To Be Honest Page 13

I laughed too while simultaneously lingering in the sting of this perfect harsh truth. She continued, “Describing yourself is always suspicious. When someone goes out of their way to call themselves nice, they sound psychotic. It’s like saying out of nowhere, ‘I’d never murder anyone. I’m definitely not the type who murders people.’” Until now, Eve had come across as very serious, but when she cracked this joke, she had exquisite comic timing.

  “Are you honest?” I asked her.

  She laughed. “Have you learned nothing from this conversation?” We laughed again but then she looked down, inspecting her drawing. “I try to be honest, but it’s hard.”

  “What about it do you find difficult?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “How could you not know?” I asked. Then I figured it out. “Oh, you mean you don’t want to tell me.” Eve laughed again but still didn’t answer the question. She filled in the speech bubble with the leech-like monster saying, “I’m probably a liar.”

  At the end of the night, I didn’t dare imagine that she might be romantically interested in me, didn’t even consider trying to kiss her, but I did ask for her address so I could write her.

  I sent her a handwritten letter without corrections or cross outs and admitted that I achieved this effect by writing numerous drafts. Both of our addresses were on Grand Street, though about a mile apart, so I ended with, “It’s like we have a tin can telephone and Grand Street is the string.”

  In her response, Eve wrote about how her teachers had always punished her for doodling and now she’d submitted a book of her doodles to various comic book publishers. I found it funny that she referred to her drawings as “doodles.” I’d seen stuff from Picasso’s sketchbook that wasn’t as good as what Eve had sketched in front of me, but he’d never called his drawings doodles. I wondered if her doodles would be published. I believed in the beauty of Eve’s drawings more than I believed in the wisdom of publishers.

  Eve finished her letter with a line suspended at the bottom of the page without context: “This is not normal.” If there was ever a line to make Michael Leviton swoon, it was this one.

  When Eve invited me to her apartment for the first time, she showed me the book of doodles, a lined composition notebook filled with ballpoint tableaus. I looked through it in front of her. Her characters grinned with crooked teeth or bit their own lips, haggard and awkward, with anxious eyes and sweat flying off their foreheads. The characters’ thoughts and dialogue appeared in bubbles around them, sometimes so many overlapping bubbles that the characters appeared smothered under their own words and feelings. Eve portrayed herself in many of the scenes too, her eyes sad dots framed in bags and lines, even in happy scenes.

  Eve’s real eyes were big and green and decidedly not dot-like. She didn’t have prominent eye-bags either, but her face read as wise and experienced, like she’d thought and felt a lot, traits I associated with eye-bags. Her portraits of herself did, however, accurately communicate her paper-pale complexion and her hair, black as ballpoint.

  There was no way to ignore that Eve’s doodles, drawn long before meeting me, showed a preoccupation with dishonesty. Some characters announced plainly in word bubbles that they were liars or truth-tellers; others would translate themselves or each other, clarifying, “When I say ‘shut up,’ I mean ‘you’re the greatest.’” In my favorite image, an unflattering portrait of Eve swooned in the arms of a smiling bucktoothed boy who pronounced: “We know what no one else will tell you.”

  I was so moved by these drawings that I started crying. I explained to Eve that I cried whenever I felt a lot. She said she’d always cried easily too and told me a story about when she visited the Grand Canyon with her family when she was eight. She stood on the cliff with her mom and started sobbing. Her mother asked what was wrong and eight-year-old Eve answered, “I’m crying because the best part of the Grand Canyon is being here with you.” Eve got emotional retelling this story and that made me cry again. So, from the start, we were crying.

  Later, we drank some wine and she put on a record and asked me to slow-dance. We danced and she moved her mouth toward mine, but I pulled away. “Of course, I want to kiss you,” I told her. “But this isn’t realistic. You’re not gonna be my girlfriend. I’m happy just to be friends and have you in my life.” Eve ignored this statement, moved toward me again and, this time, I kissed her back.

  I spent the night in her bed. She fell asleep first and I stayed awake next to her, telling myself to enjoy whatever time I had with her because it wouldn’t last.

