Broken People

by Sam Lansky

  And so they talked for a while about Charles’s job at the hedge fund and the shifts in the global market, about how his mother was considering buying a house in the Hamptons but couldn’t find a property she liked, about the guy Charles had been dating who was nice but seemed a little too attached, about his family’s upcoming holiday in Portofino, about how Eleanor’s boyfriend had proposed and she was turning into a complete bridezilla, and Sam felt it all, the familiar rhythms of how they had talked to each other, the overlapping beats of their conversation, and it was as if no time had passed at all, and also as if a thousand years separated them instead of two, all that closeness and all that distance.

  “Are you happy?” Sam asked.

  “Yes,” Charles said. Then he reconsidered. “I don’t know. Most of the time, yeah—I am.” He looked at Sam and the corners of his mouth turned down, like he was afraid. “Are you?”

  Sam nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I am.”

  “Good,” Charles said. He looked down, then back at Sam. “All my friends read your book,” he said. “They all really liked it.”

  “That’s really nice.”

  “It was a good book, Sam.”

  “Sure,” Sam said. “I mean, whatever.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “No, I don’t mean—it’s just not about the book.”

  “You and me?”

  “No,” Sam said. “No, not that—I mean, all of it. I can’t—I don’t know how to explain it.” He rubbed his face with his hands. “You know I only wrote that book because I thought it was going to fix me. To fill up the emptiness that had been inside me my entire life. And then it didn’t work. It didn’t fix anything. And I’d already lost you over it.”

  “You didn’t lose me over the book,” Charles said. “You were already too lost, by the end. I just couldn’t keep trying to find you.” He picked at his food. “You’re happy now, though.”

  “I am.”

  “What changed?”

  And so he told Charles the story of Jacob and the whole weekend, what he had remembered and what he had seen, and what had happened down in the room, and Charles’s eyes widened when Sam got to the part about the leather jacket—“The Valentino?” he asked, and Sam laughed and said, “Yes, the Valentino.”

  “Why do you think you saw that?” he asked.

  Sam thought about it. “The room,” he said. “So that was the place where I stored all the evidence, right? And this is how I always moved through my life—trying to prove this thesis, collecting data to support my most deeply held belief, which was that I was bad. So I discarded the experiences that might disprove that theory, and hung on only to the memories of those that supported it. It was confirmation bias on the deepest level. And it just got worse and worse, the more proof I had that I was bad. And when you left me, I think, it was the ultimate confirmation I had been looking for.” He shook his head. “It seems so obvious now. You, not being a complete fucking nightmare, basically understand that bad things happen to you because that is a part of life. But, Charles—I always believed, even if I couldn’t articulate it, that bad things happen to me because I am bad. And so I needed everything to be bad so it would agree with the only thing I really knew about myself.”

  Sam sighed. “I wish I had known that then,” he said. “I wish I had been able to accept how much misery is self-fulfilling.” He felt tears well up in his eyes, then spill out down his cheeks. “But maybe I wouldn’t have been able to love you the way I did if I had been any wiser,” he said. “I really am sorry, Charles. I’m so sorry that I wasn’t better.”

  “You were just so unhappy, by the end,” Charles said. “I didn’t know how to help you.”

  Sam laughed through his tears. “God, I was so uncomfortable,” he said. “My body. My poor body. I hated it so much.” He rested his hands on his thighs and squeezed them affectionately. “And I was so addicted to the stuff. To your lifestyle.” He corrected himself. “Our lifestyle. Even though it wasn’t making me happy.” He looked down at his sneakers. “And now it all feels so dumb—I mean, none of it was really that important, but it mattered so much at the time, you know? I just didn’t know how to be a person in the world.”

  “Being a person is hard,” Charles said, and he looked sad. “Especially when you’re complicated.”

  “It is but it isn’t,” Sam said. “I mean—even that. Why do I have to be complicated? Why do I have to be broken? Why can’t the story be something else?”

  “So you really think he healed you? The shaman?”

  “Sort of?” Sam said. “Maybe he did. Or maybe I was just ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “Change,” Sam said. “To change. I mean, for so long I felt so sick and crazy. But maybe I was just healing in my own way. Slowly, and inelegantly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Sam closed his eyes. The hairs on his arms stood up on end. “Maybe you don’t heal in a vacuum,” Sam said. “Maybe you don’t heal on the floor of somebody’s house with a shaman blowing holy smoke in your face. Or maybe that’s part of it, but it’s not all of it, because the healing isn’t just the part that looks like healing. You don’t just get fixed in a weekend. You have to keep making the choice to fix yourself. Every time you choose to be nice to yourself instead of being unkind. Every time you decide to experience life fully in all its shades of joy and sorrow. Every time you participate in the boring drudgery of self-care. The whole thing was the healing—everything that came before and everything that’s happened after. Not only what happened with the shaman. He just got me unstuck.”

  Sam looked at the door. The wind was moving in the curtain. It looked like it was dancing. “I go to this meditation class sometimes,” he said.

  “You’re into meditation now?” Charles said in disbelief. “Oh God, you really do live in LA.”

  “Yeah,” Sam laughed. “I do. Okay, so wait, listen—I go to this meditation class and at the very end, the teacher starts naming different parts of the body that you’re supposed to draw your awareness to—like, she starts with your feet, and she says, ‘The left big toe,’ and you pay attention to your big toe, and she says, ‘The left second toe,’ and you pay attention to your second toe, and then it’s your legs and your hips and each of your fingers, up to the crown of your head, and then she says, ‘The whole body. The whole body. The whole body,’ and it’s like, all of a sudden I feel it, all of it, every cell and every molecule and all the life inside me, and they aren’t different parts anymore. They’re all connected.”

