by Sam Lansky
“Did you read it?” Sam asked.
Charles nodded. He looked stricken.
“I wish you had asked me first,” Sam said.
“You’ve given it to everyone else in your life,” Charles said. “I figured it was time I read it, too.”
“What did you think?”
“You can’t be serious about putting this out.”
“What do you mean?”
“The things you write about...” Charles shook his head. He pushed his chair back from the table. An expression Sam hadn’t seen often was on his face—disgust. “All the guys you fucked. For drugs, or for money. All the fucked-up shit you did. You want people to know this?”
Tears sprang into Sam’s eyes. “It’s my story,” he said. “And it happened. I need to own that.”
“Oh,” Charles said. “This you need to own? Your own life. Your mental and physical health. Your ability to participate in this relationship. Those things you can’t take an ounce of responsibility for. But this? This you need to own?”
Sam shook his head. “I have to tell this story.”
“Why?” Charles yelled. “Why do you have to tell this story?”
“Because I do!” Sam shouted back. “I have a contract, Charles!”
“A contract?” Charles laughed. “You wanted to do this in the first place. You wanted to expose yourself to the world this way. Why?”
“I don’t know, okay?” Sam said. “Because I need people to see me. This, right here. This book. These stories. This is who I am, Charles.”
“No,” he said. “It’s not.” He gestured around the room. “This is who you are.” He pointed at the manuscript. “Not this.” He looked at Sam. “This. Us. You and me. Your life here. Not the stories you’re always telling about yourself and who you think you are, or who you want to be.”
“Those stories are true,” Sam said. “And they’re important.”
“That’s not what this is about,” Charles said. “You think telling stories is a way of facing yourself. But it’s actually how you run from yourself. From who you really are.”
“And who am I?” Sam said.
“You’re selfish,” he said. “You don’t care about anything but yourself.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Sam said.
“You put this first,” he said. “Ahead of me. You always talk some bullshit about writing to make sense of your past. But what actually happened is you wrote people right out of your life.” Now there were tears in his eyes, too. “I have been here all along,” he said. “Trying.”
“I’ve been trying, too,” Sam said.
“You haven’t, though. Not really. You’ve been putting all your energy into this. This.” He pointed to the stack of pages again. “I can’t support you with this. I don’t know how I’m supposed to sit back and watch you do this. It’s—it’s humiliating.”
“For who? For me or for you?”
“For both of us,” Charles said. “You want me to pretend like I don’t care what people think of me—of us? Yes, I care that all of my friends will know about all the things you’ve done. It’s embarrassing to me. I don’t have a problem admitting that. But you—you care more about what other people think of you than anyone I’ve ever met. Which is why I can’t understand why you want to do this. To yourself. To us.”
“So is that it?” Sam said. “You’re done with me, because you think my book is embarrassing?”
“Oh, you’d love that, wouldn’t you? If it was that linear—if that could be a part of your story, too.” Charles stood. “I’m not going to be that for you.” He raised his hands. “You’re always telling a story, Sam,” he said. “A story about how much pain you’re in. How misunderstood you are. How hard things are for you. Once you’re done with this one, there will be another one. But I’m not going to wait around for that.”
And that was it. Sam should have known that it was ending, but he didn’t, somehow—he still thought some part of it was fixable. Maybe he would take a few objectionable parts out of the book for Charles, to sanitize it a bit. Maybe once they moved, things would be better. It had been a funny sort of cognitive dissonance, this inability to see his world crumbling around him, to truly register what was happening.
They never resolved it. It hung over the apartment like a storm cloud for a week or so, until they left for a long-planned vacation that now neither of them seemed particularly interested in taking. Charles’s mother had rented a villa in St. Barts for a week, which was the kind of holiday that would have felt unimaginably opulent to Sam a few years earlier, but now, spoiled as he was, the beauty of the place barely registered.
“Let’s just try to have a good time, okay?” Charles said softly, and Sam nodded and rested his head on his shoulder.
They splashed around in the water on the beach, but Sam wouldn’t swim; a black T-shirt was as naked as he was willing to get. He mostly wished he could be home in the privacy of the apartment, eating Indian takeout, instead of here, with all this tanned, toned flesh on display, reminding him of his own inadequacy. The one thing that still excited him was the prospect of the new apartment. They tooled around design shops for inspiration, studying chaise lounges and high-back barstools, where Sam bought a bottle of room spray for a hundred euro. Whatever. “For the new apartment,” he said to Charles. They were picking up the keys the next week, once they returned to the city.
But Charles seemed distant the whole trip. Sam overheard him arguing with his mother in French.
“What’s wrong?” Sam asked.
“She’s driving me nuts,” Charles said. Sam knew there had to be more to it, but he didn’t want to press the issue.
In bed that night, Sam felt Charles’s hands on his body. He swatted them away, as was customary. The idea that Charles would find him desirable now was almost unthinkable. But he was so persistent that Sam relented.
The next night was their last on the island. Sam had dressed for dinner, wearing a tropical blue shirt and white jeans. Charles was buttoning up his shirt in the dressing room of the suite. The door was open to the terrace, making the long sheer white curtain billow in the wind. The night air was salty; Sam could taste it on his lips.
