by Sam Lansky
I inhaled. I felt exposed.
“You can drop the boy Lolita act,” he said. “You don’t have to perform. You can be exactly who you are. I mean, it’s obvious that you’re smart but troubled, and that’s probably your narrative, and you don’t want to be the victim—you want to be the one in control. But I’m not trying to control you. And the whole thing is a little practiced. You’d be much sexier if you stopped trying so hard.”
I went quiet for a minute. I finished my drink. It was the first time I’d been called out like that. It was thrilling.
“Let’s go back to your place,” I said.
He paid the check.
Outside on the street, I was a little drunk—it didn’t take much—and spinning from amphetamines. The air was tap-dancing on my skin. I reached toward Dean to steady myself.
“You okay?” he said.
“Fine,” I said.
Dean’s apartment was a few blocks away, on West Street, in a modern high-rise building with a glass lobby that felt like a fishbowl. The doorman waved us upstairs with a brisk nod. In the elevator, Dean’s boots were black and well-worn, and his chest hair looked prickly, lying perpendicular to his clavicle. The elevator doors opened.
“After you,” he said.
A blood-red foyer opened up into a dining area, both with vaulted ceilings. A golden candle chandelier overhead glinted. I stopped and took it in. He turned to face me. Then, wordlessly, I slipped off my blazer, dropping it on the floor. I unbuttoned my shirt, then my trousers. Then I tugged off my underwear, pulling them off over my shoes. I stood naked for a moment, wearing only my penny loafers.
“Oh,” he said. He put his hands on my chest, then my belly. He grabbed my hand and led me into the bedroom. It was maybe thirty feet long, with floor-to-ceiling windows that framed a panoramic view of the Hudson River, and bookshelves lining one long wall; the room was painted a pale peach, which in the late-afternoon light gave it an odd dreamlike haze. He pushed me onto the bed. He kissed me, his stubble scratching against my neck, and his strong, hairy chest pressing against mine, lean and smooth, and his tongue was inside my mouth, our teeth clinking as festively as a cocktail party toast.
When I woke up it was dark outside and for a brief moment I couldn’t remember where I was. I was naked in his bed, lying against him with my head leaning against his chest; his arms were resting lightly on mine.
It felt good to be held—better than I had imagined. That intimacy I had been craving that felt more substantial than just sex.
“You are so beautiful,” he whispered in my ear, and it seemed true, or at the very least plausible.
At first, I had pegged Dean as a typical investment banker asshole, probably a closet case—I had been with a lot of guys like that—but he was different; he defied easy categorization. He had made a lot of money working for Merrill Lynch, he said, and then decided he didn’t want to be in business anymore; at that point, he was coasting, working idly on a few creative projects. He was a self-described artist, a writer and a filmmaker. He split his time between New York, Princeton, and London. He was old money, descended from a long line of American aristocratic lineage that I couldn’t entirely follow. He was progressive, intellectual, bookish; he dropped names liberally but not, at least to me at that point in my life, obnoxiously—although it would have needed to be pretty egregious for me to find it obnoxious. He also seemed like a dilettante who had gotten lucky.
He was bisexual, he said, explaining that he had mostly dated women and been involved with few men. Never someone my age, he said, and I believed him. Curiously, there was nothing predatory about him—nothing desperate or furtive in the way I’d found many older men were. He seemed at once very young and very old, avuncular in a comforting, familiar way but also like a peer to me.
Naked, I picked at the books that lined the wall. There were titles on queer studies, memoirs and autobiographies, and there were pop culture titles from the ’60s, which I thought predated even him. He said he inherited them from his mother and he liked to keep them ironically.
He told me that he loved Salinger; he had just finished reading The Catcher in the Rye, he said. I laughed. “It’s so trite,” I said. “All that angst.”
He asked me what I wrote.
“Some poetry,” I said. “Short memoir and essays. I like writing about my life.” On his computer, I pulled up a piece I had been working on and read it to him. He poured me red wine.
