Everyone Knows How Much I Love You

by Kyle McCarthy

  “She’s private.”

  “Yeah. I mean, she’s so charming and nice. Everyone loves her. But she actually doesn’t talk about herself so much, not if you really listen.”

  I smiled at him. “She talks to me.”

  “But about real stuff? Stuff she’s actually dealing with?”

  I thought of our long evenings with tea, all the catching up we had done, the delicate way we had discussed all the men in our lives, save the two we shared. For sure, Lacie refused the usual guise of female intimacy. But she cooked for me, she had knit me a hat, she picked up toothpaste when we were out. All our little exchanges were electric pulses; I found them more honest, and more thrilling, than the standard confessional mode. But if Ian hadn’t figured this out, I couldn’t help him.

  “I keep feeling like I can’t quite grasp the critical things in her life,” he was saying now.

  I smiled at him again, still feeling smug. “You have to be patient with her. She’ll open up.”

  “Really? She seems so elusive.” He pulled on his beer. Then, timidly, like a child drawn irresistibly to a forbidden room, he said, “So, really, did you guys have a falling-out, or what?”

  I shook my head. “It’s not a very interesting story.”

  “Was it in high school?”

  The sound of a key in the door. The dress. I stood. Ian looked at me strangely. I sat. All my nerves danced, like metal filings when a magnet gets too close.

  “I can’t,” I said very quietly, and then there came the clop-clop of Lacie kicking off her shoes in the foyer. “Ian?” I pictured her frowning at his big white Chucks. “You’re here?”

  It was shocking to see the subject of our conversation walk into the room. She brought with her a swirl of sidewalk and exhaust, tendrils curling out from her loose topknot, several tote bags spilling from her shoulder to the floor.

  “What are you guys doing in the dark?” she exclaimed, and there was not an ounce of distrust in her voice.

  “Hey, babe.” Light like a lion, Ian padded to her and kissed her on the cheek. “We were just waiting for you.”

  “Why is it so hot?” She went to the window and hoisted up the glass, angry at the heat—I recognized this mood from August. We were all regressing.

  “Let’s get out of here.” She stood in the center of the room, hands on hips, elbows pointed. “Are you guys hungry? I’m starving. Let’s go to the Tibetan place.”

  Then she saw me. Her face went through a thousand explosions of feeling. “You’re wearing my clothes.”

  I stood so hastily I knocked against an old Amazon box. Cat took off, hissing.

  “Doesn’t she look good in it?” There was eager soothing in Ian’s voice.

  “I’m sorry. I should have asked.” For Ian, I tried to keep my voice light.

  Lacie was the mistress of ease, a high priestess of social lubricant, but even so, there stretched between us an electric buzzing. She knows, I thought suddenly. She knows I go through her room every day.

  Then, with great effort, and great grace, she shut it down. Her face shut down. “No problem,” she said. “Ian’s right. It does look good on you.”

  “Yeah. It totally does. Let’s get Tibetan.” Ian stretched, faux-casual, his shirt rising a few inches to reveal a pale slice of belly with dark curled hairs. “A spicy curry will help me sweat it out.” He ambled toward his shoes. Lacie looked at me expectantly.

  “Great,” I said. Obediently we all followed Lacie out of the apartment, down the pink-carpeted stairs, and into the dark.

  It was cooler outside, and after the stuffy apartment the night air slipped around me like the silk gown. Walking down Rugby, I kept far from Lacie. I didn’t want her to say anything more to me.

  We ordered extravagantly that night: shrimp and pork dumplings, red and yellow curries, a thick gluey bread from Nepal, and mixed green vegetables in a steamy clump. Drinking cold beers and eating spicy curry, we slid through conversation, chopsticks hovering, eating fast and drinking faster, laughing and interrupting, stabbing the dumplings, desperate to show how much we liked one another, how much fun we were having.

  “It’s going to be great,” Lacie announced, pressing her dewy bottle against her neck. Naturally, talk of the weather had turned to talk of the apocalypse, specifically the Zombie Apocalypse. “I’m going to be so good at it.”

  “Are you?” Ian smiled.

