Broken People

by Sam Lansky

  “It’s you,” Charles said.

  Sam paused. “Is your friend all right?” he said. The man Charles was standing with collapsed against the wall and slowly slid down it into a sitting position.

  “Yeah,” Charles said. “He’ll be fine. Enzo just had a few too many. Didn’t you, Enzo?”

  “Charlie,” Enzo slurred. “Let’s go to—let’s go to fuckin’ Le Bernardin.” He was very tall and very good-looking and very drunk and very French, which was too many things to be at once. “I want a fuckin’ cheeseburger from Le Bernardin.” He kicked his Ferragamo loafers against the ground impatiently, like a little kid throwing a tantrum.

  “I’m sorry,” Charles said. “He’s a mess. I always end up babysitting him.” Charles turned to Brett. “What’s up,” he said. Brett raised a hand in greeting.

  “It sounds like we’re going to Le Bernardin,” Charles said. “Do you want to come?”

  The invitation surprised Sam. He looked at Brett, whose face communicated total disinterest. “I think we’re going to pass,” Sam said. “But good luck with this.”

  Charles looked surprised for a moment, and the thought struck Sam that maybe this was someone who was used to people saying yes to him. “I should probably get him home anyway,” he said.

  “Yeah, it looks like it,” Sam said. “Good luck.”

  And then Brett turned to walk away, and Sam was about to turn, too, but for a second he glimpsed something in Charles’s eyes, some desire, and so Sam said, “I’m around if you want to get a drink later, though.”

  Brett looked at Sam, startled.

  “Okay,” Charles said. “I’m going to take him back to the Upper East Side. Want to meet at the Penrose at eleven thirty?”

  “Sure,” Sam said. “I’ll see you there.”

  As they walked away, Brett looked at Sam like he had snapped. “What was that?” Brett said.

  “I know that guy from high school,” Sam said. “Sort of. He’s cute, right?”

  Brett shrugged. “He looks like he has a trust fund and does a lot of coke.”

  “All right, I see the caliber of guys slinking out of your bedroom in the morning,” Sam said. “Didn’t the boy yesterday have a lip ring?”

  Brett laughed. “I came out to have a good time and I’m honestly feeling so attacked right now,” he said, hailing a cab.

  That was where the memory stopped. Sam couldn’t remember the cab ride back, or how it had felt to be at his apartment after the show, or if he had changed his clothes between the concert and meeting Charles at the bar, or the walk down Eighty-First Street to Second Avenue. There was just a big gray nothing, a gap in the reel of film, missing frames. Then the Penrose.

  It was a place that felt defiantly unlike everything that this unfashionable stretch of Yorkville stood for. It belonged in Williamsburg; the drinks were served in mason jars, good-looking young people gathered in booths made of tufted brown leather against a backdrop of exposed brick, eating salmon tartare and Gouda macaroni and cheese, the hot rush of conversations lifting over music that grooved and crashed rudely.

  Charles was already there when Sam walked in, still wearing that track jacket and now an apologetic half smile, seated at the bar. He had a Cartier watch around his wrist and Sam noticed now that he, like Enzo, was wearing designer loafers. It made him look a little out of place there, like he should have been drinking closer to the park.

  “What’s up,” Charles said. He had said it that same way earlier in the night and it struck Sam now because it wasn’t something people really said anymore—not the way Charles said it. It reminded Sam of the straight boys from prep school whose approval he had always wanted, how they were slightly reticent in that boyish way. Not expressive, as Sam was, which always played as feminine.

  “Your friend get home safe?” Sam said.

  Charles shook his head, beleaguered. “Yeah, he’ll be fine,” he said. “Just needs to sleep it off. I’m sorry. I realize it’s not a great first impression.” He cared about making an impression. Sam liked that.

  “It’s fine,” Sam said. “That was me in high school. And it would be me now, if I still drank.”

  “You’re sober?” Charles said.

  Sam nodded.