The piece was overwrought and riddled with clichés. He loved it.
“It’s so lyrical,” he said. He was pretentious and affected. So was I, especially with him, dropping the flip tone I used with my friends and making my language more deliberate, more adult.
We made love again. “You give me an erection of the body and soul,” he said, thrusting into me.
At the east end of the room was a daybed in a window seat, with one large glass pane looking out over the city, and just beneath the seat, another window; when I lay there, it felt as though I were suspended in the air, floating over a glittering Manhattan evening. I smoked compulsively, like my life depended on it, making rings that drifted out the open window into the cool night, stubbing my cigarettes out into an ashtray that grew congested with little tan tombstones.
I told him about Princeton, about the way I’d felt the day I visited the campus, that world of rarefied privilege to which I wanted access so badly. He stroked my hair. “You’ll get in, Igby,” he said. “We could be together there.”
He told me about his friends on the faculty in the English department. A knot formed in my stomach. This was it. He could help get me in. “I know some folks on the admission committee, actually,” he said. “I could put in a call and see what I can find out.”
“That would be amazing,” I said.
“It’s nothing,” he said.
He pushed me onto the bed again.
At the time, my proclivity for sleeping with older guys felt like a matter of taste—it took many years for me to fully untangle the snarl of pathological self-loathing that drove me into the beds of middle-aged men across Manhattan—but still, in a taxi leaving Dean’s apartment, some small part of me worried that I was getting in over my head. It had happened before.
The first time I was with an older man was when I was fourteen, a freshman in high school in Portland. I’d been down the previous year reeling from my first heartbreak with Jerick and spent a lot of time online, in chat rooms, looking for connections that I couldn’t find in the real world. There was no one my age there, which I liked—it was so easy to find men, even if they were just words on the screen, who would make me feel valuable. Mostly, though, it stayed in the realm of fantasy. When I chatted with a man in his forties who lived in Southern California, he told me that he wanted to sleep with me. “I’m HIV positive. Is that okay?” he asked. I jumped away from the keyboard like I had been burned—the very adult reality of this stranger’s sexual health colliding with my teenage need to feel desired made my stomach turn. Another time, a man in Alabama told me that he wanted to fly me out there and spend a weekend together; mostly seeing if he’d go for it, I told him that I’d do it for a thousand dollars. We got as far as booking air travel before I blocked him, too frightened by the possibility that it might be real to carry it any further.
In one of those chat rooms, I met a man named Jim. He was a graduate student at a local university, twenty-four. Our conversations were flirtatious but felt fraternal, too; they were less about sex and more about him wanting to introduce me to an adult way of being a gay man that I hadn’t accessed yet. He wanted to talk about coming out, about gay representation in the media, about what it was like to be so young and already sure of my sexual identity. In his pictures, he had sparkly eyes and a five o’clock shadow. He wanted to meet in person to talk.
This felt treacherous, but I was intrigued, too. The responsible thing to do, I thought, was to discuss it with my psychologist, Judith, whom I’d begun seeing after I had come out a
s gay. (“Maybe it would be useful for you to have some additional mental health resources at your disposal,” my mother had said delicately.) I liked Judith: she reminded me of a television therapist, all statuesque salt-and-pepper smarts. But after I confided to her that I was considering meeting an older man I’d chatted with on the Internet, she called my parents and told them. Alarmed, they had a stern talk with me about it, and I agreed to cease communication with Jim. (I also stopped seeing Judith, who I knew I couldn’t trust anymore.) A few weeks later, in an act of rebellion, I decided to meet Jim in person. The fact that adults thought the situation was dangerous enough to intervene made it much more worth doing.
