The Gilded Razor Read online

  When she came over, she sat at our kitchen table, drinking from a lipstick-stained glass of red wine and talking about “the corporate culture.” She was nice to me, but she often seemed uneasy, too eager to win my approval. She was in her midforties and she had never been married or had children, and I suspected that she saw me as an irritation, an impediment to her ability to hold my father’s uninterrupted attention.

  She talked to me as if I were her peer, which annoyed me. There was nothing maternal about her, which I was grateful for. She was blond, which I liked, and athletic, which also annoyed me, with half-moon glasses and a smile that split her face sideways into a dozen crinkles. She had grown up in the Southwest and had the sort of style that I associated roughly with a childhood trip to Sedona: turquoise jewelry, velvet blazers, clogs, a shimmery purple leather handbag in the shape of a ruched butterfly. I gave her compliments when she wore something classic, trying to reinforce how I thought she should dress. She fretted about her weight, she trained for and ran marathons, and she drank too much. When she did, she would talk endlessly about her early twenties, when she had lived in Germany, and all the dear friends she had made overseas.

  She didn’t seem to have many friends in New York, dear or otherwise, I thought—but then, who was I to judge? I was too hard on her, but I couldn’t help myself—it bothered me. I should have been kinder but I didn’t know how.

  My father never told me exactly what drew him to Jennifer, but often they giggled like children together, in a way that I found unbecoming. With me, my father was the same as ever, endlessly pacific and perpetually detached. But with Jennifer, he seemed suddenly vitalized, leonine, coming home in his bike shorts on a hazy summer day, shaking sweat from his hair, boyishly besotted. There was something about her that electrified him, and I hated her for invigorating him in a way that neither my mother nor I could.

  It took me a long time to fully realize how I experienced his happiness: as a betrayal, an abandonment, the creation of a new family. One that didn’t include me.

  Jennifer was exactly what a second wife should be, even before they married. There was a levity, an ease to her, that my mother never had. I had inherited my mother’s emotional intensity—maybe that was why, like her, I couldn’t fully connect with my father. I believed that I should like Jennifer, and pretended to myself that I did. “I’m happy to see my dad so happy,” I would say when anyone asked me about her. This was untrue, but it seemed like the mature, adult thing to say, and people nodded appropriately.

  I hurt Jennifer’s feelings one time, not long after they began dating. I was standing on the corner of our block finishing a smoke when I saw her crossing the street toward me, her gait slightly lopsided. She spotted me as I extinguished my cigarette.

  “You shouldn’t be smoking!” she said. I shrugged in response, smelling the wine on her breath. She reached on a mailbox to steady herself. The wind had blown her hair askew. She was sloppy, I thought snidely. I never let myself get that sloppy. (In truth, I got that sloppy pretty regularly.)

  “Are you going to see my dad?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by. Is he home?”

  I nodded.

  “All right,” she said, hesitating. I resented her for monopolizing his attention. Not that I wanted to spend time with him, frankly, but I wanted him to want to spend time with me, and when she was around, he didn’t.

  “Well, be careful,” I said. “It looks like you’ve had a few. Don’t want your new boyfriend to think you’re a drunk.” Our rapport up till then had always been friendly, but it came out sounding nastier than I had intended. She looked as though she had been slapped.

  “That was so mean,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, backpedaling. “I didn’t mean it like that.” Like what? I didn’t know. I could feel that amity between us, the amity I had been working so hard to cultivate, evaporating.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “I’m going upstairs.” She didn’t speak to me for the rest of the night, glowering at me from across the room.

  Later, my father asked me whether I liked Jennifer.

  “Of course I do,” I lied.

  “You do?” he said, searching my face for honesty. He looked eager, suddenly, as though my approval meant so much to both of them—more, I thought, than my opinion on anything else ever had. “It’s very important to her that you do.”

  “I’m really happy for both of you,” I said. Partly this was because I wanted him to see me as grown-up and reasoned, but also I knew that if he thought I approved of her, he would spend even more time at her apartment, and less time monitoring me.

