Broken People

by Sam Lansky

  “He had to sell all his planes,” Charles said, sounding a little melancholy.

  “That’s a very glamorous sentence,” Sam said. “In fact, having to sell all your planes might be even more glamorous than having planes in the first place.”

  “I think true glamour is keeping your planes through the Great Recession,” Charles said, pushing his glasses up his nose.

  On someone else, it would have been unbearable, but on Charles, it wasn’t, somehow; he was funny and self-conscious about his station. He wore his privilege like a loose garment, a part of him but not defining. He told Sam a story from his childhood; he’d grown up with a driver, and so the first time he was ever on board a public bus, he whispered his address in the driver’s ear. He thought that was how it worked. Charles laughed helplessly at this, mortified by the memory.

  It reminded Sam of the culture shock he’d experienced when he had moved to Manhattan as a teenager and realized that the flashy, name-dropping way that rich people talked in the movies was totally inaccurate—the way fictional characters always pointed out their privilege, as though insecure that it might go unnoticed by those around them. This, he had learned, was a parvenu tell—people born of true privilege never have to acknowledge it, because it just is. Sam’s friends in high school had scorned the flashy monogrammed purses that the upwardly mobile carried; they wore slinky Marni dresses, tasteful Celine totes. Living well wasn’t a point to be proven—it was the stage on which life played out.

  Sam wondered if Charles’s lifestyle would have alienated someone who hadn’t spent a few years traveling in those same circles, who didn’t already speak this language, and he was grateful to be familiar enough with it that it didn’t rattle him, because he thought he might like the person underneath it.

  He couldn’t remember leaving the restaurant—couldn’t remember doing the delicate dance of reaching for the check, though he was sure that Charles had paid, which was probably a relief to Sam at the time—the bill for a dinner like that could have wiped out the balance of his checking account, spread thin as he was financially. He couldn’t remember anything until later that night, when the date was over, sitting up on his roof and talking to Kat on the phone. Charles would have dropped him off at home. How funny that Sam now couldn’t remember the kiss as he was getting out of the car, if it was polite or lusty or something else altogether. How tragic it was that those details just got lost to time, disappearing like ghosts in the night.

  But he knew this—that he had sat on that roof and called Kat. “What do you do if you meet a cute boy who is into you and you’re into him but you worry that you’re only into him because he represents the unattainability of your unfulfilled past?” Sam said.

  “Get married?” Kat said. “Who is this dude?”

  “We met last week at a show,” Sam said. “The good news is that he’s French so our kids would have dual citizenship and be better than everyone else.”

  “Chic!” Kat said.

  “The bad news is that he works in finance which means he’s probably a cokehead and I bet all his friends suck.”

  “That’s less good for you,” Kat said.

  “But I think I’m mostly attracted to him because he reminds me of the super rich kids I partied with in high school whose approval I craved except even when I got it, it was still never enough for me because I’m a black hole that endlessly sucks in validation and gives nothing back.”

  “Relatable,” Kat said.

  “So do you think we should raise our kids in Paris or send them to boarding school?” Sam said. “It’s very important to us that Colette is bilingual.”

  Why had he joked about it that way? Maybe it was some way of externalizing the anxiety he already felt about the fact that he’d met someone, out in the real world, and that someone liked him back. It was so much easier to spin his wheels about the potential problems than to just exist in this thing that felt good and simple. But there was also a real fear there—that Charles represented some sort of resolution to the things that were still sticky in Sam’s past, the way he’d grown up, the very story he was trying to tell in this book that he wanted to write but was afraid that he would never finish. There could be no more fitting partner than a true Upper East Side blue blood when Sam was trying to tell the story of how he’d fit in among them; it was a way of coming back to the person he’d been running from for the past half decade. Perhaps it would even help him write the book.

  Sam came back into his body, wriggling his fingers as if to remember that he still had them at all. His eyes darted around the room, which was still as brightly lit as if there was a lamp on, even though there was nothing to illuminate it.

