Everyone Knows How Much I Love You
Page 2
All my sweaty parts went clammy. Even knowing it was coming, it was strange to hear Lacie’s name on Portia’s lips. I told myself firmly that the Lacie in my manuscript had nothing to do with the stylish thirty-year-old graphic designer I had just met, that they were separate, one fictional, one real.
Yet listening to Portia talk about character, the need for more details, I flashed back to Lacie’s espadrilles, trying to decide whether they would make sense in a story set in 1999. Or was there something in her head tilt, or the way she touched her hair? The important thing was to convey her charisma. Her allure.
After I had thanked Portia profusely for these thoughts, she clicked off on her tiny heels to a back room and returned with three bound galleys, saying, offhandedly, “People are pretty hyped about these. I’ll get a letter off to you next week. I just wanted to share these initial thoughts, but really, Rose. I couldn’t be more excited.”
Ten minutes after the appointment for which I had waited two hours had begun, it was done.
No matter. I burst out onto the street, buzzing. The city glinted with promise. All I had to do was throw in some telling details, get Lacie down, and I’d be launched.
* * *
—
But first, the tutoring interview. By slinging around the name Harvard I had quickly landed interviews at four companies, but from the beginning I had had my eye on Ivy Prep Consulting, the most expensive and exclusive “academic and test preparation firm” on the Upper East Side. Wild rumors flew about them: their top tutors made a thousand dollars an hour, they regularly flew on private jets with the families, the College Board itself sought their consultation. Half their tutors, it seemed, had graduated summa cum laude; all of them, the website bragged, ranked in the 99th percentile for every test they tutored.
Reading this, I decided to doctor my SAT scores, carefully inserting into my cover letter, “While I don’t precisely recall my SATs from more than a decade ago, I believe I scored somewhere in the high 700s for both math and reading,” knowing full well that I did not break 700 on the math, knowing, too, that I could say whatever I wanted, that my lie would not only be believed, but that it would confirm the whole set of assumptions already operating around me, that I came so fully outfitted in the trappings of success—Harvard, Iowa—that embellishment to cover any gaps was practically obligatory.
Then, interview scheduled, address received, I nearly blew it: 9:07 the morning after meeting Lacie found me racing from my cousin’s living room to bathroom, from bathroom to front hall to couch, not quite late, but becoming increasingly dependent, with each passing minute, on the good karma of the F train, and then 9:57 found me run-walking, and then flat-out sprinting, down Eighty-Fifth Street toward Third Avenue, having spent the previous train ride staring straight ahead, my gut churning, too full of self-recriminations to read or even think about what I might say to Griffin Chin, founder and director of Ivy Prep, Harvard-trained lawyer, and “educational consultant” who regularly appeared on Bloomberg TV.
Griffin’s office, in a residential building, had probably formerly housed a family of four. The living room had the black leather and glass-topped table of an executive suite. SAT prep books filled the kitchenette. When I arrived he ushered me to what must have once been the dining-room table and offered me a Poland Spring from the full-size refrigerator.
I was three minutes late—a negligible amount, especially in New York, where everyone is at the mercy of trains and traffic—but I could see he had noticed. “Rose.” He squared his legal pad perpendicular to the table’s edge. “Thank you so much for coming in. Now, as I said on the phone,” though he had not said this on the phone, “you’re very qualified. People in the office are very into you. So let’s think of this not so much as an interview as a chance to get to know each other better.”
I nodded and subtly wiggled my shoulders, trying to make my cheap Pashmina slide down my back. What do I look like? I am a girl, a girl who can look many different ways. When I want I can put on a nice professional, demure dress, and brush my hair so it is soft and luxuriant and smooth, and wear my grandmother’s pearl earrings and a tiny gold watch; I can look utterly familiar, utterly unremarkable, except, perhaps, for my stained teeth. I am slender, with a long pale face that blushes easily, and strawberry-blond hair from which I pluck the occasional strand of gray. When I was young I looked much more unusual because I didn’t give a fuck. I thought that’s what you did if you didn’t want to get trapped. Now I had convinced myself that freedom lay on the other side.