  “Oh, totally. I’ll get everyone I love in one place and like, ration out the food and organize everything.” She laughed at herself. “I actually really love thinking about it. It’s kind of sick.”

  “And get guns,” Ian advised. “You’ll need guns. And a tarp. For water.”

  “Does that actually work?” Lacie wrinkled her nose. We all laughed—at nothing, just to keep the mood going.

  “Yeah. Just lay a tarp out—if you can stake it up a few inches it’s really good—and in the morning you collect the condensation.”

  “So that’s like, how much water?”

  “Umm,” Ian paused for effect, “maybe four ounces.”

  We both shrieked. “Fabulous,” Lacie laughed. “Totally perfect. This is going to be great.”

  “Or you could just, like, hold up a Duane Reade,” I suggested. “With all those guns you’ll have.” We were all giggling, picturing Lacie in—what? a balaclava?—storming into a drugstore.

  “That’ll be the first thing that everyone does. Storm Duane Reade. Steal all the condoms.”

  “Condoms?” I pretended outrage.

  Lacie shrugged. “I hear they’re useful in a disaster.”

  “Oh my God, the sex is going to be great.” Ian shook his head. “Disaster sex is going to be incredible.”

  “Maybe everyone will share,” I suggested. “Maybe we won’t have to loot.”

  Lacie slung her arm around me and twisted me toward Ian. “Isn’t she adorable?” she demanded. “Isn’t she the cutest?” The crook of her elbow was damp and mean against my neck.

  “The cutest,” Ian agreed, but he wasn’t quite looking at me.

  “Anyway”—Lacie unhooked her arm—“it’s going to be total Lord of the Flies. Though it’s sweet that you can even think otherwise. But no. We’re going to have to rely on my natural charisma.”

  “Your overwhelming charisma,” Ian amended, pinching a plump shrimp and holding it out to her. “Your animally magnetic charisma.”

  She ducked her head and made off with the shrimp. “They’ll all fall into line like good worker bees.”

  They locked eyes. A tiny smile tugged at Lacie’s lips.

  I laughed too loudly. “I don’t know,” I announced. “Some part of me also thinks there’s something deeply unethical about building a bunker. Isn’t it just a way of caring less about everyone else?”

  Ian had a way of looking at me that was more a looking into me. He did it now. He dove in deep. And it was an endless temptation—I remembered this from the Barn—to ask him what he had seen.

  “Well,” Lacie said. “I don’t think there’s anything unethical about planning ahead. Or taking care of yourself.”

  “No, I mean, sure, when the next hurricane comes, I’ll be hoarding food like everyone else. But do you know what I mean? Isn’t this why we live in cities? Because we believe in this grand, totally imperfect, collective experiment? Because we want to take our chances in being part of an interconnected web, rather than some lone cowboy out in Wyoming with his gun?”

  Gravely they both nodded. I felt oddly thrilled. “You’re not wrong,” Ian said.

  “No.” Lacie considered. “You’re not wrong,” and I felt like their child, but in the nicest way, like they would take care of me and approve of everything I did.

  Just then an ambulance went by, bleating and beaming its disco lights, so we just sat there, smiling and nodding. Ian said
something to Lacie too quietly for me to hear, and by the time the siren had faded she had responded and Ian was saying, “But I could just get a studio somewhere else.”

  I had ruined Zombie Apocalypse with my prudish ethics.

  “But Red Hook is so cheap,” Lacie said.

  “Red Hook is cheap, but Eli is driving me insane.”

  I didn’t know who Eli was, and I didn’t know why he was driving Ian insane. Lacie never told me anything, and I didn’t want the thing to start where they forgot about me. I blurted out, “I like to walk in Red Hook.”

  Lacie’s eyes narrowed. “Really? I didn’t know you liked it there.”

  “Where do you walk?” Ian asked.

  I didn’t know any street names. “Oh, just down by the water, like that little park, you know? Where you can look at the Statue of Liberty?”

  “Really? You should let me know when you’re around. My studio’s right there.”

  “Oh?” I said innocently. “I don’t want to interrupt you.”

