To Be Honest Page 19

  This whole scenario was complicated by the fact that Eve was open about her own feelings for other men we knew. She’d get depressed or manic and tormentedly ask me whether she should try being with someone else. I’d say things like, “I’m not the one to give unbiased advice because I’m in love with you and I want you to stay.”

  In these discussions, Eve often found a way to get angry at me, but with a confusion regarding what exactly to be angry about. Once, she became angry that I wasn’t more upset about her having feelings for someone else; she insisted my not being jealous meant I must not love her. I told her I was upset, but that I was focusing on trying to comfort her. Then she became angry that I’d suppress my own feelings to deal with hers. So I focused on myself, telling her more about how upset I was. Then she accused me of guilting her, trying to control her. When I told her I wanted her to do whatever would make her feel better, she again became upset that I wasn’t jealous and the spiral started over.*

  Once, Eve and I were lying on the couch together after resolving one of our breakups when she asked directly if I ever fantasized about women we knew. This question felt particularly pointed because we’d just made up after a jealousy-related dumping. I was dismayed that she wanted to start on this again already. But she asked the question softly, as if she she’d find it romantic to know some of my more dangerous thoughts and feelings. “It’s okay, I fantasize about other people too,” she said. “It’s something everybody does.”

  I wanted to tell her that my whole life before her had been all about fantasizing, that I’d always found fantasy to be joyful and comforting, something I had when no one liked me. I was about to launch into this speech but I stopped myself. Eve had explicitly given me permission to tell her the truth, but if she really believed everybody fantasized about other people, why was she asking?

  I had to think fast because she was looking right at me. I imagined my transparent face betrayed that I was deciding whether to be honest. I’d seen that weaselly look on many faces. They usually chose to lie.

  If I lied, she’d surely know. But I had an unpleasant suspicion that she wanted me to lie. I felt nauseated again, and it was hard to push the words out of my mouth. I probably sounded like I was stuttering or slurring or both. “I don’t fantasize about other people,” I said. It was my third proper lie.*

  Eve smiled gloriously and embraced me, a reaction that seemed unwarrantedly positive. My first response was to feel awful that she’d believed me, to feel possessed by a compulsion to confess. But then it occurred to me: maybe she didn’t believe me. Maybe it moved her that I’d lied to protect her feelings. I desperately wanted to ask if she’d been fooled by the lie or if she recognized it and appreciated it. But I knew that question would ruin everything so I stayed quiet, wondering if this is what people meant when they said lying could be an act of love.

  My Infant Self

  Eve spent our third drive up the mountain to camp insisting that I confront Dad about how my view of him had changed and tell him I wanted to be less like him.

  “I can’t just say that,” I told her, noticing myself sounding suspiciously like most people, explaining what one “can’t” say. “He’ll just call me crazy. He might never speak to me again.”

  Eve rubbed her hand on my shoulder. “That would never happen.”

  “Who knows?” I told her. “My family is full of estrangements. People sometimes stop talking to each other. Dad’s sister hasn’t talked to him in fifteen years. She refuses to say why. When they’re at the same family event, they stay on opposite sides of the room.”

  Eve said, “Just the fact that you think telling your dad how you feel might make him never speak to you again shows that you need to tell him.”

  I asked Dad to talk and we left the camping area for the thin road that passed by family camp, an ideal place for a private conversation; you could talk for hours without a car passing. The surrounding forest provided shade and the sounds of the running creek and the wind through leaves and birdsong.

  We strolled up the mountain, alongside the uninhabited woods. I felt ill at the thought of what I would say; I couldn’t remember a time when saying something true made me so nervous. There were too many potential angles or places to start. I never felt more like I needed to express myself perfectly. I was prepared for this to potentially be our last conversation.

  In the past, when I had something to say that I knew would get a bad reaction, I’d treat speaking as a simple physical act, like putting a letter into a mailbox. I’d push the words out of my mouth as if they had no meaning.

