by Sam Lansky
“So why am I in it?” I said.
She turned to me. “Sam,” she said, “how oblivious are you? You’re the poster child for daddy issues.”
“Not everything is about my relationship with my father,” I said. “I think this is about a lot more than that.”
“Well, of course you do.” She sighed. “Why can’t you just find a nice, early-twenties gay to date? Maybe one of those corn-fed midwestern types, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, freshly out of the closet—somebody whose life isn’t all dysfunction and drama. NYU is crawling with guys like that.” She cocked her head. “Or so I’ve heard.”
“That sounds boring,” I said. She tapped the contents of her grinder out onto a rolling paper.
“Whatever,” she said. “Then keep fucking him until you hear back from Princeton so at least he can pull some strings for you—if he’s such hot shit there. Just don’t delude yourself into thinking it’s more than that.”
“But that’s the thing that’s completely infuriating,” I said. “If I didn’t love him, that’s exactly what I’d do. It’s because I love him that I feel bad using him.”
“Then you’ll always be known as the boy who didn’t go to Princeton,” she said.
“I’m so exhausted,” I moaned.
“When was the last time you actually got a full night’s sleep?”
“Sunday,” I said.
“Sam,” she said, agitated, “it’s Friday. Why are you out? Go home. Don’t go to Dean’s. Just, like, get takeout from Mr. Chow, take an Ambien, and get some sleep. Like a normal person. You’re going to die.”
I told her I would, fully intending to keep that commitment, but by the time I got home, I was too tired to sleep—a feeling I had often. I envied the clarity with which Sahara saw the situation. I knew there was a part of me that was manipulating Dean, just as he was manipulating me, but it was thornier than that: I had grown to care about him too much to be so opportunistic, and I had no poker face. And if my youth was what he coveted, why did he talk to me like I was a peer?
After tossing and turning between the sheets for a few minutes, I texted Dean. He told me to come over, and so I did, jumping into a cab and speeding down the West Side Highway.
We lay in the window bed, facing each other. He massaged my legs.
“I hate school and I hate my life,” I whined. “I just want to be with you.”
“How do you want to be with me?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Maybe forever,” I said. “But that’s a long time.” I paused. “How do you want to be with me?”
“Let me think about it,” he said.
Later, he sent me a note. “I want to be with you in many more discombobulated and recombobulated states . . . to see that smile of yours which is half-visible . . . to touch the most vulnerable pieces of you, circulating energy that I wish I could call by a more nuanced name than love . . . to feel your body modulate, in my experience of it, from very manly to boyish . . . to know things after being with you that form a new pattern, things not having to do with you directly but that fit together as a result of some cohesion and opposition—some alternating current—between us . . . to feel our power: yours, mine and ours.”
“That’s, like, the very definition of sweet nothings,” I wrote back. “Or maybe sweet everythings.”
Later, I read his note to Sahara over the phone.
“Dude,” she said.
“Isn’t it romantic?”
“No, it’s weird,” she said. I could hear her sucking on a cigarette. “Maybe you two deserve each other.”
“I could do worse, though,” I said. I hacked a low, guttural cough. I’d had it for a few weeks and it just wasn’t going away.
“It’s funny,” she said. “He’s so old, but he’s probably going to outlive you.”
It was mid-December when I got a letter in the mail from Princeton. I could see clearly that it wasn’t big enough to be an admissions packet. My heart stopped. I tore it open, scanning it for the rejection that I knew was coming.
It wasn’t a rejection, at least. It was a deferral to the regular admissions cycle.
I called my father and told him. “That’s disappointing,” he said brightly. “But what a great opportunity for you to strengthen your application by January—to give them a really strong case for accepting you in the regular round. Maybe get involved with some more extracurriculars.” Fucking extracurriculars. I hated extracurriculars.
I didn’t see it that way. I called Dean. Surely he would know how to cheer me up. “Oh, Igby.” He sighed. His husky baritone gave me chills. I could smell his neck.
“I feel thwarted,” I said. “Not defeated but thwarted. I lost the battle, I guess.”
“Without thwart, there can be no character,” he whispered. He often did this: murmuring poetically in a way that made all my rhythms go haywire, like he knew exactly what I needed. “Without character, the colors of your soul would dull. You’re supposed to be a prophet of the last generation, a more vivid prophet than the easy experience of successful early admission to Princeton would allow.”
A more vivid prophet? I had no idea what that meant, which made it seem all the more profound. “No,” I said. “It was supposed to be easy.”
“Buck up, Igby,” he whispered.
I went out with friends that night and drank too much, falling down in the street. I couldn’t be inside my head anymore. I had failed.
Who was I if I wasn’t the person who belonged at Princeton? What would my future hold? The fantasy life I’d been leading had been so beautifully rendered in my imagination. I couldn’t conceive of a future worth living anywhere else.
I hatched a plan. Dean could be my savior, I thought; he could help me at Princeton where I couldn’t help myself. He was powerful and well connected. Surely he would do that for me—surely he loved me enough to pull a few strings.