  In the morning, I informed her that I was emotionally prepared for this to end at any time, that I didn’t want her to feel guilty when she inevitably dumped me; I just wanted to ask that when she did, I’d like her to break up with me straight instead of trying to protect my feelings. Eve laughed this off, made a joke, and kissed me some more. In the same conversation, I told her about my fetish, about mentioning it on the Michael Talking Tape, about Dad suggesting I bring it up to the rabbi. She found the stories hilarious but was surprisingly moved too. “Having a fetish sounds strange and beautiful,” she said. “It’s so great that you weren’t taught to feel shame about it.”

  Over the next few weeks, I kept asking Eve directly how she felt about me. When she avoided the question, I’d start to tell her how I felt about her. She’d interrupt before I could get out half a sentence. “We just met a month ago,” she’d say. “You don’t even know me.” So I stopped bringing it up.

  We’d hang out at the Clubhouse and go see concerts and movies and play music or listen to records or take weekend morning trips deep into Brooklyn to wander junk shops looking for vintage clothes or furniture—nearly everything I owned came from these junk shops, most notably a faux-Victorian three-piece turquoise velvet couch which served as my apartment’s centerpiece.

  After three months, she called me at work and asked me to have dinner with her. She told me where she wanted to go and when, but when I arrived, Eve wasn’t there. I waited twenty minutes and called her. She didn’t answer so I figured maybe she’d gotten stuck on the subway. I waited another half hour and she still didn’t show. The restaurant filled up and the waiters got anxious, regretting having seated me alone. I gave up the table and waited on the sidewalk outside. I called again and she still didn’t answer. When she was more than an hour late and still not responding to my calls, I worried something bad had happened.

  I headed to her apartment to see if her roommate might know something. Eve’s buzzer didn’t work, so I waited for someone to enter the building and open the main door for me. I knocked on her apartment door, and when it opened, Eve was standing there, her nostrils shrinking and flaring as if smelling something rotten. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “You didn’t show up to meet me and you weren’t answering your phone.”

  “You came to my apartment?” she said.

  “I was worried,” I told her. She didn’t seem happy to see me and hadn’t invited me in, so I asked, “Is everything okay?”

  She sighed and gestured that I could come in.

  “I didn’t plan to see you tonight,” she told me.

  “You asked me to have dinner,” I said.

  She jumped back stiffly. “No, I didn’t. We left it up in the air.”

  “You told me where and when to meet you.”

  Eve moved across the room one step at a time, drifting farther and farther from me. “If that’s what you think, then why are you here? If I stood you up like that, you should never speak to me again.”

  “Never” is a haunting word. It sent my thoughts to an imagined future, a new era known as “never.” This conversation would end, and I’d leave the apartment and “never” would begin and that’s where I’d live from now on.

  I told her, “I don’t know what you could do to make me never want to speak to you again.” This felt like the most romantic thing I’d ever said, but Eve’s expression showed no sign that she’d witnessed any
thing romantic.

  She sat on her bed, her fingers lacing and unlacing. “I didn’t want to have dinner with you. You guilted me into it.”

  “Why are you lying?” I asked her.

  “Stop badgering me,” she said, suddenly crying. “Leave me alone.”

  Without thinking, I sat on the bed, embraced her, and told her, “You don’t have to lie.”

  “Yes, I do,” she said through sobs.

  Here, I started channeling family therapy camp. “What are you afraid will happen if you tell the truth?”

  She looked me in the eyes, crying madly, and said, “You’ll see that I’m a horrible person.”

  “What did you do that’s so horrible?”

  “I can’t even say it,” she said.

  “Tell me.”

  Eve took a breath to brace herself. “I was lonely and I thought it would make me feel better to see you. And then I changed my mind and decided I didn’t want to see you, tonight or anytime.” My arms were still around her, and the thought came to me that this might be the last time I’d touch her. I focused myself on feeling this embrace so I could remember it. Eve continued. “And then you came here like a crazy stalker.” She laughed and wiped her eyes. “You didn’t even get the hint that I was dumping you.”

