liked to think he’d given up on dating before Carroll Street. On work and being in public too. But it was the last two years on this enviable block, where sun-gilded microgardens fragranced every foot, that had made a hermit of him. That had sealed him shut inside his life.

  THREE

  While in his senior year of college, a classmate of Maggie’s named Kevin Kismet invented a location-based dating app, RoseBox, which paired potential significant others on the basis of shared traumas. His idea was that race, class, educational background, taste in movies, and physical appearance were superficialities at best, and had nothing on the bonds between people who understood each other’s suffering: veterans, addicts, survivors of abuse. With the help of some friends in his Mobile App Development 300 course, he built an exhaustive list of adversities and wrote them into a simple matchmaking algorithm. Users built profiles based on their collected hardships. For example: If you never knew your father, the app would seek out other users who had grown up in a single-parent home. If you once endured a difficult surgery, RoseBox would find you a partner who had also gone under the knife. If you were picked on in school—and so forth. To pretty much everyone’s surprise, the app, which had begun as a homework assignment, exploded in popularity. Now, almost two years after he graduated, his company was valued in the tens of millions.

  A week after fainting at Emma’s birthday party, Maggie sat in a Bed-Stuy café, reading about Kismet’s upcoming IPO on her phone and ignoring a string of texts from Emma. She looked up from the screen with the world-weary sigh of a much older person.

  The café was squarely Warm Industrial, its walls paneled with salvaged wood beneath a maze of exposed ceiling pipes. Cage brass pendant lamps hung over crate shelves bearing burlap sacks of coffee beans. The word boulangerie was painted in arching gold copperplate across the street-facing window. She had chosen the café because it was roughly midway between her and Ethan’s respective neighborhoods, and because it was the kind of place he would like: upscale, and resembling his apartment. (He’d allowed her to visit him there only once. The interior was stylish but impersonal, a slick aesthetic that did not permit feeling.) On the exposed brick wall behind the counter, the café manager was hanging a Warholified portrait of Toussaint Louverture as a tribute to the neighborhood she was gentrifying.

  Maggie was beginning to worry that Ethan wouldn’t show at all. He wasn’t above bailing on her last-minute. He’d blame his absence on “social anxiety,” though Maggie didn’t find that defense convincing. It was a fine line between self-loathing and selfishness. They shared more than a prefix. Intelligent, sensitive, tall—here was a man with all the advantages. But what had he done with them? People with less than Ethan had accomplished much, much more. Besides, getting coffee with your sister hardly counted as “socializing,” and as someone who propelled her angst outward, she had trouble understanding her brother, the private multitudes he seemed to contain. She suspected that his desperate need for privacy and his bottomless well of ennui were merely symptoms of loneliness. She thought he needed someone he could be alone with. All his can’t-pick-up-the-phone evasiveness, all the tortured, you-wouldn’t-understand posturing—it was the cri de coeur of a social animal in isolation.

  She redirected her irritation back toward Kismet, then catapulted it at society writ large. It did not speak well of society at this still-early stage of the newish millennium that an idea like his was worth so much. RoseBox, with its “iconic” red heart-shaped profile border, had started as a joke. She’d heard Kismet say as much herself! At a Sig Nu charity benefit outside the student parking complex! Now that he wa
s rich, though, Kismet had become a real cupid, proselytizing on behalf of love every chance he got, appearing on Anderson Cooper to preach the bonding properties of shared victimhood and rebut detractors who wondered what he did with all that data.

  Maggie eyed the freelancers seated throughout the café, busily tapping their devices on the brushed-steel tables before them. Chances were that some of them were scrolling through RoseBox right now. She zeroed in on a handsomely stubbled guy by the counter with an Eye of Providence tattooed on his forearm. Maggie wondered what his issues were. OCD? Child of divorce? Touched by a priest? There were countless possibilities, all of them intriguing.

  She returned to her phone and after a minute of futzing found herself on the RoseBox download page. Well, she thought, now that she was here . . . And suddenly the app was downloading and Maggie’s checking account balance dropped ninety-nine cents, the money flickering between server farms before it disappeared.

  Holding the device close to her chest, she built her profile. TRAUMATIC PUBERTY? Of course. ANXIETY/DEPRESSION? Not clinically, but a definite yes. HISTORY OF BEING BULLIED? Well, she had chaired an anti-bullying campaign in middle school. Never mind that she’d mercilessly bullied people into joining.

  As the hardships grew increasingly niche and she arrived at LOSS OF PARENT AT FORMATIVE AGE, the person with whom Maggie shared this specific trauma crept through the café door.

  Ethan had become handsome late enough in life that it still surprised his sister. His short hair verged unexpectedly on blond. He had the rosy cheeks of a child. He was cocooned in a cozy, shawl-collared sweater that looked as soft as handled money. His belly seemed to bulge a bit, a slightly pregnant protrusion. She hadn’t seen him in at least two months, but Maggie knew him by his walk. The way he carried himself. Or failed to carry himself, hunched, like his body was a little bit much.

  She stuffed her phone in her pocket and stood to greet him. They hugged across the low table, forming a letter A in profile. She felt his stomach against hers. She thought to comment on it, but she didn’t want to draw attention to her own body, how fragile she’d become. But he was too wrapped up—in the sweater, in his thoughts—to notice. On the table between them, forks and knives were swaddled in napkins beside a paper card that bore the impotent command NO LAPTOPS.

  “Thanks for meeting me,” she said. “Did you walk here?”

  “No, no,” he said, tugging on the tail of a thin scarf wrapped around his neck. It unspooled on his lap. “I called a car.” His eyes darted warily back and forth across the room.

