by Sam Lansky
“Why does it bother me so much?” Sam said, agape. “There were other sober people here tonight. Did you even consider how that looks to them?”
“That’s what this is about, then. You always make me out to be so image obsessed, like I care so much about what other people think. But you’re just worried about fucking up your brand.”
“I don’t care about my brand. I care about having a partner who gives a shit about my safety. Which you don’t, clearly.”
“Your safety is not in jeopardy because some kid did a little coke in the bathroom,” Charles said. “Grow up, Sam.”
“I knew something bad was going to happen tonight,” Sam said. “I fucking knew it. I felt it.”
“Oh, congratulations,” Charles said. “You manifested another shitty night.”
I don’t want to do this, Sam thought, and he no longer knew whether he was thinking that in the memory or in the present, whether that feeling belonged to the version of him that had been there in that apartment, or the version of him that was lying on the floor of Buck’s house. Take me out of this, please. He rolled over on his side and opened his eyes, coming back into his body.
He sat up. He was completely lucid. He looked around the darkened room. There wasn’t even a trace of the spooky glow-in-the-dark effects of the previous night. He looked over at Buck’s nest, but it was empty. He could see the outline of Jacob, sitting cross-legged a few feet away. He closed his eyes again. He lay back down.
He couldn’t go back into the fights, to look at how ugly they had turned, the mysterious way that love could spoil, how the depth of their love was commensurate with the depth of their rage. Not here. Not yet. Not when there was no single fight but rather something more like a supercut of fights; there had been so many that the individual fights had lost their shape—there were only moments, frames that he could freeze on.
The way Charles had looked, so crestfallen and so surprised by Sam’s capacity for cruelty, when Sam had said something unforgivable in the fever pitch of anger—he couldn’t remember what it was now. Another night, sitting up in bed at the apartment on Sixty-Third Street, and Charles was yelling, spittle flying out of his mouth, and Sam was saying, “Just hit me then, if you hate me so much, just fucking hit me, you faggot, you coward, you fucking pussy,” and he could see Charles straighten—he wanted to do it, Sam knew, and Sam wanted him to, because that was his inviolable boundary—if Charles hit him, then Sam would leave.
How did they get there? Sam rolled over again. It must have been something Sam had done, or something that he kept doing, some way that he was inciting Charles’s anger—something Sam had done because he was rotten to the core.
No. He didn’t want to do this. He didn’t want to go there. He wasn’t ready. He wanted to stay in the electric gold of that night in the Hamptons, the whisper of an acoustic guitar, the sun over the bay, the way Charles’s car hugged the country roads, mosquitoes buzzing by lamplight, the fantasy of the house on Woodhollow Drive.
Sam had liked that version of himself, the him that lived in the house on Woodhollow Drive. It looked right, to be someone who summered in the Hamptons—to be someone who summered, period—someone who wore white pants and ivy green Tod’s to a dinner out at a little restaurant overlooking a dock with his good-looking, moneyed boyfriend. There he was. Exactly as he should be. He could see himself there, how right it all was.
That was one of the good nights, one of the ones that Sam had committed to memory as if to remind himself of how it should be. But he felt himself pulled, insistently, deeper into the memory, into what happened next, and he shook his head, not wanting to remember it, how just as the server was setting down the ceviche, Charles’s phone rang. He looked at it.
“It’s the broker,” he said.
“Oh my God,” Sam said, grabbing Charles’s arm. “This is it.”
Charles picked up the call and put it on speakerphone.
“How are you?” the broker said, his voice crackling from a lousy connection.
“Give us good news!” Charles said.
“Listen, guys,” the broker said, “unfortunately the seller has rejected your offer.”
Sam furrowed his brow. “What?” he said. “I don’t understand. We came in almost at the asking price. He doesn’t want to counter?” This sounded like something people would say, though he didn’t understand exactly how it all worked, because he was twenty-five and could barely manage the logistics of paying his cell phone bill; buying a house was entirely beyond his ken.
