by Sam Lansky
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Prologue
For many years after it was over, there were songs I could not listen to, for fear they would take me back there; certain photographs that made me clench my jaw in a particular way; and street corners where, crossing from a subway exit to reach an appointment or a restaurant, I would flash back momentarily to a long-forgotten winter night years earlier and see myself, seventeen years old and spectral in the lamplight, stumbling out of a brownstone with a runny nose and my fly unzipped. My hair would have been too long, probably, from always taking the money my father gave me for a haircut and using it to buy drugs. (“What do you mean, ‘It doesn’t look any different’?” I’d ask, always doe-eyed.) My hands would have been wedged into my pockets because I always forgot to wear gloves. And I would have been walking briskly back to my father’s apartment, eager to get into bed and pretend it never happened.
I say that I would have done so because so often I did, but if I could, I would do it differently. Memory is a funny type of haunting. The subconscious keeps chewing away at sins atoned for long ago. Even after everything has been set right, the body doesn’t forget the places it’s been.
Stockholm. I sleep badly, tossing and turning in my hotel room. In the night, I awake from strange, listless dreams. The furniture turns to gold when I touch it, then crumbles into dust, silken as ash. I’m just tired, I tell myself; it’s just jet lag—the foreignness of a new place. One morning I wake up and the bed is full of glitter. I fall back asleep, and when I awake again, the sheets are crisp and white as fresh snow.
At a fancy party, there’s a champagne toast; I hold my glass up to the light, watching the bubbles fizzle and break as they meet the surface. I set it down on the table unsipped. I am used to that by now. It may not always get better, but it will always get different. That was the promise—the only promise.
There are ghosts around every corner. At a cocktail bar in Södermalm: I am alone at a table, writing in a notebook, when I see a man I recognize, although I can’t say from where. He smiles at me—he knows me, too, and more intimately than I know him. He has a handsome, doleful face. Faces like that all blur together for me now. His name could be Jim, or Steve. He could be an investment banker or a surgeon or a congressman.
He approaches me. Slowly, he reaches out to touch my face and presses a finger against my cheek. I want to ask what he’s doing, but instead I just sit there, frozen. He raises his hand to show me. On the tip of his thumb, there is a speck of glitter.
“Where did that come from?” I ask. We both begin to laugh.
I don’t go home with him because things are different now. But that night, alone in my room, I dream of falling down the stairs in a town house in Boston. I dream that I’m running through the ruddy desert of Utah, with no shoes on, under a silver moon.
I dream that my apartment is full of snow, and there are wolves at the foot of the bed, nipping at my ankles.
One
I was seventeen years old and had been subsisting on a diet of cigarettes and Adderall for months. Now, on a sunny fall morning, I was on my way to visit Princeton.
My father was waiting downstairs, on Eighty-eighth Street off West End Avenue, in front of our apartment building. He had rented a nondescript blue sedan—no frills, with upholstery that smelled faintly medicinal, talk radio pontificating from the tinny speakers—and now stood with one hand on the hood of the car, making small talk with the doorman. On his hand, his wedding ring was conspicuously absent.
As I watched him, I convinced myself that I could see a trace of a tan line on his ring finger, a thin band of flesh paler than the natural olive of his skin—but then I blinked, and it was only a trick of the light. I shook my head. It was a stupid, sentimental thought.
I usually tried not to think about my parents’ divorce: its once-prominent space in my consciousness had descended into the shadows of everyday normalcy, and now sometimes it even seemed as if they had never been together at all. In the same way that I watched people milling about in midtown Manhattan, so inoculated to the city’s mammoth scale that they no longer realized how strange and spectacular a sight it was—the skyscrapers, the crowds, concrete and steel—the emptiness left by my parents’ separation was so enormous that I had forgotten how it once felt extraordinary. And when I was in midtown, I, too, looked straight ahead like a native New Yorker. Only a tourist would look up. Only someone embarrassing would still be haunted by the collapse of his parents’ marriage a full year after it had happened.
I stood on the sidewalk for a moment, nursing a sickly sweet cup of bodega coffee and sucking down my first cigarette of the morning. In a paper bag at my feet was a lemon poppy seed muffin, glazed with a sugary sheen, which I had bought not to eat but to prove to myself that I could keep from eating. I wasn’t about to ruin my diet by eating solid food now, especially on the day I was to visit Princeton, which I had recently decided was probably my dream school.
I was dressed in preppy staples—a V-neck sweater in a warm autumnal scarlet, the ivory collar of a dress shirt starched and collegiate around my throat, a rep tie knotted in a loose four-in-hand. My father wore a long-sleeved thermal shirt and jeans, the self-effacing functionality of which annoyed me. Whenever he came home from work, he always seemed eager to shed the markers of his professional life—the cuff links, the wool slacks—and change into something comfortable and utilitarian. I preferred to keep my tie on until I went to bed, not wanting to lose the power I pretended it gave me, aligning me with the pedigreed prep school boys whose cravats were always effortlessly askew. There were even nights when I slept in my blue blazer—a security blanket, I told myself, to remind me who I was supposed to be. (Mostly, though, I did this so I could tell people I’d done it—I hoped it would make me seem more interesting, somehow.)