  “My best friend, Eleanor, got sober when she was really young, too. I’ve been to meetings with her. Eleanor Rubenstein? Do you know her? She went to Chapin. Always in and out of rehab when we were growing up.”

  “I don’t think so,” Sam said. “That was me, though. Seven rehabs by the time I was nineteen. And then I finally got sober.”

  “Sounds like a lot of kids I know from the city,” Charles said.

  “Yeah, I guess it’s par for the course,” Sam said. “But I only did my last few years of high school in the city. Did you grow up here?”

  Charles nodded. “Between here and Florida,” he said. “My dad lives in Miami. But I went to school here. And I still live on the Upper East Side.” He motioned north. “Ninety-First and York.”

  “You came back to the neighborhood?” Sam said.

  “Well, it’s my mom’s apartment, but she’s not there much,” Charles said. “She stays with her boyfriend on Sutton Place most nights. So I’ve been living at her place.” He sounded slightly self-conscious about this, like he was trying to minimize the admission that he lived at home.

  “Listen—Manhattan real estate is a killer,” Sam said. “If I still had family in the city, I’d be staying with them, too.”

  “Your family isn’t here anymore?”

  Sam shook his head. “My dad moved away a few years ago. I never thought I’d end up back on the Upper East Side. But we—my roommate and I—found a great place nearby.”

  “We’re neighbors,” Charles said. “Surprised our paths haven’t crossed sooner.”

  “Yeah,” Sam said. “And city kids all seem to know each other, don’t they? They. We, I guess.”

  “We do,” Charles said. “It’s a universe unto itself.”

  “I don’t have many friends from that chapter of my life anymore,” Sam said, a little more abruptly than he’d intended.

  “Why not?” Charles said.

  “Sort of hard to explain,” Sam said. “After I got clean, I had to put some distance between them and me, I guess. You know—city kids party. And my life is just—it’s different now.”

  “I know what you mean.” Charles leaned a little bit closer to Sam and his eyes were very bright. “I bet your friends from the city miss you, though,” he said.

  The moment was intimate, more so than Sam knew how to navigate. “Yeah,” Sam said. “Maybe I’ll call one of them up and see if there’s, like, a gala I can tag along to.” His palms were sweaty. He wiped them discreetly on the front of his jeans. “So,” he said. “What do you do?”

  “I’m a risk analyst,” Charles said.

  “Cool,” Sam said, although he had no idea what that meant. “Is that...finance?”

  Charles laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “What about you?”

  “I’m a music journalist,” Sam said. It sounded more official, and impressive, than saying that he wrote two-hundred-word posts about pop stars’ album tracklists for a blog.

  “Wow,” Charles said. It had worked—he sounded impressed. “Is that what you studied in school, journalism?”

  “No,” Sam said. “I studied creative writing. I always wanted to write a memoir. I mean, I am writing a memoir. Or trying to, at least.”

  “About what?” Charles said.

  “That world,” Sam said. “Our world. My years running amok all over the city. Kind of a Less Than Zero type thing.”

  “Why do you want to write it?” Charles said. It was a funny question, Sam thought. He bit his lip.

  “A lot of reasons, I guess. Probably for the attention. That’s a big part of it. I love attention.” />
  Charles laughed. “That’s honest,” he said.

  “That’s not the only reason, though,” Sam said quickly. “I guess the other reason is because—well, when you’re an addict, you blow through peoples’ lives like a hurricane, causing all this damage. And then you get sober and you get better but you can never really undo the damage. So what was it all for? For you to grow and learn from? That’s nice, but it feels so insubstantial compared to how much fucking chaos you’ve created. And the idea of making something from it—to actually create something useful out of all that wreckage—is appealing.” He looked at Charles. “Does that sound really grandiose?”

  “No,” Charles said. “It’s a nice impulse.” He took a sip of his drink. “I’ll read it,” he said.

  “I have to finish it first,” Sam said.

