To Be Honest Read online

  At the sight of me, her face fell. “Hey, are you okay?” she asked. “What happened?” I hadn’t realized how frazzled I looked.

  “Oh, nothing,” I said. “I was just talking to Dad.”

  I explained the part about Josh’s hand–eye coordination and Eve laughed. “All parents do that. My mom still always calls Lila the writer even though she hasn’t written anything since she was ten.”

  “Yeah,” I said vacantly.

  Eve sucked in her lips. “Did something else happen?”

  I shrugged. “He also told me he thought I was too young to have a serious girlfriend.”

  Eve stiffened and put down her ballpoint. “He said what?”

  Here we spiraled into theorizing what this statement meant. I told her that my first interpretation, that he disliked her, seemed both impossible—she was too cool and charming—and out of character for Dad. He’d have just told me explicitly. Eve suggested that he might fear her influence over me becoming more powerful than his. With every interpretation we proposed, Eve asked if I was okay. “You seem to be having thoughts you’re not saying.”

  “No,” I told her. “For some reason, I’m just not having any thoughts.”

  After camp, Eve spent the whole car ride down the mountain complaining about Dad. “He doesn’t believe in being considerate. He acts like it’s superior to do whatever you want without accommodating anyone.”

  “I don’t want anybody accommodating me,” I said. “Everyone should be themselves and do what they want.”

  Eve rolled her eyes. “Are you nuts? Everybody’s accommodating you all the time! You just don’t notice.”

  This baffled me. “Who’s accommodating me?”

  “Everyone,” Eve said. “Everyone’s walking on eggshells so they don’t say something you’ll disagree with. You don’t see that everyone just goes along with whatever you want to talk about?”

  I didn’t want to believe this. “You’re telling me everyone is lying to me? Why?”

  “Because you give them no other choice! If they don’t do what you want, you won’t like them,” Eve said.

  “What you’re saying is horrifying,” I told her.

  “Look,” Eve said bitterly. “I know you don’t compromise to make me happy. I can deal with that. But it does bother me that you don’t notice all my compromises.”

  “Like what?” I asked, proving her point.

  “For instance,” Eve said. “I’m freezing right now because you like air-conditioning.”

  “That’s crazy!” I said, turning off the air-conditioner. “Why would you do that?”

  “Because I care about you.”

  “There’s nothing romantic about you being secretly uncomfortable for my sake,” I told her. “Do you do other things like that?”

  “Of course, like a zillion.”

  “I don’t do anything like that. Not one thing.”

  “I know!” Eve said.

  “Tell me all the things you do to accommodate me without my noticing.”

  Eve proceeded to tell me that she made sure in advance that anywhere we went would be air-conditioned, not too loud or crowded, with music I’d like, that there wouldn’t be anyone there I’d clash with, that she’d involved her family in many of these plans, calling in advance to restaurants to be sure they were air-conditioned and asking what music they’d be playing. She told me she cleaned the apartment when I wasn’t home, dealing with the dust I thought didn’t bother either of us.

  “Don’t clean secretly! I’ll help!” I said.

  “But I don’t want to bother you!” she said.

  “This is the strangest fight ever,” I told her. “I’m angry at you for secretly helping me and you’re angry at me for not appreciating it.”

  “Exactly!” Eve said.

  Then she started listing times she’d disagreed with me and pretended to agree and times she was upset by a story I told her and pretended to like it.

  “Why didn’t you say something?” I asked.

  “Because that would upset you and then we’d only have to talk about it even more, which would upset me.”

  I was so thrown off that I considered stopping in the middle of the one-lane mountain road. “You promised you’d be honest with me.”

  “I know,” Eve said. “But how can anybody promise that?”

  “I promise that,” I said.

  “But if I told you every time I was upset, you’d hate me.”

  “What feeling could you possibly express that would make me hate you?” I asked.

  Eve thought about it, came up with no examples either, and laughed to herself. “I’m sure we’ll find something.”

  * I see now that I was unnecessarily torturing real estate agents who were only trying to make a living. Psychological manipulation was part of their job. I’m sure they weren’t happy about it either.

  * It would have been advisable to comfort her by insisting that it couldn’t have been about the tree, but we’d emotionally committed to a certain world and there was no turning back now.

  * I’m now aware that this is not extreme at all but rather the way most families celebrate holidays.

  * We live so much in our own styles of communication, it’s hard to know why we prefer it, if there’s even a reason.

  * I shouldn’t have mentioned that I was in town. Once I’d mentioned it, I should have made up an excuse why I couldn’t work, but hiding information and making up excuses were not in my vocabulary.

  * This wasn’t a double entendre; he was literally talking about tents.

  * I could’ve interpreted this in a number of ways: perhaps he disliked Eve or wanted to upset me. But, still naively taking everything at face value, it seemed to me that he was just arguing that twenty-five was too young to fall in love this hard, which read to me as even more obtuse than his juggling phantom beakers.