  Jacob was singing a different song now, in a foreign language, with a slow and dirgelike melody. Was it Sanskrit? Sam didn’t know if he had ever even heard Sanskrit before—how would he recognize it if that was indeed what it was? Yet it plucked at the strings of something private and primal, and with a heavy sigh he went deeper into himself, back into this film he couldn’t help but play to its final frame.

  It must have been only a few days later that he had met Charles for a third time, for dinner at a little bistro on Third Avenue. Sam couldn’t recall the name of the restaurant now. But he remembered standing on the corner and seeing Charles’s silhouette approaching him in the spring dusk. He had a slightly flat-footed walk and a bottle of water wedged into the pocket of his jacket and he kissed Sam on the cheek. That was all Sam could remember with any clarity.

  Maybe it had been one of those arbitrarily punishing New York days where there was no hot water for his shower and when he stepped out into the rain, he realized that the umbrella, which he had grabbed on his way out of the door, had broken tines crumpled up like the legs of a dead insect and he didn’t have cash to buy one from a street vendor and he couldn’t get a taxi and so he sprinted to the train and then it ran express for no reason, skipping his stop, so he was late to work and then the line at the deli that sold sad desk salads to sleepy-eyed corporate zombies was so long that he had missed his one o’clock meeting, rushing back down lower Fifth Avenue clutching his lunch in a brown paper bag and walking in red-faced and embarrassed to a disdainful glance from his boss.

  Or maybe it had been something else entirely. But whatever the reason the city on that particular day had not felt like a place where all things were possible, instead feeling like a place where all things were difficult, and pointlessly so, and so Sam’s frustration with the city had leaked out of him over dinner. Somehow the subject of New York and what it would mean to stay there had come up, and Sam had been overly dismissive of the charms of the city, saying something offhanded about how it was very difficult to imagine growing old in New York, although of course he understood implicitly that it was and always would be the center of the world, but that he thought often about moving to Los Angeles, where the sun would always shine and things might be a little bit easier, that maybe when his lease was up he would just go and do something else, get out of the rat race and just live.

  And somehow this conversation had bloomed like a weed, and Charles had said that he couldn’t imagine leaving New York—why would you ever live anywhere else?—and when Sam said he would probably go to Los Angeles eventually, Charles looked crestfallen. It was emotive in a way that was premature, given that they barely knew each other, but Sam could see it now, as clear as a photograph, some faint but distinct wounded shock in Charles’s eyes, the way his mouth went tight into a thin horizontal line.

  “I don’t know,” Charles had said. “I love it here. I know it’s hard sometimes. But it’s worth it to me.” And then maybe they had switched subjects, skating through that loaded little moment as gracefully as possible.

  But this, now this, Sam remembered clearly. They had finished dinner and were standing on the street and Charles kissed him and his mouth felt exactly right on Sam’s; even his breath was sweet. I wan
t this forever, Sam thought. It was such a dumb, romantic thought, but he thought it anyway.

  And then Charles pulled away from Sam and gripped his hips and looked at Sam with his piercing blue eyes and it was like Sam was seeing him for the first time clearly, all of it—this sweetness, this impossibly lovely tenderness, as Charles shifted so effortlessly from a little boy playing dress-up in his father’s business clothes to a man in his own right, self-possessed and confident with a swagger all his own. In an instant, Charles was all of the things—he was kind, and he was funny, and he was smart, and he was the only one who could be all of those things at once. It no longer felt difficult to be loved. It felt easy.

  “Don’t go to California,” Charles said plainly.

  And Sam realized that he didn’t want to anymore.

  “Okay,” Sam said. “I won’t.” And he couldn’t believe it but he really meant it.

  God, how Sam wished he could go back there, that he could rewrite his own history, that the story could have gone differently. But it wasn’t real anymore. It was all just memory.

  This is all just memory.