Charles looked up at Sam from across the room and Sam saw it in his eyes, and in an instant, he knew. “Charles,” he said.
Charles looked at him.
“What’s going on with the apartment?”
He didn’t say anything. There was a long moment.
“Am I coming with you?” Sam asked.
He didn’t even know where the question came from, or how he knew to ask it. Charles shook his head no.
“Oh God,” Sam said.
Slowly, as if he was afraid of what Sam might do, Charles sat down on the bed next to him. “You’re not happy,” he said. “I don’t think I can make you happy anymore. I keep trying and trying. But nothing’s working. We’re too broken.”
“Please don’t do this,” Sam said. “Please. Take me with you.”
“I didn’t want to do this here,” he said. “I was going to tell you when we got back to the city. But I don’t want to lie to you. We’ve been trying so hard to make this work for so long. And it’s just not. You know that, don’t you?”
In the morning, they packed their bags in silence. They boarded the ferry to Saint Martin separately. Sam sat on the deck, away from Charles and his family, feeling the spray of the sea as they sped away from the island.
When they landed back in New York, Sam raced through customs. It was snowing and he was still wearing shorts and flip-flops. Stepping out of the terminal onto the street, the cold hit him in a frosty blast. He fished a hoodie out of his bag and trudged across the street to the taxi queue, dirty ice water splashing on his exposed feet, and took his place in the long line that snaked around the median. Horns blared. A bus
rolled past, shuddering gray exhaust.
Sam turned to see Charles and his mother leaving the terminal. She was wearing a fur stole, and he had his parka on. They looked cozy, prepared, competent somehow, like people who just knew intuitively how to navigate the world. He watched as a sleek black Mercedes, dusted with snow, pulled up at the curb. They climbed into it and disappeared.
Back home, Sam hauled his bags through the lobby past the doorman, slipping and sliding on the polished floors. Charles was staying at his mother’s and Sam had the apartment to himself. He tossed his things onto the floor, tracking slush onto the white area rug in the living room, and collapsed onto the couch and sobbed.
Of course he had thought that Charles would take it back after a few days, that he would change his mind. But Charles was firm. It was over. And so Sam stayed alone in the apartment full of all of the things while he considered what to do.
That was what Sam remembered most about the end—how much stuff there was, and how by that point it all felt dirty and ugly. They ate and fucked and fought and spent and lied and said nasty things, hateful things they could not take back. Sam had grown spoiled and precious and greedy. And the more he consumed, the emptier he had become. He hadn’t been able to see it at the time. He hadn’t been able to see it until just now.
Charles left piece by piece, over the course of the next several weeks. Sam would arrive home from work to find something new was missing. First it was the kettle that Charles used to brew his tea in the morning. Then the saucepan disappeared from the stove. Next it was the silver-plated tissue box from the nightstand, then the heavy glass Versace ashtray on the coffee table, and finally it was the toiletries—the bottles of Molton Brown body wash, the little silver jars of moisturizer and La Mer eye cream and the bottles of Creed cologne. Rich people always had the best toiletries, the stuff you can only find at some little apothecary in Paris or get imported from Korea.
Sam washed his face with a bar of hotel hand soap he found in his toiletry bag.
One night he came home to find that Charles had taken the lamps—the French cathedral wire-mesh floor lamp from Restoration Hardware and its tabletop counterpart. There was no overhead lighting; everything was dark. Sam laughed at the heavy-handedness of the symbolism. He went down to the corner bodega and bought a flashlight, then used it to illuminate the room, now barren.
Charles’s half of the walk-in closet was empty; all of Sam’s shirts still crowded onto one rack. All the sweaters that were carefully folded and fluffed on Charles’s side were gone now. There were little scuff marks on the shoe racks, specks of lint on the shelf. The hallway closet, which was just for Charles’s suits—that was one area where he outpaced Sam; he had dozens, since he actually wore them to work—Sam pulled the door open, afraid of what he would find, his breath catching in his throat—and there it was, just empty, everything gone, not only the trim Dior suit jackets and the cropped Thom Browne slacks but the big black Louis Vuitton canvas duffel that always sat on the floor was gone, too, and for some reason the sight of the empty floor rattled Sam.
They had fought over that closet, Sam remembered, when they moved in—“You’re going to take the whole thing?” Sam whined, and Charles had snapped, “I have more stuff than you!”—but Sam had relented because Charles let him keep a bookshelf in the living room, a steel-and-glass space-age monstrosity they’d found at the Lillian August in Greenwich with glass doors just opaque enough to obscure its contents, so you couldn’t really see the books. Still, it was important to Sam that there were books on display, somewhere in that apartment, because Sam was a writer and what kind of writer didn’t have a single bookshelf? Sometimes when Charles wasn’t home, Sam used to open his closet and look at all those beautiful things lined up on their hangers, all pressed and sorted by color, from lightest to darkest in a perfect gradient. In those moments he wished that he could be as beautiful as any of those things.
