To Be Honest Read online

  The Best Part of Breaking Up

  In 2006, Eve went to camp with us a second time and became even more a part of our family. Everyone loved her so much that her name appeared in most of the sentences they spoke to me. Dad would introduce her as the future mother of his grandchildren. Once, he asked her directly if it made her uncomfortable when he went overboard praising her.

  As Eve figured us out more and more, she wore me down with constant insights and interpretations. After that second year, she’d become the only one with both the closeness to understand us and the distance to see us as we were, the true expert on our family.

  But when I upset her, Eve now told me what was on her mind, bringing up my family and psychology like a therapist, but angry.

  “When you were a child, your dad refused to consider your feelings and never let you be upset. And now you act like everyone else’s feelings are stupid and unnecessary. But they’re not stupid or unnecessary.”

  “You can’t be my therapist when you’re mad!” I told her. “That’s the opposite of what’s supposed to happen in therapy!”

  When I couldn’t be convinced,* I’d tell her I was sorry that we disagreed.

  “Your apologies are the worst,” she’d say.

  “Disagreeing is okay! We don’t need to agree,” I’d tell her. “This is like you getting upset because I don’t like coconut!” Over time, the chocolate defense had become personalized. “If I have to apologize for believing something you don’t like, why don’t you have to apologize for believing something I don’t like?”

  In the cases when Eve’s arguments turned me around, I’d say, “I get it now. You’re right. You changed my mind. Thank you for spending so much time and energy explaining it. I’m sorry you had to go through that. I won’t make the same mistake again.”

  But my apologizing never ended anything. “Your apologies are even worse when they’re sincere,” she told me. “Like you’re issuing a correction of a factual error.”

  As we fought more and more, I described it as a problem of “philosophical incompatibility.”

  “You think it’s okay to demand that I change essential parts of myself to please you,” I told her. “Does that mean I can demand that you change too? Can I demand that you be more accepting?”

  Eve narrowed her eyes a moment and then softened. “You feel like it’s wrong to ask for someone to change because as a kid you knew your dad wouldn’t change.”

  “Well,” I said, not softening with her, “at least when Dad criticized me, he’d tell me what he thought and let me make my own decisions. You’re just as critical but you act like it’s my responsibility to become whatever you happen to want. That’s way more brutal than Dad.”

  “I’m not like your dad!” Eve said, suddenly joking. “You’re like your dad!”

  I matched the joke. “No, you’re like my dad!”

  With Eve, I never knew when a fight would become a joke or when a joke would become a fight. She was the one who decided. But many of our fights ended with laughter.

  Once, in the middle of an argument, Eve stopped and said, “Oh no, does this mean the salad days are over?” We both cracked up. “Who named it the ‘salad days’ anyway?” Eve asked. “Can we all agree that person was insane?”*

  In the midst of the laughter at the end of one of our fights, Eve pulled off a remarkable feat of emotional translation and told me exactly what she needed. “I know you care,” she said. “You show it in your own way. But it’d be nice if you could show it in my way too.”

  Not long after that, I came home to a handwritten letter on the bed that said she didn’t want to be with me anymore. Though I’d known this day would come since we started dating three and a half years before, I still had to sit down on the bed sobbing and read the letter ten times. Eve wrote about all we’d had together with so much sentimentality, nostalgic already for the past that had just ended. I was at least glad she didn’t hate me like most ex-girlfriends. I hoped we could stay friends, that I could keep her in my life. I accepted her decision but I wanted to say goodbye with a gesture that showed I didn’t blame her, that I knew what I’d done wrong, and that I hoped to learn from my mistakes.