Earlier that summer, my father had told me he would take me on a trip to visit the colleges that interested me, but I’d been wary. My prospects for college were dim. I was already certain that no school that met my impossibly high standards would accept me as a student, and no school that accepted me as a student could possibly be worth attending. Princeton, a bastion of privilege—even the name sounded rich in my mouth, Princeton—seemed like the institution most beyond my reach, which was exactly what made it attractive.
But the actual process of applying felt so tedious. I preferred to spend my time in self-aggrandizing fantasy or its darker counterpart, neurotic dread; it was much easier obsessing than actually doing anything.
Most of all, the whole thing seemed implausible: Would my father really make the time to chauffeur me up and down the Northeast Corridor to check out colleges that he and I both knew were too good for me? His travel schedule for business was unrelenting, and even when he was in the city, he often stayed at the Upper East Side apartment of his girlfriend, Jennifer.
So now that we were finally leaving on this road trip, any flickering enthusiasm I might have felt for this next chapter of my life was smothered by what I perceived as the emptiness of my father’s gesture. Surely this college tour had nothing to do with where I would actually end up going to school. It was about maintaining the lie that I was a happy and successful teenager with a bright future before me. I had to keep going through the motions, because if I didn’t, my father might start to pay closer attention to me. That was the last thing I needed.
Yet even though I hustled my father constantly, lying an
d manipulating him to keep him at arm’s length, I was devastated by the fact that he couldn’t see through it. I wanted him to know me deeply enough to recognize that I was struggling. Not that I would have admitted it at the time.
My mood grew foul as I lingered on the sidewalk, smoking the cigarette down to the filter. My father called my name and I extinguished the butt with the toe of my loafer, then stalked over to the car. As usual, he had not realized that I was upset—but then, I hadn’t realized I was upset yet, either, let alone why—and I was unwilling to tell him. Instead, and also as usual, I was determined to punish him for not understanding this thing that even I didn’t understand by being as sullen as possible.
I slid into the passenger seat. The mood in the car felt heavy. To most seventeen-year-olds, I imagined, college represented liberation, a period of endless possibility, but for me, the idea of being shackled to academia for another four years was exhausting.
I was what I liked to call myself in fits of self-description a “lazy overachiever” or a “failed perfectionist”—a deadly combination of ambition and sloth. College would just be the next place where I would strive and fail in the pursuit of excellence, and subsequently loathe myself for it. As I sat in the passenger seat and considered this line of thought, I couldn’t help but feel a thrill of smug superiority: To be already so bitter as I toured one of the nation’s most prestigious colleges felt like the ultimate mark of how very adult I had become. Certainly it elevated me above the ranks of naively optimistic high school seniors who were genuinely excited about college—those kids weren’t as sophisticated as I was. It took years for me to learn that there was a difference between cynicism and maturity. In that car that day, they seemed to be one.
My father looked over at me with a sort of friendly disdain. “You know that everything you own smells like smoke, right?” he said.
“I know, Dad,” I said.
“Just checking.”
As he turned the key in the ignition, I took out my iPod and put on my father’s noise-canceling headphones. We cruised onto the highway. I rolled down my window and let my arm drape lazily on the frame of the car door, feeling the chill of the wind erecting the downy hairs on my arm. It was still early in the morning, and daybreak was crisp and clear. The trees on Riverside Drive were beginning to turn. Autumn was a welcome respite from the steaming heat of the New York summer—my first full New York summer, the brutality of which had astonished me. The city festered and stank, hot mist rising in a scalding cloud from the subway grates where, below, I could hear the shrill whistle of trains piercing the muggy night. Even my cigarettes had wilted.
My father hated the summer heat as much as I did, although we both had spent much of the season away—I went to Oregon to see my now-single mother, while he took frequent business trips punctuated by weekends away with Jennifer. On the rare occasions that we were both in the city at the same time, we sprawled across the living room couch, saturated with perspiration, panting like wounded animals while the air conditioner clicked and whirred, straining against the sauna that was the city.
Strangely, I loved those sweaty moments with my father, those instances of shared suffering, though I lacked the emotional intelligence to ever tell him so. On some level I must have recognized the significance of those times because I locked them away in my mind as evidence that there was a bond between us more meaningful than blood. I could see it, but I couldn’t quite access it; I couldn’t translate it into actual affection.
On those days, which I could have spent lolling around in the heat, my father would quickly grow restless, needing to busy himself with shuffling paperwork at his desk or leaving to take a jog through Central Park. He always seemed most comfortable in motion—like me, he had been chubby as a child, and he exercised religiously.
Now, behind the wheel, he was cool and controlled even as the chaos of rush hour exploded on the street outside. Back in Oregon, my mother would speed and brake breathlessly, muttering expletives under her breath and, on one memorable occasion, careening the wrong way up a one-way street, past a well-marked DO NOT ENTER sign. I missed that recklessness—especially here, gliding so smoothly through the city with my father.