  “I don’t think you were always honest,” I told Dad.

  “I can’t think of a time when I wasn’t,” he said. His eyes didn’t look up and to the right like someone trying to remember.

  “I don’t know if you lied consciously,” I told him. “I think you repeated to me the lies you told yourself.”

  “What would be an example?” he asked.

  I felt tremendous pressure to choose the right first example to convince him. Combing through the past, Eve and I had found dozens. I picked one, uncertain if it was the best.

  “When we walked to and from synagogue when I was a kid,” I said. “You’d give me hypothetical questions and mock any answer I gave you. You acted like I could get your approval if I could just make a good argument, but you never acted proud or told me I was right.”

  “What was I supposed to do? Pretend I thought you were right?” His pace quickened and I hurried to keep up, re-creating the very walks we were discussing. “In a debate, you don’t tell your opponent that he’s right or that you’re proud of him,” he said.

  “I wasn’t your opponent,” I said, my voice cracking already. “I was your son.”

  Dad’s hard-walking didn’t flag. “It would have been hypocritical for me to give you special treatment just because you’re my son.” I felt this line settle in my stomach. Dad stopped walking. “I don’t know what to tell you.” In the silence, he shrugged over and over as if shrugging at each individual thought that came to him. “If this is all you’ve got, I don’t know how to go on with this conversation,” he said. “I’m sorry, if this is the level of your thoughts, it’s probably best if you just don’t say anything at all.”

  Back at the dining area, I told Eve I’d talked to Dad and she started crying and hugged me. “I’m so proud of you,” she said. “You’re so brave.” I hugged her for a whole minute. I suddenly understood why other people had always been so into long, silent hugging.

  I recounted to Eve what had happened with Dad and she sucked in her lips, her most disappointed expression. “I thought he’d respond better,” she said.

  “You overestimate us,” I told her.

  Later that night, after dinner, while much of camp was milling about or playing cards or engaged in quiet intimate conversations in duos and trios in the forest dusk, I returned from the bathroom to find Eve looking shaken.

  “Your dad just came up to me sobbing,” she told me.

  “He didn’t say anything?” I asked.

  “He said, ‘Thank you so much for appreciating Michael and understanding him. I don’t know how to show him that I love him. At least he has someone in his life that can show him.’ And then he hugged me and cried.”

  “I don’t know what to make of that,” I said.

  “It means talking to him helped! You’re solving your family’s problems!” Eve said. “Are you gonna do work?”

  “Oh no,” I said. “You want me to do work now?”

  “Yeah!” Eve said. “How many years have you come to camp without doing work?”

  I had to do the math. “This is my eleventh year.”

  “In all this time, you never did work?” Eve said. “It’s ridiculous. You have to!”

  “But they’re gonna make me get on the rug and play myself as a baby!”

  Eve laughed. “Come on!”

  “But I don’t want to play my infant self!”

  Eve
kept on me about it and I figured I might as well since I was already trying whatever Eve thought I should and, as far as I could tell, she’d been right about everything so far. And, at the very least, this could show her I was trying to change and compromise, which I hoped would convince her to stop dumping me.

  At the next session, Max asked for a volunteer to do work, and I raised my hand. As I stepped up to the front the audience audibly responded, some laughing or whispering to each other. Maybe, like Eve, they’d been waiting years for me to do work. Or maybe they suspected my session would involve the Leviton family camp scandal and everyone was ready for a sensationalistic thrill. Or maybe they were rooting for me to learn to be less obnoxious.

  “So, Michael,” Max asked. “What’s bubbling?”

  “I have lots of problems,” I said. “And I think that they’re connected to my dad.”

  I felt an excited tension in the audience and I wondered if they hoped to see me fall apart. I could understand how camp would find that satisfying. Even for me, falling apart had some allure.

  “I want to list my problems,” I said. “But I feel like it’s gonna take an hour.” The crowd laughed.

  Max said, “Once you start, you might realize it’s all just different facets of the same thing and you’ll get your point across quicker than you think.”

