The Gilded Razor

by Sam Lansky

  “What?” he said.

  “I said, ‘Can I smoke?’ ” I said, flashing a big-tip smile.

  He waved a dismissive hand and rolled down the window. The interview was a cigarette, I thought. I had to get enough spark to light it up, but after it was lit, I could just let the words drift from me in ephemeral plumes, warm and aromatic.

  I exited the cab and walked to the coffee shop on the northwest corner. My stomach was somersaulting. I ordered a large iced sugar-free nonfat vanilla latte, took a sip, then promptly threw it away at the risk of appearing too effete. I bought a bottle of water and let it dribble down my throat. My mouth was dry.

  My interviewer, Paul, was country-club blond and faultlessly polite.

  Paul had majored in economics and was captain of the lacrosse team.

  Paul worked for an investment bank.

  Paul was married last May.

  Dread pitted in my stomach. I would never be Paul.

  “What is it that interests you, Sam?” he asked. He was cheery, fraternal; I hated him for the effortlessness of his success as I imagined it. I realize now that Paul probably worked pretty hard in high school to get into Princeton and probably didn’t spend his evenings doing blow with older men, but in the moment, I was outraged by his grace, his charisma. It must have been so easy for him, I thought.

  The writer.

  “English,” I said. “And writing. Creative writing.” It was convenient, I thought, not only because it was true but also because I was fairly certain that the legitimacy of an interest in creative writing was difficult to investigate; surely it was the discipline with the least rigorous associated extracurriculars. If anyone asked, that was why I didn’t have many activities on my résumé. It had nothing to do with staying out all night on drugs, fucking strangers. I’d just been too busy writing. Internally, I bristled, preparing to fight for my identity.

  “Interesting,” Paul said. “Who are some writers you like to read?”

  “Edmund White,” I said. “Joyce Carol Oates. Jeffrey Eugenides. They’re all great.”

  Paul laughed. “They’re all on the faculty, right?”

  I licked my lips. I could feel myself starting to perspire.

  I asked him about the English department. He didn’t know too much about it. I told him that I loved Edmund White, that I loved his triptych of autobiographical fiction about gay culture in America. Then I chastised myself for using the word “triptych.”

  That wasn’t even the right word. What had possessed me to use that word?

  Everything was falling apart. This was a disaster.

  Triptych? There was no recovering from this.

  The conversation was polite, but I could tell he didn’t think much of me. In the cab on the way home, I called my father.

  “Everything okay, Sam?” he said. “I’m in Washington.”

  “I think it went okay, Dad, my Princeton interview, but it wasn’t great, I guess, it wasn’t the hole in one I’d imagined—Jesus, what am I doing using a golf metaphor? Whatever—and it’s probably going to take something more. I mean, I know that I’m smart, but I just don’t think that’s enough for a school like Princeton, you know? I can’t compete with those other prospective Princetonians. Those fratty trust-fundsters from Exeter and Dalton who really, honestly, feel passionately about business administration and tennis and date-raping townies in Sag Harbor or whatever else they do (we both know that’s not really my scene), but I mean, I feel like I held my own, like I established an identity or something, but it’s not the end, is it? It’s just the start. A good start? I guess. An okay start.”

  “Let’s talk about this when I get home,” he said.

  My father expressed some low-level concern over how many pills I had been prescribed, but my grades were up, which suggested that Dr. Chester’s cocktail of pharmaceutical drugs was working. Yet I was sickly, pallid, temperamental, and always covered in a thin film of sweat, even in the dead of winter. I never ate, except for occasional, extraordinary binges that left me ill for days; I slept perhaps once a week, for twenty-four hours straight.

  For a long time after I left New York, I wondered how he could have failed to see that I was unwell. Perhaps it was because I was finally thin after years of being chubby—and my father, who prized physical fitness so highly, couldn’t see anything past the thinness that he had always wanted for me. Or maybe I was just a better liar than even I realized.