  I considered what Eve had said about wanting me to show her I loved her in her way. In the past, we’d talked about how much she liked flowers. I’d parroted one of Dad’s mocking rants about the ridiculousness of flowers and candlelight being defined as romantic, how a culture could arbitrarily assign meaning to things that could be easily bought, that could be given emptily or deceptively, that didn’t even express one’s personality or anything specific about the relationship. “Oh yeah?” Eve had replied. “Then tell me about all the special personalized gifts he gave your mom instead of flowers?” I admitted I’d never heard of him doing anything romantic for Mom. “I rest my case,” Eve had said. So I decided to buy Eve flowers, certain she would know what that meant.

  Inside the flower shop, chilled by the damp iciness of the refrigerators and overwhelmed by smells that changed each time I took a step or turned my head, I realized I didn’t know what kind of flowers Eve liked. She’d been buying flowers for the apartment for years and I’d never really looked at or asked about them. I thought I knew her because I’d heard her personal stories and opinions and could name her favorite movies and records, but I only knew what I’d wanted to ask. There were other things that she’d wanted me to know. I cried in the flower shop and bought hydrangeas from a lady at the counter who was worried about my emotional state. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” I told her. “It’s my own fault.”

  Eve had said in the letter that she’d stay a few nights with her sister. I figured I’d leave the flowers on the kitchen counter with a note for her to find whenever she returned, but when I got back from the flower shop, Eve was already there on the couch. When she saw me enter with wrapped flowers, she jumped to her feet.

  “You got me hydrangeas?” she asked. She embraced me, told me she’d come back because she loved me and couldn’t possibly ever leave. She told me how moved she was by the flowers, that I paid more attention than she thought. It turned out hydrangeas were among her favorites. I admitted ruefully that it had been a lucky guess. But I told her the story of crying in the flower shop and we were together again.

  Within a few months, our fights came back, this time more frequent and volatile. I asked her, “Do you think you’re criticizing me more now because I’m getting worse? Or because we’ve been together so long that stuff you didn’t mind before now bothers you? Or is it because you’ve become more comfortable expressing how you really feel?”

  “All of those explanations are right at different times,” she said. “Sometimes they’re all right at the same time.”

  I came home to another letter almost identical to the last. And, like last time, she came back less than a day later to say she loved me and would never leave again.

  By spring of 2007, Eve was dumping me once every two months, sometimes even more. Once, in a happy period, I joked that maybe we should switch our song to the one that claims that the best part of breaking up is making up.

  Eve didn’t laugh, just looked at me sadly. “I do like making up.”

  Eve had been a hypochondriac since childhood. She told me that once in kindergarten, she’d overheard an adult talk about AIDS. She didn’t know what AIDS was, but she felt certain that she or her parents had it or would get it. She’d lie awake in bed at night, secretly worrying about AIDS. Eventually, she began falling asleep at school. When her mother asked what was wrong, Eve broke down sobbing and said she couldn’t sleep because she had AIDS. She didn’t change much in the next twenty years because she still lived in an on-and-off panic about having cancer or some other ailment she’d just heard about or found on the internet.

  Once, lying together on the couch with her head in the crook of my neck, she asked me if I’d leave her if she had cancer. Hypothetical questions had stressed me out ever since Dad started me on them as a child
, but Eve’s were more dangerous; when I answered wrong, she’d be devastated by what I’d theoretically do in a situation that wasn’t happening. But I believed she had the right to ask any question and that I had to answer.

  “How can either of us know what we’d feel or do if you had cancer?” I answered, likely with some desperation in my voice already. Eve jerked up. I told her, “No one knows who they’ll become in a time of tragedy! Maybe you’d have a nervous breakdown. Maybe you’d dump me.”

  Eve returned her head to my neck. “I know,” she said. “I still wanted you to tell me you’d never leave me.” She’d learned by now to explicitly state what I was supposed to say.

  “You’re asking me to promise something that can’t be promised,” I told her.

  “It’s not lying,” she insisted. “It’s saying what you hope will be true.”

  “Here’s a question,” I said. “Forget about the cancer part: are you gonna leave me sometime when I don’t have cancer?” Eve lowered her eyes guiltily. “After all,” I continued, “you’ve dumped me plenty of times. You never needed cancer.”