  An interior switch flicked, accepting that Eve wouldn’t be my girlfriend, redirecting all hope on staying her friend. “There’s nothing wrong with not wanting to see someone anymore,” I told her.

  “I stood you up!” she said, crying again. “I’m a monster! Why are you still here?”

  “Because I’m in love with you,” I said.

  Eve fell back onto the one pillow on her twin-size bed. I stretched out next to her, my face inches from hers. Her sad eyes moved back and forth, staring into one of my eyes, then the other, and back. I liked watching Eve’s eyes darting. She laughed and wiped more tears off her face. Then I kissed her and she kissed me back and the breakup was off.

  After that, we saw each other nearly every day. I played in her band and she played in mine. I spent a lot of time with Eve’s friends and twin sister. In a few months, Eve agreed to call herself my girlfriend.

  One weekend afternoon, Eve and I were in my apartment when she took a phone call from an unknown number. A thrilled shock rolled over her face. “Oh my god,” she said. “Wow. Thank you. Wow.” She listened on the line awhile, thanked them again, and hung up. “They want to publish my doodles,” she said. “They want to publish the book as it is.” She explained that she’d been getting rejection letters the whole time we knew each other, that she’d kept them secret. She’d been rejected by everyone she’d sent it to except her favorite publisher, who hadn’t written her back. They’d just called, eight months after she’d sent it, to tell her they wanted to publish it. I’d never been so happy. “I love when the world has better taste than I’d expect,” I told her.

  In January of 2004, Miriam, who was now a senior in high school, visited me in New York. Miriam’s hair still puffed with brown curls like it had when she was a child. She wore a lot of flannel with T-shirts and jeans.

  Eve changed her style regularly, had now retired her black hoodie for a red-and-blue plaid winter jacket and thin-rimmed glasses.

  Miriam and the friend she’d brought with her on the trip showed up at my place straight from the airport. I opened the door for her and watched Miriam take in my one-bedroom apartment cluttered with beautiful old stuff I’d collected and Eve sitting there on my fake-Victorian couch. Eve leapt up and said, “Hi!” in a much higher voice than usual. “I’m Eve! I’ve been so excited to meet you!”

  Miriam looked at Eve and then at me. She’d expected my life here to be much worse. She hugged Eve, shooting me a skeptical look over her shoulder as if she suspected I’d hired an actress to pretend to be my girlfriend. Miriam’s friend behaved normally. For her, an older brother with a girlfriend was unremarkable. In my family, it was concerning.

  I’d planned to leave Miriam and her friend to find ways to spend the day while I was at work, but Eve volunteered to show them around New York. She spent every afternoon with them, which struck me as nuts. “You really don’t have to!” I told her.

  “I know! I want to,” she insisted.

  We threw a party at my apartment for Miriam’s seventeenth birthday and invited all of our friends. I made a compilation of doo-wop and soul from the ’50s and ’60s, leaned my bed against the wall and designated my little bedroom for slow-dancing. Miriam had a disposable camera and shot a photo of me and Eve swaying together, her head against my chest.

  On Miriam’s last day in town, we got lunch just the two of us. “Eve’s so amazing,” Miriam said. “She’s so pretty and nice and funny and stylish and talented and cool. I’m sort of obsessed with her. I’m gonna buy her same jacket when I get home. I can’t believe she’s your girlfriend.”

  “Neither can I,” I said.

  Miriam was chewing potato chips. “Do you think this is gonna last?”

  “Probably not,” I said. “But I’m gonna enjoy it while I can.”

  At that, Miriam relaxed, relieved. “I just wanted to make sure you had realistic expectations.”