“I’ll be honest with you,” the broker said. “I don’t think he really wants to sell this house. It’s been on the market for nearly two years. If he wanted to sell it by now, he would have.”
“So what do we do?” Charles said helplessly.
“At your budget?” the broker said. Sam heard him clicking his tongue. “Maybe you should consider getting a condo. There’s a really nice new development in Sag.”
Suddenly the whole thing felt absurd. Some elitist, entitled joke that they had pulled on themselves. Being with Charles, it was so easy to expect that the world would open up its riches to them. But life didn’t always work out that way. Sometimes it all just felt average and staid and anticlimactic. There would be no watermelon gazpacho, no drop-ins from Gwyneth, no house on Woodhollow Drive.
They drove back to the rental house in silence. The dream was ending. Sam looked over at Charles as he navigated the country roads. He was so handsome—dark hair and a strong, wide build; an expressive face that modulated so quickly from boyish to manly. He was the one that Sam had been imagining for years, that Sam had hoped the universe would deliver to him.
Most of the time.
“We’ll find another house,” he said.
“I know,” Sam said, but he was disappointed. They both were.
Would things have gone differently if they had bought the house on Woodhollow Drive? Sam often thought that they would have. That in some quantum permutation of the universe, there was a version of him who was sun-kissed and happy there, tending to his herb garden, while his good-looking finance boyfriend drove in from the city on a Friday night. Sam would kiss his face when he arrived and ask him about his day and point to the dining room table, a slab of salvaged wood dotted with tea candles, where Sam would have thoughtfully curated an array of hors d’oeuvres for him. He would sit and Sam would rub his shoulders and smile and be relaxed and at ease and later suck his dick just because. He would be the man Charles had wanted him to be.
And though it would have been just as easy to populate this fictional universe with a different man, or put them in a different house, in Sam’s mind it was always Charles, and the house on Woodhollow Drive.
Sam opened his eyes again. He stood and silently loped out of the room into the hallway. One candle was burning at the far end of the hall, below a mirror, and Sam looked at his silhouette, as if he wasn’t quite sure that it was really him. He raised a hand at his reflection and waved it at himself.
He turned the corner into the bathroom and sat down on the edge of the tub for a moment.
What was all this, even? It was halfway through the second night and he had yet to experience anything that felt remotely like healing. This, the slideshow of memories that he’d been replaying in his mind for years already, wasn’t anything new or revelatory.
The intolerability of it came on quickly like a head rush. He didn’t want to go back in there, didn’t want to lie there listening to a drumbeat, remembering all of the dumb things he’d done and mistakes he’d made. It wasn’t cathartic, or spiritual. It was pointless.
And yet, he also knew that he’d made a commitment to Jacob that he would see the whole thing through, and as unimportant as that felt, he was also afraid of what might happen if he broke it. He thought back to that morning at the gate. Chills ran through him. He still believed enough to keep going, or at leas
t, he believed that something bad might happen if he didn’t, although he didn’t believe enough to feel confident that the whole experience would offer any ultimate benefit. It was just that if he didn’t stay there, in this sustained suffering, there might be an even worse outcome.
So he stood and trudged back into the den, where everything was still and silent, stepping over Buck’s motionless body and crawling back into his nest. Sam closed his eyes and tried to recenter. After a moment, Jacob began to sing again.
“Usa mi cuerpo, hazme brillar, con brillo de estrellas, con calor de sol.”
Sam put his hands over his chest cavity and took a deep breath. Do we have to do this? he asked, and somehow, he knew that he did; he felt it intuitively, the way you just know some things, and for a moment it made him wonder if she was there with him, the spirit, but he stayed very still for a moment and tried to feel something mystical, and there was nothing—just the sound of his breath in his lungs. His lungs. His lungs.
