Everyone Knows How Much I Love You

by Kyle McCarthy

  She wiped her eyes. “By the way. It’s really fucked up you never told me what it was about.”

  “Well, I wasn’t telling anyone.”

  “But you were writing about me while living in this house. You were like a spy. It’s so creepy.”

  “I wasn’t spying on you,” I started, but my words sounded empty, even to me. Who was a writer, anyway, but a voyeur? “And I wasn’t telling anyone what the novel was about. Ian just happened to guess. He’s so curious about you.” And then, a nasty flash of inspiration: “Maybe if you were a more open person, he wouldn’t have come to me begging for dirt.”

  “Oh, so it’s my fault you guys fucked?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “How long was it going on?”

  I crossed my arms. I was still standing over her, but I couldn’t bring myself to sit. She was like a wild animal. “Not long,” I mumbled.

  “How long was it going on? I’m such an idiot. You were always out late, but I never asked, I just figured, She’s a private person….”

  “You’re the private person. Ian is mystified by you.”

  Her elbows slid around her thighs as the heels of her hands worked her face. With slow, tentative movements, I lowered myself onto the far corner of the daybed, keeping an embroidered tangerine pillow between us.

  When she looked up, the pressure of her palms had left red clouds around her eyes. “It’s just like…who are you? You move into my apartment, wear my clothes—yeah, I noticed that my stuff kept moving around—write about me, write as if you are me, steal my boyfriend…what is it, Rose? You take and take.”

  It hadn’t felt like taking. It had felt like a way to be close to her.

  “I don’t get it. I literally don’t get it. You’ve got this, like, vampiric relationship to my life, but when I offer you something genuine, like friendship, you don’t take it, you can’t even see it.”

  The heat turned on. That old familiar gurgle of pipes, followed by clanking, as if a little man in our radiator were banging away with his hammer, banging away at my heart. “You’re right.” I found myself whispering. “I’m sorry.”

  She straightened. “I think you should go.”

  What could I do? By saying sorry I had ended our game. All that remained was a reversal: the retrieval of my coat, the slow, careful winding of scarf around neck. Lacie wouldn’t look at me; she wouldn’t speak to me, except to remind me, again, that she needed the rent.

  With a heave I shouldered the green duffel and stepped over the threshold. I turned back, to say one last thing, one final whatever, and found that her face had screwed even further into damage and rage. “So, what?” She gestured at my bag. “Back to his place now? Just, you got all your stuff, go running back to Ian?”

  I dropped the duffel, and my gut dropped with it. “What? No.” Then my heart began to swell. She had just told me everything I needed to know.

  When I got home that night I wrote an email:

  Dear Ervin,

  First of all, I want to apologize for upsetting Isabel so badly. Obviously, that was not my intention, and I feel horrible about it.

  Over the past week I’ve been thinking about our conversation, and I’ve come to believe you’re right in your assessment. Isabel does need to move on with her life. I’d be more than happy to send along a sample essay for “inspiration,” if you think that might help Izzy with her process.

  As you may have heard, I’ve parted ways with Ivy Prep. However, I’ve consulted with their pay structure, and the fee for this kind of sample essay is $1,800, paid directly to me.

  Please let me know as soon as you can if this appeals.

  All best,

  Rose

  Ervin never replied. But an hour later, a bright notice on my phone told me I had received a PayPal payment in the amount of $900. The accompanying note promised the balance “upon receipt of the deliverables.”

  The next morning I wrote the ending to my novel.

  I had written it many times before, in Iowa City, delusionally triumphant, and then chastised, again, upon my return to Oakland, and three times at the Barn, once in Nebraska, a tinkering on Albemarle Road, each time with the faith that it would be the last, each time pumped up on epiphany and insight, but now was different: Now I had fresh the shining example of Lacie’s rage, so much of which I had forgotten: the way she couldn’t quite do it; the way you had to scrutinize her words, hold them to the light, to really understand she meant it; the way her emotions swung about, somewhere beyond you, so that even fighting with her you still felt you were missing her, that she was lost in a private sea. Yes, that morning I sailed our fight like a ship back to high school, to senior year, to the island where she had stranded me.