  He waved his hand. “Usually I can use a break. Seriously. Text me.”

  Lacie took a long draw on her beer, watching us. So, I thought. It’s not like we’re hiding anything.

  * * *

  —

  On the way home, Lacie pulled me close. “Just ask,” she hissed. “With the necklace too. I really don’t care, take whatever you want, but just ask.” And she tugged, hard, on the sleeve of the dress.

  On the day I learned that Isabel’s father committed, or probably committed, debt fraud, the day I learned that the charges against him were then abruptly and mysteriously dropped, none of his cronies or underlings or the investigating prosecutor willing to explain why the SEC was no longer interested in Ervin West, no longer interested though it acknowledged, and Ervin West acknowledged, and it was generally and widely acknowledged that an “impropriety” had occurred, not an impropriety like sleeping with your best friend’s boyfriend, no, nothing like the ordinary, dull, unimaginative sins of small people, but something truly fabulous like remaining the chief shareholder in an entertainment conglomerate whose improper debt swapping you have supervised, and then making, in the four years after said improper debt swap, in excess of $10 million in personal profit, yes, on that day, I chose my clothing carefully. A slouchy sweater dress, pale gray; Oxford loafers; and my leather jacket, soft as creamy lamb.

  “Okay.” I slid Isabel’s paper between her laminated copy of “Be You” and her Cosmic Cranberry Kombucha, whose label promised, as Ivy Prep had promised, to reawaken, repurpose, and redefine Isabel.

  I was up for the job: sharply dressed, speaking strongly, and oh so ready to make money again. Ervin West’s email to me, which had prompted the googling, and which had had no subject line or salutation, had read in its entirety: Please confirm five o’clock today, and though we had not discussed meeting—though I hadn’t even known Isabel was back from California—I immediately wrote back, Confirmed.

  “This is great,” I declared. “Really great. But what I find myself wondering is, Do you think you’ve really gotten to the very heart of it? Do you think—I’m just wondering—do you think The Souls of Black Folk is the very best book to help show colleges who you are?”

  Isabel blinked. “My teacher says it’s not just the job of black people to talk about being black.”

  “You mean race. It’s not just the job of black people to talk about race.”

  She gave a little moue of impatience. “Yeah, that’s what I said.”

  Sulkily she pushed one bare leg out from the desk. No tennis today, apparently: she was still in her school uniform, plaid skirt and blue polo, dainty gold chain around her neck. Gold her father had bought; skirt her father had bought; skirt to attend private school whose tuition her father had bought. Dirty money. Sometimes being with Isabel was like staring at one of those magical 3-D paintings: one way, she was just a pattern of pretty, psychedelic dots, but dilate your eyes, and from the rich schizoids of red and purple emerged the dinosaur shape of her father’s ill-gotten capital.

  Briskly she stabbed her paper with her forefinger. “This is the most important thing I’ll ever write,” she reminded me. “This determines my future.”

  “Absolutely,” I agreed. “That’s why I want to be sure we get to the heart of who you are.” We were both quiet, thinking about her heart. Then I brightened. “You said you were a feminist. That’s interesting to me.”

  “Why?” She sounded suspicious, as if she had no idea what might be remarkable about a wealthy young model/actress with collagen-injected lips and a gluten “allergy” pledging allegiance to absolute gender parity. Look, I wanted to say, I’m fighting for the right to get laid when I’m fifty and single. What are you after? Are we even on the same team?

  “I guess I just mean I want you to write about what you care about. I want you to express yourself. I want you to—” I was emotional, why was I so emotional? I took a deep breath. “Isabel. I think you actually have fascinating things to say about being a woman. A young white woman. It’s different from how I grew up.”

  “Because of the internet.”

  “Because of the internet,” I agreed. “And cell phones. We just had pagers. Actually, sometimes we used pay phones. We used to call the pay phone at the train station, just to see who was hanging out there.”

  “You hung out at the train station?”

  “Yeah.” I wrinkled my mouth. “There wasn’t a lot to do.”

  “But that sounds so boring,” she exclaimed, delighted. “You would just sit there?”