Jacob had said there was something in his lungs, Sam remembered. He wondered what it was. It wasn’t as though he was constantly ill. He’d get a head cold maybe twice a year, which lasted for less than a week, and occasionally he had a flare-up of seasonal allergies, and sometimes it was difficult to tell which of those was which, but both felt like little more than unpleasant inconveniences to be weathered, an infrequent tax on an otherwise healthy life, not a sign of spiritual unrest.
But there were a handful of times that Sam had gotten sick with a mysterious twenty-four-hour virus that passed as quickly as it came. It happened twice in New York, both when he was living with Charles. The first time it was late winter and it started as a heat, and then soon Sam’s entire body ached as though he was meat that had been tenderized; it hurt to stand and it hurt to lie down. Sam’s teeth chattered and he dripped with sweat.
When Charles got home from work, he took one look at Sam and fled uptown to his mother’s apartment; he was a hypochondriac who washed his hands compulsively and took a dizzying regimen of vitamins to keep his immunity up, and they had been entrenched in a low-level fight about something for the past few days anyway, so if his affection for Sam had barely been strong enough to override his paranoia about getting sick at the very best of times, it certainly wasn’t enough now.
But Sam was grateful that he was gone. He drew the blinds, turned on the air conditioner and sprawled wide across their big bed with its grand hammered steel headboard, punching the pillows soft, feeling the thick crinkled linen of the duvet turn from chilly to hot as his body warmed it. His fever climbed to 101, then 102. He felt wild-eyed and delirious, like a movie character, driven mad by some mysterious illness and consigned to life as an invalid.
After several hours of this decadent misery, he walked the six blocks uptown to an urgent care clinic, where a doctor inspected him, declared it a random virus that would probably pass quickly and advised him to rest and drink lots of fluid. But Sam did not want to get better, to go back to phone calls that needed to be returned and dry cleaning that needed to be picked up and bills that needed to be paid. He wanted to stay in the center of the fever, which was too encompassing to fight through. He wanted to be too sick to do anything forever, because he was sick enough that being sick felt like its own activity, one to which he was forced to surrender. He embraced his powerlessness, let the sickness envelop him like an unwelcome hug.
The next morning he woke up and felt fine—better than fine, even, with the clarity that only comes after a fog has lifted.
Sam was more surprised the one time it had happened in Los Angeles; for whatever reason he assumed that New York, such a cesspool of scuzzy germs and filth and inclement weather, was a place where people got sick with strange illnesses, ones that were probably carried by rats and roaches, then infected you when you touched the credit card console at Duane Reade and didn’t immediately wash your hands. But Los Angeles, with its sunshiny, slightly vacant good vibes, did not seem like a place for sickness. Nonetheless it passed in a day, and Sam woke up in the morning with the previous night’s suffering feeling far away.
And then there was one other time that he had been sick like that, he remembered—he was in Morocco, on a holiday with Charles, and he had fallen ill their last night in Marrakesh and Sam became hysterical, convinced that he had come down with some rare North African flu and Charles hated the riad where they were renting a room—“I don’t like it here,” he said, “I don’t want to stay”—and so they decided to leave Marrakesh early to drive to Casablanca, and Charles hired a driver to take them out of town. They drove through the night, along long, badly lit desert roads, past gas stations with prices in Arabic, as Sam moaned and keened with his head leaned against the window, letting his breath steam up the glass, and the next thing he remembered he was sitting on the floor of the shower at the Sofitel in Casablanca, shaking from fever, and then in the morning he was all right, again. As sick as he had been, he was not sick anymore.
Was all that normal? Remembering it, it felt stranger than it had when Sam had lived through it, those little sicknesses that came and went so fast. But that was the strange thing about being sick, at least in that way—the sickness that came with fever chills, body aches; those fluish maladies—the transience of it almost felt like magic. How curious a thing that the body could be so susceptible to something that was utterly incapacitating, then would pass in a single day, leaving you restored to your original condition. And then it was always forgotten once your health returned. Sam did not think about what it was like to be sick unless he was already sick, and then what it was like to be sick was all that he could think about.
