To Be Honest Read online

  When I was no longer in the thrall of the moment, it occurred to me that in order to pull off this surprise, Eve had conducted her own apartment search, concurrent with mine. She’d listened as I told her my miserable experiences and let me keep looking, wasting my time. She’d misled me to believe that she didn’t want to live with me, let me think that she didn’t love me. Instead of appreciating the surprise, I managed to resent the dishonesty behind the most romantic moment of my life.

  Eve and I decorated this shabby one-bedroom railroad with what we found on our junk trips. In the living room, we had my fake-Victorian fainting couch and the decrepit speakeasy piano I’d gotten for free on Craigslist. Our guitar amplifiers served as end tables with flowers in vases, and we used a pile of vintage suitcases as a coffee table. The bedroom in the middle of the apartment was only big enough for our bed so the kitchen doubled as Eve’s art studio with a desk and easel and her paintings, drawings, and instruments cramped in one corner. Everything in the apartment was coated in a quick-replenishing dust that neither of us was hung up on removing. Eve collected our pencils in a box and wrote “pencils” in illustrated text. She could make anything beautiful by writing or drawing on it. Even the mundane reminder Post-it notes she left stuck to her computer screen killed me. Sometimes when she wasn’t home, I’d stand by the door and gaze at her little office corner in the kitchen as if it was itself a work of art.

  We complained often about the constant background noise from the street two stories below (sidewalk conversations, car stereos, revving trucks), but even the racket could be romantic. An out-of-view local child would occasionally call up to a nearby window for someone else named Eve. The child would shout the name with a long “e”—“Eeeeeeeve! Eeeeeeeeeve!”—the same way people in love elongate syllables. We never saw this shouting girl or figured out where her calls originated. Each time I heard her, it felt as if this unseen child were an extension of my own feelings, as if I were the one calling out Eve’s name.

  Though Eve and I were both used to spending most of our time alone working on things, we miraculously continued exactly as we always had, except on opposite ends of the same railroad apartment. I’d write or play in the living room while Eve drew or wrote or played in the kitchen. We’d take turns being silent while the other composed or practiced. We’d take breaks to eat together. At night, we’d have band rehearsals or go out to see friends play concerts.

  After a few months in the new apartment, we discovered an unusual video store around the corner. The store had no organization system, just a few thousand random DVDs and videotapes on shelves, mostly direct-to-video B movies and low-budget unprofessional stuff, almost nothing good. Eve and I would sometimes spend an hour there showing each other one insane video cover after another, eventually renting whichever one struck us as funniest. Eve called these movies “thrilers” because of their often-misspelled descriptions; one had literally referred to itself as a “thriler.” She’d smile romantically and say, “Let’s rent a thriler tonight.” We’d end up watching some ridiculous monster movie with homemade special effects, commenting on every hilarious detail. Occasionally, a thriler would have an inspired moment; we’d be watching a movie that acted as if a rubber toy alligator was a huge monster, and a character would give a surprisingly moving monologue out of nowhere and Eve would say, “I’m crying at Killer Croc 3! Has it really come to this?”

  When we felt more in the mood to watch good movies, which Eve sometimes referred to as “tearjerkers,” we’d trek to the regular video store. But no matter what we rented, I watched mostly for Eve’s commentary. Making it through a movie could take hours because we paused it so often to talk. Sometimes, we’d abandon the movie and stay up talking. We were so great at talking.

  Sometimes we’d cover our favorite songs or even whole albums for fun. Other times, we’d take turns showing each other music we’d discovered. It wasn’t long before we associated hundreds of songs with our relationship and joked about how a normal couple would have decided by now which one was “our song.” Once in a pharmacy, I hugged Eve and said, “The radio’s playing our song!” It was that Michael Sembello 1980s hit in which he spends the whole song repeating that a woman he knows is a maniac. This started a running joke suggesting wildly inappropriate possibilities for “our song.” Another night when we were listening to records, Eve put on her own suggestion for our song: The Monks’ “Shut Up.”

