Part I

Like most people trying to get by in something like the regular current of American life, I don't act like a total asshole to most people I meet, and am generally regarded as pretty nice, mainly because I leave myself vulnerable to hearing out other people's crises and complaints for longer, on average, than would be merely polite. And the fact is, I do tend to like people in practice, even though I've built an airtight case against them in principle. It's a natural response, I guess, to being raised by relatively kind parents who taught me to be polite and decent and to rely on the company and help of others, but to also consider myself smarter and, on some fundamental level, more deserving of complete fulfillment than anyone in the world besides maybe my sisters.

This may be why, when my girlfriend, Julia, asked me to meet her at the house of a recent acquaintance of ours, a New Age–leaning woman named Anna whose family, through what specific brand of plunder I don't know, owned a gigantic house out in horse country, I agreed. Julia would be arriving late from a shift in the ICU and wanted me to be the advance guard. She believed this dinner held the potential for a better-than-usual time, since it brought together a number of people we didn't know very well but had been told we would like. Of course, the "people we would like" often turned out to be amateur poets and holistic healers, but to her eternal credit, this didn't stop Julia from holding out for social transcendence, the nature of which I didn't fully understand. My goals at these things usually extended no further than making at least one moderately clever comment and trying not to spill anything on my shirt.

With the address Julia had given me, I followed my glitchy, ancient GPS to the mechanized gate marking the entrance to Anna's family compound. The architecture ahead was nouveau hunting lodge, polished wood in the kind of low, modernist arrangements I'd encountered at expensive hotels in underdeveloped countries with my parents. I parked in front of something designed to look like a former stable and wandered around the main residence, casing it for an entrance.

As I passed a long window, I saw the profile of a woman staring fixedly into the distance, moving her lips in spirited chatter. Her long dark hair was pulled into a messy upward configuration, held in delicate balance by a pencil, maybe. She stood erect, shoulders squared, but she seemed comfortable, at ease in her formality. She was standing at a kitchen counter, chopping something on a cutting board. This first ghostly observation of Leslie remains significant in my mind, since it was the only time I saw her — ever will see her — without knowing anything about her. In that first long look I couldn't help but notice that she didn't seem to belong in her delicate flowered sundress, that her strong, tanned arms and shoulders were positively bursting out of it. Her bright red lipstick was smeared gooily across her mouth. She looked like a wild creature that had been hastily and not entirely consensually bundled into something approximating midsummer southern chic.

Anna, at the stove, turned to say something to her and caught my eye through the window. Her momentary alarm — this wasduring my Allman Brothers phase — quickly turned to enthusiasm, feigned or otherwise, at my arrival. I held up my bottle of wine and baguette, raised my eyebrows, and mouthed "Door?" She circled her finger in the air like E.T.: go around, or back home, whichever. So I continued along the path, drawing a tight shadow of a smile from the woman at the cutting board, and eventually arrived at a grand door ornamented with a huge metal knocker. A long moment later Anna appeared with an orotund "Oh, hello," and I was in.

Anna was magnificently curly headed and just shy of troublingly thin, with a squished cherubic face that seemed to promise PG-13 secrets. She'd grown up in the area and had recently moved back for somewhat mysterious reasons, possibly involving a now ex-boyfriend's arrest for dealing prescription drugs. She radiated the kind of positivity that suggested barely repressed rage.

"You're only the second one here!" she said. "Everyone else has a very loose interpretation of when seven o'clock starts."

"Thanks so much for having me," I said. I took in the wood-paneled walls, the smudgy, probably authentic impressionist painting mounted and lit with gallery-grade precision.

"This Bruce Wayne guy sure must be loaded," I said.

"Daddy was a carpenter," she said with a sudden drawl. "But Granddaddy? He was Dow Chemical." If you had to be rich, it was best to be self-aware.

"Who else is coming?" I said as we made our way down an African-mask-lined hallway.

"Well, Lucia and, apparently, her new boyfriend, Herman," Anna said. "I know I said no couples, but they started dating, like, between the invite and the actual thing, and I'd invited them both separately. I mean, what I just said isn't actually true, but whatever. It's happening. He's fine. And Molly Chang — you know her? And ... well, here she is. Leslie, Peter."

I hadn't realized from the window how tall she was — nearly six feet, I guessed, to my five eleven plus hair. When she turned from the cutting board, she had a polite nice-to-meet-you grin on her face, but her mouth shaded serious almost immediately, like she'd thought of something important but wasn't sure whether she should say it. My arrival seemed to worry her in some way.

"How's it going?" she said.

She gave me a strong handshake, elbow at a perfectly cocked right angle. My father would have been impressed — he would have asked her what her parents did.

"I'm mostly trying to decide which piece of art to steal," I said.

"Well, it's important to consider both net value and fenceability," Leslie said. "There's no point in stealing it if you can't sell it. Or so I've read."

"What if I just want something for my house?" I said. "Like, for the love of the art."

"Maybe, instead of stealing my mom's stuff, Pete?" Anna said. "You could pour us some wine and slice up that baguette."

Leslie grinned at me, the full-toothed thing, which, maybe, was the first tentative step into the abyss of the rest of my life, or whatever you want to call it. Love. Leslie went back to the chopping, and I did as I was told.

"So are you ... visiting Virginia?" I said from the far side of the marble counter.

"Yeah, I live in Austin," she said. "Technically. But really I'm kind of between places. My aunt lives in Louisa, and I figured I could maybe get some work done here. Of course I mostly just lie in the grass wondering whether or not I'm sweating yet, but. It's a start."

"So you work from, uh, home?"

"Yeah, I'm a bum," she said. "Like you, I heard."

I figured she meant writer.

"She's getting paid to write a script," Anna said. "Which is why she can do whatever she wants."

"Encouraged is more accurate than paid," Leslie said. "I'm just helping some friends. But fiction's my main, uh, lady."

"That's awesome," I said, which was my default response whenever people told me what they did with their time.

"I've got to figure out whether it is or not," she said. "My brain has almost resolidified now that I've been out of Texas for a few days. Austin? It's like fucking in a sauna, forever."

"So ... hot," I...