  Chapter 7

  To Know Her Is to Love Her

  The year following Eve’s first time at family camp was particularly eventful. My theoretical horror movie fell apart boringly and unsurprisingly, Eve’s book of doodles was published to some very deserved acclaim, I released a ukulele album to little acclaim but still more than the zero I expected. Eve and I went on tour together playing music all over the country. Eve was getting more illustration work, and I got some freelance writing work ghostwriting children’s picture books for celebrities. I helped Eve record her new album with her mother playing violin and her sister singing, a family band. Her family had gotten used to me, even often found my honesty charming. Eve told me that she could feel me changing them, that they were getting more comfortable admitting when they were sad and wanted to talk, or when something meant a lot to them. For Eve’s next graphic novel, she wrote short illustrated stories intended as personal messages to specific people she cared about, telling them what she’d most longed to say. She dedicated the book to me.

  Our friends weren’t going to the Clubhouse anymore and we missed those old open mics, so we started our own version, throwing monthly parties in our little apartment, inviting our musician friends to play a couple songs each. Eve and I were falling deeper in love all the time. I’d never imagined that I’d have friends I loved or a great romance; at twenty-six, my life had already far surpassed my highest expectations.

  Having been to camp and spent time with my family, Eve knew a lot more about the origins of my bad qualities. We’d talk about my family often and she’d give her takes on all my old stories. Eve spoke as if I were under a spell that she hoped to slowly break. It frustrated her when I parroted Dad’s arguments or wouldn’t acknowledge his wrongness. Eve said that when we quarreled, she felt like it was Dad she was fighting.

  No matter how much I asked Eve to stop doing secret nice things for me, I kept catching her. She refused to stop, and I started to recognize that it made her feel connected to me, that maybe my compromise was to try to notice and express appreciation. I was awful at noticing things that weren’t talked about. />
  Each time Eve admitted to me that she was upset, I thanked her because I knew it was hard for her to admit. There was nothing I wanted more than to trust that she was really telling me how she felt.

  We continued watching lots of movies, pausing to discuss. Eve talked about her past more and more. I think we learned the most about each other while movies were paused.

  We rewatched a lot of children’s movies and told each other about how we’d responded when we first saw them as kids. During Fantasia, Eve explained that the satyr dance had epitomized her vision of romance: each satyr had a nearly identical counterpart as if born to be together. I told her I’d loved the Muppets, Edward Scissorhands, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, in which lovers looked nothing alike and romance was unpredictable and inexplicable. Eve stopped Oklahoma to tell me how as a child, she’d loved “I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No,” how Gloria Grahame’s character sang about her boy-craziness without shame.

  We joked that we chose movies superficially, purely based on the sexiness of the actors and situations, but this joke was more than half a truth. Eve pushed to rent whatever starred Robert Redford, Winona Ryder, Paul Newman, or Sam Rockwell until we’d watched their whole oeuvres. These movies so full of seduction and flirtation finally got Eve telling stories of men she’d been with before me, telling me sexy things they’d said and done, stuff straight out of the movies and miles from anything I’d ever say or do. I asked if she had any pictures of the men she described. She hesitated at first, but then trusted that I could handle it, and dug through her memory boxes to show me photos of ex-boyfriends much better looking than me. When Eve asked me why I wasn’t jealous, I didn’t have much of an answer. “I don’t understand jealousy,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I be happy that you’ve had romantic or sexy experiences with really attractive people. If you found out I’d been with really hot, cool people before you, wouldn’t you be happy for me?”

  “Yeah,” Eve answered, clearly lying.

  One night, Eve paused Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to tell me about one man she’d dated who acted like Paul Newman, avoidant and mean in the perfect way to inspire obsession. She eventually learned from someone else who had known him longer that his fiancé had died in a bike accident a year before. When Eve confronted him about this, he denied it, called her crazy, accused her of irrelevant character flaws, until eventually he broke down and admitted it was true. Then he disappeared and stopped answering her calls.

  “He was afraid to let you know him,” I said.

  “I know!” she answered as if I’d stated the obvious, which maybe I had.

  “Imagine,” I said. “If your girlfriend died and you didn’t want anyone to find out, if you preferred your most profound experience to be invisible.”

  Eve’s green eyes looked angry and sad at the same time. “I don’t have to imagine it. That’s how I am. You don’t even notice.”

  It wasn’t long after that conversation that Eve and I were sitting around the apartment listening to a compilation I’d made of my favorite doo-wop and slow-dance music when the Teddy Bears’ “To Know Him Is to Love Him” came on. Eve stopped talking to listen. The recording played all the way through while we cried together. We understood what this meant: regardless of what Eve had just told me, she wanted me to really know her. When the recording ended, we took in the unspoken moment, perfect for me to ruin by clumsily announcing the obvious: “We found our song!”

  Teaching Hopelessness for No Reason

  Soon, our job situations worsened and freelance work was too intermittent to live on. Eve insisted that I should get a regular job but I assured her I couldn’t make it through interviews and that even if I did, I probably couldn’t keep a job because I was so bad with people. “I’m sure you can get hired if you try to be nice,” she told me. “You can be so charming.”

  “Employers don’t find me charming,” I told her.

  Eventually, she’d get fed up and say, “Just figure it out!”

  I started searching for a regular job for the first time since I moved to New York four years before.