  We’d often spend time with Eve’s twin sister, Lila, who Eve spoke to on the phone every few hours. The closeness of the twins was impressive to witness. Once, when Lila wasn’t around, I asked Eve if twins felt this close because they knew everything about each other, a rare human experience. “She’s witnessed almost your whole life,” I said. “The rest of us see barely any of one another’s histories. Even if we all shared as much as we possibly could, we’d never get close to knowing each other like twins.”

  Eve answered, “I can’t imagine not having a twin. It feels to me like without a twin, you’d immediately lose your mind. How do you live without another you? Without a person that’s born to understand you?”

  “I accepted as a child that I wouldn’t be understood,” I told her.

  “I understand you,” Eve said, gazing at me warmly, proud to be the only one who understood me.

  “I think I understand you,” I told her. “In some ways, at least. But I still want to understand you more.” Eve smiled, but I could sense her uncertainty about this comment. “I mean, we’ve been together for a year and there’s so much you haven’t told me about your past. I don’t know any stories about your ex-boyfriends—”

  Eve laughed, blushed, and said, “Oh, you don’t want to know. It’s boring.”

  “It’s not boring!” I said. “I’d like to see you try to be boring.”

  Eve didn’t laugh. “It’s boring,” she repeated until I let it go.

  One night, we watched a movie in which Natalie Wood gave an angry speech to Robert Redford about how much she hated him. He interrupted by kissing her, and she fell blissfully into his arms.

  “If I told someone that I hated her and she tried to kiss me, I’d be horrified,” I grouched, pausing the movie. “If a woman told me she hated me, I’d never even think to try and kiss her! I’d leave! It’s so disrespectful to assume she’s lying. And I wouldn’t want to be with someone who says stuff she doesn’t mean just because she’s upset.”

  Eve sighed. “Come on, it’s obvious she’s in love with him. He just knows what she wants without having to ask or hear her say it.”

  “I don’t find that romantic at all.”

  “I know,” Eve said. “You’re romantic too, in your own way.” Eve ran her hand through my hair. “You’re romantic in a way that isn’t in movies.”

  In Space, No One Can Hear You Lie

  Around this time, my friend Sidney called me with a wild offer. Sidney had been one of the few in college who appreciated me. He’d played football, was tall and broad-shouldered and good-looking, could pass as normal when he tried. He’d done such a good job passing that he’d been hired at a studio in Los Angeles to package modern remakes of old movies from their archives. He said this meant he was in a position to hire me to rewrite a horror movie from the 1930s, a dream job I desperately needed.

  Very soon after I started working on it, he told me the studio had taken him off my project and replaced him with a more experienced producer based in New York, that I should go into the office to meet him. I looked up this new producer’s name and found that he’d worked on a few movies I’d seen. I didn’t like them, but they were popular with everyone else I knew. When the receptionist showed me into the producer’s office, I was surprised at his appearance: blond and muscular with spiky hair like a surfer, young-looking for his forties. He cockily bragged about his career, about dropping out of high school to work at a movie studio. He described himself as a “wunderkind.” I couldn’t fathom why he was so intent on impressing me. I theorized that he might f
eel insecure about taking over for my friend. Maybe my being twenty-four made him feel old so he wanted to tell me he’d been a success younger than me. Maybe he did this with everyone; that possibility disturbed me most. How infinitely tedious and painful to want to impress everyone!

  As the producer went on about himself, he told me a story from his first week in Hollywood, about the marketing meeting for the movie Alien. “So, I’m this high school dropout in a conference room on Sunset Boulevard, listening to pitches for poster taglines. Everybody’s talking typical horror sci-fi stuff about screams and space until someone says something about screaming in space. The wife of the producer overhears and interrupts to make fun of us like, ‘You idiots! You can’t scream in space because there’s no air and no sound!’” The surfer-producer across the desk paused smugly before the obvious climax in which, he, a teenager in his first week on the job, wrote, “In space, no one can hear you scream!”

