Broken People

by Sam Lansky

  Sam patted a necklace of imaginary pearls. “Darling, I simply can’t tolerate the city in the summer,” he said in an affected voice. “Have the driver bring the car around. I must go to the house on Woodhollow Drive.” He mimed wrapping a scarf around his neck.

  “Why are you putting a scarf on in the summer?” Charles laughed.

  “Because rich people are always cold,” Sam said. “Duh. Haven’t you ever noticed that? Rich people are always, like, reaching for a pashmina or a shawl. Also, they never sweat. Have you ever seen a very rich person sweat? They don’t. Being cold is the ultimate luxury.” He hugged his arms around himself. “I can’t wait to be rich so I can be freezing cold all the time.”

  “You’re so dumb,” Charles said, messing up Sam’s hair.

  On a sunny Saturday morning, they drove to see it, up a winding country road lined with trees. The forest in the Hamptons was greener than anywhere else Sam had ever been—almost mint green, bright green, luminescent. They parked at the base of the driveway and hiked up through the overgrown bush to the house, which was perched at the top of a hill. The gate was open, so they quietly walked around the side, shushing each other and giggling.

  “Is this considered breaking and entering?” Charles said.

  “It’s, like, B-and-E adjacent,” Sam said.

  Through the dusty windows, they could see the interior of the house, spread across three levels. The decor was outmoded; much of the house had seen better days. But the grounds were spectacular. Long beams of gray wood decking framed an enormous swimming pool, perhaps forty feet long, with tiered levels that would create a waterfall cascading down; the pool had long been emptied, and Sam caught a whiff of rotting stink from an animal that must have died nearby, but it was easy to imagine how breathtaking it would be when the house was up and running. It looked like a resort, a little enclave surrounded by dense, verdant woods, and it was so quiet all Sam could hear were their footsteps. Stairs led up to levels of decking that circled the main house, and they climbed up to the highest story to peer into the kitchen, then to look down onto the pool. From there, you could see the bay in the distance beyond the tree line.

  Sam held Charles’s hand and they gazed out over this, what might be their kingdom. Sam looked at Charles and he could see some gleam of madness in his eyes.

  “We have to have it,” Charles said.

  Sam blinked.

  Jacob was still beating on the drum. Sam opened and closed his eyes to the beat for a few seconds. He wanted to be in this memory, because it was happy, but he didn’t, because it was so embarrassing now—that he had been so entitled, so greedy, to think this was something they could do. He sighed and gave in to it.

  It was when Sam was twenty-five; it had been a year since he had met Charles. Now it was summer, and he had stockpiled vacation days to take a month away from work to finish writing his book, and Charles had rented a house in East Hampton for the month of June. He would drive out from the city on weekends and during the week Sam would be alone to write.

  Sam loved it out there—not so much on the weekends, when the highway would grow clotted with cars from the city trying to get to Surf Lodge, or when Charles would bring a carful of friends to the spare bedrooms of the house, getting high by the pool and sloshing drinks in plastic cups and putting on pastel dress shirts to mill around parties at somebody’s share in Montauk, but he loved it during the week, when the little town of East Hampton was conspicuously quiet, the gorgeous silence of those empty streets. Sam would awaken early before the day got too hot and sit in the shade by the pool, drinking iced coffee and chain-smoking and pounding away at his computer, then drive into town to get a sandwich with Brie and turkey at the Golden Pear, then go back to the house to write more as the day grew steamier, until some indeterminate point in the midafternoon when he’d strip down and go for a swim. It was an amber-hued summer dream and even when the work was difficult, he loved the solitude, the quiet, the serenity.

  “This is my favorite place in the world,” Sam said to Charles.

  He rolled his eyes. “You and every rich person in Manhattan,” he said. Then he softened. “I know,” he said. “I love it out here, too.”

  Charles had inherited some money earlier that year; initially he had intended to buy an apartment in the city but slowly, first half jokingly and then over time more seriously, they had been talking about buying a house in the Hamptons instead. “Property values are going up like crazy out here,” Sam said with the authority of someone who knew what he was talking about, although of course he did not. “We could keep renting in the city and have a house out east for weekends and the summer. We could rent it out for just one month of the summer and pay the taxes and maintenance for it all year long.”