  “Yeah, please cut me off if I get redundant,” I said. “I’ve always thought you don’t cut people off enough.” Everyone laughed, including Max. Then they waited for me to tell my story. “So, Dad always had a lot of rules and demands. He had opinions about what was right and what made sense and I had to be in line with those things.” The audience was with me. They could relate. It was unusual to have people relating to me. “I thought it was all worth it because, you know, most people’s minds are disordered, they don’t know how to express themselves or they’re afraid to, they’re cowards and liars who don’t even care whether they’re right.” I’d lost the audience now. I spotted Eve in a lawn chair near the front, also uncertain about where I was going.

  Max interrupted. “You just wanted him to love you.” It only took one line for me to be relatable again. Max continued, “But I don’t think that was the end of it. I think what you really wanted was for him to love you without your having to earn it.”

  A groan pushed its way through my throat. Now tears poured from my eyes. “It’s difficult to talk while I’m crying this hard,” I whimpered, barely able to dribble out the words.

  “You don’t have to talk,” Max said. “We don’t need words to understand.”

  At this, I broke down in classic family therapy camp fashion. It felt dizzyingly physical, more like retching than crying. In that moment, I wished someone would photograph me, like on a rollercoaster when they catch you mid-scream.

  “Let’s go back to a time before you could speak,” Max said, and I knew what was coming. “Why don’t you call up someone to play you as a baby?” I snapped out of my emotional state and laughed.

  “What happened?” Max asked. “Stay with me—”

  “Do I really have to call someone up to play my infant self? That’s my least favorite camp cliché.”

  The audience laughed. Max said, “I’ve never heard someone stop his work on the grounds that something was ‘cliché.’” The crowd loved that. They were more receptive to jokes about therapy from people taking part in it. That felt like a lesson to apply elsewhere.

  Max continued. “Some things are cliché because they’re true.” I resisted my impulse to say that sentiment was also cliché. I looked into the crowd to pick someone to play my infant self. Without any conscious reason, I chose one of the teenagers I knew from the campfire. The teenager got down on the blanket on the forest floor, with leaves scattered around him.

  Max called into the audience for Dad. “Would you come up? I’d like to talk to you for a moment now, if that’s okay.”

  I found Dad crying in the audience. He slunk up to the stage, hanging his head.

  “How do you feel about what Michael’s been saying?” Max asked.

  “I’m so sorry!” Dad keened.

  “Look down at baby Michael there,” Max said. “And talk a bit about how you felt when he was a baby.”

  Dad straightened, his body expressing his instant distraction from what he’d just been feeling. “I don’t remember much about how I felt when Michael was a baby,” he said.

  “Try to remember.”

  “I loved him so much,” Dad said, his voice now clear.

  “Why did you love him?” Max asked.

  Dad’s face screwed into a pained scrunch. “I tried to find reasons,” he said.

  Max’s eyes narrowed and his voice shed its therapist warmth. “You tried to find reasons to love your baby? What would be an example of a reason to love a baby?”

  “He rolled over early,” Dad said. “He could move along with music; he had a good sense of rhythm. He said his first word when he was only six months old. He said ‘ice cream.’”

  Max warmed again and asked softly, “Why did you have to justify loving your baby?”

  “I don’t know how to love without a reason,” Dad said.

  “Why don’t you lie down with baby Michael and let yourself love him without a reason.”

  Dad crouched and rolled onto the blanket to hug the teenager pretending to be my infant self. Dad wept and groaned, “I love you so much. I love you so much.”

  As the session grew more redundant and comic, I spaced out. After a while, I interrupted Max and Dad and said, “I feel like there’s a lot of other stuff to talk about.”

  Dad looked up at me from the rug, disappointed that his spooning this teenager hadn’t solved anything.