  “Hold on,” I said. “Why was the producer’s wife there? And why was she able to overhear what was going on in the conference room? Was the door open? She was standing outside the meeting room, listening, and then barged in through the open door to correct the room? And, before that, no one there had considered that there was no sound in space? How many people were in the meeting?”

  The producer swiveled in his chair, stunned. I shouldn’t have been surprised; Hollywood was famous for its liars. But I tried to be positive, imagining that maybe his lying benefited him when navigating the movie business. I changed the subject to something complimentary.

  “You know, I looked you up before this meeting,” I told him. “And you’ve produced a couple movies my friends really love.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said. “That’s always cool to hear.”

  “I didn’t personally like them,” I added. “But I still feel positive about our being able to work well together.”

  The producer smoothed it over best he could, thanked me as if I hadn’t insulted him.

  It wasn’t long after this meeting that they attached a director to the project, a brilliant cinematographer who had shot many movies I loved. I couldn’t imagine why he’d be attached to some kid’s theoretical script that wasn’t even written yet.

  When the producer, the director, and Sidney were all in New York at the same time, they set up a meeting. The moment before Sidney, the producer, and I entered the conference room to meet the director, I joked, “Wouldn’t it be crazy if I walked into the meeting and instantly transformed into a Hollywood caricature, speaking in all the clichés, like ‘Paulie, baby! Love your work! Big fan! We should do lunch! I’ll have my people call your people!’”

  The producer looked unnerved. Sidney grinned uneasily and said, “Michael, that wouldn’t be crazy; that would be normal.”

  I laughed. “And what I’m actually gonna say will be considered crazy.” My friend laughed, the producer shrugged, and we went in.

  I listened as the surfer-producer and the brilliant director praised a movie that didn’t exist, going on about the masterpieces it would resemble, mired in self-congratulation about what a hit it would be. They spoke as if unlikely fantasies were certainties, toasting successes in advance. I tried interrupting, but my reminders that the script hadn’t yet been written and that it was best to manage our expectations somehow had no dampening effect whatsoever on their enthusiasm.

  Funerals for Fish

  Eve loved animals and wanted a pet. I hadn’t been raised with pets, was allergic to cats, and we had no space for a dog. So Eve bought a blue fighting fish to keep in a bowl by our front door. She named the fish “Josh,” not after my brother; the name match was a coincidence. Eve loved to watch Josh swim around and loved feeding him.

  One day, Eve noticed Josh swelling up on one side and wobbling in his swimming. She searched online for possible diagnoses and read that Josh was very ill and likely to die. She ordered medicine off the internet and sprinkled it into the bowl, but Josh continued to swell grotesquely as if he’d soon burst. He continued to swim in a disturbing zigzag. Eve took it hard. I asked her if we should euthanize Josh since he was suffering. She insisted that the medicine would cure him.

  Eve was away for the weekend visiting her family in Boston when I noticed Josh dead at the bottom of the bowl. I knew Eve would be devastated. I flushed Josh down the toilet, found a black pillowcase to put over the fishbowl like a shroud, and waited for her to come home. When she opened the door, she immediately saw the fishbowl with the pillowcase. “He died right after you left,” I told her. “It was like he waited for you to leave because he knew how much you loved him.”

  The empty fishbowl sitting there depressed us. We decided to get another fish. I actually said aloud, “That’s what Josh would have wanted.” I said it seriously, but Eve laughed, jolting me to reality, and then I laughed too.

  We got a little red goldfish this time, that Eve named Banana, but pronounced with a funny accent so it sounded like “Bananer.” Bananer liked to sit in a little green fake tree in the fishbowl. He barely swam. I marveled at how even fish could have unique personalities. I’d never truly understood why people loved them so much. I noticed now how animals embraced their actual selves in ways that humans couldn’t. Animals didn’t fake anything, didn’t protect anyone’s feelings, didn’t pretend to love; you could trust them. I wondered if they embodied a subconscious fantasy of showing all joy or pain or sorrow, of loving openly without hesitation, without shame.