  Jennifer kept an African parrot as a pet; she had bought the bird in her youth, not realizing (or perhaps realizing fully—I never knew for sure) that this particular breed had a typical life span of fifty years. The bird seemed to think of Jennifer as a mate, and quickly came to see my father as a threat, screaming a bracing caw and beating its wings whenever he approached. Soon his hands were covered with cuts from the animal’s sharp, demonic little beak.

  A handful of times she left the bird in our apartment while she traveled. It shrieked through my phone calls with friends, which mortified me. “This bird,” I muttered into the phone. “This fucking bird.”

  My friend Daphne came over one afternoon when we were hosting the bird. It began screaming like a siren as she walked through the door. “What is that terrible noise?” she said, pulling off her oversize sunglasses. “Is that the smoke detector?”

  “Bird,” I said flatly.

  “How awful,” she said.

  “It’s Jennifer’s,” I said, “which should tell you everything you need to know about her. I mean, look, there are two kinds of people in the world: people who have pet birds and people who aren’t completely fucking insane. Like, you know they’re tiny feathered dinosaurs, right? What is the psychology of someone who has a bird? The people who keep birds as pets—well, people, more like women and gay men, I guess; strange, lonely women who have resigned themselves to lives of solitude and aging Florida show queens and Arizona hypoglycemics; who has an exotic pet in the Northeast?—must want to hold captive an animal with no humanoid qualities at all. Except, I guess, mimicry. How creepy is that? There’s nothing warm or cuddly about them. Like, get a puppy. You know? Honestly, if I become one of those mottled old gays with a pet bird, please kill me. That life is not worth living.”

  “You’re horrible,” Daphne said fondly. She considered it for a moment longer. “But so is that animal. In fact, I don’t know who’s more of a monster—you or the bird.”

  She had a point—we were both preening beasts. Yet what chilled me most was how, on some level, I empathized with the need for companionship that had prompted Jennifer to adopt the bird in the first place. It was the very same willingness to accept affection from inappropriate sources that I saw, and hated most, in myself.

  I liked that my father wasn’t around. He left his credit card sitting in a leather valet on his bedroom dresser, as well as envelopes of cash on the kitchen counter. He also left me preloaded subway cards, an implicit invitation to take public transportation, which I tried to avoid. (“Dad, you know as well as I do that the crosstown doesn’t stop on Park!”—I was fond of saying things like this, with what I considered a rarefied wit, although everyone around me must have found it very tiresome.)

  My father always returned to New York with unlikely souvenirs for me, like a boarding pass emblazoned with the autograph of the celebrity next to whom he had been seated, or novelty T-shirts that I would never dream of wearing. Once, he came home from a conference organized by a well-funded think tank with a gift bag that included three different brands of expensive anti-aging facial moisturizer. I was vain and obsessive, so I used all three of them each morning, inadvertently turning my face a glistening pink, shiny as a gutted salmon.

  For my benefit, my father wrote his travel itinerary in cursive scra
wl on an oversize calendar, which hung in the hallway of our apartment. I never checked it, though. Most of the time, both of us slipped in and out of the apartment like ghosts, communicating via phone and email.

  He was, I thought, waiting for me to graduate from high school so he could turn his attention to Jennifer full-time, and I was trying to stay exactly where I was, unparented enough that I could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.

  As we sped along the New Jersey Turnpike, the panoramic New York skyline disappeared into the rearview mirror. I always thought it was peculiar to think of Manhattan as an island since it always felt to me like a mainland, the only place that had ever mattered.

  After an hour of stop-and-go traffic, my father needed a bathroom break. So did I, but for other reasons.

