by Sam Lansky
They spent that night together, awkwardly fumbling in bed in that unfamiliar way, like the encounter was freighted with too many expectations for it to ever carry an erotic charge, like Robert had come over because he felt like he had to in order to be sure that Sam was as much of a disappointment as he suspected. Or maybe Robert was the one who felt like a disappointment, like he could never live up to the lofty bar set by his online persona as a writer, impressive as it was.
Soon after, Robert ghosted—or maybe it wasn’t a full ghost, but it was certainly ghostly, in that he took days to respond to Sam’s messages and dodged attempts to make follow-up plans. And as he ignored Sam’s texts, Robert continued tweeting and blogging cheerfully, which made Sam irate as he sat at home on weekend nights, staring incredulously at the glow of his laptop—at the sheer gall of this man, to have made such clear gestures at romance, to have allowed something that had felt so promising to wither and die so cruelly.
“I will never find anyone smarter than him,” Sam told Brett.
The Robert thing crushed him. Sam could see himself now, pulling up his bedroom window and stepping onto the fire escape. It was winter, and the little balcony overlooked a courtyard frosted with snow. He felt the hot rush of tears coming and soon he was sobbing. Surely it was something about him, some way in which he was undeserving.
He resolved to stop pursuing creative types in their twenties, and he announced so to Brett. “They’re all such emotionally stunted alcoholics.” (In fact, only two of them were even drinkers; Adam was rather temperate, so he did not fit this narrative, but it was easier for Sam to pretend that it had never happened, let alone that he’d had some agency in how it had ended, than to search for some thread that tied all three together.) “There’s only room in a relationship for one of those, and it’s going to be me.”
Brett turned down the volume on the Kylie Minogue record that was blasting from the speakers like a glitter cannon and set down his takeout. “Okay, so no more alcoholics,” he said. “What is it that you actually want?”
“Kind, funny, smart,” Sam said. “Just someone decent.”
“And you think you’re going to find that guy in this city?” Brett said. “Among these queens?” He shook his head. “Good fucking luck. I’m lucky if I take home a guy who doesn’t try to steal my wallet.”
“Maybe it’s the universe’s way of telling me that I need to focus on other things,” Sam said. “Work. The book. Myself.”
“I don’t think of you as someone who has a problem focusing on yourself,” Brett said, spearing a bite of ziti with his fork.
“Drag me,” Sam said. “But don’t you feel like every self-help book in the history of the world is like, ‘Become the kind of person that you would want to date’?”
“That doesn’t sound right,” Brett said. “Two bottoms don’t make a top.”
“You know what I mean! Maybe instead of trying to get these guys to love me, I try to become a better version of myself. Unpack some of this baggage.”
“Get it down to a carry-on, girl,” Brett said. “Stop paying those checked baggage fees.”
Baggage. That was always the problem. Sam had too much of that. And now he was conscious of his body, not in memory but in the moment, in Buck’s house, and he put his hands on his chest and sighed. The heaviness of it was almost unbearable.
What had he said after that? He couldn’t remember. That was where the memory stopped, and in his mind’s eye it was as blurry as a watercolor, Brett’s funny little smile disappearing into a kaleidoscope of static. Sam pointed his toes and flexed his feet. The room was full of smoke now, and it irritated his throat, making him cough.
Is anything happening yet? he asked. No. Nothing was. He tried to settle back into his mind, to drop back into those months of fruitlessly dating through a New York winter. The snow was packed on the ground and crusted on the barren trees like they were wearing gloves made of ice. By the time it all began to thaw, Sam had changed, too.
He had known on some level, even if he couldn’t articulate it clearly at the time, that the problem, the thing that kept him from being loved, was his tendency toward excess, the big hunger inside of him, the same force that had made him drink and drug that had mutated in sobriety to other things—mostly food and validation—and he stuffed the emptiness however he could. His need was bottomless.
Where did that come from, Sam wondered—why was he like that? The only time he had been thin was in high school, when he was living in the city with his father, the same years that he was writing about in the memoir.
Sam’s father had wanted him thin, Sam remembered; it had mattered to him. Like Sam, his father had been chubby as a kid, but had leaned out in adulthood as he fixated on fitness. He exercised for multiple hours a day, training for triathlons, biking to work and taking long runs through Central Park.
Sam had dropped the weight as soon as he started abusing amphetamines when he was fifteen; even more than the speedy high, Sam loved the feeling of satiety. His days were no longer ruled by hunger. For the first time during those years, Sam joined his father at the gym, barely grazing when they went out to eat, and by the time Sam was a senior in high school, he was gaunt enough that teachers at school were expressing concern. Sam thought he looked great. Not only was he desirable to the older men he dated, but his father was proud of him. Sam could feel it in the warmth of his demeanor, the way he seemed affectionate with Sam in a way he hadn’t been before. When Sam was fat, he had been a manifestation of his father’s shortcomings as a parent, a mirror of the heavyset kid his father himself had been and spent so many years running from. When Sam was thin, there could be no other problem. Never mind that Sam rarely ate or slept, consuming only cigarettes and Adderall. His thinness was a blinding light that kept his father from seeing anything else.