  He was still administering the random drug tests my mother had begun—it had been a condition of my moving to New York with him—but through some spooky sixth sense I always knew when they were coming: when he returned from a long business trip, or just off some glint in his eye if our paths crossed in the morning. I quickly learned that a liter of cranberry juice and a long stint in the sauna at the gym flushed all traces of anything illicit I’d ingested out of my system in fairly short order—and I came up positive for amphetamines and benzodiazepines usually anyway, since I was prescribed them. It was too easy to cheat.

  What he couldn’t test for was how I spent my nights when he was over at Jennifer’s, traveling on business, or had simply gone to bed, when I would go to the apartments and hotel rooms of men I met online, over to the homes of friends to party, or out to bars and nightclubs. On the few occasions when he caught me coming home just as the sun was rising, I told him I’d woken up early. Only once, in the middle of the night, did I return to the apartment from a nocturnal tryst with Greg and Matt, a couple with a lavishly decorated Central Park West apartment, to find my father awake and working on the couch.

  “Oh, hi,” I said calmly. “I just went out for a cigarette.”

  “It’s late,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve been up working on this history paper.”

  “Okay,” he said softly. “Get some sleep, will you?”

  I nodded. I went into my bedroom and shut the door.

  It wasn’t five minutes later that Robert sent me a text. Robert. He was late thirties and bearded. He lived just a block away. He always had good drugs.

  “Come play,” he wrote. My muscles clenched reflexively. I checked the clock. It was past one. But I had taken a Viagra that evening in anticipation of Greg and Matt’s inexhaustible libidos, and I was still a little tipsy from the wine they had served me before we all went to bed together.

  “Give me ten,” I replied.

  I shut off my bedside lamp and waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. The crack under the door was dark—my father had gone to sleep. Go to bed, I thought. Or at the very least take a shower. But instead I dressed and left the apartment again.

  Robert opened the door wearing just his boxer briefs. His chest was lean and furry; he had a friendly, boyish charm. He kissed me hard on the mouth, and his breath tasted odd—a metallic flavor, almost antiseptic. On his desk, I spotted a little glass pipe, a skinny stem with a spherical bulb clouded and charred with flakes of crystal meth, and a propane lighter.

  “I didn’t know it was that kind of night,” I said.

  He smiled dreamily.

  “Want a hit?” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. He held the pipe gently to his lips, flicking the propane lighter to incinerate the contents of the bulb, which bubbled and browned, the color of an oxidized apple. After a long breath, he pulled me in for a kiss. I parted my lips, and he blew the smoke into my mouth.

  Suddenly, I felt bright and alert and shiny. It felt like someone had turned the lights on inside me—like the first rays of sunshine after a long and terrible winter.

  I exhaled the secondhand smoke.

  “You should be careful with this shit,” I said.

  “Don’t be a buzzkill,” he said.

  I grabbed the pipe for myself and took a long pull, holding it carefully by the stem. The smoke I blew out was white and fluffy as a cloud.

  “It’s so good,” I said, ecstatic, getting higher. Happiness was less a thought than a punctuation mark—the period on the end
of the sentence that had been my life before this moment.

  “Come to bed!” Robert said, delighted. I grabbed his hands, delirious. I laughed to myself over nothing at all. Everyone is stupid and wrong about meth. This is great. Once in a while. Just once in a while.

  “I am feeling so good,” I said stupidly as Robert began to unbutton my shirt. “I am feeling so good.” I repeated it as he pushed me onto the bed. Soon the words became like a mantra, a prayer that I was whispering to myself in the hopes the good feeling wouldn’t end.

  The next day at school, Sahara stopped me outside French class.

  “Babe,” she said, “how did it go?”

  “What?” I asked. I was bleary. My head was ringing. I hadn’t slept at all. I felt like shit. Why do you keep doing this to yourself?

  “Princeton,” she said. “The interview.”

  “Oh!” I said. For a split second, I considered telling her the truth—admitting that I was terrified and insecure. That my whole life was a mess. That at the rate I was going, I knew that I’d be lucky if I survived senior year.

