by Sam Lansky
To hang an oversize portrait of Christina Aguilera in the living room.
When Sam got a job writing for a music blog out of college, Brett took it as a sign. Brett had been living upstate with his parents and commuting to Westchester for a corporate job he hated. “That’s it,” he said. “I’m moving to the city to chase my dreams.” He mimed getting into a taxi. “Take me to the center of everything.”
Sam found a listing for a two-bedroom in Yorkville, many avenues from the subway. “Eighty-First and York?” a coworker at his new job said, frowning. “That’s basically upstate.” It was all they could afford, and they couldn’t even really afford that. It was probably stupid to try to live in Manhattan on their incomes, but it felt important. They met at Grand Central Station and took the 6 uptown.
Sam hadn’t been up to the Upper East Side in years. Not since high school, when most of his friends had lived there. As they walked down Eighty-Sixth Street toward the East River, Sam noticed the places that were familiar to him through some foggy lens: the building on that corner where he had snorted Adderall with some girls from school. The sushi place where he relapsed on sake bombs after his second stint in rehab, or maybe it was the third. He couldn’t remember.
Being there brought back his past in more vivid color than he particularly wanted to see. The privilege he’d had as a prep school kid in Manhattan, before his father had cut him loose financially, not long after Sam got sober. Sam had even managed to pay for college himself, through some combination of scholarship, loans and working retail. He had been terrible before he got sober. He knew that. What a relief to never be that ugly again.
Things were different now, because Sam was different now. He was twenty-three, over four years sober, financially independent and, miraculously somehow, employed with a real job. And now here they were, about to move into what he was sure would be their dream apartment.
“God,” Brett said. “This place is far from the train.”
They heaved and grunted, making their way up five flights of stairs, the building manager fumbling with the lock. The pictures on Craigslist had been a little bit deceptive, as was standard in New York. The ceilings were unexpectedly low. The kitchen had been shoddily renovated. The grout between the tiles flaked off in little clumps that stuck in the grooves of Sam’s sneakers. But the living room was big, with a wall of exposed red brick, and at least it was clean. Sam looked at Brett as if to say, Not bad. Brett shrugged.
The building manager sensed their uncertainty. “You have to see the outdoor garden.”
Up yet another flight of stairs they trundled, out onto the roof. It wasn’t a garden so much as a fenced-in square, perhaps ten feet by ten feet, with a wooden gate and a table with two chairs seated at it. There was no greenery, no photo-worthy staging. But it wasn’t hard to imagine that with some string lights and a few planters or some paper lanterns, it could come to life, their own outdoor paradise in the middle of Manhattan.
Sam imagined throwing parties up there, everyone crowding in on a dreamy summer evening, one of their aspiring pop star friends strumming away at a guitar, all of them singing along. He could see in Brett’s face that he liked it, too. On their way back to the train, they decided to take it.
They would make it a home, Sam thought, and it would be a place where music would always play. To love something as purely as they both loved the mysterious alchemy of a perfect pop song, all those chords in mathematical symmetry, the explosion of a euphoric chorus, the key change on the middle eight that felt like speedballing to heaven, some young woman (never men) singing about crying at the disco over a sparkly beat, that gorgeous intersection of happy and sad. Even years later, the sound of a synth loop from one of the songs they’d loved could transport Sam back to that era, efficient as boarding a time machine. There, both of their names on the lease, nobody could judge them for the songs they wanted to hear.
The space never ended up looking quite done. They spent all their money on first and last month’s rent, barely scraping together enough for the security deposit, and there was little left over for furniture. They had an IKEA sofa and a few bookshelves that Brett had brought from his childhood bedroom, a moon-shaped mirror they found at the thrift store, and Sam did indeed go to Times Square one afternoon to have a sidewalk artist draw a black-and-white pastel portrait of Christina Aguilera from a photo that Sam had printed out for him. She wasn’t quite recognizable in the drawing, but they pinned it to the wall with a thumbtack anyway. Sam tried to convince himself that the sparse furnishings of his bedroom gave the appearance of luxurious minimalism instead of betraying the reality that he didn’t have the means to buy anything except the bed and a little side table. He bought a mattress with his first paycheck, but couldn’t afford sheets until the next one, so he slept on it bare, waking up with the sunlight, happy.