That was why it was so significant the last time Sam had gotten sick, a few months earlier, when he came down with a fever and began to feel a little bit dizzy. Sam had thought to himself then, “Oh, it’s another twenty-four-hour bug.” It had always followed a predictable pattern from which he had never known it to deviate. He knew the lay of the land, knew how sick he would get and how bad it would feel, knew that the end of it, a return to health, was already on the horizon—that it would pass, because the condition of being sick, as Sam had always known it, was a fundamentally brief one, and so he assumed that it always would be.
But it wasn’t. That time was different.
Do we have to do this? Sam asked again, and again, the answer was yes.
It had started the week between Christmas and New Year’s the previous year, during that overlong holiday interregnum where the world seems to stand still in its normal rhythms of work and events and errands. Sam had been coming to the tail end of several weeks of travel that had left him feeling depleted—not ill just yet, but more susceptible than normal, maybe. It was in the late afternoon after a morning flight from Las Vegas, where Sam had spent the weekend with Noah, when he realized he was warm in that feverish way, and a little dizzy.
Why had they gone to Las Vegas in the first place? Noah liked it—that was why. “It’s peak America, isn’t it?” he said. “All that tacky splendor.” They had both been traveling for the holidays, Sam with his mother and Noah back in England with his family. They had only been seeing each other for a few months, which made that Christmas trip feel like an eternity; time meant such different things at different moments. Sam was nervous landing at McCarran, nervous as he tugged himself out of the taxi downstairs at the side entrance to the casino, where Noah was waiting, beaming, like he was so proud of himself. Sam dropped his bag onto the concrete and fell into his arms. His smell, leather and smoke.
“Come on,” Noah said, pulling Sam by the hand into the casino. It felt like a maze, being led through endless hallways of gold-plated everything, the musty, malodorous hallucination of it. They barely made it into the room before Noah’s hands were all over him, in the waistband of Sam’s jeans, pulling down his fly with one hand, kissing him hard, their teeth clinking, and then Noah pulled away and Sam saw something hungry and primal in his eye
s—that look, that I need to have you right now that always made Sam go numb and bright.
This was how it always happened: then Noah’s hands were down the back of Sam’s pants, cupping his ass; and then he pushed Sam down on the bed; and then he pulled off his own shirt, revealing his strong, lean chest and the pale pink of his nipples, the fur that led from his navel down; and it was here, in this moment, that the feeling inside Sam burst from desire into something more like need.
Then Noah’s underwear was off and he spit on his hand and rubbed it on his cock and pushed himself inside Sam and for an instant Sam was complete. Noah leaned forward to kiss him, Sam’s ankles on his shoulders, the metallic taste of his spit, tugging Sam’s lower lip with his teeth; and then as he got closer, his weight shifting in and out, he looked at Sam and his eyes fluttered and groaned, spasming and quaking, and Sam wanted all of Noah, wanted to belong to him—and once, only once, did Noah say the thing that made Sam’s face flush so hot he could hardly bear it, but now was not the time to remember that, not here, not in this sacred ceremony on the floor of Buck’s house. But the memory of it made Sam stiffen in his briefs and he turned over on his side and worked his jaw, trying to back away from the waves of desire that rolled over him and into him, the shame of wanting it that badly.
Not that part. Anything but that.
Fast forward to what came later, as they sprawled out on the bed, and Sam pacing around in his underwear, smoking and telling Noah about the week he’d spent with his family; the black coffee they drank looking out over the Strip. Noah fucked him again before they went to dinner. Raw and savage, standing up this time, Sam’s face pressed against the wall.
Sam hadn’t known then what it was—he knew it wasn’t love, but it was a lust more palpable than anything he’d experienced before, so potent it almost felt like it was enough to build a relationship on.
Out in the hallway, the stench of smoke and medicinal cleaners. It had been so sickening. No wonder he’d gotten sick.