To Be Honest Read online

  During this period, I’d often run into friends or acquaintances at my usual bar and ask questions about normal social life. They’d have a drunken laugh poking holes in my theories. It was more fun for them than it was for me. I couldn’t decide how reliable they were, but they still influenced my thinking. Because they involved a rotating cast of characters, and in many cases I can’t remember who was there and who said what, and because they mostly judged me, I’ll refer to them in our dialogues as “the jury.”

  I told them, “If the etiquette experts are to be believed, everyone’s constantly embarrassed and trying to avoid embarrassment. I don’t understand why.”

  The jury glowered, sensing where this was going. “Yeah, that’s because you have no shame.”

  I told them it would be helpful if I could hear the kinds of daily interactions that embarrassed them. The jury told me about being forced to admit to rich friends they couldn’t afford something and being snubbed by cool girls, about showing up overdressed or underdressed to parties, about public rejections and disastrously timed toilets that wouldn’t flush. The jury responded most to one story about a man who got money out of an ATM while his date stood close to sneak a look at his bank balance. “At the time, I only had forty dollars,” he said. The jury’s hysterics embarrassed him all over again. He insisted, “I was gonna get paid soon!”

  “Here’s the part I don’t get,” I told them. “These things happen all the time. Toilets clog. People have forty dollars in their accounts. That’s probably happened to all of us. What’s the big deal? There’s no reason to be embarrassed about not having money. Statistically, almost no one has money. The embarrassing thing is to be someone who would care so much if someone isn’t rich! If this woman on the date judges you, she buys into foolish cultural dogma. That’s embarrassing.”

  This comment offended the jury because it turned out most of them would judge their date for only having forty dollars.

  One of my new rules was to backpedal if I offended people, so I used the classic strategy of adding “all I’m saying” to the beginning of every statement. “All I’m saying,” I told the jury, “is that the jerks who’ve embarrassed you are the real embarrassments.”

  The jury drew my attention to the absurdity of me considering myself the arbiter of embarrassment, so I moved on to another question. “The etiquette books assume there’s a lot that we all know but still can’t stand to hear someone speak aloud. Can you think of things you feel that way about?”

  The jury started listing:

  — Not everyone will like you

  — Some are more moral than you

  “Is this why so many people hate vegans?” I asked. “Because we agree they’re morally superior?” The jury proved its point by avoiding this question to continue listing.

  — When you achieve something, it isn’t necessarily because you deserved it

  — The one you’re with now was with others before you

  — Your relationship likely won’t last, and you’ll likely hate each other after it’s over

  — There are other values one could have, other ways to live

  “Oh, maybe that’s why some people with kids feel offended by people who don’t want kids? And why some people who devote their lives to making money get upset about people who don’t?”

  — You’ll never be rich

  — Someone is better looking than you

  “How can they possibly be upset at the idea that someone is better looking!?!” I asked. “Of course someone is always better looking.”

  I got the sense that this list could go on forever, but I stopped them because it depressed me to imagine needing to avoid these common truths visible everywhere, referenced a thousand times a day. They needed sheets to throw over the mirrors. I’d always been the mirror when I should have been the sheet.

  Nobody Calls Them Lies but You

  My early lies were simple attempts to misrepresent myself as normal. I answered each “how are you?” with “great” or “fine” no matter how I felt. I gave disingenuous compliments to be nice. When I received an invitation, I said I planned to be there even if I had no intention of going. When greeted by someone I didn’t remember, I feigned recognition. If I’d forgotten someone’s name, I pretended I knew it. When someone didn’t pay enough on a split dinner bill, I didn’t call it out, I just covered it. When something went wrong, I acted as if I hadn’t noticed. I pretended to like people I didn’t. I littered my speech with standard questions, clichés, and pleasantries: “How are you?” and “What do you do?” and “Where are you from?” and “So nice to see you!”

  All of these felt like small-time cons. I’d get nauseated and stuff my hands into my pockets to hide their involuntary clasping and unclasping. An omission would leave me hungover for hours. I was a goldfish in a plastic bag. I kept reminding myself, “Nobody calls them lies but you. Nobody calls them lies but you.”

  A few months into my experimentation with dishonesty, I attended a party at a newly opened restaurant where the tables encircled a white grand piano. After dinner, they removed the tables for a dance party around this piano. When most of the crowd had cleared out, the restaurant’s manager, a friend of a friend, turned off the music. We stayed after hours in the silence and I asked her if I could play the piano. She gave me permission so I played a jazz standard I’d taught myself. This manager told me they needed a piano player to play background music for brunch on Sundays and asked if I’d like the job.

