Broken People

by Sam Lansky

  “I’m thinking about getting a place with Charles,” he said as they were eating takeout on the couch one night.

  “Really?” Brett said. He forked some noodles into his mouth. “It’s a little soon, no?”

  “Yeah—I mean, the lease is up after next month, and it just seems like...I don’t know. We’re ready. You know?”

  “If you say so,” Brett said, and for a split second Sam felt guilty for doing this to his friend, but he wanted to be with Charles more than he wanted to do right by Brett.

  “I’m sure you can find another roommate who wants to take my room,” Sam said. “I’ll help.”

  “Maybe I’ll just get a studio,” Brett said. “I dunno.” He sighed. “You gonna move in somewhere super bougie?”

  Sam shrugged. “We haven’t really started looking yet,” he said. “But I’d be happy to live somewhere, you know...nice.”

  Brett looked around the living room, and something fell across his face. “I love our apartment,” he said softly.

  “I do, too,” Sam said, too quickly. “I didn’t mean—”

  “I get it,” Brett said. There was no bitterness in his voice—just resignation.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine!” Brett said. “Nothing lasts forever.”

  The memory was too much for Sam. He curled up on his side, fetal, and the pain of it pierced him in his chest. He could almost cry out from the sadness. Brett, his friend, who he had loved so much. Sam had been selfish. If only he had known then that those would be some of the happiest nights, sprawled out on the couch in that apartment watching reality TV.

  The white light was blinking again in the background and Sam scrunched his eyes up, trying to blot it out.

  But it hadn’t been enough to deter him. And so he and Charles had gone to see the listing for an apartment on Sixty-Third Street and Third Avenue, in a modern high-rise. Charles had wanted to live somewhere new, and the photos on the realtor’s website looked appealing enough—the elegant mirrored lobby, a doorman in a hat with a brim, the long gray awning that Sam saw himself waiting underneath for a taxi on a rainy day, wearing a trench coat and holding an umbrella, looking toward Second Avenue for a cab with its numbers lit up.

  In the lobby they met the realtor. “Let me show you the unit,” she said. The unit—Sam hated that, the clinical sound of it. It wasn’t a unit. It was the place that would be their home.

  As soon as they walked in, Sam knew that Charles would love it—loftlike dimensions, dark hardwood floors, a kitchen that gleamed, closets for days. There were other things that Sam noticed. The bathroom, modern but cramped. There was no overhead lighting, which made the place feel a little sad and dim. The windows faced the block, with a view of a nearly identical building across the street—double-paned windows like expressionless faces, all those other people paying too much just to live their lives. And there were odder things, too—in the living room there were holes in the walls, presumably from where there had once been shelving or paintings hung, but there was one round depression where the wall itself looked caved-in, and Sam had the clear, disturbing thought that it looked as if someone’s head had been smashed into it. Surely that hadn’t happened, though. It was just a thought.

  “Oh, it’s chic,” Charles said.

  “Are they going to fix that?” Sam said, pointing to the wall.

  The realtor rolled her eyes as if it was a stupid question. “Of course,” she said. “It’ll be spick-and-span by the time you move in. And the rent is subsidized, because they’re breaking their lease and they want to get out of here. So it’s less expensive than other units in the building.”

  “Why are they breaking their lease?” Sam asked.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I put them in here. Nice young couple. Courtney and Brian.”

  “Did they break up?” Sam asked.

  She shrugged again.

  “So they broke up,” Sam said.

  Charles had a lot of reasons they should move in: the convenient location; the price that was reasonable, again by Manhattan standards, for a one-bedroom in a doorman building on the Upper East Side. And he was right that it was nice—the nicest place Sam had ever lived in New York by a mile.

  But Sam didn’t want to live there. It was superstitious, he knew, but he was skittish about building a home in the dissolution of someone else’s relationship. Still, they reluctantly signed the lease.

  That night, Sam took a cab down to Enchantments, a hole-in-the-wall storefront in the East Village that sold witchy knickknacks. There he bought a smudge stick and carried it through the apartment as ash sprinkled down onto a white porcelain plate, letting plumes of fragrant white smoke snake through the living room. He didn’t really believe it would work, nor did he really believe that it wouldn’t, but it was the kind of thing that his mother would have done. So he said a little prayer, asking that whatever darkness left behind would evaporate.

  It would never really be their apartment. It was Courtney and Brian’s apartment. Even after it had been painted, there were little things that Sam kept noticing in the days after they moved in, things that gave him pause. Like the chip in the granite on the kitchen sink. Sam made up stories about it. He imagined Brian cracking a beer open there, too drunk to find the bottle opener—did Courtney hate his drinking?—her sniping at him, resenting him a little bit more every time she washed a dish and saw that aberration in the smooth line of the granite.

  For months they got Courtney’s mail. Sam should have forwarded it to her, but usually he just threw it away, which was shitty of him, he knew, but he flinched every time he saw Courtney’s name attached to their address. He wanted to erase any indication that an unhappy couple had lived there before they did.