  All that day I wrote and revised, declaiming my paragraphs from the hard gray sofa before returning to the study to smooth them out. The words came cleanly, falling into my mind, the right rhythm and shape, the right inflection of noun and verb; as music they were perfect, and yet somehow they also made sense. Hours passed. I ate more of Alyssa’s yogurt and fruit. Some of Marcus’s chorizo. I found myself re-adding a sentence I had deleted, and then cutting it an hour later: the loop. The loop was always a sign I was done. So—trying not to overthink it—I pasted the new ending into the final draft, hit Save, and sent it to Portia Kahn.

  With the novel I included a note saying that I thought this was it. If she liked what I had done, she could submit it to editors.

  * * *

  —

  Only then did I allow myself to unwrap the present Lacie had given me. Only then did I take her final question in that final moment and unfurl its glorious implications. If she thought I was with Ian, they were not talking. No amends had been made. Maybe he was even waiting for me. Maybe. But I had to be careful. I had to fish him with just the right words.

  Dusk was falling, the purple-black December night close. Ian and I had talked so much about dusk. Often we had commented The darkness feels especially dark this year; showing off our poetic chops, we had discussed how the winter light both drained and saturated, the yellow deepening into gold until the pooling shadows swam out and swallowed the land. Then, we agreed, the darkness came fast and total, a black scrim yanked down upon the world, changing the city, making strangers wary of one another, turning quiet side streets menacing and squeezing the stomach of every pedestrian with dread.

  Now, with the light stabbing through the high, uncurtained windows of this stylish apartment, I could practically feel him thinking these thoughts. I got out my phone and wrote: Every time the light gets like this I think of you. No. Too saccharine. I tried: God, dark so early. And then: Don’t know how you’re feeling, but I’m leaving town & would love to see you before I go. The word love. With a tap I sent it out.

  For twenty minutes I furiously ate Marcus’s salted almonds and waited for my phone to chime. Finally, frustrated, I shut the phone in a desk drawer and went out into the gathering night.

  * * *

  —

  Up by 179th Street the neighborhood gets a little funny. Not only the usual funny of uneasy gentrification, though there’s that, too, but the crazy funny of the nation’s busiest bridge belching thousands of cars through twin cloverleafs directly above a quiet residential neighborhood. The scale is all wrong: there are eighteen-wheelers and commuter buses pounding concrete and families heartbreaking in their helmeted vulnerability wobbling up the pedestrian ramp on their bikes, and meanwhile quaint brownstones and Dominican bakeries and bodegas with dyed roses all seeming to slide down the impossibly San Franciscan hill that announces the bald fact that we are on an island, and this is the shore.

  As I sloped in the chilly twilight down to the water, I came upon a screaming boy. Wailing, he clutched his shin, his dark eyes bright with tears, the front wheel of his overturned bicycle still slowly spinning.

&nb
sp; A man brushed past. He was tall and slender as a wisp, so that when he knelt by the boy he was like a string dropping. “Aw, kiddo,” he said, and kissed the crown of the boy’s head. “That hurt, didn’t it?” Soon he had his son standing, and together they were reciting the names of the body, the boy dutifully squeezing his arms and legs, cheerfully reporting back that each part of himself was okay.

  This tender parenting so moved me that I found myself a step or two later nearly blinded by sentimental tears. The dad had been neither overly fussy nor indifferent to the boy’s pain; I decided he must be a doctor, an ER doctor who had had to regularly assess for life-threatening bleeds; that he had turned this dire task into a playful game to distract a hurt child charmed me, and when, a minute later, I saw the boy and dad wheeling the trike up the hill, I almost looped back and asked the man for his number. Though of course that kind of nice man usually comes with a wife.