  Sam said we although this was Charles’s money, but it didn’t feel like he was overstepping. They were building a future together. But it wasn’t until they found the house on Woodhollow Drive that this bit began to feel like a reality.

  “It’s a steal at that price, but it needs a lot of work,” Charles said, pursing his lips.

  “I know,” Sam said. “But listen. I could quit my job and move out here for the fall and supervise the renovation.” He got higher off the fantasy, like he was taking sips of a powerful inhalant. “Maybe I’ll drive a white Range Rover and go to the farmers market and get organic produce and make a light summer salad and sit out on the veranda or tend to my herb garden, and Gwyneth Paltrow will stop by on her way back from Barry’s and I’ll say, ‘Oh, Gwyneth, it’s so lovely to see you—I just whipped up some watermelon gazpacho, would you like some?’ and she’ll say, ‘No, thank you, too much sodium,’ and I’ll say, ‘Of course, I understand—please help yourself to some cucumber water from that carafe on the table.’ And I’ll have pastel trousers in every color and the slightly leathered look that older leisure gays have but I won’t even bother driving to Sag Harbor to get a vampire facial because I’ll be aging naturally, you know?”

  “Wow,” Charles said. “You are really going to make a fantastic Hamptons housewife.”

  “I think it’s my calling,” Sam said manically. His career and his life in the city felt so far away.

  “We should buy an apartment in the city,” Charles said. “It’s where we live.”

  “I mean, sure,” Sam said. “But at the same price point, which would you rather own—some five-hundred-square-foot shitbox in the sky on Garbage Island, or your literal dream mansion in Fancy White Lady Paradise?” He shot Charles a pointed look. “You do the math.”

  “I’m doing the math!” Charles protested. And indeed he was. After he crunched some numbers—a process which, to Sam, seemed a little bit opaque, but it hardly mattered if they were going to get the house—Charles decided to put in an offer. “It’s a smart investment,” he said, a little bit uncertainly. “In our future.”

  It had been so crazy, Sam thought. But at the time it had felt entirely sensible. They were young and in love and successful and Charles had the money—why shouldn’t they buy their dream house in the Hamptons? Why shouldn’t they have everything that they wanted? Never mind that Sam made a modest salary and was still paying off his student loans; never mind that they’d only been together for a little more than a year; never mind that they were both still in their twenties. It seemed like the only truly foolish thing would be to temper their expectations—to ask for anything less than that. And Sam opened his eyes again, staring around at the darkness of the room, and he almost couldn’t believe it, that this had been his life for a little while.

  All of it would have been unthinkable only a year earlier, at the beginning. But life had changed for Sam, and quicker than he’d imagined it could.

  The first thing, and perhaps the biggest thing, was the book. A friend of a friend had connected Sam with Elijah, who had read his pages and agreed to take him on as a client. The summer that Sam met Charles, he was work
ing on the proposal, going back and forth on rounds of edits and notes, discreetly printing out drafts at his office after everyone else had gone home and going over them with a red pen on the roof of his building until he knew every sentence of it, every punctuation mark; he could have recited the entire manuscript by heart—that was how many times he had read it. And Elijah’s attitude about the material was, if not altogether bullish, at least encouraging; surely, Sam reasoned, Elijah wouldn’t bother taking the time to work with him on it unless he thought it would sell.

  The problem with the material, Sam now knew, with a rush of shame, was that he had focused too much on the style and not enough on the substance; he had been so concerned with the beauty of his sentences he hadn’t thought through what he was saying, which seemed to him now exactly the kind of mistake that you would make when you were young and eager to prove yourself in the world. He didn’t know that the book he was writing had critical flaws, and it made him sad all over again to know that he could never tell this story again, the indelibility of this thing he had created, and as he started to think about that again he reminded himself, No, that story belongs to last night, and he felt it drift away from him and he rooted himself back in the summer once again.