  High Ceilings

  The literacy program where I worked had hired their freelancers for a defined period of a year and a half. Eve and I had been together for a year when my contract ended. I’d found some freelance writing work to live on for a while and I hoped to get more, but I couldn’t afford to keep living alone without a full-time job, and I doubted I could get another one. I’d learned at family camp to ask for what I wanted, even if I knew the answer would be no, so I told Eve I needed to move and asked if she’d like to find an apartment with me and live together. As expected, she said no. She was generally hesitant to commit (it had taken her six months to admit I was her boyfriend) and she was independent, spent a lot of time alone, liked having her own space. I’d also always hated to share living space, but there was nothing I wanted more than to live with Eve. I knew she didn’t feel the same way; I’d long since accepted that I loved her more than she loved me. So, I started searching for apartments and talking to other friends and acquaintances about being my roommates if I found a place.

  The apartment-hunting situation in Williamsburg, Brooklyn had changed a lot between 2002 and 2004. When I’d found my first apartment, I’d gone through a charming elderly real estate agent with a dirty office that had clearly been there for decades. That place had since closed. Now, every broker I could find had a clean office with a glass storefront like an aquarium full of young, clean-shaven white men with gelled hair and expensive-looking suits who spoke in continuous streams of flimflam.

  I told anyone showing me apartments my one deal-breaker: I was too tall to live with a low ceiling. Each time, they’d take me immediately to an apartment with a low ceiling. When I remarked on the low ceiling, they’d reply, “These ceilings are high.”

  The first time this happened, I laughed. “Come on!” I said. “I’m looking right at it! Do you expect me to believe you over my own eyes? Do people fall for this?” The broker looked at me as if I’d been rude.

  The second time a broker claimed low ceilings were high, I found it less funny and tried to push past it. “Well, I’d like to only see places with ceilings higher than this.”

  The broker doubled down, sticking with his script. “With your budget, you’re not gonna find a place with a higher ceiling.”

  At this, I laughed again and did one of the things liars hated most: I leaned into his lie. “Oh, of course,” I said. “Well, since this is the highest ceiling you’ve got, I guess there’s no reason to have you show me any other apartments.”

  At that, the broker backpedaled: “Actually, I just remembered some other apartments with much higher ceilings!”

  “Sorry,” I told him. “I can’t work with people who lie to my face.”

  It only took a few rounds of this before I determined that they would all lie to my face, using the same stra
tegy of showing their worst apartments first, misleading their customers into thinking there weren’t better options, a business practice I considered despicable. So, I started telling brokers from the start, “Hey, I know about the trick where you show the worst apartments first. With me, you can skip that.” The brokers pretended to laugh and praised me for being clever. Then they’d show me their worst apartments anyway, telling me the low ceilings were high.

  After a few weeks of this, one broker infuriated me to the point that I held off on calling him out and asked him to show me another apartment. I walked into the next apartment he showed me, which of course had the higher ceilings that he’d claimed I couldn’t afford. “What a high ceiling!” I exclaimed. “Isn’t this odd? You said I couldn’t find a higher ceiling, and then look at this. How strange! It’s almost as if you were lying!”

  The broker, enraged but holding himself back from exploding, avoided my gaze. He muttered bleakly, “It just looks higher. It’s an optical illusion.”*

  Around this time, Eve asked me to meet her at a nearby coffee shop I’d never heard of in half an hour. This was suspicious. We always got coffee at the same few spots, and usually it wasn’t so spontaneous. Also, she’d stayed over at my apartment the previous night; we’d seen each other that morning. The timing coincided with my few weeks of dismal apartment searching and her telling me repeatedly that she didn’t want to move in with me. I felt certain she’d invited me to coffee to break up. We hadn’t had a fight or anything, but I knew that these decisions were made secretly and without elaboration. Even if she wouldn’t tell me why, I could think of plenty of perfectly justified reasons.

  When I arrived, I found Eve standing outside the coffee shop accompanied by an older woman in business attire. Eve smiled, kissed me, and said she wanted to show me something. The stranger unlocked the door to the building next to the coffee shop, led us up two flights of stairs, and opened the door to an apartment. We entered, and I found myself standing alone with Eve in a sunlight-flooded kitchen. Eve embraced me, smiled, and asked, “Michael, would you like to live with me here?” We both started crying and I told her yes without even looking at the apartment or the height of its ceilings.