The Gilded Razor

by Sam Lansky

  “I wish I felt that way,” I said.

  “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen,” I said.

  Jane laughed. “You have so much time,” she said. “You’re so lucky. All the pain you’re sparing yourself. The years I’ve wasted. Decades, even. Smart to nip it in the bud now before it gets any worse.”

  I shook my head. This line of conversation was infuriating. “People keep telling me that,” I said. “They use that word, ‘lucky.’ As though it’s some gift that I have to be sober for the rest of my life.”

  “It is,” Jane said. “You’ll feel differently about it when you’re older. I promise.”

  I hated that, too, but didn’t want to tell her so. I wanted her to like me.

  She looked around thoughtfully. “It’s neat that they put rehabs in the desert,” she said. “It’s a good use of a waste of space.”

  “That’s how an ex-boyfriend used to describe fucking me,” I said.

  She looked at me quizzically.

  “Never mind,” I mumbled. “Dumb joke.”

  “You like to make people uncomfortable, don’t you?” she said. “Set their teeth on edge a little bit? Push their boundaries?”

  “If I get to be crazy, I don’t have to be vulnerable,” I said.

  “Yeah.” She took a deep breath. “That works with other people. But when you get out here and it’s just you and the sky, none of that matters.” She looked at me, her expression affectionate but a little sad. “God doesn’t care about your rapier wit.”

  “I’ve always seen God as having more of a fondness for tragedy, anyway,” I said.

  Jane smiled and flexed her arms, tucking her legs under her and rising to her feet. I stood up, too, and suddenly the cold hit me all over again, the dizzying strangeness of this winter morning in the desert so far from home.

  “Should we jump in?” she asked.

  “I’m cold,” I said stupidly, although it wasn’t really about that: I was self-conscious about my body. That was why I’d gone out there in the first place, in the hopes of swimming alone, being able to take off my shirt without that arms-crossed discomfort of former fat kids who get lean by adulthood but always remain convinced, on some level, that their bodies are disgusting.

  “I bet it’s warmer in there,” she said. My insecurity must have been palpable because her face softened.

  “How long are you going to stay afraid of everything?” she asked. It was the kind of question that people asked often in rehabs, an inquiry that would sound transgressively rude coming from a relative stranger in any other context, but was commonplace in the emotionally unbounded domain of treatment.

  I stripped off my shirt and kicked away my flip-flops, moving around the circumference of the pool until we were standing side by side.

  She reached for my hand and, for whatever reason, I gave it to her. She squeezed it tightly. It felt so odd, standing here half naked in the frigid sunrise with this woman I didn’t know, the thrilling intimacy of it, like seatmates on a long flight bonded together by a plane crash.

  “One,” Jane said. “Two. Three.” And I felt my knees flexing and hers did, too, and it felt like a long moment that I spent suspended in the air, waiting for the impact, and then the water hit me and I sank to the bottom, pressing my knees close to my chest, feeling the shock of that freeze, my limbs tingling. It wasn’t warm.

  And then I opened my eyes underwater and looked up at the morning through the rippled lens of the pool, a darkness that was now daubed with color like an impressionist painting, the expanse of a sky that was beginning to split open.

  My therapist in rehab recommended an aftercare program—an intensive outpatient rehab to transition patients back into the real world after inpatient treatment—in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I knew Boston from visiting my paternal grandmother there throughout my childhood, so I went happily, and sober.

  I was sure that I could approximate the experience of staying sober behind the walls of a rehab—where my only responsibility was to feel my feelings and articulate them for people who were paid to listen—in a new city, with all of the pressures and responsibilities of an adult life I’d never had to experience before beating at my back. I could do it, I thought. I had to.

  This proved arrogant.

  It’s funny that, even though I moved to Boston sober, I remember less from those first few months there than I do from the years I spent under the influence. A few images are electrifying in their vivid clarity: the sun-dappled trance of a New England winter, my feet crunching on the grass, the ruddy brick brownstones along Commonwealth Avenue as expressive as faces.

