Desmond’s own relationships had tended to be short-term tugging matches. If he met someone he was interested in, he worried they wouldn’t find him attractive or interesting enough. But if they reciprocated his enthusiasm, he felt the bar had been raised on his own net worth and was plagued by thoughts that he could have done better. It was like shopping in Morocco; once your offer was accepted, you felt you should have driven a harder bargain. The best way to avoid this cycle of disappointment was to flirt with friends and fuck with strangers and thus keep yourself suspended in a safe no-man’s-land somewhere between loneliness and suffocation. No soaring highs, but none of that get-me-out-of-here anxiety either. And after all, a comfortable emotional flatline was the Holy Grail half the population was seeking: How else do you explain the popularity of Prozac, hydroponic tomatoes, and Tom Hanks?

Then, six months after His Hard Road to Hell came out, he met Russell Abrams at a cocktail party, curled up in a chair in a quiet corner of the apartment, reading Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts, one of Lewis Westerly’s great rivals. He invited Russell to dinner and, in one way or another, they’d been together since. Desmond found Russell a curious and appealing blend of arrogant confidence—passed down directly from his confident father and arrogant mother—and severe, occasionally crippling self-doubt, the B-side of the same inheritance. He was teaching art to special needs children when they met, a disarmingly noble profession, even if it was one he’d chosen because he knew it would meet with disapproval from his mother. (“Any child who’s been properly toilet-trained,” Gloria had written in her infamous first book, Playing with Childhood, “will be bored senseless by mucking around with finger paints.”) Russell had the great virtue of wanting to take care of people and, at the same time, the unacknowledged but obvious need to be taken care of. Which made him, in Desmond’s eyes, both lovable and easy to manipulate.