  Max rose from his kneeling position. “I don’t know what you want to say, but I have a suspicion that you intend to build a case against your father. You want to list all the ways he’s hurt you. Is that right?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Your whole life, you’ve built cases,” Max said, “You have a talent for describing in detail what’s right or wrong and why. As a child, you needed that skill to survive. But did it ever get you anything you wanted from other people? Even from your father?”

  “No,” I said, again choking on the weird physically manifesting feelings.

  “You can’t convince someone to love you with a good argument. People don’t love each other for being right.”

  It seemed suddenly that a vast percentage of life had been a sham, a prank on me. I’d worked so hard for something that should have required no work at all.

  Max asked Dad to get up so we could face each other. Up close, I could see his big nose pores and hairy nostrils and his penetrating dark brown eyes, which looked beautiful crying. Max asked me if there was anything I wanted to tell him. A breeze blew and I heard birds. I assumed the squawking was in response to the breeze but then decided the two weren’t connected.

  “You taught me that being honest meant not caring,” I said. “But now I want to care. And I guess I needed you to care.”

  Dad embraced me and sobbed into my ear. “I don’t know how!” He wept in my arms for a moment. “I love you so much,” he murmured. “I just don’t know how to show you.”

  “I don’t know how to show that I care either,” I told him. “I think I don’t know because you don’t know.”

  Max said, “Has there been anybody in your life who’s been able to show you that they care, where you felt like they loved you even when you couldn’t earn it?”

  I looked through the audience of family campers sobbing, with crumpled tissues all over the dirt floor. I found Mom among them, her face wet and blotchy. “I always knew Mom loved me,” I said. “She loved me before I could speak.”

  Mom came up front and gave me possibly her most crushing hug of all time; the crowd applauded. Then Max invited Eve up to the front. I told her, “I feel that you love me too, even though I often make it difficult.”

  “Loving you isn’t d
ifficult,” Eve said. I could tell she meant this despite the statement’s technical inaccuracy. We pulled together for a teary group-hug, and it appeared that all present found it cathartic and satisfying.

  Afterward, Eve was a broken record telling me how proud of me she was and how brave I’d been. “Well, don’t get too excited yet,” I told her. “Let’s see if it makes any difference.”

  * I imagine she just had a policy of ignoring the unsolicited advice of raving strangers.

  * Eve’s being across-the-board right didn’t mean I was ready for these ideas.

  * It was Shakespeare.

  * As bizarre as this whole conversation might sound, I think the wildest part was that her being honest with me about all this only further convinced me that our relationship was special. I figured she’d never be so honest with someone she didn’t love.

  * To recap, my first was at five when I let the kindergartners believe in Santa. My second was at eighteen when I told Amanda during her work that she’d be appreciated for her authentic self. For this third lie, I was twenty-six.

  Chapter 8

  Uncomfortable Questions

  On the plane home from camp, I started writing down what had happened, just so I could get some distance and wrap my mind around it. I continued writing when I got home, and soon I was spending most of my free time writing about family camp.

  As much as we’d returned feeling hopeful, I hadn’t changed much. Eve regularly expressed her disappointment. I told her, “I guess I still haven’t been traumatized enough.”

  As I wrote more and more, I noticed her focusing on a new hope, that writing about myself would change me more than therapy. Though I talked about trying to publish what I was writing as a fictionalized novel, Eve told me she recognized its real purpose, that it was a message to Dad.

  Eve and I moved together into a much nicer apartment with a proper office for Eve and space for a dining room table. We once again searched the junk shops. We spotted the base of a wrought iron Singer sewing machine probably from the 1930s. It didn’t have the sewing machine attached, but its foot pedal sent gears spinning. Eve had the idea to make it into a table. We bought a walnut tabletop and attached the two ourselves. The table was the centerpiece of the apartment, the first thing you saw when you walked in. When we sat there, we could pump the wrought iron foot pedal and look out at the whole neighborhood through our fourth-floor window. A man on the roof of the building next door trained pigeons; at twilight, Eve and I would lie on the fire escape and watch his cloud of birds circle.