I brought it up one night, on the patio of a dimly lit restaurant in Tribeca, the kind of place where we could make out in the back without anyone noticing. “Maybe you could put me in touch with Ed,” I said, as casually as I could.
“Right,” he said, sidestepping the question. “I bet he’d like you, even if you were angling for a good word with the admissions committee.” He reached for a drag of my cigarette. “But I think he’s on leave in London or somewhere like that for a few months. I saw him a few weeks ago at Yolanda’s house for a little dinner with Steve Martin, who was in town.”
“Steve Martin–Steve Martin?”
He smiled. “Shameless name-dropping is part of the courting ritual of a May-September relationship, isn’t it? You keep flaunting your youth and I just keep flaunting my cocktail-swirling panache with the big-timers.”
“Do you know when he’s coming back?” I asked.
He shrugged. I gulped my cabernet.
“Too bad,” I said.
There was a moment’s long hesitation.
“Well, if you talk to him,” I said, “tell him his pubescent doppelgänger wants to buy him a drink.”
“Will do,” he said, smiling at me, but it felt strained.
“What other of my literary idols can you hook me up with?” I said, trying to break the tension. “Hermann Hesse. Can you make that happen?”
He grinned. “Oh, I wish I’d known you’d be so impressed with Hermann,” he said. “I reconnected with him the other night, actually. Nietzsche was such a scandal, drunkenly trying to pants Schopenhauer—and then he got really irritated and spilled his drink all over Hannah Arendt. Oh, what a marvelous party.”
He could see me trying to manipulate him, but he wasn’t taking the bait. And I could feel myself beginning to pull away from him, just the slightest bit. It wasn’t that I loved him any less for what I perceived as his unwillingness to help me—it was a fissure within myself. I could envision the life where I clawed my way into Princeton and we stayed together there, a love that grew deeper and more profound with time. But what if I didn’t? Would I go
to some other college and take the train to New Jersey on the weekend to see my middle-aged boyfriend? Wouldn’t I want to be young and unencumbered?
There were too many variables—too many moving parts. I was going back to Portland for Christmas, and I thought it would be good to be there for a little while—away from the city, and away from him.
I spent my last night in New York with Dean, not knowing if it was exactly where I wanted to be. We had sex, although I didn’t want to. The thought spun around in my mind like water circling a drain: If I don’t sleep with him, what happens to Princeton?
I didn’t wake him up in the morning when I left for the airport, but I left a note on the kitchen counter telling him that I loved him.
I still meant it.
I was almost sure.
Four
Outside baggage claim at the airport in Portland, I could see my mother idling in her black SUV, the passenger-side window rolled down. She had cut her hair since I’d seen her in the summer; now it was styled in a fashionable bob that showed off her angular jawline and high cheekbones. I walked toward her car, tugging my suitcase behind me. She scanned the throng, and I could see her looking right past me. I raised a hand in greeting.
“Mom,” I called. She looked directly at me without recognition, then did a double take. She stepped out of the car and walked toward me.
“Oh, Sam,” she said. She wrapped me in a hug. “You’re so thin, honey.” She looked alarmed. I took it as a compliment.
“I know,” I said.
She touched my hair. “And you need a haircut,” she said.
“I know.”
“I’m glad you’re home,” she said.
“This isn’t home anymore,” I said sharply.
If this hurt her, she didn’t show it; she had gotten better at deflecting my anger, or depersonalizing it. I knew she had been going to a support group for families of addicts, but she said it was about her father, who had been an alcoholic—I wouldn’t learn until much later that it was for me.
I was always angry at my mother, usually unfairly: for her emotional irregularity, which I privately believed had pushed my father away and resulted in the collapse of their marriage; for not fighting harder to keep me from going to New York with my father when, I thought, she should have wanted me to stay in Portland, my home; and for the way she interacted with me, which usually involved efforts to police my behavior that resulted only in conflict.
None of this was actually her fault. My father had been passive or absent, leaving her to overcompensate for his unavailability with explosive outbursts and dramatic gestures. I’d been set on going to New York anyway, and besides, there had been so much tension between us in the preceding years, she would have been powerless to parent me; my resentment toward her was transparent and ugly. Most of all, though, what I couldn’t see then was that she was floundering, too. In short succession, my brother, Ben, had left for college, her husband had left her, and I had moved thousands of miles away. In the space of two quick months, she lost the two identities that had given her purpose for decades: wife and mother.
She tried to set limits, but I quietly flouted them: if she told me not to go out, I simply waited until she went to bed and went out anyway; if she told me she was concerned about my weight or how many pills I took, I threw back in her face my academic successes and college prospects, which were certainly brighter than they’d been in Portland. “Oh, like you did such a good job being the parent,” I’d say, and I could see her face fall, but it was better than the alternative—having to change. She had stopped fighting back. In personal essays I wrote for school and in the stories I told my friends and therapist, I made her out to be the villain in my family’s narrative, embellishing details of our arguments and taking things she had said out of context to give her the shape of an emotionally volatile, glamorously self-involved narcissist. (I might have been projecting.)