Reverentially Griffin spoke of the top “independent” schools, ticking them off on his fingers—Brearley, Dalton, Horace Mann—and then mentioned, for the second time, that his daughter was off to Yale next week (“How wonderful!” I exclaimed, though with less enthusiasm than before).
There was something funny going on with his teeth too. They diminished in a diagonal that culminated in pale pink gum. The back of his hair flipped out in a ducktail that couldn’t have been intentional. His suit was expensive, his grooming impeccable, yet still his body’s strangeness asserted itself.
He became serious. “Rose,” he said, “there is no cynicism in what we do, absolutely none, because then everything would fall apart. And I believe the student is absolutely at the center of what I do. I don’t care who’s paying the bill. The student is my sacred trust.”
I tried to imagine him coming home to his wife, unbuttoning his shirt, making a crass remark about money. That part of him was so utterly hidden that I suspected it must be large. Nonetheless, I was careful when he asked why I wanted to tutor. Not for the money; certainly, no!
“Well, kids are great.” I shook my head, still stunned by their greatness. “I mean, kids are kids, right? It doesn’t matter if their parents are on financial aid or are really, really rich, kids are always just—sweet.” Even I was unconvinced by myself. I added hesitantly, “Of course, you know, if they’re entitled, that’s a little hard.”
“Entitled.” He shook his head, genuinely grieved. “Now, that’s a word I just hate to hear. It’s so sad when you see it in the kids.”
“Yeah, absolutely.”
“It’s one thing when you’ve been alive for forty, fifty years, when you’ve made enough money to support your family for ten generations, okay, fine. Be entitled. But when you haven’t done anything, and you expect things?” He shook his head again.
But did he mean—he did, didn’t he?—that the adult residents of the Upper East Side, the bankers, the entertainment lawyers, the venture capitalists and heads of PR firms—deserved their ludicrous, indeed historically anomalous, wealth? I was just absorbing this when he added, “Well, as I said, the people in the office are very high on you, and I think we might just have a few kids for you.
“Now,” he added, after I had burbled my gratitude, “what we like to do at Ivy Prep, we like to figure out what each person is extremely good at. Take Claire Pryor, for instance. Now, Claire is a graduate of Georgetown, which is a very good school”—the way he said “very” meant not at all—“and when she came here, I gradually realized, it’s the strangest thing, but she’s exceptionally good at grammar. And so now, she’s the one who trains our Harvard PhD tutors how to teach grammar!” He beamed happily at me.
“Wow, that’s great.” I shook his hand. “That’s such a good way to do it.”
His beam widened. It wobbled. Griffin was not a stupid man: he sensed my disdain. The gracious mask he wore as easily as his silk shirts slipped, revealing a man confused, a face in the act of seeing its mistake. At that moment I almost liked him.
* * *
—
I started to text Lacie the good news but hesitated. Why should she care? We hardly knew each other anymore. But she had said to stay in touch. Following up was only polite.
To my surprise she wrote back right away, with exclamation marks and charmingly inexplic
able emojis, including a rather festive dolphin. I considered sending her back a whale or a dragon, but both seemed too literal, somehow. In the end, I didn’t reply, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t pleased. Her response was so much warmer than I had expected.
On the subway a few days later I watched a pair of high-schoolers engage in that particular social ritual known as “I Want to Fuck You but I Can’t So I Will Laugh Hysterically at Everything You Say.” Their bags were scattered everywhere, as if this Q train were their living room, and they sprawled along the benches with their feet up and their heads close. City kids. I envied their ease.
The boy, despite acne, was cute. In three years he’d be a heartbreaker, with his brown curls, puppy-dog eyes, and insouciant red socks. The girl, in a gauzy long skirt and black hoodie, reminded me of Lacie, Lacie with Leo: a little hippie, but nervy, too, under the skin.