  We pulled over at a rest stop outside of Edison. I circled the hallways until I found a handicapped-accessible restroom, single-occupancy. I locked the door, then jiggled the handle as I always did, to make sure that the door was really locked. I turned the spigot in the sink, letting the water gurgle noisily, then unfastened the changing table. From my back pocket, I removed a small leather pouch and emptied its contents onto the smooth grooved plastic of the table: a pocket mirror, a golden razor blade (I’d bought it at a head shop in the East Village, thinking it very edgy), a straw about two inches in length, a travel-size bottle of nasal spray, and a few dusty orange tabs of dextroamphetamine, trade name Dexedrine.

  Dexedrine was increasingly hard to come by; I had prescriptions for methylphenidate, trade name Ritalin, in both standard and extended-release formulations, and I could always find amphetamine salt, trade name Adderall, but dextroamphetamine was the best. If someone had asked me, I would have explained, patiently and clearly, that methylphenidate is a less potent analogue of amphetamine salt, which itself was composed of two separate and distinct molecules of amphetamine: the levorotatory and dextrorotatory stereoisomers.

  I would run through the medical terms in my mind frequently as I prepared the drug. The levorotatory amphetamine, or levoamphetamine, acts primarily on the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, producing a feeling of clarity and focus—whereas the dextrorotatory amphetamine, or dextroamphetamine, induces release of another neurotransmitter, dopamine, producing a feeling of pleasure and satisfaction.

  Ritalin made me feel good, and Adderall made me feel great, but Dexedrine made me feel amazing.

  Dexedrine elicited none of the twitchy, breathless anxiety that Adderall and Ritalin tended to induce; it didn’t make me want to study, because I didn’t need to study; it didn’t make me want to clean my room, because suddenly, my clothes were strewn about the floor for a very good reason. Dexedrine was just pure, clean euphoria, the thrill of acing a test without even trying, the vertiginous rush of getting everything I had always wanted all at once.

  I took a card from my wallet and crushed the two tablets of dextroamphetamine into small chunks. Then, with the razor blade, I cut them into a coarse powder—thinking, as I always did, that the powder looked like the flavoring packet that came inside a blue box of macaroni and cheese. The gilded blade shone in the light. It had come attached to a chain, meant to be worn as a necklace, so its edge had been dulled just enough—not sharp enough to cut myself on, exactly right for chopping up pills. It screeched conspicuously across the surface of the mirror as I ground the powder into a chalky dust, then combed it into four choppy lines. In two quick breaths, I snorted it.

  One, two.

  Three, four.

  Finely pressed fireworks exploded in my septum, then dripped down my throat: a welcome bitterness. Insufflating the drug, I repeated to myself, as opposed to taking it orally, potentiated its effect and expedited its impact. I knew all this very well because I had stayed up many nights in fevered highs, reading about it online. I knew it also because I carried a pocket-size prescription drug reference in my book bag. I knew it mostly because everyone I knew was snorting pills, too.

  I wiped down the mirror with a moistened paper towel, then took several hits of nasal spray to irrigate my sinuses. I checked my reflection for those telltale orange granules that could so easily betray me. A dribble of snot, the sunshine yellow of an egg yolk, pooled in my philtrum. My pupils were pinpricks in the gray-green sea of my irises. One vein at my right temple throbbed cartoonishly. I wiped my nose, put on my sunglasses, and exited the bathroom.

  My father was idling in the convenience store, and I watched him through a pane of glass for what felt like a long moment. It had only been one year since he had left my mother, who had never cared much about how he dressed, and started dating Jennifer, who—if nothing else—had upgraded my father’s once-Spartan style. Gone were the saggy chinos and old cork Birkenstocks, grimly waxy from wear; in their place were overdyed indigo designer jeans, buttery leather loafers, cashmere sweaters. Even today, dressed so casually, he looked tall and handsome, with a prominent nose and a dark beard that masked his weak chin. He looked more virile, somehow, than he had before, emasculated by his marriage to my mother. I had inherited his sturdy build, thick hair, and full lips, and I was glad that he had passed this genetic inheritance on to me.

  In that moment, I was glad that I was his son.

  He looked up as I approached.

  “Everything all right, Sam?” he asked.

  “Oh, yeah. I’m fantastic,” I said, now meaning it.

