Page 2 of Gifted & Talented

Arthur felt a renewed thrill of excitement at the thought of the evening and swept away the missed call from his screen, choosing instead a more secure messaging app and a contact labeled with the image of a mouse.Can’t wait to see you, he typed.

No reply, but that was fine. Give or take some city traffic, he’d be there soon enough.

He meant to tuck his phone back into his pocket but paused, checking the more public-facing messaging app to see if there was anything from Gillian. Nothing, aside from his text that he had landed, to which she had given a demure thumbs-up. He supposed she was enjoying her time off as well, presumably with military tactics and rugby, or some alternate hobby du jour that Gillian found appropriate for that evening’s relaxation, usually strategy games and bloodshed.

Just then, Arthur’s relentless news app pinged with a headline:CONGRESSMAN ARTHUR WREN (D-CA) TO ADDRESS THE WAYS AND MEA…

It trailed off and Arthur successfully ignored it, as he often did. (This is a lie. Arthur has something of a chronic nosiness as to the nature of his public perception. Call it a vocational hazard or casual narcissism; eitherwill apply.) There was no purpose to wading into the obvious, though Arthur anticipated the usual comments. Something-something nepo baby—thatnever got old, never mind that nearly every sitting congressman came from some sort of wealth, and for fuck’s sake, where would they prefer he got the money? Big Tobacco? The NRA? Wasn’t it sort ofrelaxingto know that Arthur Wren’s campaign funding came from somewhere banally ambivalent—in fact, so uninterested in his political agenda that it could not be persuaded to call him personally, only reaching out by virtue of an assistant whose name Arthur wasn’t entirely sure he’d gotten right?

Not that this was the time to think about his father, a surefire erection killer if ever a thing existed. The point is, voters were more likely to connect Arthur to his father or sisters than to his grandparents, who weren’t railway tycoons anyway, so contextually, “nepo baby” felt a bit unfair. Arthur’s theoretical value was mostly unrealized—generational via his father, i.e., not strictly Arthur’s—and even with the inheritance from his mother, he was normal rich, not blood-money rich. NotPhilipparich, which was presumably his appeal to her.

Ah, there it was again, the thrill he so unfailingly associated with Philippa. Arthur caught on to it and shivered in the sensation, familiarly electric. His normal life, outside of this one escape, had become increasingly untenable. He was on the campaign trail again, facing down a hung Congress and a looming presidential election whose end results he doubted he could bear. The bills he proposed, which came from a place of forward-leaning—nay, radical!—progressivism were functionally toothless by the time they came before committee, rendering him a sort of new-age jester who’d accomplished nothing but the turntable warp of a sitcom laugh track. Social media itself, the thing that had first positioned Arthur for greatness like the rise of a cutting-edge trend, had brutally turned on him. What, the echo chamber hive mind demanded to know, had come of Arthur’s promises to end American-sponsored colonialism? To replenish the resources of the planet? To do away with his generation’s mounting debts? To revitalize critical social programs and increase the availability of affordable housing, for which money had been redirected over the course of their lifetimes to warmongering, genocide, and lining the very congressional pockets that he, Arthur Wren, now counted among?

What he couldnotsay aloud (because it was undignified and whiny) was the obvious: that it wasn’t as if he wasn’t trying! Arthur’s rosy-eyed attemptat a straightforward bill to increase environmental jobs wound up with an unintended rider cutting educational budgets for nutritional resources to low-income schools. Andthatfiasco, horrifically enough, was all he had to claim as an accomplishment! His impassioned speech on the congressional floor calling for intervention in the Congo had been a mere afterthought in media coverage, mentioned onlyafterArthur and a mining-sponsored congressman had been photographed walking together—a result of poor timing, the enmity of the fates, and the limited radius of good coffee spots open past three around the Capitol. (Arthur could have just sent an aide like all his contemporaries did, butnooooooo,he had to believe in fetching his own coffee, inviting the ire of public opinion like Odysseus taunting the Cyclops.)

Serious question—what was the appropriate alternative? It was this that left Arthur’s mind reeling, his thumb scrolling until it went numb. Should he have instead shoved the other congressman into traffic and screamed,Death to the industrial complex, literally? Maybe so! That seemed to be the consensus online, but instead Arthur had simply walked and smiled tersely and committed the violence of silence, and for his crimes, he had been featured being handsomely duplicitous on the landing page of every liberal digital imprint, read to filth by the very demographic from whence he’d progressively come.

In sum: To everyone actuallyinCongress, Arthur was far too liberal to be taken seriously. To everyone who had put him there, Arthur wasn’t liberal enough. The constancy of his failures—the mythology of his individualized, sinister hypocrisy rather than the darker institutional truth, which was that sociopolitical compromise meant the lesser of two evils was often not letting things get immeasurably worse—was enough to make Arthur want to get swallowed up by quicksand.

Or, better yet, disappear into an orgy, never to emerge.

Finally! The car slowed to a stop and it was all Arthur could do not to jump out and perform an outsized musical number about the street where Philippa… well, not lived, but where she had a house, and where she and Yves occasionally spent their time when they were not otherwise absconding to a country estate or touring Europe or generously debauching Arthur on his home turf.

Lady Philippa Villiers-DeMagnon (Pippa, Lady Philippa, or PVDM to the press; Pipsqueak or Mouse to Yves and, when appropriate, to Arthur)was of course fashionably unemployed, being an heiress and an aristocrat who generally made her living by flitting from one charitable cause to the next. Her current project was the publication of a cookbook by a refugee shelter in central London. Philippa didn’t cook herself, obviously, not because of luxury (partially because of luxury) but because it was utterly domestic, though she considered herself to have a particularly interesting palate due to her childhood in Barbados.