  I’d had some experience working with kids, even occasionally going into elementary school classrooms with my ukulele to write spontaneous songs with the children. It also helped that I’d published a bunch of books for young people through the literacy program, ghostwriting, and other freelance work. I managed to convince a few friends to connect me with potential jobs playing music and writing songs with kids at the schools where they taught.

  A teacher friend invited me to spend a few days assisting him at a nursery school before I applied to work there. I loved observing the social world of these three- and four-year-old kids. My teacher friend intervened in a fight between two boys with the simple question, “What’s going on?” and I watched them struggle to articulate themselves. Adults couldn’t answer that question most of the time either. Describing their feelings really calmed the kids down; they loved being listened to, even though they had little to say. “Music time” was much more depressing. A separate teacher handed out drums, xylophones, and toy pianos, and the kids banged unpleasantly, unable to play notes that fit together. The teacher sang out of tune over the cacophony. It wasn’t much like music at all.

  After my few days there, I interviewed with the head teachers and told them what I’d observed, including the problems with music time. “All you have to do is give the kids instruments designed to complement each other, that play in the same key, don’t have any dissonant notes,” I told them. “That way, everything the kids play will automatically sound like music. If you plan it well, they could sound really beautiful.”

  The interviewer said, “Oh, that’s very interesting.” I recognized that she used the word “interesting” to express a lack of interest.

  “Regardless of whether you give me the job,” I told her. “You should do that.”

  “We’ll consider it,” she said, implying that she would not consider it and that I should move on.

  Instead, I tried to figure out why she was against my suggestion. “Is it about the cost of new instruments? I’m sure you could get really cheap ones.”

  “Oh, we have plenty of funding,” she told me.

  “Do you have some argument against this?” I asked her.* She looked at me now as if I was being very rude. “This isn’t about me,” I said. “It’s so the kids have a positive first experience making music. As it is, they’re only learning that whatever they play will sound awful. You’re teaching hopelessness for no reason.”

  They didn’t hire me.

  At the second school where I applied, my interviewer was an ever-laughing, rose-cheeked, gray-haired woman in a suit. In each room, well-dressed children sang or improvised plays. Young cool teachers read to cuddling masses of gasping and laughing kids. The walls showed off the children’s exquisite drawings and comics. My only issue was that this wonderful place was reserved for rich kids. “I wish all schools were like this,” I told the interviewer.

  “Thank you,” she said, not catching my meaning.

  “I mean, I wish public schools were like this,” I said. “Not just private schools.”

  “Thank you,” she said, still not catching my meaning.

  Though I’d originally applied because I needed a regular job to ease Eve’s stress, the prospect of spending afternoons at this school making music with kids was very dreamy. I really wanted the job.

  I followed my interviewer into a conference room lit sublimely by a skylight, and faced three expensive-suited interviewers behind a luxurious wooden desk. Their eyes landed on my ukulele case.

  “I brought my ukulele so I could play you some songs I’ve written with kids,” I said.

  The interviewers looked at one another, flustered. “Oh,” one said. “We don’t need to hear you play.”

  I rested the case on the hardwood floor and took a seat. I labored to hold myself back from asking how they could possibly decide to hire a musician without hearing him play. “Okay,” I sa
id. The interviewers sensed my judgment. “It’s just that I’ve written a lot of songs with kids and they’re really funny and beautiful. I expected that playing them for you would convince you to hire me.” The interviewers hesitated, none of them wanting to be the one to figure out how to respond.

  I could tell that the interview was over already. I got up and lifted my ukulele from the floor. “This clearly isn’t working out,” I said.

  The woman who had given me the tour grimaced. “What do you mean?”

  “Come on,” I said. “It took two sentences for this to go wrong. I don’t see any reason to sit here and hide my feelings while you go through with the rest of the interview just as a formality.”

  “Wow, okay,” one of the other interviewers said.

  “Are you sure?” another asked. That question struck me as odd and purposeless; did she seriously expect me to sit back down and go ahead with the interview after this outburst?

  “In the future,” I said. “Let potential music teachers play for you. At the very least, you’d get to experience a little private concert. Maybe you’d hear something you liked, assuming you enjoy music, which maybe you don’t? I imagine if you enjoyed music, you’d want to hear applicants play.”

  The interviewers glared as if I’d told them off, which made no sense to me. I didn’t see any “fuck you” in the suggestion that it could be beautiful to listen to some children’s songs.

  When I told Eve about these interviews, she went back and forth between finding them funny, agreeing with whatever objection I’d made, and being furious at me.

  After a while, I refused to bank on the possibility that I might please an employer. I hatched a scheme to teach one-on-one ukulele lessons out of our apartment. Eve designed me posters to put up around town, and I advertised lessons to my mailing list of fans of my ukulele album. A handful of students responded immediately. Then a popular Brooklyn blog wrote about my ukulele lessons and I got a dozen more. Each day, I received more emails inquiring about lessons. It turned out that when someone searched for “ukulele lessons” with “ny” or “Brooklyn”, the post about me came up first. Soon enough, I had twenty students a week, an arrangement that paid more than any of my previous jobs. My students needed to know how to improve; for once, my truth-telling helped.