  Eve and I, again, stared into a fishbowl crying happily. After a while, Bananer’s tree became encrusted with algae and Eve took it out to clean it. It still looked gross, so she planned to go out and buy another tree when she got a chance. The next day, I was in the living room writing when I heard Eve scream from the kitchen. I ran across the two rooms and found Eve on the kitchen floor next to Bananer.

  “He jumped out of the bowl!” Eve said, looking up at me, sobbing. “Because I took away his tree!” Bananer was still on the floor. “That tree was his only reason to live!”*

  “You were just trying to help him,” I said. “You couldn’t have known or you would’ve just gotten a new tree before taking out the old one. It’s not your fault. You were just trying to make him happy!”

  “All I wanted was for Bananer to be happy,” she said, still sobbing.

  “Me too,” I told her. “Me too.”

  Welcome to the Real World

  Eve’s twin sister, Lila, was a musician too, so one weekend we had the idea to all play together in my practice space. I rented and shared the space with a dozen other musicians, so I checked the schedule and told the twins Saturday night was the only time that week the space wasn’t reserved. We planned to play that night. When the time came, we were sitting on our velvet couch with Lila. Eve said, “I’m not feeling like playing music tonight. Let’s just do it tomorrow.”

  “The space is occupied tomorrow,” I reminded her. “Tonight’s the only free time this week.”

  “It’s okay,” Eve said. “Let’s just do it tomorrow.”

  I looked at Lila to see if she noticed this odd response, but Lila showed no sign of anything unusual.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “I just told you tonight is the only time the space is available.”

  Eve glared at me and repeated herself. “I don’t feel like it tonight. We’ll just play tomorrow.”

  “I don’t get what’s happening,” I persisted. “Are you pretending to not understand what I’m saying?”

  “Let’s go get a drink instead,” Eve said. “We’ll play music tomorrow.”

  Eventually, I had to let it go, but the conversation haunted me for the rest of the night. When I was finally alone with Eve again, I asked her what it was all about. She seemed annoyed by my bringing it up.

  “Lila didn’t feel like playing music tonight,” she said. “I didn’t see why you made it such a big thing.”

  “You kept saying we’d play tomorrow.”

  “I wanted Lila to feel like we
’d play music with her another time.”

  “Why didn’t you just say that? Or something that made sense? And why did you say you didn’t want to play instead of Lila just saying it herself?”

  “What’s the big deal?” Eve said. “Who cares?”

  “Well, you must care enough to make it worth a bunch of weird lies! It seems like you’re the one who thinks it’s a big deal.”

  This escalated into a fight, Eve acting as if she were defending Lila against me, like I’d mysteriously become possessed to attack her family. I couldn’t follow the logic, and it eventually just petered out without resolving.

  Not long after that, Eve invited me to Christmas with her mom in Boston. Her dad lived in the same area, so I’d be able to meet him too on the same trip. Given how much she loved her family, I felt certain that she’d only stay with me if I could charm them. Never before in my life had I felt that I needed specific people to like me. I’d never pandered before, had no idea how.

  “I’m worried your family won’t like me,” I told Eve. “I don’t know how to get people to like me.”

  “You knew how to get me to like you,” Eve said.

  “No, I didn’t!” I said. “I was just myself and you happened to like it. That’s not how it usually works out.”

  Eve laughed, not as concerned as she should have been.

  Eve’s mom smiled at me warmly, expecting to like me. I’d imagined having to prove myself to her before receiving any positivity. Her house had a whole Christmas setup with a tree and decorations, and I talked a lot about how strange it was for me to celebrate Christmas, how I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about giving and receiving presents. I told Eve’s mom and sister the story of my moment of truth with Santa and about my dad’s mother rejecting gifts. Eve’s mother laughed at my stories, but I could also see behind her positivity that she was collecting information, deciding what she thought of my telling these stories of my troubled family so quickly, of my speaking ill of my grandmother.