  And then the tape went blank again. What happened after that? Sam squinted. Charles must have walked him home, because then they were standing outside Sam’s apartment building. It smelled like smoke. Was that in Buck’s den or in the memory? Oh, it was both. Sam had taken out his cigarettes, a little bit guiltily, and Charles had said, “Oh God, can I bum one—I’ve been trying to quit,” and they had stood outside for a moment in comfortable silence. Suddenly Sam could see himself, his younger self, so clearly, as if he was watching a recording of it. He had been wearing a light gray cardigan and a lemon-yellow shirt. Had there ever been a more perfect spring night than that one? It was late by then and the midevening stickiness had burned off.

  And Charles had looked up at Sam’s apartment building and back at Sam and then he had kissed Sam. “Normally I would try to come up,” he said. “But I think you might be special.”

  “I hope that’s a risk worth taking,” Sam said.

  That was it. Risk. Why did that word feel so charged now?

  Sam looked up at the streetlamp illuminating Eighty-First Street and the light was almost blinding, and then the light circled him, taking residence just behind his eyes, and began to pulsate like a strobe. He couldn’t even see Charles anymore, couldn’t see the shadowed street, the stairs leading up to the apartment, the cherry of his cigarette. There was only this pulsating white light in his periphery.

  Sam’s hand twitched. He opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling. He looked around. He could see the books on the shelves, Buck lying next to him and Jacob lying cross-legged on the other side of the room. Now it was bright enough to see clearly. Who had turned on a lamp? Where was the light coming from?

  He sat up. Groggily it dawned on him, with some mix of horror and astonishment, that there was no light. The room was completely dark. And yet he had the full use of his vision. He could see in the dark. Like a cat.

  Like a cat, he thought. What the actual fuck.

  Sam felt a tension in his groin and realized that he had to pee. He wobbled to his feet, stepping over Buck’s outstretched body, and stumbling through the living room to the bathroom around the corner. There was a candle burning in the hallway. Sam shielded his eyes from it; it was searingly bright, like gazing directly into the sun.

  In the bathroom, urinating was a powerful relief; it felt like he’d had to pee for a hundred years. A candle was burning on the floor of the bathtub, with the shower curtain drawn so the light wouldn’t be too bright, but still it illuminated the whole room so well that Sam could see his reflection.

  He studied his face. He couldn’t tell how altered a state he was in. On one hand, he felt pretty sober. On the other hand, he was basically a cat, so he didn’t want to overestimate his clearheadedness.

  As he blinked at his reflection, it started again—that pulsing white light that felt like it was coming from right behind his eyeballs. What was that?

  He made his way back to the living room and lay back down. He closed his eyes again. Still the white light was flickering.

  What was that thing that his teacher had said? It’s not about what you remember. It’s about why you remember it that way.

  The details that stuck with him now, all these years later—why had he committed those to memory? The boorish people at the concert and Charles’s drunk friend and the conversation they’d had about Sam’s sobriety—it was because it had been hard, hadn’t it? Harder than Sam had wanted to admit at the time, when he was so committed to the performance of having it all together. But it was so terribly lonely and frightening to be sober in an unsober world, and this was something that Sam hadn’t wanted to say out loud, at the beginning. He didn’t even want to think it, as if allowing the thought to exist would drive him to drink.

  Maybe he had been jealous of Charles from the very beginning. Maybe Charles had represented the ease and security that Sam imagined came with money. Like all the kids Sam had known from high school with whom he no longer kept in touch.

  And rich gays were the worst of all. It was part of why Sam had left New York, but it was just as bad in Los Angeles. Noah had been rich, too, which was annoying. Noah, he thought, and a memory threatened to crack open, but Sam couldn’t go there yet, and he opened his eyes and looked up at the ceiling to steady himself in the clear voice of his inner narrator, not in something as immersive as a memory.

  Rich gays. Even Buck, who had been so generous to him—on some level Sam resented him, too. These gays who were handsome and effortless and spent money however they liked. That was all Sam had ever wanted to be. It was so shallow and petty. He didn’t want that to be the only thing he felt—surely there was something more profound than that, something deeper than simple envy, some grave wound that he could heal. And in an instant Sam wanted, desperately, to know what it was, to touch that deeper pain and to tear it out at its root. But he couldn’t remember what it was.