  Instead, I grinned.

  “I killed it,” I said.

  Three

  Senior year sucks,” I said to Daphne one afternoon. It was November now, and we were smoking cigarettes and drinking vodka-tonics on the balcony of her parents’ Upper East Side penthouse after school one day. “I’m so bored.”

  Daphne took a gulp of her drink.

  “And yet you’re doing a fine job of keeping it interesting for yourself,” she said.

  “All I do is go to detention and go to school and do my homework and, like, wait for Princeton to get back to me and do, like, extracurricular activities.”

  Daphne guffawed. “What extracurricular activities?”

  “I joined the school newspaper,” I said defensively.

  “We don’t have a school newspaper,” Daphne said. She reconsidered. “Do we?”

  “We do now,” I said. The paper had been defunct for nearly a decade and I’d attempted to revive it with a faculty member, knowing that they would let me call myself editor in chief, which would look good on my college applications. I retitled the paper the Dwight Chronicle—emphasis on “chronic.” Dwight’s motto, emblazoned on all promotional materials and on posters around the school, was “Use your spark of genius to build a better world,” so I’d given the newspaper the tagline “Sparking genius since 2005.” We still hadn’t produced an issue yet due to the propensity of the editorial staff, as I was totally willing to concede, for sparking genius when we should have been writing copy.

  “Right,” Daphne said. “I’ll keep an eye out for it.”

  “I also have the Young Writers’ Society,” I reminded her.

  “That’s not a real club,” Daphne said. “That’s just a place where you read your poetry to underclassmen and they give you compliments.”

  “So? I’m still the president of it,” I said.

  “How could Princeton say no?” Daphne said, dry as chardonnay.

  I flicked my cigarette off the balcony. “Do you think I’m going to end up at a state school?”

  “I don’t know what that is,” she said. “But no. Probably not.”

  I stood. “I should go,” I said. “I have a date.”

  “Oh dear,” she said. “Park Avenue wives, hide your husbands.”

  “This one’s unmarried,” I said. “Or divorced, I think. And I have a very good feeling about him.”

  “Just remember,” Daphne said. “If he promises you the moon, grab it and run.”

  I did have a good feeling. His name was Dean and he was forty-three. He had written a personals ad online, cross posted to Manhattan and central New Jersey—Princeton, specifically. I wondered if he was connected to the school somehow. I hoped he would be

  Back at my apartment, I dressed in tan chinos, a light wool scarf, a blue blazer that made me look especially boyish, and my favorite brown leather loafers. I grabbed my wallet, keys, cell phone, and a pack of cigarettes, and put two Ritalin in my shirt pocket.

  I used to say that I was a waste of a perfectly good roofie, but then, I used to say a lot of awful things; still, I had a bad habit of going home with any man who would buy me a double vodka-tonic; any man in whose shoes I could see my reflection; any man with salt-and-pepper hair and an affectionate demeanor; any man with sad eyes and a wedding band; any man who offered me cocaine; any man who reminded me a little bit of my father—not so much that it felt transgressive but just enough that it felt like love.

  Dean was different. His emails back and forth to me were quick-witted and sharp. Even his punctuation was good. He had been an investment banker, he said; now, he was having a midlife crisis, and that meant wanting to sleep with strangers he met on the Internet. I liked his honesty and reciprocated. For once, I didn’t pretend to be someone I wasn’t; I used my real name and told him that I was seventeen, which was the truth. He asked me to bring a piece of identification proving it—seventeen was the age of consent in New York, after all—and so I did, slipping my passport into my back pocket before I left my apartment.

  I met older men online for sex frequently enough, and often it was just for the gratification of cheap quick thrills, guys who had better drugs than I could afford on my own—but mostly it was for the euphoria of being desired, worshipped for my youthfulness. Supine in some dude’s loft, I felt powerful in a way that even the best cocaine couldn’t make me feel. But there was also a part of me that wanted, desperately, to be loved by an older man in a way that was sincere and true. Even at that age I was self-aware enough to know what that was really about. “I wonder if this has something to do with my father,” I’d say with a grin to Daphne the morning after, recounting certain details of how I’d spent the evening but keeping the most lurid of them secret.