  But it gets muddier quickly. Memory distorts, glazing the surfaces of my small studio apartment in Cambridge in a crimson varnish. I remember that the curtains I hung on the windows were a deep cherry, and so the winter light that beamed through the glass cast a psychedelic red pall throughout the apartment, coloring the clean minimalist lines of the chain-store furniture and the unadorned white walls in a scarlet glow.

  Now it seems ironic that in my first grown-up apartment, I had unwittingly created a regressive womb-like space where I could hide from the very adult responsibilities I had moved to Boston to embrace. Life in that apartment was a delirious waking dream of spinning wheels and broken promises.

  If I could do it all over again, I would do things differently.

  Quickly, I found a job managing a small boutique on Newbury Street, and I rented a remodeled studio apartment in Cambridge, on Massachusetts Avenue just north of Porter Square, with spit-slick hardwood floors and stainless-steel appliances and walls of pristine windows that looked out onto the road, one window framing a red neon sign that read LIQUOR in front of the beverage retailer across the street. The sign flashed incessantly through the night (I imagined the word tattooed across my forehead in neon light as I slept), and my buzzer didn’t work and, incredibly, I failed to notice before signing the lease that there was no oven in the kitchen (not that I would have cooked).

  But these were trivial concerns, of no real significance when the block was shady and tree-lined and I could walk to the subway in ten minutes. I had an apartment to come home to, an apartment that I could keep clean and tidy, and it was mine, even if I couldn’t really afford it, and given the turbulent shape of the past few years, which felt even more peripatetic in retrospect than it had while I was living it, it seemed that nothing could be more important than finding a stable living environment.

  At work, there were opportunities for career growth, I was told. Could I see myself being a corporate trainer? How on earth should I know, at age eighteen? I wondered. And with my first paycheck I bought linens and silverware and a flat-screen television from a department store in the Prudential Center.

  I called Annalise and told her, “I like it here, I think I might stay for a while,” but not even I really believed this was true.

  Boston—stoic, inhospitable Boston. Boston, I discovered, was a city of paradoxes, a metropolitan college town full of athletic nerds, a liberal enclave with doggedly Puritanical blue laws. There, the people were polite but never nice. I had always thought of Boston as New York’s inferior cousin, and my first few weeks there confirmed this suspicion. I was drawn to it then because I thought that Boston was more like New York than most other places, but not enough like New York for me to behave the way I had in New York.

  I went to Boston for a fresh start, to escape the ugly wreckage of my past—in recovery circles, this is called “pulling a geographic”—not realizing that nobody came to Boston to work a low-paying job in retail management, especially not at my age. Everyone I met was either a native or a student, and I resented both camps. Each morning, I walked to the Red Line and took the train into work in my grandfather’s silk-lined herringbone topcoat, glaring at the other commuters behind haughty aviator sunglasses, and when I spoke I was painfully conscious of my short A and rhotic pronunciation, conscious of the fact that I was eighteen (which to me, then, felt very
old) and that I had left college to go to rehab and, frankly, had no idea if I was ever going to find my way back to higher education.

  The men who cruised me on the street weren’t stylish like they were in New York. In Boston, they wore baseball caps and hoodies, more boyish swagger than urbane charm, and even while some piece of me yearned for the high gloss of men with manicured eyebrows and European-cut suits, there was something appealing about the effortless masculinity of the men I met in Boston. An old family friend who was in graduate school at Boston University told me that she kept meeting eligible men at bars but couldn’t go home with them; she said she could never respect a man who lived in Boston. I pointed out that she, too, lived in Boston, but I think that was the point.

  The program my therapist had recommended treated drug addicts and patients with eating disorders in a brownstone not far from the Harvard campus; I liked the eating disordered women the most, since much of the reason I’d abused so much Adderall was to stay thin, and I felt like I had more in common with them, mostly privileged white girls from the suburbs, than with the hardened addicts who lived at the halfway house.