Those kids! Leaning into each other and laughing, the girl exclaiming Oh my God, I’m, like, obsessed with it! while the rest of us sat, sullenly polite, knees together, bags on laps. They didn’t know how desire stamped their bodies, how we all saw it. When the boy stretched out his arm, and the girl, giggling, nudged the crook of his elbow, they were totally unself-conscious, as if they had, just this minute, invented the language of longing themselves.
Meanwhile, someone’s little sister sat across the car, nose buried in a book, a pale ghost in a pink T-shirt. Will you think it self-pity if I say she reminded me of myself?
* * *
—
Then a young man was ushering me into an elevator reeking of piss. Apartment viewing number three, and though the crumbling brick studio and the overpriced railroad apartment had not discouraged me, this one-bedroom—which turned out to be filled not only with a partially disemboweled sofa but a silent middle-aged woman in curlers who glowered at the broker’s cheery greeting, slammed her coffee mug down, and lit a cigarette—left me a mite dismayed.
It was a child’s game, this making of a New York life—my friends had mostly done it when they were twenty-two, and either had left the city by now or zipped along to higher incomes, better apartments, decent jobs. They’d outgrown their starter set, and I, embarrassed at how I needed everything—job, apartment, life—had not called them. Instead I was staying with my cousin in Queens, who, though she was deep in her surgical residency and hardly ever slept, had answered her phone right away and invited me to crash with her.
Now, standing in this shoddy apartment, I felt as though I were making my life from the cardboard boxes I had played with as a kid: they were printed to look like solid brick, but light enough for a child to knock over.
Patiently I listened as the broker detailed the “prewar” features and opened closet doors for me. The fake wooden siding on the cabinets was curling off. The countertop was chipped, and the shag carpeting smelled of mildew. “I love the…the…space,” I said, thinking that whatever price he quoted me, however reasonable it might seem, would undoubtedly be hundreds higher than what the people around me were paying. I would become a harbinger of gentrification, treated with derision and distrust, and I would deserve it.
As we walked out, I said I loved the neighborhood, and old buildings, and old charming buildings, and buildings with good bones. I was by then so sure that I would never take the apartment that I became desperate to convince the broker that I might.
This often happens to me. As soon as it becomes clear not merely that things are not working out but that a grotesque misalignment has occurred, that there is no way that I will ever take this apartment, accept this job, date this man, I become obsessed, obsessed, with hiding my hesitation. “I’ll call you,” I said, shaking the broker’s hand. “I’m so excited!”
* * *
—
Walking toward the subway, I felt loose and empty, reluctant to go back to my cousin’s, but unsure what to do with myself. A clutch of teenagers glowered as I walked past. One said something, and they all collapsed into laughter. I felt fourteen again. I didn’t belong here, but I couldn’t stomach the long ride back so soon after leaving.
I got out my phone and hit Maps, though in truth I already knew. When I had called the broker, I had known. Now, looking at the blue dot pulsing near the soft gray letters of DITMAS PARK, I thought: Well, I could just walk over. I could just go see.
* * *
—
Church Avenue was broad but traffic-choked, delivery trucks double-parked, a beat-up Lincoln making a three-point turn while horns roared. Racks of cheap printed dresses fluttered in the breeze of a passing B35 bus. A broken man with red, runny eyes sat cross-legged on the sidewalk, rhythmically rocking. Following my phone, I walked past John’s Liquors and GEMS GEMS GEMS, past the Golden Krust Bakery and the Island Waves Caribbean Market, past a fishmonger hawking pale, icy flesh, and a Chinese restaurant with starry, bullet-burst glass, dodging as I went pooling piss, and a spongy pizza slice, and melted ice cream, its dye curling out from the cream in a long pink trail.
Then I turned off Church to a quiet, leafy street. Everywhere, mansions and lawns. I stopped, amazed. There was a Tudor, an English cottage, a Southern colonial. A Victorian in orange and green, done up like a pagoda. A medieval castle, all turret and balustrade. Over the green swells of land bloomed English tea roses and tall, triumphant lilies, late-season honeysuckle and purple allium balls. Another world.
