Broken People

by Sam Lansky

  “That last part could be a Lana Del Rey lyric,” Brett said.

  “Brett.”

  “Look, we can all freak out as much as we want but it’s pointless and serophobic,” Brett said. “Besides, I started taking PrEP.”

  “What is that?” Sam asked.

  “It just hit the market—it’s this new drug that’s like birth control for HIV!” Brett said brightly. “You can take it and go have as much empty, high-risk, promiscuous, deeply unfulfilling sex as you want while minimizing the risk of catching the big one.” He paused. “I guess the sex doesn’t have to be unfulfilling, but it probably will be.”

  “A dream come true,” Sam said.

  All of this should have assuaged his anxiety, but it didn’t feel like enough somehow; the noise was still too loud. He wished that there was a pill he could take every day that would give him a less anxious mind; nothing any psychiatrist had ever prescribed had given him much relief, except the years he was able to spend drifting in and out of a benzodiazepine stupor before he’d gotten sober. He wished that his sickness could live in the body instead of in his head—this sickness that saw fear hiding in every shadow. It was disturbing that his conscious mind was able to convince himself so powerfully that something was true when it patently wasn’t; that fear could be so potent and so poisonous that it could actually distort his reality, turning every day into a funhouse mirror. It wasn’t even the anxiety that frightened him—it was his certitude.

  Sam came back to his body, feeling the cushions against him and the smell of tobacco. Is that it? A voice inside his head asked him—petulantly, expectantly—and Sam shook his head no, and he understood, in some deep and instinctual place, that this was an important part of what he had to remember, but it was not where the story ended, as shameful and embarrassing as it felt. There was more here—something else about Charles.

  Charles. Sam tried to conjure his memory, but he couldn’t—couldn’t even picture Charles’s face, the face that he had once known so well, every freckle and every hair—all he could see was the apartment again, and in his heart, that little voice said, Deeper, and he dropped down another level into a lightless place, into the lightless apartment.

  You were so dumb, Sam whispered to himself, feeling his body quiver. So dumb.

  Being diagnosed negative with Charles should have resolved his anxiety, but it didn’t. Instead the energy he’d spent obsessing about his health dispersed, finding new targets. He wanted to locate the turning point where it started to unravel, but there was no defining moment—only a series of moments, equally weighted, like abstract thumbnails that he could click open to see what each one held, and so he did, curious to see what lay behind them, as if he hadn’t already lived it.

  The first thumbnail led to an ex-boyfriend of Charles’s who resurfaced a few months after they started dating, sending late-night text messages to Charles that he would read in bed, his back turned to Sam; Sam knew who it was and Charles insisted it was just a friendship and Sam tried, desperately, to be chill, that most unattainable standard—of course gay men could remain friends after dating without that being cause for concern, especially since Charles and his ex had grown up together in the city and shared many friends in common. And why did it matter if the ex was a little bit more demanding of Charles’s attention than seemed appropriate, even a little bit flirty, at least from what Sam could glean from glancing in as chill a way as possible over Charles’s shoulder. But over time, his anxiety about it mounted untenably, until Sam was going through Charles’s phone early in the morning before Charles had awakened, searching desperately for proof that something illicit was going on, although he never found anything incriminating, just the ex coming on too strong and Charles blankly responding lol, until finally Charles said crisply, “Please stop going through my phone,” and Sam knew he had been found out.

  It hung over him, this conviction that Charles was going to cheat on him, would leave him to return to this young man. And yet, as Sam descended into this series of memories, he knew this wasn’t leading him anywhere fruitful. This isn’t it, he thought, and he pulled back, and the glow of Charles’s phone screen faded away into nothingness.

  The next thumbnail was the issue of going out, which caused Sam chronic stress: Charles’s social calendar was fairly busy, long and boozy dinners with his friends where he expected Sam to join him, and birthday parties thrown by former New York prep school kids. Sam had been game enough for this in the beginning but as he had grown more and more uncomfortable with his body, he didn’t want to be out—he just wanted the comfort and security of being at home, where nobody had to see him. Charles couldn’t understand why Sam seemed to struggle so much with it.

  “You need to be more supportive of my recovery,” Sam snapped, which might have been true, but it must have been confusing for Charles—Sam had been so freewheeling in the beginning. He didn’t know how to tell him that it was because he felt bad about himself, as if by saying, “It’s because I’ve gotten fat,” Charles would suddenly see him as fat—as if it was something he’d been hiding so far and to vocalize it would make it real in a new and terrible way.

  Maybe they had both gained weight, though it was difficult to say exactly how much. Sam’s body image was so distorted that he had no way of knowing, and he was petrified to weigh himself, while Charles oscillated in Sam’s experience of him from the most exquisitely good-looking man he’d ever seen, no matter his size, to something else, something monstrous, something that snarled and snapped its jaws at him, a jackal whose eyes went coal black with rage.

  “You made me this way,” Sam would say when they fought. “You made me like this.”