Whether this allegedly cosmopolitan taste of hers was real or not was of no pressing concern to Arthur, whose attraction to Philippa granted him a certain blessed blindness. Her generosity, her fundamental strangeness, her almost pathological contrariness, her enthusiastic embrace of his… occasional technical malfunctions—these were the things he loved about her, the oddities, the sort of howling-at-the-moon quality she seemed to preternaturally possess, so as a rule he did not ask himself too many questions about the nature of her class. Arthur chose to focus on Philippa’s well-meaning attempts to empower women and devote her brilliant mind to such universally worthy causes.

If Arthur didnotfocus on this aspect of Philippa, then of course his mind would wander elsewhere: to the frothing symbiosis of Philippa’s tabloid coverage; to what her fondness for Barbados (and, at times, a suspiciously unspecific adoration for “Africa”) might actually suggest; to whether Arthur’s own mantle of hypocrisy was dismally fitting, however itchy it happened to be. But it was easy not to ponder such things while beingnearPhilippa, who was one of those wealthy people whose wealth seems to make them effortlessly generous, not only with money but with time, and whose disposition was occasionally so sweet it wounded Arthur’s heart—just properlymeltedit, soldering parts of it to his rib cage and leaving a sticky-toffee residue of unfading, unfaltering affection.

Arthur had first met Philippa at a charity exhibition of her family’s private collection in the National Gallery, where he was drawn to her because she spoke so lovingly and animatedly about each of the pieces. So invested was she in their style and history and the inherently sexual nature of the baroque that Arthur initially mistook her for a scholar of art history. That was the thing with Philippa, who was so dazzlingly bright and quick-witted and cultured and refined that at times it nearly hurt to look at her. She was very beautiful, but more importantly she was incredibly weird, a buffet of idiosyncrasies. It created this mystique about her, this sense that she wasnot exactly for everyone. Arthur stayed up the whole night with her, never imagining her to take any interest in him, already aware that she was famously dating Yves Reza, a Formula Magitech racecar driver who was not a musician and yet was, somehow, the only man of their generation whom Arthur felt could properly be called a rock star. But Philippa must have sniffed out the weird in Arthur, too, and so now, well, here they were.

The door was open even before Arthur reached for the knocker, his hand still typing something in his phone. “Finally, you’re here!” proclaimed a voice that Arthur recognized as Yves’s, though he wasn’t entirely sure at first itwasYves, because the latter was wearing an ornate golden mask and the entryway was so packed with slick, squirming bodies in elaborate masquerade that Arthur was instantly overwhelmed.

“Arthur, open your mouth,” said Yves, who was definitely Yves, because other people did not usually say things like that to Arthur.

“What is it this time?” asked Arthur gaily, or as gaily as it was possible to be after a seven-hour flight. Which was surprisingly gay indeed, because Congressman Arthur Wren of the twelfth district of California was about to be (for once) the good kind of fucked.

“Just something to liven you up, you know, for the jet lag!” added Yves, lifting his mask and leaning in to greet Arthur with a kiss that was at once very wet and very dry. Arthur coughed, choking on the chalkiness of whatever had just been passed to him by Yves’s tongue.

“Darling, go easy on him, he’s only just arrived.” From the undulating crowd came Philippa in a heady swirl of orchids, effulgent purplish-black robes swelling out from around her hips like a bruise-colored Georgia O’Keeffe. She adjusted her matching Venetian mask with one hand, pressing a still-sizzling flute of champagne into Arthur’s with the other as he leaned in to brush his lips to her cheek.

“Beloved.” Present company made Arthur hopelessly pretentious, more so than usual. (That’s my take on the matter, not his.) In any case, Arthur downed the pill, swishing the drink around in his mouth until it fizzed, happily domesticated, on his tongue, and Yves shifted to sling an arm around his waist. “Can’t thank you enough for your hospitality, as ever,” said Arthur.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll get the opportunity to try,” Philippa purred fondly, reaching out to cup Arthur’s cheek with her palm. “Now stand up straight and let me look at you.”

Standing there in the doorway of a party—where, for once, Arthur could feel properly accepted, not an underachieving product of nepotism (for who here wasn’t that?) but simply a man with a very fine cock and the heartily won know-how to back it up—Arthur felt his heart flood with elation. It reached him like a heady onslaught of tears, a sudden pent-up release that caused the foyer’s chandelier to flicker, individual bulbs ebbing and flaring as if to fanatically perform the wave.

It was an oddity that hadn’t gone unnoticed, particularly where it had occurred right above Arthur’s head. “Who’s this?” asked another masked member of the crowd, materializing to squint accusingly at Arthur, the only person in the foyer not concealing his face. Belatedly, Arthur reached into the inner pocket of his jacket, producing a simple black leather mask in a wordless gesture of apology.

“He’s our boyfriend,” said Yves, “so fuck off, Felix.”

“Yes,” agreed Philippa, “fuck off, Felix!”

There was a near-instantaneous booing akin to a medieval mob, and Felix made a gesture that was meant to either wash his hands of them or vigorously masturbate, and then he disappeared again into the maelstrom of the crowd.

“Felix?” echoed Arthur, recalling vaguely that Felix was the name of a foreign prince Philippa sort of knew, but by then she was pulling his hand. The chandelier flickered again, then began to spark dangerously, releasing a meteor shower in miniature as the room dimmed to black. This time, the juxtaposition of Arthur with his backdrop of fiber-optic electrical failure attracted the undivided attention of the madding crowd, who pressed in around their trio to catch a closer glimpse of apparent pyrotechnics.

“Christ,” said Arthur, looking over the backs of his hands. Every hair stood on end, and the malfunctioning chandelier that reached for him with greedy tendrils suddenly exploded in a frantic spray of dissipating fairy lights, a final flare of power outage like a ray of dying sun. “What did you give me?”

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