  He didn’t want to be in this story anymore. He hated this story now. He closed his eyes and tried to conjure up anything else—a memory of something different, a fantasy that he had yet to live, a mantra or a prayer, but his mind was blank. He had to drop back down into it.

  Everything sped up after that—it was harder to isolate specific evenings. Back when Sam had used drugs, he had loved the way amphetamines had made things feel so quick and glossy, like time passed in a different way, like life was happening around him but he didn’t have to be present for anything but the best moments, which he could step into and feel with such acuity and then return to autopilot, like his body was a machine. Falling in love with Charles was a little bit like that, those big surges of dopamine whenever he saw him, and everything in between was just white noise, as he floated through life in an altered state waiting for the next rush.

  But maybe it was the next night, on his fourth date with Charles, that Sam had met his friends; some heiress was having a ’70s-themed birthday party downtown. Rich people loved costume parties as they loved any occasion to buy a new outfit; for Sam, who lacked both time and money to think through and purchase a period-specific costume, it was a deeply stressful invitation. Still, he had rallied, running to the Goodwill on First Avenue that afternoon to forage for bell-bottom jeans and a tacky plaid blazer, which he’d hastily thrown on before heading to meet Charles, spritzing himself with cologne to cover the musty aroma of secondhand clothes.

  There was a photo booth, and streamers everywhere, and all Charles’s friends had names like Isabelle and Chloe and Lucie, gamine young women in suede dresses and patterned jumpsuits, some lo-fi disco number tinkling in the background.

  How is it? Are they terrible? Are they your new best friends? Brett had texted him, and Sam had written back, They are both and it’s fine.

  That was the first night Sam had spent with Charles. He could picture the blazer folded on the arm of the overstuffed chair in his bedroom, the way Sam had creased it so Charles wouldn’t see the chain-store label and think less of him. There, cocooned in his bedroom, lost in his limbs, Sam told Charles that he had a bad history with men, that he always seemed to scare them away by being too intense, too intimate, too vulnerable and too needy, that from all the men he’d ever really cared about going back to his father, he’d had the same terrible pattern: once men realized that Sam was simply too much, it was only a matter of time before they left.

  Charles looked at Sam with something like bewilderment, and he said so quietly, “I think all of those guys were really dumb.” It was a line, but a good one, and Sam had the passing thought, almost too implausible to hold tightly, that maybe this might really be something.

  Sam let the memory pass through him, allowing himself to feel a twinge of longing and regret, but only shallowly; he couldn’t bear to touch the big emptiness underneath it.

  Sam hadn’t been in an apartment like Charles’s since high school, a five-bedroom colossus in an enormous postwar building on York Avenue with panoramic views of the East River; there was a capacious formal dining room, and servants’ quarters that were actually inhabited by a real-life live-in maid, an unsmiling Ukrainian woman named Yana, and a guest bedroom that was cluttered with old stuff, designer shoeboxes and racks of clothing and—Sam gasped when he saw it—a portrait, nearly as tall as Sam, of Charles as a young boy, painted by some middling artist and encased in a gilded frame. It wasn’t entirely up to date—everything in the apartment was wood-paneled, which must have been a trend in the ’90s but made the space feel more like the interior of a yacht than an actual home in the city—but it was still luxurious.

  It would be weeks before Sam finally met Charles’s mother, who spent most nights with her boyfriend across town, and it was easy to see why even in his late twenties Charles had continued living there: there were always groceries in the pantry and Yana kept the house tidy; when they ran out for coffee in the morning, they returned to find Charles’s bed made and the clothes all folded neatly on the overstuffed chair in the corner and the little toothpaste spots wiped off the mirror in the bathroom, which was an emerald-tiled cube, all its fixtures so glossy and pristine. When Sam opened the vanity, there were so many fancy toiletries, bottles of Molton Brown black pepper and coriander body wash and little silver jars of Dr. Brandt moisturizer and La Mer eye cream and endless bottles of Creed cologne. The closet, too, was crowded with nice things, Gucci loafers and fur-trimmed Moncler parkas and effortless Saint Laurent topcoats and cashmere sweaters in every color. It activated something in Sam, some desire to be a part of this world where everything was put in its right place, where there was no dust or lint on anything, where things were expensive and beautiful and fit where they belonged.