Down the block a film crew had set up, its silver trailers hugging the curb. Half a dozen klieg lights brilliantly flooded the cherry-red door of a colonial. A No Parking sign taped to a lamppost announced the filming of a popular TV show, one that took place in a studiously “normal” American town, and that was when it hit me: Swarthmore. This neighborhood reminded me of home.
After two blocks the street hit another commercial strip, less hectic than Church, with sun-faded awnings and an upscale ramen joint. I passed a “wine shoppe,” an upholstery store, and three hair salons. There was check cashing and craft beer. A Mexican restaurant, a school. A bar that doubled as a flower shop.
By the library, I came upon a bevy of white four-cornered tents, like a caravan set down for the night. A woman called to me; did I want to fight fracking in New York State? Hastily I shook my head and waded in. It was slow-going. Fathers with strollers and older women clogged the sidewalk, leisurely leaning over the eggplants and pulling plastic bags from overhead hooks. There were homemade pies, a freezer of turkey meat, veiny gray shrimp. Potted herbs. Zucchinis and berries and endless, endless tomatoes, heirloom and cherry, plum and Roma, yellow and green and scarlet and that wonderful flat pink-red.
By the Bread Alone tent I saw her. In a pale peach sundress, with her hair atop her head, she floated in the eddy of shoppers. When she leaned over the lettuce heads, her shoulder blades tensed like twin hearts.
For a long moment I stood, half-hidden, watching. Lacie moved as if there were no one around her, as if each brimming basket of tiny wild strawberries had been picked especially for her.
The cheesemonger’s face softened like a peach when she approached. Laughing, he offered her a wedge of something gooey. She took it, smiling, nodding in agreement: delicious. And then she moved on. Yes, that was how she was—that was how she had always been with boys. But there was something new in her, too, something I couldn’t quite name.
Then she turned, and looked directly at me. Something live flew into my throat. I studied the sidewalk, and when I looked up again, she had turned away. I pressed through the crowd.
“Rose!” Awkwardly we hugged, her tote bags hitting my body. “What are you doing out here?” she cried, with a sour note of aggression she didn’t bother to hide.
Maybe that was the new thing: a little knife sewn into her childish voice, a butterfly skewer so light you hardly noticed it until the slice.
“I was just looking at an apartment nearby.” I hoped I sounded breezy.
“And you came
over for the farmers’ market?” She sounded skeptical. “It’s so small.”
“No, I was just walking around. Exploring.”
Pedestrians swiveled around us, some sending reproving glances behind them. Lacie began to drift along the stalls, and I followed, twisting my hips to avoid the strollers.
“So how was it?” she called over her shoulder.
“The apartment? Not great.”
“Where was it?” She stopped to examine a cucumber.
I dodged a bobbing yoga mat. “Um, near the Parkside Avenue stop, on this big road—”
“Ocean?” She wrinkled her nose. “Yeah. Some of those places are in pretty bad shape.”
We reached the herb tent, where she bought a bouquet of mint, and something called sorrel, counting out her dollar bills and carefully flattening each one.
“I can’t believe how beautiful it is here, though.” A sack of squash thunked my ribs. “The houses are just gorgeous.”
She looked at me sharply, as if I were suggesting renting one of them. “A lot of them are still single-family homes.”
We reached the end of the stalls. “Well, bye,” she said with a tight little smile, her hand curling into a wave. I panicked. Apparently this was going to be it—she wasn’t even going to remark on how strange it was that we had run into each other. I found myself saying, “Wait.”
She turned back, surprised.
“You want to get coffee?”
“Ohh.” She grimaced. “You know, I totally would, but I’ve got to get this meat into the fridge.” She hoisted a bag, and I registered fully for the first time how many bags she was carrying, the way the straps cut into the pale skin of her shoulder.