Lansky - Gilded Razor, The : A Memoir

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F or many years after it was over, there were songs I could not listen to, for fear they would take me back there; certain photographs that made me clench my jaw in a particular way; and street corners where, crossing from a subway exit to reach an appointment or a restaurant, I would flash back momentarily to a long-forgotten winter night years earlier and see myself, seventeen years old and spectral in the lamplight, stumbling out of a brownstone with a runny nose and my fly unzipped. My hair would have been too long, probably, from always taking the money my father gave me for a haircut and using it to buy drugs. (What do you mean, It doesnt look any different? Id ask, always doe-eyed.) My hands would have been wedged into my pockets because I always forgot to wear gloves. And I would have been walking briskly back to my fathers apartment, eager to get into bed and pretend it never happened.

I say that I would have done so because so often I did, but if I could, I would do it differently. Memory is a funny type of haunting. The subconscious keeps chewing away at sins atoned for long ago. Even after everything has been set right, the body doesnt forget the places its been.

Stockholm. I sleep badly, tossing and turning in my hotel room. In the night, I awake from strange, listless dreams. The furniture turns to gold when I touch it, then crumbles into dust, silken as ash. Im just tired, I tell myself; its just jet lagthe foreignness of a new place. One morning I wake up and the bed is full of glitter. I fall back asleep, and when I awake again, the sheets are crisp and white as fresh snow.

At a fancy party, theres a champagne toast; I hold my glass up to the light, watching the bubbles fizzle and break as they meet the surface. I set it down on the table unsipped. I am used to that by now. It may not always get better, but it will always get different. That was the promisethe only promise.

There are ghosts around every corner. At a cocktail bar in Sdermalm: I am alone at a table, writing in a notebook, when I see a man I recognize, although I cant say from where. He smiles at mehe knows me, too, and more intimately than I know him. He has a handsome, doleful face. Faces like that all blur together for me now. His name could be Jim, or Steve. He could be an investment banker or a surgeon or a congressman.

He approaches me. Slowly, he reaches out to touch my face and presses a finger against my cheek. I want to ask what hes doing, but instead I just sit there, frozen. He raises his hand to show me. On the tip of his thumb, there is a speck of glitter.

Where did that come from? I ask. We both begin to laugh.

I dont go home with him because things are different now. But that night, alone in my room, I dream of falling down the stairs in a town house in Boston. I dream that Im running through the ruddy desert of Utah, with no shoes on, under a silver moon.

I dream that my apartment is full of snow, and there are wolves at the foot of the bed, nipping at my ankles.

I was seventeen years old and had been subsisting on a diet of cigarettes and Adderall for months. Now, on a sunny fall morning, I was on my way to visit Princeton.

My father was waiting downstairs, on Eighty-eighth Street off West End Avenue, in front of our apartment building. He had rented a nondescript blue sedanno frills, with upholstery that smelled faintly medicinal, talk radio pontificating from the tinny speakersand now stood with one hand on the hood of the car, making small talk with the doorman. On his hand, his wedding ring was conspicuously absent.

As I watched him, I convinced myself that I could see a trace of a tan line on his ring finger, a thin band of flesh paler than the natural olive of his skinbut then I blinked, and it was only a trick of the light. I shook my head. It was a stupid, sentimental thought.

I usually tried not to think about my parents divorce: its once-prominent space in my consciousness had descended into the shadows of everyday normalcy, and now sometimes it even seemed as if they had never been together at all. In the same way that I watched people milling about in midtown Manhattan, so inoculated to the citys mammoth scale that they no longer realized how strange and spectacular a sight it wasthe skyscrapers, the crowds, concrete and steelthe emptiness left by my parents separation was so enormous that I had forgotten how it once felt extraordinary. And when I was in midtown, I, too, looked straight ahead like a native New Yorker. Only a tourist would look up. Only someone embarrassing would still be haunted by the collapse of his parents marriage a full year after it had happened.

I stood on the sidewalk for a moment, nursing a sickly sweet cup of bodega coffee and sucking down my first cigarette of the morning. In a paper bag at my feet was a lemon poppy seed muffin, glazed with a sugary sheen, which I had bought not to eat but to prove to myself that I could keep from eating. I wasnt about to ruin my diet by eating solid food now, especially on the day I was to visit Princeton, which I had recently decided was probably my dream school.

I was dressed in preppy staplesa V-neck sweater in a warm autumnal scarlet, the ivory collar of a dress shirt starched and collegiate around my throat, a rep tie knotted in a loose four-in-hand. My father wore a long-sleeved thermal shirt and jeans, the self-effacing functionality of which annoyed me. Whenever he came home from work, he always seemed eager to shed the markers of his professional lifethe cuff links, the wool slacksand change into something comfortable and utilitarian. I preferred to keep my tie on until I went to bed, not wanting to lose the power I pretended it gave me, aligning me with the pedigreed prep school boys whose cravats were always effortlessly askew. There were even nights when I slept in my blue blazera security blanket, I told myself, to remind me who I was supposed to be. (Mostly, though, I did this so I could tell people Id done itI hoped it would make me seem more interesting, somehow.)

Earlier that summer, my father had told me he would take me on a trip to visit the colleges that interested me, but Id been wary. My prospects for college were dim. I was already certain that no school that met my impossibly high standards would accept me as a student, and no school that accepted me as a student could possibly be worth attending. Princeton, a bastion of privilegeeven the name sounded rich in my mouth, Princeton seemed like the institution most beyond my reach, which was exactly what made it attractive.

But the actual process of applying felt so tedious. I preferred to spend my time in self-aggrandizing fantasy or its darker counterpart, neurotic dread; it was much easier obsessing than actually doing anything.

Most of all, the whole thing seemed implausible: Would my father really make the time to chauffeur me up and down the Northeast Corridor to check out colleges that he and I both knew were too good for me? His travel schedule for business was unrelenting, and even when he was in the city, he often stayed at the Upper East Side apartment of his girlfriend, Jennifer.