  “A car? That’s kind of a waste, isn’t it? Of money? And carbon, um—fossil fuels?”

  Ethan didn’t answer, and dropped his gaze to the menu. “Do you know what you want?” he asked.

  “Because the G runs right by here.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “You could’ve taken the train, is what I’m saying.”

  A yawning waiter took their order. Ethan asked for a black coffee, and Maggie, who wanted creamer but now felt unable to admit it, took the same. Her phone shook in her pocket, emitting a whining sound she’d never heard it make before.

  “How’s the place?” she asked. “Still liking the neighborhood? Are you seeing anyone?”

  “Maggie, please,” he sighed.

  “What?”

  “Ease up on the mothering.”

  “I’m interested! I want to help!” She drummed her fingers on the table. “What about job stuff?” she pressed. “Still just—”

  “Enjoying myself,” he said flatly.

  “But by now you must—”

  “Maggie.”

  “Because the cost of—”

  “Maggie. Drop it.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said, shaking her head. “Even with everything that happened, I still can’t believe you quit.”

  A consulting firm had hired Ethan out of college to “implement transformation imperatives,” which meant explaining to business leaders twice his age how to streamline their operations. The firm sent him around the world to conduct research and present it to the Fortune 500s that could afford their services. He pinned a software company’s failures on the weakness of its brand recognition; he fingered thirty employees at a healthcare NGO ripe for “vocational displacement.” He’d worked a memorable case for Dr. Scholl’s that involved interviewing 1,500 rural Chinese farmers on their footwear preferences. He thrived at first, the interminably long days leaving little room for introspection. He passed out in hotel beds, too exhausted to dream. But the job was taxing, and each passing year he felt increasingly ridiculous for the power he wielded, as he had little experience with software, or healthcare, or orthotics. His team’s findings had been used to justify the dismissal of countless employees at companies with which Ethan had only a fleeting affiliation. The hotel beds left a stiffness in his neck. Unfortunately, his colleagues were not as tormented about their roles. They all moved up or out to brighter careers, while a continuous supply of recent college grads assumed their posts and Ethan, who was not adept at the politics of self-advancement, became something of a reluctant elder statesman.

  “You called me a sellout the whole time I worked there,” he said.

  “You were a sellout! But you had something to do all day, at least.”

  “All that travel—”

  “You didn’t seem to mind it at the time. You were extremely high functioning. Okay, things got out of hand. Mom died. You crashed. But you’ve been down for how long now?”

  “The more I thought about it, the more I realized how miserable I was.”

  “There’s such a thing as too much thinking.”

  “Let’s just talk about what we came here to talk about.”

  “Fine.” Maggie dove into her coat and emerged with her father’s letter, which she dropped on the table. Ethan produced an envelope of his own, which he placed on top of hers.

  “You got snail mail, too, huh?” she asked. Her phone whined again.

  “He went all out for sure.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not thrilled about the idea.”

  “Because of him?”

  “Because of him.”

  It was not what Maggie had hoped to hear. Though she had no interest in seeing her father, she wanted to pay respects to her mother, and on top of that there were some items she hoped to collect in St. Louis and bring back with her to New York. Some personal effects. A thing or two of Francine’s. Arthur’s invitation provided her the opportunity to return home without seeming to have wanted to, and raid the house for keepsakes. “Oh,” she said without conviction. “He’s not so bad.”

  “I was thinking over what you said after the funeral. About how he’s had plenty of opportunities to be present in our lives. About how it’s time I realized he isn’t going to change.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “You did.”

  Whine.

  “Well,” she said, twisting a curl of hair. “I mean, sure.”

  “You said, and I quote, ‘You spoil him with second chances.’”

  “That doesn’t sound like me.” She couldn’t go to St. Louis alone. She needed Ethan with her, to act as a buffer between her and her father. A whole weekend with Arthur, just the two of them, was unthinkable. Without Ethan, the chemical composure of the family skewed volatile. “Maybe this time it’s different. He wrote us, after all. He invited us.”

  “I’m honestly shocked to hear this from you.”

  “We can visit Mom.”

  “‘Spoiled with second chances,’ you said.”

  “That doesn’t sound like me at all.”

  The waiter reemerged, clanking their coffees on the table with botched flourish. Maggie raised the mug to her mouth, blowing folds across the dark surface.

  Ethan took a sip and dre
w in a sharp breath. “Oh, shit.”

  “Hot?”

  “No,” he said, lowering his head and making a visor of his hand. “Behind you. Coming out of the men’s room. Don’t look.”

  Maggie jerked around in her chair. A tall, muscular blond with the sides of his head shaved was taking his seat at a table in the back.

  “I said, don’t look.”

  “Who’s the neo-Nazi?” she asked.

  He shushed her. “Keep it down.”

  She turned to look at him again. “He’s cute. If you’re into Übermenschen.”

  “Let’s go,” Ethan said.

  “We just got our coffee!”

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He ducked his head.

  Whine.

  “Is that you?” he asked.

  “No. Yeah. I don’t know. Promise you’ll think about it.” Her phone whined again.

  “Will you turn that thing off?” he snapped.

  “Hey,” called a voice from behind her. “Ethan!”

  “Shit,” he whispered. Ethan sat up in his chair. “Shawn!” he said, waving.

  The blond sauntered over to their table. “It’s good to see you!”

  “You too.” Ethan stood and put one arm around Shawn’s shoulder before sitting again. “This is my sister, Maggie.”

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.” Shawn cocked his head. “Been a while, handsome!”