  “Yeah. Sometimes the boys would fuck—like, mess up, the trash cans,” and honestly, dropping the F bomb was the best thing I could have done for student-tutor relations at that moment. She grinned. I covered my mouth. “Whoops.”

  Coyly she asked, “Were you guys the bad kids?”

  “Not really. We were just, like, bored.”

  “That’s cool.” She really did sound impressed. “That’s, like, really cool.” Thoughtfully, she unscrewed the cap of her Cosmic Cranberry. Took a tiny sip. Winced.

  I laughed. “Do you actually like that stuff?”

  “Not really. It’s kind of gross.” She giggled.

  “Can I smell it?”

  A weird, unprofessional request, but Isabel handed over the drink, warning, “It smells like gym clothes. Seriously, it’s foul.”

  Delicately I took a perfunctory whiff, careful to keep my nose and mouth well clear of the lip. “So foul,” I agreed. “It’s like something my friend Lacie would like.”

  As soon as I said her name the air got funny. Wavy and charged.

  “Cool. Is she really into juice or something?”

  “She’s into kombucha. Actually, she makes it.”

  “That’s crazy.” Isabel flapped her arms, excited. “That’s, like, really crazy. It’s mold. Does she know that? How does she know it’s not going to kill her?”

  “She’s very careful,” I assured her.

  Dreamily Isabel rested her head in her hand. The Souls of Black Folk was nudged aside. “That’s totally something they would do in L.A. Make kombucha. That’s, like, totally something they’d be into. Maybe you should go there.”

  “To L.A.? Yeah, actually, I’ve been.”

  “I think you would like it.”

  “Yeah, no, I do like it.”

  “Yeah,” Isabel said. “I think it’s your kind of place. ’Cause you’re earthy.”

  The statement was categorical, her conviction absolute. My sweater dress, chosen with such care, shriveled to a shroud. “Earthy? What do you mean, earthy?”

  “It’s not bad,” she said gently. “I can just tell. You’ve got that natural hippie look.”

  “What do you mean?” I was mildly hysterical. How could she tell? What gave me away?

  But she only fixed me with one
of her dead, sexed-out stares. “They’re kind of hippies there. They like juice and stuff.”

  * * *

  —

  It’s odd, the power we give strangers over our lives, how readily we believe they see the truth of us. It’s as if the burden of knowing ourselves is so great that we lay it down happily, easily, without complaint; as if we think our friends and family are blind, but strangers, random indifferent strangers, possess judgments as arbitrary and definite as God’s.

  Isabel wasn’t exactly a stranger, but she didn’t care about me, and so I trusted her. Earthy. Dowdy. Bland. Boring. Refusing to shower, or wear deodorant, or brush hair. Smelling of body odor and thrift-store clothing. Everything I had been, back when I was her age. Everything I thought I had escaped.

  Lacie in the living room had burrowed deep into the daybed with a book. As I came in she said, “Look at you. You’re adorable.”

  “Ha. Don’t even start.” She had on her beautiful face today, the pale gray eyes and pink pallor of a Renaissance maiden. “This tutoring girl is making me feel insane.”

  She rattled her cubes. “Go get something.”

  The whiskey was all hers, but she shared readily, carelessly; what was hers was mine, she implied with every action: it should be understood. After two months, I still marveled.

  “You do really look cute,” she repeated once I had fixed myself a jam jar.

  “I don’t feel cute.” My dress hem rode up; I tugged it down. “Isabel just told me I was earthy.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “What does that even mean?”

  I sipped, and whiskey fire lit Isabel’s words. “I have no idea. She was like, Oh, you’d like L.A. You’re earthy. She’s such a—she’s this total Barbie doll who thinks she’s a feminist, and is totally unaware of how she’s completely complicit in the objectification of women. It drives me absolutely insane.”

  Lacie was furrowing her brow. “L.A.’s not earthy.”

  “But how do you think she knew? I mean, is this outfit ‘earthy’ to you?”

  “Well”—Lacie cupped her own jar—“it’s definitely more New Agey than here. It’s airy. But it’s not earthy. There’s nothing terrestrial about it.”