We approached the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel, the lanes clotted with underslept commuters. With my headphones on, I could see my father’s mouth working, but I pretended not to notice. He tapped me on the shoulder and I took off the headphones. Symphonies of honking horns suddenly screamed around me, making my shoulders clench.
“What?” I said, sighing loudly in a performance of agitation.
“I said, ‘First stop, Princeton!’ ” he said. I could tell how hard he was trying.
“I know, Dad,” I said. I wanted to connect with him, but I put the headphones back on instead.
I had never really felt that close to my father. He was the executive director of a nonprofit foundation headquartered at Rockefeller Center. We had moved to New York from my native Oregon a year earlier, after the divorce, when I was sixteen, under the pretense that, based in New York, he would travel less. That didn’t happen. It still seemed to me that he was always en route to Dulles, Heathrow, Logan: places I had heard mentioned throughout my childhood, shrouded in mystery, abstract proper nouns muttered across the dinner table while my mother’s frustration filled the room, invisible but toxic like carbon monoxide.
But as I got older, those names began to acquire meaning, so that when my father called to tell me that he was stuck on a layover at O’Hare, I could almost feel the steady thrumming of the moving walkways underfoot, a kaleidoscope of multicolored lights overhead in that tacky rainbow tunnel. I felt then as if I understood him a little better. On the occasions when we traveled together, I marveled at how he could doze off shortly after takeoff, with a studied grace born from spending decades practicing transcontinental commutes. The melting ice in his half-consumed cranberry juice would fill the plastic cup with rosewater while he slept peacefully through the screams of apoplectic babies. He was unflappable, aloof; on those flights, I always wanted to wake him and bid for his attention, ask him to play a card game with me, but that would have been childish. Instead, I watched him sleep.
He always remained a cipher to me. Even when he told me he was proud of me, it still felt like I had embarrassed him, somehow.
Or maybe he was always trying to please me. Maybe I was the one who withheld approval. When we first came to New York together, a year earlier, he had already been subletting a one-bedroom, second-floor walk-up in a brownstone on Eighty-first Street and Columbus, for several months while he commuted between Portland and New York. Its primary tenant was a real estate broker who traveled often; he vacated the apartment when my father was coming to town. It wasn’t bad, by New York standards—small and well maintained, with hardwood floors and a bachelor-like sterility—but I had been sleeping on the couch in the living room for the past several nights since arriving from Oregon, and I felt claustrophobic, pinned, starved for light.
I came home to that apartment from school and sat at the kitchen counter, listening to the honking horns on the street outside. The noise grew louder until it felt like I was inside a horn, the blast and the blare, my nerves fraying. I was going to boil over. A one-bedroom in a brownstone was a far cry from where the kids at school lived. My father stepped out of the bedroom, freshly showered, with a towel wrapped around his waist. “Oh, Sam,” he said. “How was school?”
The noise outside grew distant, then faded away into the clicking of a radiator.
“I can’t stay here,” I said. “I need to go somewhere else.”
He looked at me, studying me as though I were a specimen, then softened. “Okay,” he said.
“Can we go to a hotel?” I said.
He nodded. “Okay,” he said again.
That night, we walked—each of us wheeling a suitcase like displaced tourists—a few blocks south to a little boutique hotel on Seventy-seventh and Broadway. I liked the glamour of this (“We live
d in a hotel when I first got to the city . . . ,” I imagined myself telling a throng of rapt if as-yet-nonexistent friends), but it turned out that it was better in theory than in practice. That hotel room was cramped, too, like everything in New York—two queen beds separated by a nightstand, and a desk too small to write at comfortably. I complained that there was nowhere for me to sit and do my homework. My father looked disappointed, as if he had let me down yet again. The next day at school, a girl in study hall, curious about me, asked me where I was living. I told her the name of the hotel.
“Oh,” she said. “I haven’t heard of it.”
Eventually we found a sublet on Eighty-eighth between Broadway and West End, not far from my school. But my father wasn’t there very often. A few weeks after he and I arrived in New York, he met Jennifer through mutual friends who took them bicycle riding in Central Park. That was the story, at least, although I entertained a paranoid fantasy that they had met before he split from my mother. My parents ended their marriage after twenty-seven years, and my father began dating Jennifer just a couple months later. Could it really have been so easy for him to say good-bye to my mother and resolve any grief over the dissolution of their marriage all in the space of a few short weeks? I wondered this some nights as I lay awake in bed. My teenage heart was still bruised over wounds inflicted in flings that lasted only a month or two. Was he callous, or just capable of accessing a type of tidy emotional resolution that I, too, would learn someday?
Jennifer lived in Yorkville, in a stately one-bedroom in a prewar building; my father quickly began spending his evenings with her there, except for the nights that she spent at our apartment.
Jennifer was an executive at a technology company; she reverse commuted to Westchester every day in an old taupe sedan. “I used to drive this fabulous sports car,” she said. “But what’s the point if you’re parking on the street? It’s just going to get trashed!” I disliked this, especially since my father frequently borrowed her car. How glorious it could have been to zip all over the city in a fashionable little coupe, the way my friends did in their parents’ cars, parked in Upper East Side garages at exorbitant rates.