They didn’t put up paper lanterns on the roof. But Sam still spent a lot of time up there, at the round card table with the wooden folding chairs, all the high-rises towering above him, casting shadows on the afternoon. He called old friends or sat with his laptop and chipped away at the manuscript for the book he wanted to write. He didn’t expect anyone would ever publish it. He knew that he was a nobody, just another aspirant in the city with dreams of big success, churning out hot takes about Top 40 hits for a blog nobody read. His boss was always talking about traffic and uniques, and Sam knew those things were important but also couldn’t imagine caring about them.
Yet to write something that would make other people feel the way his favorite songs made him feel—this was the prize, and the act of pushing toward it made Sam feel like he mattered. He could see himself, there, in this memory he had polished to a silvery brightness, in this thing that he loved to remember.
Did you feel broken back then? Sam asked himself. He returned to the present moment.
The room was dark and silent. Was it bad back then? He squinted. The answer came to him: No. You were hopeful. And the memory of that hope filled him up for a moment—oh, to feel that again. Am I on ayahuasca yet? he asked himself. No, I am not, he answered, and so he returned to the memory, tapping his feet nervously against the floor of Buck’s house, bored by the familiarity of this tape and yet disinterested in changing it. Is this what I need to see? he asked. Sure. Might as well be.
The Upper East Side. When Sam was a teenager, it had felt fancy, traveling through his friends’ park-facing apartments. Now, as an adult, he could see the neighborhood wasn’t all day-drunk private school kids and well-heeled Fifth Avenue frauen. There were a lot of young professionals in Yorkville, too. Frat bros who filled the sports bars along First Avenue, and twentysomething public relations girls who had migrated north from Murray Hill to keep the nail salons and blow-dry bars doing brisk business, and families who were more middle-class, if such a thing still existed in Manhattan, than those who lived west of Lexington. The cool kids had all moved to Brooklyn, but the city wasn’t quite dead yet. When he walked home from the train at night, he imagined he could feel some magic in the air, the romantic fantasy of being young and hungry and making it in New York, a city that remained alive with possibilities.
It was exactly the right place to be for the book he was trying to write, a memoir about those teenage years getting into trouble with a pack of rich kids, his adventures in rehab and subsequent recovery. So much of his misbehavior had taken place in that same neighborhood that if he wanted to seek inspiration, all he had to do was step outside and there it all was. All those memories.
Sam wondered sometimes, living there, if he would ever be able to reclaim those streets in his adulthood or if they would always feel like they belonged to some lost version of him, some irretrievably young self who knew so little.
Memory was like this, a house of mirrors. Sam remembered, at twenty-three, what it had felt like to be full of possibilities at eighteen, and how he had written those memories down, trying to bleed them onto
the page, to create a record of the person he had been and the person he was then, remembering them with five years’ distance; and now, at twenty-eight, lying on the floor of Buck’s house with another five years’ distance, he could not believe how young he had been at twenty-three, when he had felt so precociously weathered by experience that he had been possessed to write a book about all that he remembered; and suddenly, Sam, the present-day Sam, the one lying on the floor of Buck’s house, felt a powerful bitterness at how stupid he had been at twenty-three and the self-importance that had led him to write that book in the first place.
Now after cherry-picking the memories that served the narrative he had wanted to tell, the ones he never wrote were lost to time. Now his story, when he remembered it, was as clean and narratively resolute as flipping through the pages of his book. Was it even possible for him to remember what had actually happened, instead of the record of it that he had committed to the page? He remembered himself remembering eighteen from the vantage point of twenty-three, but now, at twenty-eight, he had nothing from eighteen except what he had published in that book.
Suddenly, fiercely, he wished that he could be twenty-three again, to be able to look back on his life as it had actually happened, to exist in all the uncomfortable ambiguity of the person he had been. Maybe this was all he was supposed to do here, on this shamanic journey—to simply remember what had gone wrong and why.