  I fantasized with drug-like fervor about being held by a man, about my woes and loneliness evaporating. Each time I hooked up with a stranger, some piece of me clung to a sad little flicker of hope that he would be the one to love me. It would not have occurred to me just to date like a normal person; that involved a type of deferred gratification of which I was incapable.

  And so I took the 1 train from Eighty-sixth Street down to Tribeca. I met him at a little French bistro. Inside, he was there at the bar, tall and svelte, in skinny black Levi’s, a white T-shirt, and a two-button black blazer. He was good-looking yet unremarkable, stubbled. He was drinking alone.

  I showed the bartender my fake ID as I sat down next to him—“Whiskey sour,” I said—and then, quickly under the bar, I showed Dean my real ID, my passport. He checked it, shining it under the light, and smiled. His teeth were white. He shook my hand, then squeezed my thigh. He seemed nervous.

  “I’m Sam,” I said.

  “Dean,” he said. His voice was deep and cautious. He paused. “Would it be cliché to say that I’ve never done this before?”

  “It would,” I said. “And that would be my line, anyway, I think.”

  “Do you do this a lot?”

  “What’s ‘this’?” I asked.

  He gestured at nothing. “You know, this. Meet guys online.”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “It’s hard to meet people when you’re”—I looked up at the bartender, who was distracted rinsing a glass—“my age.”

  “I can imagine,” he said.

  “And I don’t really get along with gay dudes my age,” I said. “Not that there are that many.”

  “Are you out?” he asked. “To everyone?”

  I nodded. “Since I was eleven.” Off his surprised look, I shrugged. “I like to tell myself I’m too intimidating to be bullied, but maybe I’m just lucky.”

  He laughed. “You are intimidating,” he said. “And smart.”

  “I know,” I said, taking a sip of my drink. He laughed again. I could see him starting to relax.

  “Have you seen the film Igby Goes Down?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “You’re like him,
” he said. “I’ll call you Igby, I think.”

  “That’s ironic.”

  “What is?”

  “This is just, like, the first time ever that I’ve used my real name and you’ve already given me a new one. It’s a better name than Sam, though. Uglier, but more fitting.”

  “And you’re in high school.”

  “Yes,” I said. “A prep school on the Upper West Side.”

  “What are you prepping for?”

  “Adulthood, I guess.”

  “Adulthood.”

  “I just want to be old enough to meet teenagers online for sex.”

  “I don’t think that’s what adulthood is,” he said. “Will you go to college?” he asked.

  “God, I hope so,” I said. “I applied early decision to Princeton.”

  “I know it well,” he said. “I have a house there.”

  “I know you do. You said so in your ad.”

  “Is that why you responded to it?”

  “No,” I said. “I responded to it because you sounded sexy. Your writing made you sound sexy.”

  “You’ll do well,” he said. “There are a lot of smart, good-looking kids there. Like you.”

  “That’s what worries me,” I said. “How will I feel special?”

  “I don’t imagine it’s very hard for you to feel special,” he said.

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I need a lot of validation,” I said. “For me to feel ordinary, everyone needs to treat me like I’m extraordinary.”

  “What makes you feel extraordinary?”

  “This does,” I said. “You’re smart; you’re older; you’re obviously successful. You’re handsome. And you want me.” He met my gaze. I dropped my voice an octave. “You do want me, right?”

  “I do,” he said. I put his hand on my groin; he squeezed my thigh through my pants. I licked my lips provocatively.

  “So what do you want to do to me?” I asked. He was silent. I made my voice go still huskier. “What do you want to do to me?”

  He had been panting; he stopped. He looked at me a little coldly. “You know,” he said. “You’re a charmer. And you’re very seductive. But it’s all sort of transparent.”