  Twice a week at the center, I sat with eight or ten girls for three hours in a windowless room where first we talked about eating dinner, and then we ate dinner, and then we talked about having just eaten dinner. Some of the girls were wasted, with the brittle frailty of the terminally ill, but others were robust; people, even mental health practitioners, tend to lump patients with disordered eating under one umbrella, even though anorexics and bulimics couldn’t be more different. I learned that whereas anorexics tend to be neurotic, tightly wound, and perfectionistic, bulimics are impulsive, gregarious, and spontaneous, and while the bodies of anorexics are externally enervated—that is, they look like people with eating disorders—the bodies of bulimics deteriorate from the inside out, so bulimics never get as skinny as they want to be. Yet as their bodies are deprived of nutrition, their organs begin to shut down, until one day they simply drop dead from organ failure. This, to me, seemed like the cruelest irony of all—to die from malnutrition while still overweight.

  A therapist once told me that the hardest sickness to treat is the sickness that masquerades as health, and I would think of this as we smoked cigarettes in the alley adjacent to the center, the fat girls who wore too much makeup and the skinny girls who didn’t wear enough and me, all of us dying.

  Because it was about dying—I knew that it was. I could see my past behavior with enough clarity to at least know that.

  It wasn’t about euphoria; it hadn’t been for a long time. It didn’t feel that way, at least. After all, I had been filling prescriptions for hundreds of amphetamines a month, using so much cocaine that I left bloody chunks of flesh wadded in Kleenex roses, deliberately ingesting double the fatal dosage on a bottle of promethazine syrup just to see what would happen.

  There had been so many stints in rehab. It all stuck together in my mind, a hazy blur of self-fulfilling sickness. Clearheaded and sober, I still didn’t know why I did any of these things, things that I often did not want to do, feeling only that I must be carrying a fatal parasite, a brain tumor, or some satanic energy that wanted me dead and would stop at nothing until I had fatally self-destructed.

  In the twelve-step meetings I went to, they called this “your disease,” and my disease seemed hungry for chaos. I was stringing together some tenuous sobriety, but it didn’t matter that the party was already over: I still felt insane about everything—the smallest social slight, someone’s bad behavior at work, a call with my father gone wrong. It helped that I looked perfectly sane—that I could put on my good suit and dress shoes that kept me sliding through the icy streets of Boston, digging my heels into the ground and pleading with a God I didn’t know if I believed in that I wouldn’t slip and fall on my way to work.

  But the fact remained that even though I was stone-cold sober, I was just as crazy that winter in Boston, as I slipped through the icy streets of Back Bay, as I had been in New York after three consecutive days without sleep, the metallic freeze of ketamine burning in my septum, waking up midflight while I was falling down a staircase in Grand Central Terminal.

  Shortly after I arrived in Boston, I began working with a sponsor, Charlie, a part-time art dealer with genteel good looks. I met him at a twelve-step meeting in Harvard Square; he told his story of growing up in a tony beach community in Maryland, where he delivered kilos of cocaine via speedboat for a high-powered drug cartel. This was so glamorous, I thought. This would be the right person to help me learn how to survive sober.

  I discovered after I asked him to sponsor me that Charlie was addicted to laxatives, which kept his body lean but lent him a sort of pasty, veiny dermal sheen that I found simultaneously compelling and repulsive, and although I couldn’t really trust the instruction of a sponsor with an active eating disorder, I didn’t have the heart to fire him.

  Charlie gave terrible advice, but provided me with a passive sounding board for my poor decision-making. When I called him and said, “Charlie, I’m going to go see this quack doctor in Chinatown who gives you B12 shots in your ass and prescribes phentermine, no questions asked,” he asked me for the address so he could come, too, and when I told him, “Charlie, this guy I dated who once threw me down a flight of stairs is in town and wants to have dinner,” he recommended a fashionable new Asian fusion restaurant.