What would it be like, Sam wondered, to remember things as they had actually happened—not to prove a thesis, or eliding the moments that felt inconsequential, or didn’t serve the story? Could he actually just recall an experience without wondering where it fit into a narrative, without trying to map the interconnectedness of things or place it within some big and convenient pattern? The very act of telling the story was not like photography; he didn’t know how to capture moments as they were. It was more like sculpture, starting from the raw materials of lived experience and chiseling away at it until it had revealed what he wanted to see, or what he thought the world wanted to see.
He turned over on his side, tasting the smoke and the brine. He exhaled the memory, trying to blow it out of his mouth.
Up on the roof, writing alone. He had been lonely in that apartment, living with Brett. Maybe that was why he had done it. Perhaps he had imagined that if he wrote a book, he would finally feel fixed, somehow rendered whole. If people were reading his story, he would never be truly alone.
On the weekends Brett went out to the gay bars in Hell’s Kitchen, to dance or to DJ songs by chart-middling pop stars while Sam usually stayed in. Much as Sam loved Brett, he was envious of him, of the freedom that Brett found in going out and getting wasted in packed nightclubs, making out with cute boys and getting pizza at 2:00 a.m. Sam would be at home, cracking self-deprecating jokes on Twitter, chasing that rush of validation as retweets and favorites rolled in while he watched old sitcoms on Netflix or sat on his fire escape, looking up at the moon. But all those notifications—they weren’t the same as having a person. Where is he? Sam wondered on those nights. When will I be loved? And so he went on dates.
First there was Adam, a blogger. Over drinks, Sam learned that, like Sam, Adam was stockily built and baby-faced, and also like Sam, his taste skewed thrillingly lowbrow, Bravo docuseries about wealthy white women throwing wine at one another and singles from mostly forgotten turn-of-the-millennium one-hit wonders. There was so much common ground, Sam thought, it had to be fated, and there was something gentle about Adam, something alluringly soft about the way he put his hand on the small of Sam’s back as they were standing at a bar, something wounded and puppyish in his eyes when he talked about the shows he loved. But over the course of subsequent dates, what had telegraphed as sweetness seemed to turn into toothlessness. Where was his edge, Sam wondered. Where was the bite?
Quickly what had once been charming grew irksome, Adam’s snoring through the night in Sam’s bed, which forced Sam to drag a blanket and pillow out to the IKEA sofa in the living room and collapse there, with the junky old window air-conditioning unit blasting on high, even though it was the dead of winter, to generate enough ambient noise to dull Adam’s asthmatic breathing in the other room, and in the morning Adam lumbered out to the living room like a bear stumbling through a campsite, wiping sleep from his eyes and apologizing profusely, even though of course it hadn’t been his fault—who can control their own snoring?
But more than the irritation of the sleepless night, it was Adam’s radiant embarrassment that was a turnoff, as though Adam found himself inherently burdensome and had been trying to hide that from Sam and suddenly he’d been exposed, that the way Adam actually felt about himself was newly transparent.
Something about the interaction haunted Sam, maybe because, although he wasn’t conscious of it at the time, it was a reflection of the way Sam himself felt, moving through the world in a body that was too big for him, making too much noise, graceless and self-conscious; to see it in Adam, for Sam, was like staring at his most vulnerable places in the mirror, and Sam knew that he could not forgive that quality in himself enough to forgive it in someone else.
Not long after, Sam called Adam and told him he thought they were better off as friends. He could hear the little break in Adam’s voice, the way he paused before he said, “I understand,” and Sam knew that he had hurt this young man, but he knew, too, that it hadn’t been quite right, in ways that couldn’t be bridged. Still, he felt guilty about it.
“I will never find anyone kinder than him,” Sam told Brett.