  “You want anything?”

  I looked down the aisles of candy bars and potato chips. Coolers of brightly packaged soft drinks. Grinning celebrities on magazine covers. Suddenly, the lights were glaring, but that didn’t bother me. I was joyfully, blissfully happy.

  Amphetamines! You, only better.

  I smiled at my father. “Let’s hit the road,” I said. He beamed back.

  And in the car, the daylight was shining through the window a little bit brighter, and I plugged my iPod into the auxiliary jack so we could listen to Arcade Fire together, and my father drummed his fingers on the steering wheel to the beat in that way he always did, and the bitterness I had felt at the beginning of the trip melted away to reveal the smooth, sun-warmed surface of my sentimental self-regard.

  When I was high, I could be kind and engaged, cracking jokes and smiling warmly. Like the son I thought he wanted.

  “Thanks for taking me on this trip, Dad,” I said.

  He glanced at me, surprised. His eyes crinkled, like he knew he’d gotten it right and he was pleased with himself. “Of course,” he said.

  In that moment, it seemed that the future that awaited me, the future that had felt leviathan only an hour earlier, was now as airy and attainable as a dandelion wish floating out of reach just slowly enough to grasp before it disappeared forever.

  I could do this. It would be easy. I was sure of it. I would get through this year, and I would go to a great college, and I would be a successful, functional adult.

  I was wrong.

  The streets in Princeton were lush and lined with grand old oak trees, dignified colonials on picturesque cul-de-sacs. As we circled through the neighborhood surrounding the university, it reminded me of the area where I had grown up in Portland, on a quiet street in a white house with a little fenced-in side yard and grand stone steps that led up to the front door, which was painted a bright cherry red. The street was arched with birch trees, and it smelled like anise after it rained. My family had felt whole there.

  In early childhood, I had shared a bedroom with my brother, Ben, who was two years my senior, down the hall from the French doors that led to my parents’ bedroom, which was always streaked in beams of golden sunlight. In the hallway, a laundry chute trapdoor led to the basement two floors below; I imagined there was an underwater lair of detergent bubbles for a villain who clanged in the night. My brother loved animals, and so my mother painted a jungle mural on the wall of our bedroom, a verdant green rain forest with monkeys swinging from high-up branches, the round dark spots of a giraffe.

  And there were pets—so many pets.
A kitten for Christmas one year who grew up into a surly, sedate cat who only purred when she wasn’t being touched. A Jack Russell terrier who was returned after a disastrous month or two. A black rabbit named Midnight and a white one named Snowflake kept outside in a hutch that made the whole backyard smell faintly of urine.

  Lizards and salamanders in a large glass terrarium—they fed on live crickets that had to be retrieved from the local pet store every week. On one such occasion, while my mother was driving home from the pet store, my brother accidentally punctured the plastic bag in which the crickets were transported; out came several dozen of them, hissing and circling, and my mother screamed and swerved, maneuvering the station wagon to the side of the road, then jumping out and patting down her body as insects streamed out of the car like some kind of biblical plague, my brother and I screaming with perverse laughter.

  Guinea pigs and mice and hamsters in little cages, spinning on their plastic wheels. If the mural was anything, it was a concession; my mother couldn’t give my brother the tropical menagerie he wanted, so she settled on an imitation.

  She was fiercely devoted to both of us. There were cookies baking in the oven when I came home from school, and hot chocolate on snowy winter mornings, and unless she was away, she came in to my bedroom to tuck me in and kiss me good night.

  It wasn’t perfect—I had to remind myself of that to keep reality from stinging too badly. For weeks at a time my father was away on business, which I assumed he preferred to spending time with us, and my mother was frequently in bed with migraines, which I assumed were fictional. Ben tormented me as older brothers do, and I, in turn, delighted in playing the victim. We were cared for by a string of nannies, and when each inevitably moved on (to other families, I imagined, boys who were nicer and smarter than I was), I was inconsolable until I had attached myself to the next one.