  “Oh, Michael,” Eve sighed. Her tears landed on my shirt collar. “Sometimes I get confused. But I’ll never really leave you.” She sounded so honest that I felt I’d been proven wrong. I leaned my head back and stared up at our tin ceiling. She continued. “I love you. And I’ll always love you.” Now I was crying too. I held her against me, believing a promise I knew to be false. She smiled up at me. “See? That was the easiest thing I could ever say.”

  Honesty Among Thieves

  I was waiting alone at 3 am on the squalid and silent J train platform at Bowery when I noticed a blond man in an orange-stained white T-shirt speed-walking toward me with one arm behind his back. He puffed out his lips and flexed his jaw to intimidate me and said, “Let’s go for a walk.” Despite his efforts to appear tough, he mostly read as stressed out. I was about to tell him that honesty about his nervousness and mixed feelings would command more respect and compassion than a transparent masculine facade, with me at least, but before I could comment, he shoved my shoulder, turning me to face the far end of the platform, and pushed me ahead.

  I didn’t have any money on me. I’d heard that some muggers would stab or shoot people with empty wallets, but I considered it more likely that my mugger would be the one hurt by this interaction, that he’d go to prison for this failed robbery. I felt a responsibility to prevent potential trouble for both of us if I could.

  “Before you go through all this,” I told him, “I don’t have any money.”

  “Shut up and walk,” the mugger said.

  I followed his order about walking but couldn’t bear to shut up. “Everyone’s so used to being lied to,” I told him, my hands gesturing wildly, my voice rising. “My family’s really honest so I’ve only lied twice ever, but still, no one trusts me.” The mugger didn’t stop pressing me toward the other end of the platform. My ranting gained fervor. “Most people lie about having no money on them, right? So now you automatically hear that line as a lie? Everyone performs this futile script: the mugged person lies, knowing he won’t be believed, and then the mugger plays his part and doesn’t believe him and so on until you end up in prison over an empty wallet.” At this mention of prison, his body tensed against me. “It’s a perfect example of how the liars spoil everything for people who trust and tell the truth.”

  As if to teach me the meaning of being believed, he moved his hidden hand into view and showed me a knife. The knife was triangular; it reminded me of a miniature sword. This mugger was like everybody else, so careful about what information he revealed and when. Then it occurred to me he might have hidden his weapon for a legal benefit, that if I’d never seen the knife, he could claim later he hadn’t had one. If he’d shown the knife at the start, the law might have punished him for his honesty.

  We reached the far end of the platform. “Empty your pockets,” he said.

  When he saw my ratty brown wallet, he averted his eyes; he couldn’t bear to watch me open it. I opened it anyway and held it out beneath his lowered face. I thought he ought to have the strength to look at it even if it bothered him. He fell back a step, looking down at the filthy station floor. “Damn!” he said, his voice pitched much higher than before. I liked hearing his real voice. “Damn!” This mugger seemed like he’d cry if he weren’t so pointlessly hung up on hiding his authentic self.

  “I tried to warn you,” I told him. “Also, for future reference, a subway platform is one of the worst places to mug someone. There are cameras everywhere.” The mugger lifted his eyes, now enraged. I resented his emotional reaction to objective fact. This alleged badass couldn’t even handle criticism from a stranger. I shrugged and said, “I’m just being honest.”

  He lunged at me, his knife-wielding hand rising in an uppercut that stopped just short of my throat. His other hand clutched the back of my head, pressing my neck into the knifepoint.

  “I’ve got some advice for you too,” he said. “Shut up.”

  I immediately went home and told Eve about the mugger almost stabbing me for being honest. I considered it hilarious, but she didn’t laugh. Eve just looked concerned. “Michael,” she said. “Please don’t do things like that. If you get yourself murdered, I’ll be sad.”