  That wasn’t fair to Charles, but it was true that Sam had changed in ways that startled even him, in terms of the way he lived his life, the way he spent his money and the way he sorted his priorities. Sometimes he looked back so wistfully at the time just a few years earlier when he was poor and hungry. He wasn’t sure why he longed for that time now.

  But buying things felt like freedom, at least for a while. He had spent so many years broke and unhappy, feeling like everyone in New York was having more fun than he was, doing all the glamorous things he could not afford to do.

  And it was funny, too, that they were the same size in everything—or at least they had been when they first met. It was so weird—the boyfriend twin thing, the apex of gay vanity. Sometimes people asked them if they were brothers, but they didn’t look alike, exactly—more like they went together. They were the same waist size and the same inseam and the same jacket size and the same shoe size and the same height and about the same weight, though perhaps they wore it a bit differently; Charles was almost imperceptibly broader in the shoulders but squarer overall in his dimensions and his calves were leaner than Sam’s (Sam was terribly jealous of this), but when Charles put on weight, it went straight to his belly and only to his belly, whereas Sam’s fat was distributed equally everywhere.

  And yet, as Sam got fatter, he could buy more stuff. Fat stuff. Because it was fat stuff, it meant both more and less to him—more because he needed it more urgently inasmuch as he hated himself so much more, and less because he mattered so much less as a fat person than he did as a thin person, in terms of the way the world experienced him and how he experienced himself.

  He could feel the excess, could feel it in his waistline and his hips, could see it in his bank account as the balance dwindled, could see how fatigued Charles had become. But he couldn’t stop. He didn’t know how to.

  The weight had represented so much more than the actual size or shape of his body; it was his happiness, his ability to move through the world as someone who deserved all of the things he had. And underneath the weight was this private conviction that all the things he had assembled while not-fat—his job, his partner, his fancy apartment—were a byproduct of his not being fat, and if he gained back the weight, those things would dis
appear from his life.

  It was all connected, these anxieties, and as Sam continued on to the next thumbnail, he knew that it was one that he didn’t want to open; he knew what was inside it, and it wasn’t something he was ready to see. Haven’t I had enough? he thought, but he knew that he had not, that there was more here. And he opened it and it was the book, the memoir.

  God, that book had meant so much to him; it had meant more to him than anything, even Charles. It had been the only thing he had ever wanted to do after he got sober—to tell the story of what had happened to him and the things that he had done in his addiction, and it was surreal, the fact that he was actually going to get to do it, after all those years of calling himself a writer—he was proving it. And yet the bigness of the platform and the indelibility of what he was writing also made it daunting in ways he hadn’t totally anticipated, in ways that he couldn’t manage.

  That pressure had started to push him to the edge. He had fallen seriously behind; aside from the month he had taken off work in the Hamptons to write, he had no time to write it. He blew through his first and second checkpoints for his editor to see pages. The publisher pushed back the release date by six months. It was unlike him: he had no problem turning around stories quickly at the magazine, but this book was another animal entirely. All the confidence that had gone into the pages that got him the book deal, which he’d written during the early months of falling in love with Charles when everything felt starry and effortless, had disappeared. Sam had convinced himself that the book would be bad, an embarrassment, but he also knew that he had to finish it. On the weekends he’d try to carve out enough solitude to make some headway on the manuscript, but usually he just ended up staring at his phone for hours on end or taking long walks through the city, chain-smoking anxiously. The more he convinced himself that the book would be bad, the more difficult it became to write; to write was to interface directly with the badness of it, and the more he wrote, the worse it became. It consumed him and terrified him.

  He could see himself, sprawled out on the sofa in that dimly lit apartment, his laptop on the floor next to him, open to a blank screen, the same scene he’d been supposed to be writing for weeks now. And then he heard the click of the door as Charles arrived home, setting his briefcase down in the dining room with a heavy thud. Sam had lit the big Diptyque candle on the coffee table to mask the aroma of the burger and fries he’d binged on, depositing the remnants of them in the garbage chute down the hall.

  “How was your day?” Charles said.

  “Long,” Sam said. “I think I’m going to go to a hotel and write this weekend.”

  Without even looking at Charles’s face, Sam knew the expression it bore: disappointment, frustration, fatigue.

  “Again?” Charles said. “You did that last weekend.”

  “I have so much more to do,” Sam said. He could feel the fight building already. He wondered how long it would take to rupture. “I can’t miss another deadline.”

  “Do what you need to do,” Charles said. “But we have Eleanor’s birthday party Saturday night. I hope you’ll be up for that.”

  Sam groaned. “Do I have to go?”

  “I thought you liked Eleanor,” Charles said. “She’s sober.”

  “I just don’t want to be around a bunch of people,” Sam said. “I don’t feel good.” He imagined himself walking into the party and instantly breaking a sweat, the way his clothes would pull on his body, which had expanded so much in size. He couldn’t be seen by Charles’s friends. They couldn’t know how bad things had gotten.

  “Fine,” Charles said. “I’ll go without you.”

  “I should really focus on the book,” Sam said.

  Charles snapped. It happened so quick—Sam thought they had at least another few minutes of passive-aggressive sniping at each other, but no.