  Yet if I had been asked what I wanted on a grand, existential plane, I probably would have said that all I wanted was to love and be loved. I couldn’t say why I thought any of the things that I was doing would bring me love, but I was so lonely, terribly lonely.

  Maybe drug addicts are just people who feel loneliness with the acuteness of a bad fever. I was quick to fall in love with any man who made me think that maybe we could have the sort of love that I always wanted. A quiet, domestic love that would provide me with the satisfaction that a thousand one-night stands never could. But that was also the kind of quiet, domestic love that I believed, even if I would never vocalize this note of internalized homophobia, gay men simply weren’t allowed to have—but that wouldn’t stop me from trying.

  I met James for the first time on a cold day, which must have been in December. He sent me a message on an online dating site; I remember looking at his pictures and thinking how handsome he was. He looked like a leading man from a bygone era, in his early forties, his face warm and creased with age, hair just beginning to go gray. Strong, almost heroic. The text of his profile read: “Smart is sexy.”

  It is, I thought. And I’m smart, right?

  We met at the old movie theater in Coolidge Corner to see a documentary that I found dull and that James seemed to enjoy, and afterward in the parking lot we stood by his car and he kissed me. His hands were large and his five o’clock shadow rubbed against my face, and it was freezing and people were staring and I felt lucky. In my head, I was already remodeling the master bathroom in the house on Cape Cod that we would buy together, selecting a palette of cool hues, slate blue tile and a bamboo bath mat, and I was putting fresh flowers in the kitchen that he wasn’t noticing, and he was forgetting our anniversary, and we were going to sleep without having sex, and even if I grew to loathe waking up beside him in the morning I would never leave him, even as our marital bliss waned to nothing.

  As I rode the Red Line back to my apartment I was warm and contented, thinking maybe I might not die alone in a studio apartment in Cambridge, unloved and unlovable. A week later, we made plans to meet again. At 7:00 p.m. I texted, then called.

  He never responded.

  Anxious, I left messages, wrote him emails, checked the news and the obituaries, suspecting there had been a tragic accident, but I found nothing. At home, I sat in my desk chair rocking back and forth (literally rocking back and forth in a desk chair, growing crazier by the minute, as the LIQUOR sign branded my chest with ambient red light), wondering how it was possible that my perfect domestic future with this perfect man could have been
shattered so quickly—how I had already managed to destroy it, as I did everything I touched.

  James never called. Months later, after I had left Boston, I sent him an email that read, “Thought of you today. Don’t know why.”

  “I think of you every day,” he wrote back.

  “Liar,” I said.

  Maybe he saw in me the same sickness that I saw in myself—it was hard to miss—but the exquisite agony of that rejection was paralytic, reinforcing some privately held belief that I was fundamentally damaged or defective.

  True intimacy was a distant point on the horizon, too evanescent to count on.

  I relapsed on a bright, clear day in March, not intending to use any drugs, but not intending not to, either.

  I had been sober for a few months, but I felt sure that it didn’t matter anymore whether I was crazy and sober or crazy and on drugs. In many respects, I was right.

  I met a man online named Greg. In his pictures, he had mean eyes and a thin, villainous smile and a muscular chest. He invited me to a shuttered, dilapidated home in Dorchester. When I entered the house, Greg was in the adjacent room, lying naked on a mattress on the floor, a freebase pipe in his left hand, a propane lighter in the other, a bare bulb overhead. He offered me some crystal meth and I said no, I didn’t care for any, but thank you. In the kitchen, there was another man, John, who was mixing a quart of electric-blue Gatorade with drops from a small brown vial of GHB. He offered me a hit. It did not occur to me that I was supposed to be sober, that I had been for months; I just said yes. The solution was soapy and acidic; it burned in my throat. Then, I was on the mattress. Someone was kissing my stomach. Everything was dark. And then I was in the bathroom, vomiting in the toilet, with Greg, whose mean eyes had gone kind. He walked me to the T station on Dorchester Avenue and told me that he had been sober once, too, that he was going back to treatment soon.