  Sam took a deep breath and exhaled it out through his teeth. “I guess that’s what it’s like. For so long all the things that happened to me were just these—these different parts, this jumble of disconnected incidents that didn’t mean anything on their own. And now it feels like all those bones took shape and became a skeleton. Something assembled. It became a whole body.” He looked down at his feet. “This entire story was just the story of my body. And how I had to hate it, because it was the thing that I came in. But the story is also its own body, and I can finally accept it, exactly as it is. So it’s another memoir, I guess, because it’s the things I remember about what happened to me, but it isn’t, because it’s all of me. And I can finally access everything. Does that make sense?”

  “No,” Charles said. He looked at Sam like he was speaking in another language. “Can you explain it another way?”

  Sam started to laugh. “I don’t know if I can,” he said through gusts of laughter, and tears were streaming down his face again. “I guess what I’m saying is that it all had to happen in the body. You know? Like, I kept trying to get it out with my words—I was trying to tell a story. But that’s what I was doing wrong all along. I thought the story was the medium. But the medium was the body.”

  “I have literally no fucking idea what you’re talking about,” Charles sa
id.

  “Shit,” Sam said helplessly, and for a moment he was bowled over by the absurdity of it. “I’m one of those people!” He laughed. “I’m a crazy LA self-help person who talks in platitudes and metaphors and riddles!” He covered his face with his hands. “This is the worst!”

  Charles reached across the table and gripped Sam’s wrists. “Okay, but do you love yourself now?” he asked. There was an edge to his voice, something sharp and urgent, and it caught Sam off guard, to realize that Charles still cared about his happiness.

  “Oh, no, I don’t think so,” Sam said. “But I hate myself so much less than I used to.”

  Outside on the street, they held each other for a long time. “I don’t want to say goodbye,” Charles whispered in his ear. He put his hand on the back of Sam’s head.

  “Me, either,” Sam said.

  But then he felt their bodies pulling away from one another.

  So, one more time, Sam let him go.

  And just like that, he was alone again.

  * * *

  Except he wasn’t. Sam could feel her with him. Maybe she’d always been there, even when he hadn’t known it. Or maybe she’d come to him in ceremony for the first time and now he had her, this funny sort of guardian. Something wise and ancient and true, something that was in him and around him, something that was real—realer than the clothes on his back or the shoes on his feet and realer even than Charles, whom he had loved so fiercely, long before he’d had any idea how to love himself.

  What a thing—to love someone that much. And Sam was sad, but he was grateful, too, for each of the men who had showed him exactly what he needed to see; not only the spirit, who took no shape, but the way she moved in and out of people. He had loved them all, and been loved by them, in so many strange and nettling and incandescent ways, Brett and Noah and Buck and Jacob and Charles, these healers and teachers.

  Maybe, Sam thought, he hadn’t made a mess of anything. Maybe he had done it just right.

  After Charles was gone, Sam walked through the city with her for a while. His legs were strong, and his heart beat fast. The streets were cool and dark, but the lights were bright above him. Everything was connected. And for a moment it seemed like magic that this body, the only body he would ever have, could take him anywhere.

  * * *

  Acknowledgments

  First: to Cait Hoyt, this book only exists because of your unwavering faith and encouragement. Thank you for shepherding this project forward with ferocity and grace. To Olivia Blaustein, thank you for being an extraordinary champion and friend for this story and all the others. To Kate Childs, Norris Brooks, Kelly Eichenholz, Jonas Brooks, Darian Lanzetta, Ben Levine and everyone else at CAA: I feel stupid lucky all the time to be blessed by your positivity, enthusiasm and hard work.

  To John Glynn, I could not ask for a better editor and friend. I will never forget the way you fought for this story and believed in it from the beginning. To everyone at Hanover Square who worked tirelessly to help this book find a readership, I am so grateful to you: Peter Joseph, Laura Gianino, Roxanne Jones, Emer Flounders, Randy Chan, Linette Kim, Eden Church, Heather Connor, Margaret O’Neill Marbury, Kristin Bowers, Jim Hankey, Gabe Barillas, and the people whose names I don’t know who played roles both big and small in getting this into the hands of readers.

  To Chase Lehner and Liz Mahoney, thank you for your passion, cheerleading and all-around brilliance.

  To my wonderfully generous and supportive colleagues, particularly Kelly Conniff and Lucy Feldman, for your early reads, sharp notes and hand-holding, thank you.

  To the authors who graciously said lovely things about this book when I was in a prepublication vulnerability vortex—Chloe Benjamin, Steven Rowley, Richard Lawson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Garth Greenwell—I will always be in your debt.

  To Taylor Swift, thank you for letting me nerd out over your lyrics in these pages and also for January 5.

  To my family, sorry for writing another deeply personal thing and thank you for putting up with me. (I swear this is the last time.)

  To my friends, too many to count, who read drafts, carried me while I was spiraling and buoyed my spirits at every step, thank you—I am especially grateful to Jill Gutowitz, Steph Stone, Debby Ryan, Dave Rocco, Carey O’Donnell, Tommy Dorfman, Kelly Stone, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, Stacy Waronker, Bradley Stern and Ryan O’Connell for your collective humor, insight and kindness.

  To the healers and teachers, both those I can name and those I can’t, who inspired this story—thank you for all the lessons. Special thanks to wise women Taryn Toomey, Natalie Kuhn and Erin Rose Ward, for returning me to my body, as well as Maud Nadler, who taught me how to make it a home.

  ISBN: 9781488055768

  Broken People

  Copyright © 2020 by Sam Lansky

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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