  “Then write it, Sam,” he said. “Fucking write it, then. Stop talking about it and fucking write it.”

  “I’m trying,” Sam said. “It’s hard. I have one chance to do this right, you know? I get one shot at this. If I fuck it up and it tanks, I don’t have family money to fall back on. You have no fucking idea what it’s like to actually have your financial future in your hands. I need this to be good. I need it to do well. It’s going to follow me around forever. There is so much riding on this. And you’re so fucking unsupportive.”

  “Oh, I’m unsupportive?” Charles said. “I rented you a fucking house in the Hamptons to write in. But that wasn’t enough for you. It’s never enough for you.”

  “This book has taken everything from me,” Sam said. “You can’t imagine what it’s like.”

  “You know it’s not going to love you back, right?” Charles said. “You know I’m an actual living, breathing person who is right here, in your life, trying to show up for you.”

  “Maybe that’s true,” Sam said. “But this book won’t leave me, and I know you will.”

  Charles shook his head. “You’re so fucking crazy,” he said.

  There was no way to explain it to him—the weight that Sam was carrying, the heaviness of this conviction, how unsolvable it all was.

  Deeper. Sam had tried so hard to pin everything that felt wrong on external factors: the stress of his job; the pressure Charles put on him to be more social; his fears about the book; the long and punishing winter; even the apartment, which he had convinced himself was haunted by the ghosts of lovers past.

  Charles wanted to buy a place in the city, the dreams of their fantasy house on Woodhollow Drive long since abandoned. On weekends, Sam tore himself away from his manuscript to go visit open houses, although they couldn’t agree on what they wanted. Finally, they found a place that they both loved, a renovated duplex in the East Village with an open kitchen, enormous skylights and a little terrace off the back that overlooked an ivy-grown courtyard.

  “We could be happy here, right?” Sam said to Charles, searching his face for agreement. “I think I could be happy here.”

  Charles nodded. “Me, too,” he said. He bought it in cash.

  It had felt like sleepwalking, the lightless days all blurring together. Once we move, it’ll be better. Once I turn in the book, it’ll be better. Once spring comes, it’ll be better. These were Sam’s mantras through that last few months, the February doldrums when the snow was hard and black on the ground. He finished a draft of the book, knowing it was terrible, and sent it to his editor and a few trusted readers, awaiting their feedback, and he printed out a hard copy which he kept in a box under the bed, taking it out whenever he was restless to flip through and make red line edits.

  And he had gone to Eleanor’s birthday party after all, he remembered. It was crowded, marijuana smoke in the air, all of Charles’s friends gathered by a window, making small talk and laughing. Sam went to the bathroom and took deep, calming breaths but it didn’t work.

  Eleanor was working the room in a printed party dress, laughing, in conversation with Charles. “Are you having fun?” Sam asked.

  “Oh, sure,” Eleanor said. “It’s a very me party. I’m drinking soda water while my friends get high and the adults are all in the bedroom doing blow.”

  Sam grimaced. His collar tightened. A moment later, he grabbed Charles by the sleeve. “I’m gonna go,” he said softly.

  Charles’s face dropped. Sam had expected him to put up a fight, but he didn’t. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll see you back at home.” He turned away from Sam.

  Sam hung his head. He was so ashamed of his discomfort, of his anxiety, of his inability to just be normal for a night.

  On his way to the door, Eleanor stopped him. “Are you leaving?” she said.

  “Yeah—I’m sorry, I’m just not feeling well,” Sam said. He tried to smile warmly. “I hope you have the best birthday.”

  “Is it because of the thing I said?” Eleanor asked. Her voice was sharp.

/>   “No—what thing?” Sam lied. “I’ve just been under the weather.”

  “Don’t leave,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t leave!” she said, sounding suddenly bratty. “It’s my birthday.”

  “I know it is,” he said. “And this is a great party. I just—I really have to go. I’m sorry.”

  When Charles got home that night, Sam was waiting for him on the couch. Neither of them spoke. Sam was angry at Charles for staying, irrationally, but he still believed he had the moral high ground.

  “Eleanor was upset that you left,” Charles said finally. “She wants me to be with someone who knows how to have a good time. That used to be you.”

  “I’m under a lot of pressure,” Sam said weakly.

  “She said...” Charles trailed off and looked down. When he looked back up, his eyes were big. “She said if it’s that hard for you to do things when you’re sober, you should either go to a meeting or relapse already.”

  Sam laughed coldly. “She’s such a fucking bitch.”

  “She’s not.”

  “Do you agree with her?”

  Charles shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know anymore.”

  The betrayal stung. Sam had imagined that because Eleanor was sober, too, that there was some implicit trust between them, that she would have his back in a situation like this. But she didn’t care about him—not really.

  And then what? Sam squeezed his eyes shut.

  He had awakened one winter morning to find that Charles was already awake, which was unusual—anxiety almost always woke Sam up early, where he would rise and make coffee while Charles continued dozing until the blare of the alarm clock. Sam pulled on sweatpants and made his way out to the kitchen, where he found Charles seated at the dining room table. A stack of papers was next to him—Sam’s book.