  The apartment. It had been the apartment’s fault. Lying on the floor now, Sam was sure of it, and he twisted over onto one side again, remembering the apartment, hating the apartment.

  What had been good? They had eked some joy out of moving in, out of the project of building a home together, taking weekend runs upstate to tool through vintage stores in sleepy Connecticut towns, and driving to outlet malls, a Restoration Hardware deep in Queens where they had the only French wall tower clock, five feet in diameter, left in the tristate area, and they rented a U-Haul and drove it there, loading the clock in the back, and Charles drove home, the clock rattling in the trailer, and Sam gripped his arm, laughing and yelling, “Please don’t crash!” That was a nice memory. Maybe he could stay there.

  But then he was standing in the apartment, right by the clock, which had been hung on the wall above the dining room table, looming approvingly over the space, and it was dusk; or maybe it wasn’t dusk, because the apartment never got any natural light, so you never really knew; and Charles was in the kitchen, filling up a big silver bowl with ice and beer. Sam squinted. When was this? Then it flooded him, like diving into a pool: the housewarming party. He didn’t want to go back there, but he couldn’t resist it, the memory tugging at him.

  It was a couple months after they had moved in, the bulk of the apartment furnished, and Charles had wanted for everyone to see how good it looked. He was insistent that they throw a housewarming party. The thought made Sam’s stomach turn, and he kept pushing it off, but Charles continued to bring it up. “Just a few people,” he said.

  “Oh God,” Sam said. “Do we have to? As a sober alcoholic who sweats a lot, hosting a house party in a one-bedroom apartment in the dead of summer is my worst nightmare.”

  “Can’t you just do this for me?” Charles said, and there was something hard in his voice and in his eyes that made Sam certain he had to let Charles win this one. This was how it was: relationships were about compromise.

  They argued about this from time to time—how they socialized, and with whom, and when, and how much Charles’s friends partied, even if Charles himself was p
retty moderate.

  Sam had been sober for long enough now to develop an intuitive understanding of how to survive social situations that revolved around drinking—for him, it was all about knowing where to find the nearest available exits. There was always an escape route planned. He had learned early on, after getting sober, that environments that seemed innocuous could quickly shift into ones that were, if not altogether dangerous, uncomfortable enough that he’d need to leave. A long, boozy dinner where everyone else was drinking but Sam wasn’t—that was tolerable, since at least there was something there for him to consume. He rarely had a great time out at bars but he didn’t mind weathering them, usually just to stop by and say hello—and he took comfort in the knowledge that he could leave whenever he wanted to, that he never had to be in a space that made him uncomfortable.

  But people were always on their worst behavior at house parties. A cramped apartment that always ended up getting humid with too many bodies packed into it. Depending on the vibe, people using drugs out in the open. And leaving always felt more conspicuous in someone’s home.

  As the evening approached, the feeling had built inside him, the feeling of not being able to do this, no matter how simple a thing it was, some overactive fight-or-flight mechanism gone haywire.

  It was a sweltering summer night, and Sam was sitting in front of the air-conditioning in the living room, trying to cool himself down, waiting for guests to arrive, as Charles flitted around in the kitchen, setting out finger food and drinks. He was cheerful, excited to see what fun the night would bring. But Sam felt a profound dread rising from his gut and up through his throat. He was wearing a fancy button-down shirt that Charles had bought him and he could feel the fabric sticking to the perspiration on his chest. His heart pounded. Why did he have to get so worked up about stupid things like this? Why couldn’t he just be normal? Why did everything have to be so difficult? He had been so angry with himself, so angry with Charles, so angry with the world for making him this way, and Sam wanted to reach through time, to grab the person he had been who didn’t have the words to explain that this, this night, would be the one that broke him—not the book or the job or anything else but a housewarming party, that it was too much for him to bear.

  Sitting in the chair by the window, Sam rocked back and forth, making a soothing noise to himself, some tuneless song. But the heat was building in him, the fear, the hellishness of this mundane thing that he simply could not do. Why is it so hard for you to do things? What is the matter with you? He took long, deliberate breaths but his heart was pounding like a drum.

  “What are you doing?” he heard Charles say.

  Sam shook his head.

  “Are you okay?” Charles said.

  Sam shook his head no.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” Sam said. “I don’t know.”

  Charles walked over to him and put a hand on Sam’s shoulder but Sam shrugged it away. He didn’t want to be touched.

  “It’s just a party, babe,” Charles said. Sam shook his head again. “It’s just a little thing.”

  “I don’t know why all the little things feel like big things,” Sam said. “I don’t know.” He wanted Charles to call it off, to say he’d turn everyone away at the door, to say that it wasn’t that important. But Charles’s face tightened instead.

  “Let’s just get through the night,” Charles said. “It’ll be over in a few hours.”