  Charles’s apartment was ten blocks north of Sam’s, on Ninety-First Street, and soon every night Sam was walking those ten blocks up York Avenue to stay over, a duffel bag stuffed with the next day’s work clothes, or just to meet Charles for a cigarette downstairs to say hi and give him a squeeze and talk about the day. Quickly he learned every step of that walk: the pizzeria and the dry cleaner and the pharmacy and the Gristedes where, he was sure, nobody had ever shopped. A few awnings down Eighty-Sixth Street toward First Avenue, there was the building where Sam’s stepmother had lived when he was in high school, and he looked often at that awning and the doorman standing underneath it in his jaunty cap—how that doorman had hated him, when Sam was a bratty teenager—and in those moments it felt terribly poignant, that ten blocks could contain an entire life in so many respects. This ten blocks that represented, in its totality, the person he was at Eighty-First Street and the person he had been at Eighty-Sixth Street and now, perhaps, the person he was becoming at Ninety-First Street.

  Sometimes Charles came over to Sam’s apartment, too, though it was always cold and a little bit empty and it was strange to see him there, this polished man in this unpolished place, but he crawled into bed with Sam and lay with him until they fell asleep or they would sit out on the fire escape smoking cigarettes. That summer Sam was listening to the new Taylor Swift album around the clock, and Charles walked in one night while Sam was playing it full blast in his bedroom, leaning out the window blowing smoke circles and singing along.

  Charles laughed at the sight of him. “You really like Taylor Swift, huh?” he said.

  “Oh, I love her so much,” Sam said.

  “Why?”

  “I mean, she’s somebody who writes about her life, like I do, so I guess I like that,” he said. “She’s pop music’s best memoirist. She’s a master of perspective. Have you heard this song, ‘Mine’?”

  Charles shook his head.

  “Oh my God,” Sam said. “You have to hear this.” He turned it on. “It’s a song about falling in love, but it’s not just a song about falling
in love—it’s a song about remembering falling in love. Like a lot of her songs. Have you ever noticed that, like, most of the best modern pop songs are in the present tense? Taylor is so good at writing in the past tense. It’s about memory—about lived experience. On ‘Mine,’ she’s singing about something that happened a long time ago. Listen to these lyrics.”

  They listened to the song together, Sam tapping his feet to that kicky guitar loop. “On the chorus,” Sam said, “she goes, ‘I remember we were sitting there by the water, you put your arms around me for the first time.’ That ‘I remember’—that’s the shit that really blows me away. We’re not with her in the present as she’s falling in love, we’re with her as she goes back into her memories, with all the grief and longing and distance that comes with the passage of time. But then in the second part of that chorus—‘You made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter, you are the best thing that’s ever been mine’—I mean, first of all, my God, have you ever heard a more spectacular turn of phrase than ‘a careless man’s careful daughter’? It just tells you everything you need to know about her, her backstory, her as a character. But then she does this beautiful little twist. ‘You are the best thing that’s ever been mine.’ Not were, but are. We’ve been in her past. Suddenly we’re with her in the present.”

  He looked at Charles—wanting him to understand, wanting him to feel the way that he felt, wishing he could pluck the feeling that was in his chest and transplant it into Charles so he could feel it, too. “Isn’t it incredible?”

  Charles laughed. He didn’t look like he felt it the same way that Sam did. He looked like he felt something else. He touched Sam’s shoulder, and suddenly Sam was embarrassed.

  “Sorry,” Sam said. “I just—you know, I always wanted to write something that makes other people feel the way a song like this makes me feel. It just makes me feel so, like—I don’t know!” He lifted his hands and pressed them to his collarbones. “It makes me feel like my heart is doing jumping jacks in the rain.”