Once Sam got clean at nineteen, the weight came back with a swiftness that surprised even him. When he saw his father a few months after he’d sobered up, Sam could feel his discomfort; it radiated out of him. It wasn’t disappointment so much as it was an inability to reconcile the fact that Sam was doing well—he was sober now and had gone back to school—with the fact that Sam was also fat, which had to mean that something was wrong. These truths were in such deep conflict with one another that it seemed easier not to deal with Sam at all.
At seventeen or eighteen or nineteen, Sam had been unable to understand with any insight why his relationship with his father felt so fraught, but with a few years’ distance, he had come to see the ways in which the dynamic had been, and still was, sick. This implicit rejection of him because of the way that he looked. An anger stemming from his time as a latchkey kid in New York City, which itself could be a tacit condemnation of his father’s negligence.
This was why Sam had been a drug addict and a fuckup—because the person who had been supposed to take care of him hadn’t been around.
But this, too, was an overly tidy and convenient story that Sam liked to tell himself, one that reinforced his sense of victimhood and flattened out the complexity of what had actually been, wasn’t it? Maybe his father had just wanted Sam to be healthy. Was that so wrong? And this, the many levels of memory and narrative, began to feel dizzying once again, and lying on the floor of Buck’s house, Sam touched his hands to his temples and rubbed them anxiously, trying to soothe a headache that wasn’t really there.
He anchored himself back in the memory of the apartment on Eighty-First Street. Of himself, standing on the street finishing a phone call in the cold early-spring light, of an enormous bodega coffee. It was in the spring that Sam had committed to losing the weight, motivated more by self-loathing than by self-love; instead of eating, he just drank coffee, and he started walking everywhere instead of taking the train, from his office in the Flatiron on Twenty-Ninth Street all the way home to the Upper East Side, or if he had appointments in the East Village or shows in Chelsea, he walked
home from those, too, long evening walks in the city where he called friends from out of town or jotted down notes on his phone or listened to music or just had the luxury of being alone with his thoughts.
Sam was broke, too, broker than he had ever been before, so broke that sometimes the $2.25 of a MetroCard swipe felt like an expense that wasn’t worth indulging, so he subsisted on coffee using K-Cups that he took from the office, justifying that he sometimes worked from home so it wasn’t really theft, and he walked and smoked (because cigarettes were one expense on which he wouldn’t compromise), and occasionally he’d stop and get a greasy slice of dollar pizza, but mostly his stomach was empty and he let the smoke and grime of the city feed him as he chugged through the hazy days that turned into crystalline nights. Sometimes as he walked, Sam imagined he was on a reality show where he would narrate his own life with self-important theatricality. This city is tough, he would say over a montage of taxis swerving, clickety-clack girls in stilettos stumbling down Washington Street, the sun setting over a brownstone roof. But so am I.
And it didn’t take long before he could feel his hip bones jutting into the waistband of his jeans and his belly was flatter than it had been in a long time. He saw it in his face, too, the way the youthful curve of his cheeks went tauter than it had been before; he almost had a jawline now. When Brett wasn’t home, Sam stood for what felt like hours in front of the mirror that hung in the living room of that apartment, sucking in his stomach, putting on clothes that had fit snugly only a few months earlier to feel how expansive they now were. He had always been unstoppable when he set his mind to something, and so he had set his mind to no longer being fat, and it had worked. The hunger for love, a love that he was sure he would find if only he was thin enough, had finally grown more urgent than the hunger for food.
Never mind that his body was still a battlefield of trigger points and insecurities. He wasn’t in shape, and in photos he could see that he had a look he had come to associate with fat people who had starved themselves thin; a not-quite-healthy sense of proportions, a head that looked a little too big for his body, and when he studied his reflection, he tugged at the flesh of his thighs and the loose skin on his upper arms with dissatisfaction. It was still all wrong. He wasn’t even thin, really—he had just undereaten to the point of no longer being too fat to date, to fit within the range of what was considered normal, to look decent in clothes, especially if he kept his jacket on or wore a slightly bulky sweater.
It made Sam want to see his father. Or, rather, it made Sam want to be seen by his father, if only so he could have a moment to gloat.
Still, things were easier not being fat. The world had a curious way of rewarding him for it—both in the warm, wide-eyed reception he received when he ran into people he hadn’t seen in a couple months, and the way that men looked at him on the street when he walked past, and even when he went out to the gay bars with Brett now, he got cruised in a way he never had before. They didn’t know that he was an imposter, a fat person hiding in an unfat body, that behind the fitted shirt he was wearing was a mess of stretch marks and baggy flesh. That was how he felt, like a bulbous skin-sack that never contained its contents quite right. He wanted to be a little babe, spoonable, fuckable, but he was too tall and broad and lumpy to ever be that, and so he had to exist like this, though still he dreamed of one day inhabiting a different body, just waking up in the morning to discover that he was someone else.