  Sam looked around the apartment, at the place they had built, and he just wanted to be alone in it, to be cocooned in the safety and security of the world they had built there. But when he heard the first knock on the door, it vibrated through him and he knew he had to perform. He stood up and spread his face into a smile.

  Guests began to filter in, saying all the right things about the expensive furniture, and Sam felt himself shift into the role of the gracious host, being welcoming and charming, moving from friend to friend, smiling warmly each time the door opened and someone new arrived. It was as if his body was operating without his mind. But that was almost worse. He felt like a liar, like a fraud, like he was pretending to be someone he wasn’t, and this, too, was sickening; sometimes it felt as if this was all Charles wanted of him—to be on his arm at a fancy party or dinner with friends, looking at him with visible adoration and gratitude. Even though Charles was gay, he was still somehow conventional in his expectations, some old-world model of how a couple should be.

  It wasn’t an hour into the party that Sam saw one of Charles’s friends, a gay who worked as a promoter for a Meatpacking District nightclub, exiting the bathroom, leading a pretty girl in a camouflage miniskirt out by the hand. She licked her lips, working her jaw; he swiped at his nose with his other hand and sniffled. Sam felt his stomach twist like he was going to vomit and the whole performance fractured. No.

  And so Sam did what he always did in these situations: he left. He slipped through the crowds of people swilling rosé in the kitchen, convening around the dining room table, past the window where someone was passing around a joint, through the foyer and into the elevator down to the lobby, where some friends were checking in with the doorman—“Oh, hi! I’m just stepping out for some air,” Sam said to them breezily—and outside into the muggy summer night. Suddenly he felt his breath rise in his throat and his eyes spilled over with tears and he sobbed. There was a piece of it that was darkly satisfying: the grim pleasure he took in being right, in having ammunition to use against Charles for the next time they argued about whether they would go out. Oh, so I can get trapped in another house party with your garbage cokehead friends? Sam would snarl, and he would win by default.

  He sent Charles a text. Can you just get everybody out? it read.

  What? Charles replied. Then: Where are you?

  Outside, Sam said. There’s people doing coke in the bathroom.

  Soon the guests were straggling out, hailing taxis and wandering uptown. Some of them in small groups of new friends, headed up Third Avenue to J.G. Melon for late-night burgers, maybe, or downtown to Rose Bar, sloshing their drinks and taking bumps from a little saran bag, sips of euphoria to keep the good vibes of the night going. Sam watched them from the shadows across the street until he was sure that everyone was gone. He couldn’t bear to see any of them, let alone speak to them.

  Back up in the apartment, Charles was rounding up the empty beer bottles. They looked at each other for a long moment. Sam could read every little modulation on Charles’s face, the tiniest crinkles in his forehead, the curve of his mouth, the version of him that hung behind his eyes. Right now he was sorry but also defensive, flexed, ready to apologize but only so much, because—in his mind—Sam bore half the responsibility for being so sensitive, so prudish, so judgmental. This was where they always broke down. Charles couldn’t understand why Sam couldn’t just be a little more chill.

  Privately, neither did Sam. But not knowing how to change it, he always just doubled down instead, insisting that it was Charles’s fault.

  “I’m sorry,” Charles said.

  “I know,” Sam said. He looked around their nice home, full of all the nice things they had bought, and for a moment he didn’t want to live there at all, and then he felt ungrateful. He sat down at the dining room table. “I really didn’t want to have this party,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Why did you make me?”

  “I thought it would be fun,” Charles said. He sounded like a little boy.

  “Fun?” Sam said. He could hear the iciness in his voice, the rage. “What about this would be fun for me?”

  “You invited all your friends, too.”

  “Because I was trying to counterbalance the stress of having to deal with yours.”

  “I am sorry that it went down like this,” Charles said. “But I can’t control what my friends do, or police their behavior—”

 
“Police their behavior?” Sam said. “All your friends know what my deal is. All your friends know I don’t drink or use. What kind of person does coke in a recovering addict’s home?”

  “I don’t think they knew, babe,” Charles said. “You can’t expect everyone to be that sensitive to you.”

  “It’s not being sensitive—it’s being fucking decent. Here’s a general rule of thumb—don’t do coke in random people’s houses.”

  “Why are you so mad at me? I’m not the one who did anything.”

  “Because I want you to care more about protecting me than about whether your friends are impressed by our nice shit,” Sam said. “Do you have any idea how hard it’s been to stay clean and sober these last six years? How hard, and lonely?”

  “Oh God, not this again,” Charles said, and he turned back into the kitchen. Sam stood up and followed him.

  “You don’t, do you?” Sam said. “You don’t have any idea, and you don’t care.”

  “Right, Sam,” Charles said. “You’re such a fucking martyr because you occasionally participate in social activities and don’t get fucked up during them. Welcome to the real world. Some people do drugs. Why does it bother you so much?”