So I met Jim at a coffee shop. I was wearing a red-and-white–striped rugby polo that made me look like a candy cane, and he was shorter than I expected, but just as handsome. The conversation was light. We went to an adult store downtown, on my suggestion, dashing past the curtain to where the pornography was stored, gawking at the titles and the splashy covers. The thrill of sneaking into this very grown-up space with this attractive older man was exhilarating. But he still didn’t seem interested in me sexually, which only made me want him more.
By a few months later, though, something had changed. One afternoon when my parents were out of town, I met him in a park. Together, we walked through the sparsely forested woods back to my parents’ house. I had borrowed one of my father’s button-down shirts to wear, something expensive and impractical, even though I was just walking ten minutes through the woods to meet him. He looked sallow and thinner than he had been when we had first met.
“You look so skinny,” I said dumbly.
“I’ve been getting in shape,” he said. His eyes were lit up. “Well, the pills help.”
“What kind of pills?” I asked. At that point, I had barely begun experimenting with drugs. This seemed exciting.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
In the kitchen, he took off his shirt and took a swig from a bottle of vodka in the pantry where my parents kept the alcohol. His abdomen was taut and waxy. Suddenly, I felt afraid. This was all too real.
“Give me some of that,” I said, taking the bottle and swallowing a gulp. I had never raided my parents’ liquor cabinet before, but it felt appropriate now.
Downstairs in my bedroom, he stripped down to his underwear. “You’re so cute,” he said. He kissed me. I realized that I didn’t want to do this, but it also felt too late to say no. He had expectations of me. I didn’t want to disappoint him.
He was aggressive. He pushed me down on my bed. It was the first time someone had ever done that to me, and I felt desired, and adult, but also disgusted with myself—disgusted with this whole situation. The no in my head came out instead as a garbled “Please.”
“Please?” he said. He smiled a Cheshire cat smile.
I nodded, and he tugged off his boxers. I closed my eyes. I imagined myself leaving my body.
After he finished, I went quickly to get in the shower. A moment later, I heard a noise in the bathroom. I saw his form through the frosted glass. Please don’t get in here with me, I thought. He opened the shower door and stepped inside, stretching under the running water. He pinched my side.
“You okay?” he said. I nodded. This was what I had wanted, wasn’t it? But it didn’t actually feel good, not in the way I’d thought it would. I liked the attention, but the act of sex was uncomfortable, awkward, embarrassing. I told myself that it would get easier.
Or maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe this was just how it was supposed to feel. The rush of anticipation, then a few minutes of intermittent pain and pleasure, and a big emptiness after. I missed Jerick. I missed my mother. Don’t be a baby, I thought. Don’t be a little bitch. I turned my face away from Jim so he wouldn’t see me cry.
I didn’t see Jim again after that. But a week later, I met another guy in a chat room. He was in his early thirties and lived just a few miles away. I told him I was eighteen.
“I don’t have wheels, though,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll pick you up.”
My apartment was empty when I got home from Dean’s place on Sunday night. Where was my father? Had he even realized I’d been gone? I had homework; I’d forgotten all about it. Emerging from the cocoon of Dean’s loft was strange and uncomfortable. All the noises of the city made my nerves shot. My thighs and buttocks were sore and tender. I could still feel where his fingers had pressed against my wrists as he pushed my face deeper into the pillow; even the thought of it produced some prickling in my groin, a longing for the erotic charge that had held me all weekend.
I spread my textbooks out on my bed and stared at them. I called Dean. “I need you,” I said.
“Come back,” he said.
I tumbled back into him. We made love. I slept. He woke me up at 6:00 a.m. and I staggered into a taxi to make it to school in time for my 7:00 a.m. detention.
There, as I read in the chancellor’s office, my time with Dean felt like a strange dream, and also much more real than anything else in my life.
It went on like this for several weeks. My father stayed at Jennifer’s. I went to school, went home, and dutifully did my homework, snorting Ritalin and popping Provigil so I would stay focused, and then at eleven or midnight, when the work was done, I would take a cab downtown to see Dean.