  While he was writing, that summer, he had felt only excitement—that this was the beginning of something, the career he’d fantasized about for so many years, the first step toward great success and good fortune. In the fall Elijah had declared that the material was ready and so off it went to a handful of editors, and Sam waited, with a heady mix of anticipation and dread that he hadn’t felt since he’d applied to college, to learn his fate. And when the book sold—to a real publisher, one of the big ones—Sam almost couldn’t believe it; it was so sublime and surreal that for the first few weeks after it happened, he woke up each morning convinced that he had dreamed it, and it took a moment to remember that it had actually happened.

  Now, of course, he had to finish writing the book. But there was plenty of time for that, as contracts were negotiated and the first half of the advance appeared in his bank account like magic and Charles picked him up by his arms and twirled him around his apartment and Sam thought something good was beginning. It felt like liftoff, like the series of memories he would spend the rest of his life looking back at to trace the origins of how it had happened, all the happiness that he’d been chasing, and at times he could almost see himself as some august older self, maybe basking in the sun on the balcony of his house in the Hamptons years down the line as Charles busied himself in the kitchen, remembering how it had begun.

  And with the little bit of money he had from the book advance, Sam could now afford to pick up the check at a nice dinner from time to time, which was a thrill, and for Christmas that year he bought Charles a beautiful leather backpack that wasn’t even on sale, something that he knew Charles would like, and over New Year’s they went to Paris, where Charles’s family kept an apartment, in a historic old building in the Marais with a cobblestone courtyard, that sat vacant most of the year. When they arrived there, they found that a window had been left open by the last person who had stayed there—Charles’s brother, a year earlier, which they knew by the empty Lanvin and Saint Laurent shoeboxes strewn about on the living room floor, the wreckage of some misbegotten shopping spree—and everything in the apartment was covered in a thin layer of dust.

  “Should we just get a room at Maison Souquet?” Charles said, his brow furrowed.

  “No,” Sam said. “Let’s clean it up!”

  And so they did, mopping the floors and running the upholstered cushion covers from the sofa down to the laundromat on the corner to be dry-cleaned, and replacing light bulbs and wrestling a new vacuum cleaner from the hardware store into the narrow elevator that rattled sinisterly underfoot, and while it wasn’t how Sam had anticipated he would spend his vacation in Paris, it was almost better to be experiencing it this way, with Charles, as some little test of their commitment to one another—that they could make a shared project out of anything, that they worked well together in domestic spaces, that there was goodwill and camaraderie that superseded romance even in the most trying times.

  And after the apartment had been put back together, there were dinners at Hôtel Costes and Le Cinq, long walks through shadowed alleyways, a day spent wandering around the Pompidou, where the most sophisticated take either of them could muster was to point at paintings or statues and say, “Me,” or “You,” or “Same,” this dumb joke that somehow never got old. Late one night on a run to the corner store for some macarons, it began to rain, and so they were running through the cobblestone streets of Paris past midnight, holding hands, laughing at the absurdity of it, and Sam thought, Oh God, this is it, this is the best moment, the moment all other moments will be measured against forever.

  The next thing to change was the job. Sam had gone in for a few interviews before the holidays but it had felt absurd and unlikely—the position, an editor covering culture at a national magazine, was well beyond his skill set, since he had no print experience beyond a few freelance magazine clips. To go from working at a little-read music blog to editor at a real magazine, one that he’d grown up with, was far too much a leap. He was incredulous they made him an offer.

  “Now who’s fancy,” Charles marveled, and for a time, Sam felt like he was.

  Everyone at the magazine was so grown-up, so serious and well-informed. In the morning meeting, each section editor addressed the latest news in their domain, and the quickness and density of it was numbing, the names of world leaders and experimental drugs for cancer and buzzy congresspeople, and every few moments one of the top editors would make an arch joke in reference to an earlier comment that would make everyone in the room laugh, and Sam laughed, too, even though he never got the jokes, and when it came around to him he would stammer and stutter about Beyoncé or the Oscar race, always feeling like he was doing it wrong, never quite sticking the landing.

