True Happiness vs Immediate Satisfaction

This novel is about two main characters known as Antony Malone and Andrew Sutherland. Antony is a young man from the Midwest who leaves behind his straight life "heterosexuality" as a lawyer to immerse himself in the gay life of the 1970s. New York. Andrew Sutherland, on the other hand, was known as a speed addict, a socialite, and a drag queen. Their social life includes long nights of drinking, dancing and drug use in New York's gay bars. His arrival in New York was met with very quiet "solitary" lifestyle where he was a ghost: sitting in his room late at night, bathed in clammy sweat, and most of the times listening to the odd and poignant sounds in the buildings around him.

By then, he had known no one and daily would hear a woman coughing in the next apartment, a man screaming at his wife "domestic violence", and the toilet being flushed and a radio chattering an uninterrupted stream of news. A man without friends is an unhappy man. As time passed by, Malone started falling in love with the people he did not know how to meet. He began carrying with him the momentary faces of men seen in restaurants, on street corners, in the subways, and fed on their imagined love "as roach feeds on crumbs". They wore bright orange vests and one of them caused Malone's heart to lunch; for he looked at Malone with eyes so still, calm and grave.

"The beauty of a man lies in his looks". After their first meeting, whenever Malone could meet Frankie, his heart would skip a little bit. He would smile and make an attempt to impress this guy so as to win all his attention. They met for the third time in a VD Clinic on Ninth Avenue one afternoon when Malone went for a blood test. And eventually, Malone's happiness was so full he such that no longer needed to touch Frankie in the same mad, compulsive way but only to look at him: shaving, stirring soup, staring at the window, lighting up a cigarette. True happiness is being with the one you love. Days passed by and their romance continued flourishing until one day Frankie suspected Malone on cheating on him with the other gay men around New York.

One day after coming home in the evening, as usual, he asked him about his affair with the other men. The issue that became very serious when Malone denied and a fight ensued between them. Due to this, Frankie was heartbroken and just wanted any shoulder to lean on and so when he could get one from Sutherland, he had to stay. One day while raining he decided to move out and go very far away from Sutherland and assume that he never even met him. In the streets on his way out, he could see lovers holding hands in every street corner something which disturbed him very much and made him more heartbroken. These people were majorly students and the type of romance that they had just made him move back to Sutherland.