The men of New York were just like his father: they preferred him thin. Or even more essentially, his value was contingent upon being thin—and this was not some wild eating-disordered distortion, it was true. He now received attention in a way he hadn’t since high school, when he was strung out and skinny and pliant. In the years that he had been working hard to finish school and building a foundation of sobriety in adulthood, when he was kind or funny or smart, but fat, he’d been all but invisible. He was the same person he’d been before, with the same assets and flaws, just in a smaller body, but he was treated so differently.
In his relationships, there was something that reminded Sam of his father, this familiar pattern of seeking attention and approval only to be ignored. He had to change the way he thought about men, he decided, to be more independent and less desperate for validation, to telegraph satiety instead of hunger, which he knew would be hard because he was hungry literally all the time, especially now, but he would simply have to put on a brave face and pretend to be someone that he was not. Someone autonomous and confident and self-sufficient. Someone who didn’t have a black hole of need inside him.
“Maybe,” he said to Brett, like a mathematician who, in a moment of profound epiphany, had just solved a seemingly impossible equation, “the problem isn’t that I keep dating my father, but just that the men I’m dating are dating my father’s son,” to which Brett rolled his eyes and put the Carly Rae Jepsen album back on.
My father’s son. Those words rolled around in Sam’s head for a minute, reverberating. My father’s son. My father’s son. My father’s son.
He returned to the present moment and opened his eyes. The smoke in the room had thinned. Was a window open? How much time had passed since they’d begun the ceremony? Was anything even happening?
Sam looked over at Buck, who was lying supine under a blanket, his eyes closed. He wondered what Buck was thinking about. Weren’t some spirits supposed to show up and start healing them?
He looked across the room to Jacob, who was seated cross-legged in a meditative posture, his eyes closed. The shaman didn’t look like he was conjuring much of anything.
Sam lay back down.
In his mind’s eye, he scanned his memory like he was looking over a reel of film, trying to find exactly the right frame. And there, he landed on it.
It was late spring, and the air in New York had grown balmy with the threat of another sticky summer. Brett and Sam were going to a concert at the Roseland Ballroom. It was Justin Timberlake, whom neither of them particularly liked—“I can’t believe we’re going to see a man play a concert,” Brett grumbled—but Sam had gotten the tickets comped through work and so they had decided to make a night of it.
It was sweltering in the venue, and so crowded they couldn’t get anywhere close to the stage. Sam blotted the sweat from his forehead. “Do we have to stay for the whole set?” Sam shouted to Brett.
“I’ve got twenty minutes of this in me, max!” Brett yelled over the din.
At the back of the theater, they lingered not far from the door, as though they might need to flee at any moment. Halfway through one song, the chorus swelling as drunk girls sang along in one big sloppy choir, Sam tapped Brett’s shoulder, shouting at him, “You need a drink?” and Brett shook his head no, and so Sam made his way to the bar. A harried bartender was tending to a line of men all queued up like stockbrokers trying to get his attention.
Down at the end of the bar was a young man with glasses and dark hair in a cream-colored track jacket, tipping the bartender. When he turned to look toward Sam, there was some odd familiarity in his face, like Sam had seen him in a dream or, more accurately, as if the sight of him triggered some long-dormant memory. Sam lifted a hand to wave at him and the young man waved back like he recognized Sam, too, although Sam was sure that he couldn’t place him. But still Sam walked toward him—it would be weird not to after this moment of acknowledgment. Sam smiled and cocked his head quizzically.
“I know you,” Sam said.
“What?” the man said.
“I know you!” Sam said, louder this time.
“Yeah,” the man said. “I had the same thing.” He extended his hand and Sam shook it, formally. “What’s up,” he said. “I’m Charles.” His eyes were very blue behind his round glasses and his hair was ink black and his lips were a little bit pouty. His face was handsome in a patrician way, like a royal portrait. He was sturdily built, and he looked like he was in his late twenties
, maybe, but it was hard to tell exactly.
“I’m Sam,” Sam said. “I can’t place you.”
Charles shook his head. “I know,” he said. “Where are you from?”
“Here,” Sam said.
“The Roseland?” Charles said.
Sam laughed. “No,” he said. “The city.”
“We probably went to the same parties.”
“Probably,” Sam said. He thought back to high school, where there was always some Greek shipping heir with a town house teeming with underage kids blowing lines on a Friday night, and it seemed likely that this was where they had seen one another, years ago, in some earlier iteration of themselves. Maybe Charles had poured him a drink when Sam was sixteen or bummed him a cigarette on a terrace. Sam was always half blacked-out in those years, anyway. No wonder the memory hadn’t stuck.
“I should get back to my friend,” Charles said. “He spilled a drink on some girl and she’s really pissed.”
“That sounds important,” Sam said.
“It was nice to meet you,” Charles said. “Nice to see you again, I guess.” And he was gone.
That was it. There were no fireworks, no violins, no big transcendent moment of connection.
But after the show, the crowd pouring out onto Fifty-Second Street in clouds of cigarette smoke, hailing taxis and shouting into the sultry night, Sam saw him again, standing on the corner of Broadway, propping up another man, who was gesticulating wildly in the way very drunk people did. Sam and Brett passed them and Sam made eye contact with Charles again.