  By the time I had wandered down to the water the darkness was a gauzy gray, the sky blushing. Three men were sitting on overturned milk crates drinking beers. They regarded me steadily as I wobbled across the rocks, my shoes grinding on the pebbles, scraping and sighing in complaint. The Hudson was a dull overturned skyscraper.

  For long minutes I stood with my back to them, regarding the last band of pink above New Jersey. Their eyes bore into me. If one of them came toward me, I would never hear it: the water was slapping violently at the shore, and humming bridge traffic zinged the air. Studying the dying light, acutely aware of my ass, my calves, I thought: either they are nice men or they are not. I felt I was offering myself, as I had offered my novel to Portia and my guilt to Lacie, submitting to the world’s scalding, letting it do what it would with me, and if these men—

  But when I turned to go they were deep in conversation, having apparently forgotten all about me. As I crunched past on the sliding rocks, one man touched his hat. His eyes under the brim were tiny and red.

  * * *

  —

  When I got back to the apartment the electric light seemed an abomination. Still buzzing from the imagined danger, I blipped on my phone: no Ian. An email from Portia: she was “excited!” to read my draft. An email from Ervin, reminding me that he had already paid me nine hundred dollars, a “substantial sum.” To maximize the effectiveness of my contribution to Isabel’s college application process, it was essential to receive the sample essay “as soon as possible, preferably before 7 P.M. tonight.” I tapped to the home screen. Half-past four.

  Quickly, confidently, I folded open my laptop and clicked a new Word document. Then I stood at the window a long time, watching the cars on the bridge. The GW from a distance was majestic and calm, but mostly what happened there were traffic jams and suicides. People fuming, people jumping. I pictured again the men under the bridge. Suddenly I knew what I wanted to say. I returned to the laptop and wrote:

  In my mind it always happens slowly, almost gracefully, the front wheels of the taxi rolling over the curb, the body of the cab swinging like the arm of a prizefighting boxer. Yes, in my mind it is graceful, and slow; there’s an aria playing, the unfurling of a soprano, an epic feel—though of course it all actually happened very fast.

  The cab came onto the curb, bent a No Parking sign, and knocked the stroller right out of my nanny’s hands. That’s what she later said, what she couldn’t stop saying: just knocked it away. I was rushed to the hospital, given less than half a chance of making it. I was two years old.

  The driver lost his medallion. He lost his green card. He lost his family, for a little while; he lost his freedom. I don’t know all the things he lost. Sometimes I think I’d like to learn them; sometimes I think it might help me make an accounting of all the things that I lost.

  But the truth is that I can’t remember. At the start of my life there is an act of violence that is lost to me. I live every day with the consequences; it has marked my body and brain, this story that has been told to me, repeated endlessly: it’s as elemental and slippery as myth.

  But I don’t tell you this to make you sorry for me. This is not the place where I tell you about an obstacle that I’ve overcome. No, I want to use this myth as a metaphor, which is exactly what a myth always already is.

  I have tried and tried this autumn, with the help of my teachers, my parents, and my tutor, to write about womanhood, or feminism, to make some statement about life on this planet as a girl. But when I think about life on this planet as a girl it seems remarkably fine, at least for me, at least until I was about twelve. But then puberty came like that taxi and changed my life. It was impersonal. It didn’t have any particular interest in me. I was just in its path.

  Now when I try to write a sentence and it comes out strange, when I try to read a book and my mind slides all over the place, when I know what I think but I can’t get it onto the page, I wish I could go back to that moment before the cab jumped the curb. Or back even further, to five, six minutes before. I would make my nanny linger at the shop window, or miss the light, somehow move us fifteen or twenty feet back, out of harm’s way.

  And sometimes when I see a ten-year-old walking along Park Avenue with a soccer ball under her arm, plucky and upright, ponytail swinging, I wish I could go back. For a long time, that’s all feminism meant to me: the desire to go back. But you can’t. You shouldn’t. It’s good to be an adult. When I think about college, I think about learning to live in my adult body. To be an adult woman, with everything that that means.