  The Fear Game

  By the few months before our third year of camp, in 2007, our relationship felt like family camp year-round. Camp’s creeping influence meant we often fell into the roles of therapist and patient.

  At one point, our unstable landlord was harassing us, demanding money we didn’t owe, refusing to turn on the heat or hot water despite formal complaints to the city. We didn’t have money to move and we loved the home we’d built, but our landlord banging on our door and screaming incoherently weighed on us. I was upset about it, but Eve was more upset. I asked her if she’d like to play the “Fear Game.”

  We’d invented the Fear Game months before. I got out a piece of paper and pen to use as a substitute for family camp’s forest chalkboard and Eve listed her fears.

  “We wouldn’t be in this situation if we had money,” she said. “And we’ll never have money. We’ll always be living like this. We’re really just broke losers.” I wrote this down. “And if we don’t have money, we can’t have children or give our children the life they should have.” I wrote this down too. “And if you really wanted children, you’d get a job and figure out how to make enough money. And you don’t do that because you don’t even expect us to be together forever.” She was crying a lot now. “And that’s because you don’t really love me.” I continued to take notes. “And you don’t love me because I’m a monster and I treat you so horribly. And you shouldn’t even be here. I break up with you over and over and you take me back, and you’re so patient and I don’t deserve it because I’m a horrible person.” Then she pulled herself together. “But that doesn’t matter because I’m gonna die of this brain tumor soon anyway.”

  “Okay, that feels like enough,” I said. “Let’s look at the list.” We moved close together on the couch and I handed her the page and a pen. “Why don’t you put check marks next to the ones that have something to do with our landlord problem.”

  Eve cracked up. “This list is bananas. It all sounded so true when I said it.”

  When Eve and I argued, it was never clear at the start which of us would end up acting as therapist. Sometimes we’d even swap roles mid-conversation.

  Though I was teaching lessons and making more regular money, Eve continued telling me to get a job. “Writing and teaching lessons is a job,” I insisted. “And it pays more hourly than other jobs I could get. And I like it.”

  Eve then became the facilitator. “How does it make you feel when I suggest that you get an office job?”

  “Well,” I said. “It’s the same message that the rest of society gives me, that living outside of normal culture is stubborn and stupid and that I’ll inevitably fail and I’ll deserve it. I feel like you
’re siding with society against me.”

  Eve said, “You talk like society is one big bully out to get you.”

  “I know!” I said. “The culture en masse acts in a creepy unison!” I flailed my arms like a family camper doing work. “If you don’t do what society wants, society gets revenge. If you make money out of your apartment instead of joining the corporate empire, they’ll do their best to arrange it so you can’t see a doctor, so potential friends or romantic partners don’t respect you, so that your obituary makes you sound like you accomplished nothing. If you don’t consent to your culture’s social rules, they’ll do their best to starve you into submission.” Eve abandoned her warm therapy face and traded it for an extended eye-roll. I finished anyway. “When you get upset at me about my job, it feels like the culture maliciously whispering in your ear that I’m a loser, hoping you’ll believe it and leave me.”

  Eve scoffed. “So if I want you to get a better job, it’s because I’m a sucker brainwashed into a minion of evil capitalism?”

  “When you put it like that, it sounds ridiculous,” I said. “But yes.”

  Eve snapped, “If I leave you, you’re gonna blame me and society. But you should know, just for the record: if I leave, it’s your fault.”

  This “if” felt more like “when.”

  On the list of our troubles, under hypochondria and general neurotic spiraling, was jealousy, Eve’s tendency to arbitrarily decide that I must be secretly in love with random women we knew. The more I denied having feelings for whatever woman she found threatening that day, the more guilty she claimed I sounded. Strangely, she only focused her jealous attacks on women I wasn’t attracted to. Eve never commented on the women whom I lusted after, perhaps because she knew if she asked I’d admit the truth; maybe she specifically liked hearing me assure her over and over.