He assumes his strange role in these men’s lives — managing household tasks, yes, but also joining their dinner parties, where he’s introduced as “Friend Gordon.” The book jacket proclaims this work “steamy,” so maybe we’re meant to be titillated. In fact, these guys are less ménage à trois than modern family. Philip and Nicola supplant Gordon’s distant and lightly drawn mother and absentee father, an ineffectual guy with deep religious convictions. The younger man even wears his boss’s cast-off clothing, as a son might his dad’s. Yes, Gordon has a sexual encounter with Nicola, but it’s an exploratory one, almost innocent, something that may well strike straight readers as “steamy.”
Gordon cannot summon desire for Philip, but still delights in his attention: “Though I had no interest in sleeping with him, I didn’t want him to stop looking either.” This is something Grattan returns to a little too often, his novel less concerned with tongues than eyes, in seeing and being seen. “Once, in fourth grade,” Gordon relays, “the closest thing I’d understood about my interest in men and boys being a special attention I paid them, one of the Mikes in my class slammed me against a wall before I realized I’d been staring.” Now, Gordon wants to be looked upon, relishing “the thrill of being considered eye candy.”
His attempts to fit into this rarefied milieu are cringe-worthy — he’s rough around the edges in a way that his beauty cannot wholly offset. The real heartbreak comes in his romance with Pavel, an art star attached to Philip’s gallery. It’s maybe too inevitable that Pavel paints him. Gordon recalls that “an overeager student teacher once gave us an assignment to discuss a superpower we wished we had. I wrote about being invisible.” Now, at last, he is seen, and rendered on canvas. He might just be a masterpiece. But he cannot hold onto Pavel’s affection, just as he (inevitably) falls out of his bosses’ favor.
Gordon takes detours on the road to himself: accompanying Philip to Europe (they’re marooned there after the attacks of Sept. 11, more historical coincidence than something the novel undertakes to address); following Pavel to Mexico City; and in the book’s penultimate act, reuniting with his estranged father in Milwaukee. This is the novel’s most compelling section — Gordon ekes out a living, runs afoul of his pious father’s homophobia, and, to use the author’s favored metaphor, finally comes into focus for the reader.