Next there was Eric, a comedian whose sensibility tended toward the macabre, tweeting weird and surrealist jokes about celebrities, particularly Oscar-winning actresses over the age of forty; after a deep dive into his feed, Sam knew that he would never look at Laura Linney the same way again. They met for coffee, taking a long walk through Union Square Park on a frosty winter day, and Sam couldn’t believe how good-looking Eric was, tall and brawny with a chiseled jaw and piercing eyes like a Disney prince. What would it feel like, Sam wondered, to be loved by a man like that?
Eric worked as a bartender at the Gansevoort and soon Sam was meeting him in the Meatpacking District to while away the hours at dive bars after he got off work, or Eric would come with Sam to the concerts that Sam had to cover for his job, and Sam felt the building tension the more they spent time together, the realization that if they hadn’t hooked up by now, they probably never would, and clearly Eric didn’t even want to, or he would have made a move—and what was holding him back? Sam was sure that it was because he was fat, instead of naturally athletic like Eric, and about this he felt such bitterness—that the only thing making it impossible to be together, or so he convinced himself, was his body, which was especially cruel given they were so good together, riffing on extended bits of pop culture detritus and texting each other jokes throughout the night.
Eric drank too much, although that wasn’t surprising—they were gay and in their early twenties; it was par for the course—and this tendency he had to get quickly intoxicated kept Sam hoping, in some private and bleakly opportunistic corner of his heart, that the stars would align and Eric would get just drunk enough to want to sleep with Sam, to overlook Sam’s physical imperfections enough to desire him, if only for a night.
One evening Sam scored an invite to a fashion week after-party and brought Eric as his date. By the end of the night, Eric was flushed and ebullient after so many vodka tonics in some West Village penthouse, and when Eric muttered, “Let’s get out of here,” Sam knew it was finally going to happen. But back at Sam’s apartment, Eric’s drunkenness had turned aggressive, ugly, pawing through Sam’s refrigerator for the beers Brett had bought for a party they’d never ended up throwing.
“You want one?” he snarled at Sam.
“I don’t drink, Eric,” Sam said. “You know that.”
“Whatever,” Eric said, slamming the refrigerator door shut. He passed out
on Sam’s bed, face-first in a pile of pillows. Even after that, Sam lay down beside him, tucking his arms around Eric and hugging his ribs, smelling his musk and the lingering spice of his cologne, wishing that he could change the ways in which Eric was flawed. Maybe that’s how Eric felt about him, too, and this realization felt like the most vicious twist of the knife—that you had to see people as they truly were, not for who you wanted them to be.
In the morning, Eric was terse and awkward, talking too loudly as if his hearing had been damaged the night before, packing up his things to go home to Brooklyn. Sam knew it was over, this thing, whatever it had been.
“I will never find anyone funnier than him,” Sam told Brett.
Then there was Robert. Oh, how heavy Sam had hung his hopes on Robert, a culture pundit who sat atop the pyramid of the cool kids of media, and who wrote with a strange and dazzling lyricism that made the intellectual snob inside Sam, the version of him who cared about that sort of thing more than looks or personality or any other quality, weak-kneed. Late into the night for weeks on end, they direct-messaged about beloved books from childhood and the curious interpersonal politics of New York media, this world Sam felt adjacent to but never quite a part of, like he always just missed the mark—not arch enough, not clever enough—and in those little missives, those text dispatches from across the city, Robert was affectionate and encouraging, intimate as a dinner-party whisper. They joked about how long it had taken for them to find one another, about a New England wedding, in a way that only a fool would have mistaken for anything serious, but surely, Sam thought, there had to be some modest kernel of truth underneath it—right?
Yet when they finally met at a cigar bar downtown—one of the few places left in Manhattan where you could still smoke inside, thankfully—Robert was chillier and more caustic than Sam had expected, hidden behind a beard and glasses, a cipher who revealed nothing. No affection, none of that desire that had been in all their correspondence. The screen, so cool and impersonal, had communicated warmth, but in person, it was cold. Still Sam bought the whiskey that he knew Robert drank, just to have on hand for the nights that he imagined they would be spending together. But Robert only came over once, declining Sam’s offer for a drink, and so it sat unopened on the kitchen counter for as long as Sam lived in that apartment, a reminder.