The following is from Regina Porter’s The Rich People Have Gone Away. Porter is an award-winning playwright and author of The Travelers, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and longlisted for the Orwell Prize for political fiction. A graduate of the MFA fiction program at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her writing has been published in the Harvard Review, Tin House, and the Oxford American.
There are Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs that tell the tale of relationships Theo lost on the road. Women and men who warmed some part of him he would rather forget. Donatella, the pretty Mexican antique dealer who traveled with Theo from Baton Rouge to New Orleans on an Antiques Roadshow trip only to be ditched during her afternoon nap at the Columns Hotel. During happy hour the night before, she had taken a sip from Theo’s Bellini and said, “Look, we’re almost the same color.”
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“No we’re not,” Theo replied.
“Yes, we are.” Donatella touched his face lightly with her bronze triple-ringed fingers. he Louisiana sun was hot, but even back in Iowa, during May end-of-year school days, Theo had always worn a duskier hue to rival the handful of black students. And suffered dearly for it.
“Maybe so. Heat down here will burn you,” he said. “In New York, everyone’s vitamin D deficient.”
Donatella was curvaceous and picked at her food so the curves wouldn’t turn into worrisome roundness. She preferred brightly colored textured dresses that did something radical to her skin, a Day-Glo natural luster supple, not the same as sweat. Later people would pay for spritz bottles of tonic to achieve Donatella’s (and Theo’s) brand of sunshine. How they gorged-like heathens on crawfish-in fist-hot Cajun seasonings, and then reached for lemon soaked wipes to dispel the crawfish smell from their hands. The smell lingered and gave them the excuse they did not need to suck at each other’s pinkies, thumbs, and forefingers and inner palms trying to lick the odor away but then rubbing it all over their night time bodies.
When Donatella asked casually, “Do you believe in past lives?” she gave Theo the excuse he needed to peer up at the ceiling in the four-poster bed and pivot inward. The life they were living at that moment might have been a past life as far as Theo was concerned.
“It’s difficult enough,” he had said, “to live in the present. Most people don’t know how. Sometimes I think this moment right here is best.”
Donatella agreed, her head pressed in the hollow of his chest. “This feels so right.” She listened to his heartbeat.
Lord it did. Lord it had. But Theo barely knew her. The raw rightness of cushy feelings scared the shit out of him. Theo watched Donatella sleep for over an hour and left a brief note on the zinc nightstand. “Donatella,” the note said, “it’s not you. It’s me.”
He picked up the tab for the room at the front desk on the way out of the hotel. A bicoastal relationship would never work anyway. Donatella lived in Los An fires, and water shortages. The lane highways, wild lives bit, he told himself, could tip from New Age eccentric to New Age fanatic. Sophistication not withstanding, she identified too strongly as Mexican, trading English and Spanish during a conversation at record speed, expecting him to keep pace and acclimate to her linguistics. He preferred simple English phrases and declarative sentences.
*
Once or twice during sex with his then girlfriend now wife Darla, he had called Donatella’s name out, grateful for the D and A in both names and the guttural nature of sex that made Darla not notice.
There was Wade, a pilot who lived in Austin and worked for Southwestern. Theo met Wade during a layover in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. They had noticed each other in the line for Garrett Mix popcorn-each bought a ten-ounce bucket-and then sat side by side for ten-minute back massages at one of the airport massage stations, where they made small talk while two women they did not look at once or twice pummeled their backs. Theo did not think redheaded people were especially attractive, and Wade was the only redheaded man he had ever encountered to make him rethink what he took as fact. As they parted ways, phone numbers were ex changed and, in the weeks that followed, a plan emerged for Theo to pick Wade up in Boston and drive together to Acadia National Park in Maine. They stayed in a B&B on Mount Desert Island, where the desk clerk asked, “Are you brothers?”
Wade, who had come out two years before, said, “More.”
Wade was an avid birdwatcher and taught Theo twitchity witchity-witch goes the common yellowthroat; zzzzzzz sings the black-throated green warbler; teacher, teacher, teacher trills the ovenbird. Bird calls Theo later sang to his young wife, who replicated them with precision on her bassoon. One morning, after ob serving bald eagles stoop out of the sky and talon prey, Theo and Wade found a watering hole to sex and swim in. Unbeknownst to them, the lake was full of leeches.
“I like this East Coast weather,” Wade said, picking leeches from Theo’s back. “We don’t have real seasons in Austin.”
“That means you’ll have to come back for a longer visit.” Wade hugged Theo close to him. “Maybe I’ll never leave.” “Don’t you like Austin?”
“Austin’s great,” Wade said. “I preserved a lot of friendships after my divorce. Sometimes the best you can do is preserve. And cut your losses.”
Theo dipped into the lake for one last swim.
“Hey,” Wade said, checking his watch as time wore on. “Aren’t you getting cold out there?”
Theo climbed out of the lake shivering, and when Wade reached outtocheck for leeches, Theo slapped his hand away. “I can handle the bloodsuckers myself.”