  Eesh, that ending! But maybe the whole thing was crap. I couldn’t tell. I uploaded the file to an email, addressed it to Ervin West, and wrote, Here is Isabel’s college essay. Thank you for sending the balance of the fee by this evening.

  Then I curled up on the tasteful couch and slept.

  * * *

  —

  That night I dreamt I was looking for Leo in a hospital. The emergency room was nothing but a long corridor of doors, all locked. A father, cradling his blood-soaked son, told me to find Room 18.

  When at last I found Leo he was soft and vulnerable, bare under his hospital gown. I crawled onto the big mechanical bed with him and held him; he put his face against my chest and told me that he loved me.

  Then he said he had to go. He was late for his opening. He had to fix one of his sculptures. Hadn’t he told me before that he was a sculptor? The dream ended on a beach somewhere, me in tears, stupidly begging him to stay.

  * * *

  —

  When I woke again it was past ten A.M. I went to the kitchen and stood in front of the sink, drinking a glass of water and staring dumbly at the announcement for Alyssa’s gallery show. My unconscious was really annoying. It was so literal, so unimaginative. For shit’s sake, I thought. I get it. I get the message.

  To prove that I got it, I retrieved my checkbook and wrote Lucinda Salt where it said Pay to the Order of. Eighteen hundred dollars. Everything I owed her. Then I found an envelope, stole one of Alyssa’s stamps from the immaculate desk drawer where she kept her office supplies, and wrote for the very last time the words Albemarle Road.

  * * *

  —

  Strangely, I didn’t feel bad about writing Isabel’s admissions essay. In the grand scheme of the world’s injustices, it was a pittance. Really, the only twinge I felt was the umbrage of my ego. In the end, I had decided I was proud of my taxi essay, amused by the metaphor of puberty-as-car-crash, and sad to think of my words floating around in the world unattached—that is, if they made it off Ervin’s computer. I could imagine him trashing the thing; in fact, I kept waiting for him to demand his money back, though the fact that he hadn’t didn’t mean anything. Eighteen hundred dollars to them was like twenty dollars to me.

  My mother hadn’t said how long the DeSalvanos were going to be in Mexico, but now that I had no more business in New York, I thought it best to be on my way. I called my mom. Her voice knit wit
h concern, but not surprise, as she told me she could pick me up at the station anytime, I could stay for as long as I wanted, I shouldn’t worry about it, she hoped I was okay, was there anything she could do for me?

  I had been sending so many letters, but I thought I’d send one last one. Well, a text. I drafted it with my heart pounding, then stood there running my thumb over the screen. This is our last chance to see each other. Before I could whirlpool into deliberation, I hit Send.

  Not two minutes later, the response came. Rose! I’d love to see you. I was thinking about going to the Brooklyn Banya tomorrow. Want to come?

  It’s like church, isn’t it, standing inside a man’s doorway moments after he’s buzzed you in? Everything hushed and still, the quiet before the service, with just his voice wafting from the bedroom, and starry silver lights bathing the kitchen in a soft glow.

  “Rose!” Ian came swinging into the kitchen, shoving his phone into his back pocket, twirling swim trunks from his finger, a gliding, swaying ballet that paused only for the instant it took to kiss my cheek. “Ready to shvitz?”

  I shyly nodded. Even thinking of him constantly, I’d still managed to forget how big and crazy his curls were, how thick and muscular his forearms were, how deep the notch ran between his eyes. There was the tang of his smell, and the way he looked at me. It was all new, always.

  “This place is a trip.” He unplugged the string of Christmas lights and grabbed his keys from a hook by the door. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  —

  We took the F, and from the F walked to Coney Island Avenue. The Brooklyn Banya sat sandwiched between an auto repair shop and a Pakistani patisserie, a squat gray box with multi-hued floodlights that bathed the word “banya” red, then indigo, then green. I turned to Ian, my eyes a question, and not a nice one.