  He rolled over onto his side and curled up in a fetal position. What a stupid exercise this was—analyzing his own memories like they were a work of literature. He had already remembered all of this a thousand times and it never told him anything new. He sighed heavily.

  And then, as if on command, Sam heard a heavy thud, like the beat of a drum. Then another. He turned his head to listen. It was a drum—he had forgotten Jacob had brought one in. The beat was slow and steady, evoking something ancient.

  Jacob began to sing in the high, eerie voice that he’d used in Portland when he was touching Sam’s belly. “Hari om namo narayana,” he sang. “Hari om namo narayana.”

  In Jacob’s reedy voice, the song was shot through with grief; the sadness was beyond words. Every syllable was an elegy. The sound of it made Sam shake, and something heavy dropped in his chest, like his heart itself was a leaden weight.

  He turned over again. When did the healing part start?

  Sam didn’t want to go back to Eighty-First Street. He didn’t want to remember anything more than this. He wanted to curl up inside the pain of the song and stay there, right there, immobilized by everything that still hurt. “Fuck,” he said under his breath.

  And there Sam was, standing under the streetlamp again in his memory, on another night, maybe a week later, holding an umbrella. It was raining. What had he been wearing? He could see himself in a rain slicker with a little hood over a button-down shirt and the plain black Tod’s loafers that he had found at a secondhand store that winter for fifteen dollars; he couldn’t believe what a coup it was, to find this sort of preppy essential, the kind he could not normally afford, at such a steal, even if the pebbled soles were already almost worn through.

  It had been pouring all day, a torrential spring rain, uncharacteristic for the season, with thunder and lightning to boot. Charles had suggested they have dinner at a new restaurant in the West Village and Sam had agreed, planning to take a long walk downtown, but the weather had preempted that plan. Why don’t we just go somewhere in the neighborhood? Sam had texted Charles.

  I can drive us if you want, he said.

  You have a car?

  I’ll pick you up, Charles
had said.

  Sam squinted through the rain as a long black Mercedes pulled up in front of the building, turning on its flashers. Was that him? The passenger-side window rolled down and Sam could see Charles inside, wearing a leather jacket and those goofy round glasses again. Sam made his way through the rain toward the car, shaking out his umbrella before sliding in.

  “What’s up,” Charles said.

  “I don’t think a guy has ever picked me up for a date in a car before,” Sam said. “Nobody in the city has a car.”

  “It’s my mom’s,” Charles said, pulling out onto York Avenue. “Having a car in the city is like having a superpower.”

  “You’re so fancy,” Sam said. Charles shrugged.

  “If I’m going to be living at home, I might as well take full advantage of it,” he said. He looked down at Sam’s shoes—the secondhand Tod’s. “I have those shoes,” he said.

  Sam wiggled his toes in them. “Me, too,” he said, needlessly, and he looked over at Charles.

  They left the car in a garage on Horatio Street and made their way to the restaurant, jumping over puddles and swerving to avoid the spray from passing taxis. Inside, Charles murmured his name to the hostess and they were shown to a corner booth. Charles looked natural in this context, at an expensive place surrounded by expensive-looking people. Everything about him seemed expensive, but not in a performative way. It looked right on him.

  It was then, that night, that Sam learned more about Charles’s life—wasn’t it? Sam couldn’t remember what Charles had said, exactly, but he remembered the stories, how he had listened intently while not eating his burrata; it had been so long since Sam had spent time with anyone like this, not since high school.

  Charles explained that his father, an American, had grown up in Texas, while his mother, the French heir to an agricultural fortune, was raised in Algiers. She moved to Paris when she was a teenager to study fashion and worked for Azzedine Alaïa before moving to New York. Charles’s parents met at Studio 54 and fell madly in love, then had Charles, followed by a messy divorce when Charles was a teenager. When the economy tanked a few years later, Charles’s father went broke and moved to Florida.