Often we got along well, but her attempts to parent me were, I thought, too little, too late. I much preferred my father’s hands-off approach. My mother often seemed to be trying to save me from real or perceived harm, and this annoyed me. I knew what I was doing. I couldn’t see then that we were both unraveling, each of us angry about the other’s instability.
We drove through the night in silence, making switchbacks up the hills toward the house, her occasionally asking a question and me responding as briefly as possible.
“I’m sorry about Princeton,” she said.
“Me, too,” I said.
“Maybe you’ll get in regular decision.”
“Yeah, that’s what Dad said, too, but I don’t know how good my odds are,” I said.
“You have to finish your other applications, right?”
“Yale’s the other reach,” I said. “Vassar and Swarthmore are probably doable. NYU and Sarah Lawrence are my safety schools.”
“That’s a good list,” she offered.
“I guess.”
“You must be excited to spend time with your friends back home.” She corrected herself. “In Portland.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’ll be nice to see Kat.”
A pause. “Are you seeing anyone in New York?” she asked.
“Couple guys,” I said.
“Anyone serious?”
I thought about Dean. I considered the option of telling her the truth: that I’d gotten in way over my head with a man more than twice my age; that I had no idea what I was doing anymore; that I was trying to sleep my way into Princeton.
“No,” I said.
“Anyone not serious?”
“Mom, I’m not going to talk to you about my sex life,” I said.
She raised her hands defensively.
“Honey, I ask your brother about who he’s dating,” she said. “I’ve known you were gay since you were a toddler.”
“Right, because I’m so fucking mincing,” I said.
“Why are you being so hostile?” she said. “You don’t have to be secretive about your life.” She sighed. “It’s not like your father’s giving me updates.”
“If I’m being honest,” I said, preparing to lie, “I’ve been too busy in the city to date anyone.”
“Is that healthy?”
“I’m not your patient,” I said.
She sighed heavily.
A long pause. I felt guilty. “I really missed you,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m just tired.”
She smiled. Her eyes looked watery. “I missed you, too, sweetheart,” she said.
I loved and hated my parents’ house in Portland in equal measures. The year that I was ten years old, as I was finishing the fifth grade, my parents had sold my childhood home and moved across town, up into the wooded area on the other side of the river.
The first time I saw it, my parents drove my brother and me to a part of town I didn’t recognize, along Burnside—the gritty thoroughfare that bisected Portland into north and south halves. Turning from Burnside, we curved up a series of long, winding roads, and although it was daylight it seemed to get darker as the elevation rose, as the broad oak and chestnut trees grew thicker and cast shadows over the streets. We took a sharp turn onto a dead-end street, boxed in on both sides by trees. There, at the end of the road, was the property they had bought. The house was big from the front, painted a pale forest green that made it blur into the landscape if you squinted, with a large garden contained by thick stone walls and a pergola that led down to the front door.
Inside, it was expansive and sterile. A foreboding black chandelier hung in the foyer. Upstairs, there was a screening room with a large projection screen; the previous owner was leaving it behind, my parents said, for us to use. A formal dining room was painted a rich cherry red, which made the space feel gracious but oddly womb-like. The lower level was unfinished; it would be the wing where my brother and I would live, separated from my parents by two floors. I didn’t grieve the loss of my old home—the new one was a nice, shiny distraction.
That
was the fall I began attending an arts charter school across town, which I had chosen with my parents’ encouragement. I was expected to get myself there on public transportation. The new house was a short walk from a light-rail station that dropped me in downtown Portland, from which I took a public bus to school.
I resented that my mother wouldn’t drive me and pick me up, like most of my friends’ mothers did, and as I rode the bus through the grimier corners of downtown, where crackheads ambled through the streets and a cluster of homeless shelters and methadone clinics created packs of panhandlers at the bus stop, I was angry at her for what I experienced as abandonment, or neglect. But on another level, I felt empowered by my independence. My father was often away and my mother was distracted furnishing our new home and starting her new career—she had launched a small practice as a financial planner after working as a therapist for years—which made it possible for me to spend the hours after school how I pleased, with little oversight.
Moreover, I liked my new school, where everyone was at least a little bit strange: artistic introverts, kids who already worked professionally as dancers in the local ballet, musical theater geeks. The grades were mixed, meaning that I, young for my grade at ten years old, was in classes with kids who were several years older.
It was there, in a theater class, at age eleven, that I met Cassie; at fourteen, she seemed impressively worldly. She wore men’s T-shirts and had buzzed her hair; she was the first person I ever heard say that “gender is a spectrum.”
In my beginners’ dance class, I was introduced to a boy named Jerick. He was already popular and well liked; the older girls fawned over him, and I envied both him for being so adored and the girls who were close to him. He was taller than I was, and slimmer. He had shaggy hair that he colored with Sun-In or lemon juice. In class, he stood at the front while I preferred to hide in the back of the room, but as I stared at his back, I wanted to run a finger down his spine, to make him shiver. I felt a desire to be close to him that I couldn’t quite explain, some tingling when he passed in the hallway that felt strange and intimate.