The decision to leave New York didn’t feel like a major life event; it felt like an inevitability. Sam decided that he would go to Los Angeles. There was nothing left for him in the city anymore. Most of his friendships had disintegrated as he had submerged himself into his life with Charles, his work and his projects.
And so, he thought, he would leave the city. Start over. Try to do things differently this time.
It took about two months to negotiate the transfer with the magazine—two months to fully extricate himself from the life in New York he’d spent so many years building. About six weeks after Charles left, Sam finally allowed himself to have sex with someone else, a burly stranger with a thick Slavic accent he met at Townhouse on First Avenue.
“You have nice apartment,” the man said. Sam looked around—it was almost empty now. He waited until the man had gone home to cry.
He cried again the next day when Brett came over to help him pack, and Brett rested a hand on his shoulder sympathetically. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“I just don’t think I’m ever going to get over this.”
“You will.”
“Everyone grows tired of me,” Sam said.
“Oh, everyone grows tired of everyone.” Brett stood up and wandered around the half-packed apartment. Sam sat down on the floor.
“I didn’t think it was going to hurt this much,” he said.
“Of course it hurts,” Brett said. “Breakups always hurt.”
“This doesn’t feel like a breakup. It feels like I’m dying.”
Brett shot him a look. “Okay,” he said. “I’ve listened to you do this for two months. You gotta get your head back in the game. You’re going to be knee-deep in quality dick once you get to LA.”
“But I’m ruined now.”
Brett sighed. “You know, you think your pain is so monumental, but it’s actually pretty mundane. This is just normal stuff, not some great human theater. It’s what people go through. They fall in love and they get their hearts broken. It’s just a part of life.”
“Okay.” Sam reached for a tissue and blew his nose. “I know I’ve been really self-absorbed for the past few months. Slash year. Slash forever.”
Brett folded his arms. “You haven’t even asked me about the monsters I’ve been dating.”
“How are the monsters you’ve been dating?”
“Terrible.”
“I have so much to look forward to,” Sam said bitterly.
Brett looked out the window. “It’s so crazy that you’re leaving New York.”
“Should I write a personal essay about it?” Sam said, and then he laughed until he was crying again.
The last time Sam saw Charles there, at the apartment, was a few nights before he left the city for good. They had to sign some documents in order to break the lease. Sam had sold most of the furniture. He had consigned most of the expensive designer clothes—particularly all of those coats, which he knew he wouldn’t need in Los Angeles, and God forbid he make it back to New York often enough to need more than one. As for the books that he’d fought to keep—except for a few that had sentimental value, he’d put them all in boxes and dropped them off at the Strand. Only a few things were coming with him to California, like a rectangular foxed-glass mirror from ABC Carpet & Home, inlaid with specks of gold, that he’d thought was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. They had hung it in the front hallway because Sam thought it would make him grateful every time he came home and it was the first thing he saw. He couldn’t remember when he had stopped seeing it; like everything else, it had just receded into the background. He had been so vain and so stupid. He was just like every other class-conscious white-collar gay with internalized homophobia and something to prove. He had bought into the lie that the way things looked was important. He had bought into the lie that filling his life with beautiful things would fix what was broken within him—that it would make him feel beautiful, too.
The stuff had never meant that
much to Charles, maybe because he never needed it as badly as Sam did. But it had mattered to Sam.
Charles stood in the empty hallway like he was a stranger. His eyes were bluer than they had ever been before, blue as glaciers.
“All the stuff is gone,” Charles said. He was wearing that Valentino bomber again, the one that Sam had loved, the one that looked like diamonds. It was so effortless on him. Sam looked around and saw the apartment anew. How many things they had picked out together that were no longer there. All those conspicuous vacancies.
“I got rid of it,” Sam said. “I got rid of everything.” It was astonishing that what had felt so important in the moment could be discarded so quickly.
“It’s going to be strange,” Charles said. “Living without you.”
“I know,” Sam said. “But at least we lived well.”
* * *
He opened his eyes. Jacob was singing and beating on his drum, and the vibrations of the drum made the whole room rattle and shake, and soon the rattling and shaking was inside Sam. Get it out, he thought. How do I get it out?
He had to keep going. Deeper, he thought, and the word was like a command, bringing him down into an inky darkness. Sam felt himself squirm on the floor, pushing his belly into the ground and arching his back in a slow, undulating motion, like he was trying to move the writhing mass inside of him, or more accurately, like the thing was moving within him—some great force that had to shake free of its home. He descended deeper into it. Here we go, he thought, like boarding a roller coaster knowing that the track was broken.
He was sitting in a dingy room. He squinted his eyes and recognized it: that meeting in Silverlake, where he had met Noah for the first time, two years later, two years after Charles and everything that happened in New York. Sam could see him standing at the podium, scruffy and lanky and kind, the way his eyes had lingered over Sam mischievously, and then they were having dinner and the conversation was so fluid, so easy, and Sam couldn’t even believe how right it all felt—he was the anti-Charles, his laconic speech, the endless whatever of it all—and Sam had that feeling, that weight in his stomach, like, Oh, this is gonna be a thing. He hadn’t felt that in so long; he hadn’t even been sure he’d ever feel it again.