  His area of expertise was arts and entertainment, and nobody expected him to also possess granular knowledge of any subject beyond that one, and yet, surrounded by so many people covering politics and international affairs, science and the economy, he felt so frivolous in those first months. And soon he came to realize that the workload was extraordinary—the sheer volume of emails that landed in his inbox by the time he woke up, missives from the Hong Kong bureau and time-sensitive requests and breaking news that required him to be quick on his feet with a plan for how it should be covered, and magazine pages that had to be closed every week (every week!), and meetings and conference calls and lunches with entertainment industry executives and soon he was at the office late every night.

  Still, it gave him a thrill to walk into that skyscraper on Sixth Avenue in his blazer and loafers, like so many generations of magazine editors had done before him, responding to quickfire rounds of emails on his phone. He felt important in new and different ways, purposeful somehow. He tried it out when people asked him what he did for a living—“I’m a magazine editor,” he said confidently—and the sheer adultness of it was thrilling beyond words.

  And it was worth it then—the sacrifice of having this job at the same time that he was under contract to deliver the book, as overwhelming a prospect as that was. He had known that it would be difficult, that it would mean many sleepless nights spent writing while Charles dozed in the other room, or more frequently, the mornings—that he would rise at 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. to sit in Charles’s cavernous dining room, the dull thud of his keyboard as he hammered away at some scene, trying to see how long he could go without looking at the work emails that were already coming in from overseas, or stealing an hour in the middle of the day, pretending to be on a conference call while revising his pages.

  What he hadn’t considered was the sense of mounting pressure that would make it easier than he’d anticipated to wake up in the darkness before dawn, that he would spring forth out of bed, his brain noisy try
ing to remember if a story running in the magazine had been fact-checked or whether he’d sent off a round of edits to a freelancer, or from nightmares in which the book was savaged by critics or bombed commercially. So he would rise, padding silently out of the bedroom, to begin working again.

  And when he wasn’t working, Sam felt guilty, that needling feeling of having forgotten something critical at home as you’re heading out on a long trip, knowing that he needed, desperately, to prove himself in both of these spaces of his life—both at the magazine and in the writing of this book, the latter of which was so permanent. He would only get one shot to do this right, and every moment spent doing something besides writing felt like squandered promise. But in the mornings in those fits of anxiety, his body felt tired and he kept thinking, Maybe I should go to the doctor, but then he would put that thought away.

  The final thing to change that felt really significant was the apartment. That was in February, the month after Sam started the new job, three months after he’d gotten the book deal, eight months after he’d met Charles, and the lease was coming up on the apartment on Eighty-First Street, the home he had built with Brett, and the truth was that Sam felt bad about it, the place where he lived, which was no longer a place where he wanted to be.

  Sam went to Charles’s place almost every night—and with each passing day, his own apartment looked worse than it had the day before: the cheap kitchen appliances and the half-furnished living room and his bed frame that creaked ominously every time he flopped onto it and the floors that were always a little grimy no matter how frequently they were cleaned up, and God, reaching the bottom of his stairs and realizing that he had forgotten his keys or his wallet and having to hike five flights of stairs back up. When the lease was up, Sam knew he had to take the out.

  Charles had been wanting to get his own place for a while. As comfortable as his family home was, with a live-in housekeeper and his mother hardly ever there, he said, he felt infantilized living there as an adult man, and it was probably time for him to grow up a little bit. Sam nodded because he knew this was true and more critically, he knew that he couldn’t in good conscience move into Charles’s mother’s apartment and so the best thing for the both of them would be for Charles to move out. And yes, sure, it was soon for them to be moving in together—it had only been eight months, after all—but this was New York, where people surely did crazier things for real estate. And when Sam thought about where he’d lived in college, in that drag queen’s apartment in Chelsea, it seemed silly to overthink the decision to move in with Charles, who loved Sam and who Sam loved, and who he knew so intimately now, even if it had been only a few months. Sam broached the topic with Brett gingerly.