Wade was nobody’s fool. The drive from Acadia National Park to the Boston airport might as well have been a barefoot walk across Siberia. There were chills and frost and a spilled mocha Frappuc cino on the passenger’s seat just as Wade said goodbye to Theo. Theo was relieved there was no curbside parking for departures.
“Did you fuck up this rental car intentionally?” Theo said. Wade took out a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill. “Truly,” he said.
“I did not.”
In Connecticut, Theo found a drive-in car wash. As he watched the liquid soap bubble all over the rental car, he heard himself say, “No more road trips with strangers.”
*
There was Victoria, a Trinidadian ESL tutor with a political science degree from the Sorbonne. She kept her hair pressed Condoleezza Rice style and beelined to the bathroom to manage her tresses after sex. Theo loved the gyrations Victoria made when he reached out to touch her hair, which he understood was strictly off-limits. The off-limits part filled him with curiosity. One Sunday while on the jitney to Sag Harbor for a cookout with friends, Victoria became nostalgic for her halcyon days at the Sorbonne. Theo looked up from his Architectural Digest magazine. Victoria had graduated near the top of her class. Theo was a B-average student at best. He closed his magazine and ran his fingers through Victoria’s hair like he was plowing a field of cabbage.
“Stop it! What the hell are you doing?” Victoria shouted, patting her hair down as he rushed his fingers through her hair from a different angle.
“Searching for knowledge and reassurance.”
Victoria attended the cookout solo. Theo toured the Whaling Museum on Sag Harbor’s Main Street while he waited for a return jitney to Manhattan.
*
Chris Beam was older by fifteen years with a mustache that made it seem like he possessed no upper lip. He strolled into the ABC Carpet & Home store one evening and selected four modern kitchen chairs to go. He needed them for a garden party in Chelsea that same evening. “It’s a get-together for gentlemen,” Chris Beam said, offering Theo a hefty tip to see to it that the chairs were delivered same day on time without a nick or flaw. His house was across the street from a park. A three-level on Sixteenth Street. Theo did not stay long but moved from room to room running his hands along the furniture, blind to the servers in black shorts and black match ing shirts and black socks, and uninterested in the appetizers and cocktails. Beam watched Theo salivating over his house.
“My friends think you’re a thief.”
“No,” Theo said, “but right now I have some serious fucking house envy.”
“I’m going to a car show this weekend in Pennsylvania. With a pit stop in Philly. My hometown. Care to join?”
Theo shook his head. “I don’t do so well on trips. With boys or girls.”
Theo still shared a flat with other roommates, who went to frat boy-style parties five years after graduating from NYU. He was determined to rent cheaply until he could buy. Aside from break fast at Veselka, he had little in common with his roommates. But with nothing to do that weekend, he accepted Chris Beam’s invitation. What soon followed were regular weekend getaways-Chris Beam sold vintage cars throughout New England and the tristate area. During a vintage car show in Hershey, Pennsylvania, Chris Beam noticed Theo admiring the aqua-blue Eldorado. He purchased the car on the spot and handed Theo the keys.
“You can’t just go giving people things,” Theo said. “Don’t you know they’ll hate you for it?”
“Theo, you could never hate me.” And it was true, this was Theo’s longest and most intense relationship. Theo had been exclusively a topper, but Chris Beam bottomed him. He had begun to pick out items of furniture for Chris Beam’s friends, who raved about the additions Theo made to the Chelsea town house-and the Jersey Shore apartment. Theo still hooked up with women on the side when Chris Beam was working or out with friends or see ing his family or just not looking.
Even so, Chris Beam was genuinely confused a year into their relationship when he invited Theo to move in with him and leave the frat boys to debase themselves.
“No,” Theo said, and began to pack the handful of things that were his in the town house.
“What’s the problem?”
“It’s not you, Chris. It’s me.”
Chris Beam wasn’t letting him off that easy. “Is it because I’m older?”
Theo smiled and said, “One day I’ll be old myself.”
Chris Beam poured a drink. “Theo, you’ve struck me as many things. Superficial is not
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“For some of us, the receiving end of pleasure is too much.” “I’m human,” Theo said, ghosting Chris Beam on his phone while he stood talking to him. “A human being can get used to any thing.”
“Get the fuck out of my house, you ungrateful piece of shit.”
Theo thought Chris Beam would use his connections to get him fired from ABC. He waited for the Eldorado, which had not yet been signed over to him, to be repossessed. The roster of clients, straight and gay, that Theo had begun to build, thanks to Chris Beam, he thought would wither on the vine, but they continued to contact Theo even after he set up camp in Brooklyn.
The week before Theo was scheduled to move, Chris Beam showed up at his apartment in the East Village on Eleventh Street and Avenue A. Theo came to meet him on the sidewalk, prepared to return the car keys.
“Is it because I’m older?” he asked again.
“I would rather not say … ” Theo offered him the keys to the Eldorado.
“Keep the goddamn car,” Chris Beam snapped. “I thought we had something going here.”
“Chris,” Theo said, pocketing the keys. “When you look at me, you see yourself. When I look at you, I see everyone else.”
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Excerpted from The Rich People Have Gone Away, by Regina Porter, to be published by Hogarth, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Copyright © 2024 by Regina Porter. All rights reserved.