We talked about modern poetry and classical art. I told him about my mother and my father. I talked about Portland, about drugs. He told me stories about his ex-wife, making it big in finance, realizing that he was wholly unfulfilled. “I had hired a fashion photographer to take head shots of me for a business website,” he said. “I was wearing a suit—I looked very corporate—and he was taking all of these pictures, but they were just all wrong. I looked stiff. I wasn’t myself. We were shooting on the roof of this building, with the skyscrapers all around us—it should have been so dynamic, this visual, but it was just flat. So I got started taking shots of vodka, and I took a couple of Ritalin—I was trying to create some different kind of energy, a ferocity on the set. But I couldn’t. So I started taking off the suit. And the photographer was shooting as I was doing this, this anguished, ecstatic striptease for the camera. That was who I was. Not this corporate jackal. But something else altogether. And so I finished out the work I had contracted to me, and I haven’t worked in business since.”
“What happens when you run out of money?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I’ll figure it out,” he said. “I’ll tap-dance on street corners. I’ll make art. I’ll get any kind of job. I just want to enjoy my life.” It seemed so romantic, the impracticality of this. It also seemed like the sort of thing that only a person with family money would say, which made it all the more romantic.
I got up to take the pills I had wedged in my wallet. He asked me what they were.
“Provigil,” I said. “They keep me awake.”
“Like speed?”
“No,” I said. “They don’t work on dopamine, the way amphetamines do. They just work on your circadian rhythms. They’re using it in the military now. See, our bodies don’t need as much sleep as we think they do. And when you don’t sleep, you get all this lost time back—all these hours where you wouldn’t be conscious that you get to use—that I get to use—productively.”
“It sounds too good to be true,” Dean said.
“It’s not,” I said. “I mean, I just take it when I have a lot of work to do and I’ll just stay up for a few days at a time. I couldn’t live without it.”
“That’s a little sophomoric, no?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” he said, “if people really didn’t need sleep, don’t you think somebody else would have figured that out first? Do you think that you—a high school senior—are the first one to discover that a life without sleep is sustainable?”
I didn’t like this. It was so condescending. “Well, it works for me,” I said.
But it wasn’t working
for me. I fell asleep everywhere: lying on the windowsill of his apartment, a half-smoked cigarette still burning in an ashtray; in his arms as he rubbed my neck; sitting in his kitchen as we drank wine and talked about music. I would wake up to him laughing, watching me doze.
“I worry about you, Igby,” he said. “You should eat something.” I shook my head no. Coffee, cocktails. Dexedrine and Adderall. I stood naked in his bedroom, chain-smoking and shivering until he wrapped my overcoat around my shoulders. His hands caressed my chest; his arms hooked around my neck.
His mouth tasted like wine as he kissed me.
“I love you,” I said, meaning it.
“I love you, too, Igby,” he murmured.
I met Sahara at a party in a notorious town house in the East Sixties, the home of a Greek shipping heir whose parents were always away. Through panes of dark glass off the living room was an indoor swimming pool, lined in black marble. Drunk kids were skinny-dipping. Sahara sat cross-legged by the coffee table, messy hair falling in her face, pulling from her enormous designer purse a grinder and a vial of marijuana to roll a joint.
“I’m really falling for this dude,” I said.
“He’s forty-three, you lunatic,” she said, glancing back at me. “What—do you think he’s going to adopt you? Or that you’re going to go off to Princeton and be with this old man?”
“Like, Sahara, I think I love him.”
She rolled her eyes. “Dude. You’re young and pretty and so you make him feel young and pretty, even though he’s old and crusty. He just wants to live forever, and so he’s, you know, drinking from the fountain of youth.”
“Gross,” I said.
“Sorry, but it’s true. He’s using you as his plaything.” She wagged a finger, the Cartier bracelets on her wrists clanging. “If you’re going to do that, at least find, like, a sheikh or something. What do you even have to show for this relationship?”