  I needed any jobs I could get and I liked the idea of being a brunch pianist, but I knew this gig would require playing for hours and I didn’t know enough piano music to last more than thirty minutes. And when it came down to it, I just wasn’t good enough at piano to deserve a paid gig like that over other pianists. In the past, I would have told her to find someone else, and I would’ve recommended better pianists I knew, but I thought instead I’d experiment with pure bullshit. I said yes and acted as if I was an appropriate candidate for the job. She bought it and asked me to start this coming Sunday, in two days. I needed at least a week to learn music and practice, but instead of telling her that, I lied, saying I already had plans that weekend, but that I could start the following Sunday.

  I spent the whole week preparing. When Sunday came around, I still sounded pretty bad and I felt certain I’d start playing and the manager who had hired me would be humiliated and they’d have to find some polite way to fire me. But, to my surprise, they were satisfied. I could have taken this as validating, told myself it proved I was better at piano than I thought. Though I was learning to lie to others, I couldn’t stop being honest with myself. The owners and manager possessed no knowledge of music and paid little attention. No job could convince me I was a good pianist. But I resisted my impulse to let them know.

  I wasn’t sure how I’d get a new apartment without Eve. She’d found our first apartment herself. And in our second apartment search, she was the one who could politely deal with the landlords and brokers. Aside from my troubles interacting with most people, I was a freelancer without guaranteed income or a boss to give me proof of employment. A ukulele teacher was no landlord’s dream.

  I’d heard that lying was so common in these situations that it was expected, part of the ritual.* I spoke to a friend who occasionally hired me to collaborate on music for commercials and asked him to write me a letter on his company stationery that claimed I worked for him full-time, earning six figures. I braced myself to be called a degenerate swindler, but he had no problem writing me this fraudulent letter.

  A landlord showed me a crumbling old one-bedroom in a great location that cost half as much as it should have. I wanted to tell him that he could charge more, but I censored myself, ignoring the stabbing stress pains in my stomach. I noticed the place had no fire escape and thought to ask if they’d priced the apartment this cheap to make up for it being a fire-hazard death trap. But I stayed uncharacteristically silent again. The landlord inquired about my job inform
ation and income and I told him about my fictional job and invented salary, my most extreme lies yet. He immediately offered me the apartment. I tried to show him my friend’s letter but he said didn’t need to see it, that he trusted me.

  Each time I lied, my mind swirled with guilt, stress, and dread. I eventually recognized my stomach sickness as what others called shame. I wasn’t used to doing things I considered wrong. When I neurotically spiraled, I found comfort in the fact that these crimes had no victims. If anything, even my most self-interested lies were mutually beneficial—the restaurant got a piano player, the landlord a tenant. Still, I couldn’t help feeling that I’d be caught and called out any time. I ran through my mind how these confrontations would play out. In every imagined version, I found myself indignant and resentful. “You’re the ones who wanted me to lie!” I’d say. “You rewarded me for it, pressured me into it!” It soon became clear that most people weren’t constantly on the lookout for lies like I was. Even if someone had caught me and despised me for it, they’d likely have been too polite to say anything. Besides, even my most reprehensible falsehoods weren’t considered noteworthy. It didn’t take long for my anxiety to dull. I was getting used to being a liar.

  In summer of 2010, eight months after my breakup with Eve, a year after giving Dad the manuscript, I still wasn’t talking often with my parents. My experiments in deception saved our conversations. My parents found the subject as bizarre and funny as I did.

  “It’s crazy,” I’d say. “When you’re behaving normally, you live in this alternate world. No one recoils in disgust! Everyone’s happier. And even if they’re not happier, they’d never let me know it!”

  “I guess that’s positive?” Dad laughed. When I told him about adding dozens of clichéd pleasantries to my speech, he said, “At work, people always thought I was mad at them. I couldn’t understand it. My therapist told me it was probably because I got to the point immediately without saying ‘How are you?’ or ‘Nice to see you.’”

  “Did you try saying that stuff?” I asked.

  “Yeah, actually. And it solved the problem immediately!” He laughed, I assumed, at his past obliviousness. It took me a second to recognize that he was laughing at the absurdity of this small change making a difference. “I went through with it,” Dad said, “but I felt a low-level resentment about them wanting that stuff.” He sighed. “I used to get so many reactions that I didn’t understand. I needed a therapist to explain. Back then, I didn’t know how other people saw me.” I held myself back from telling him he still didn’t understand how people saw him.

  When I told Mom about my newfound dishonesty, she tried to be positive. “I’ve always said that a smile is free. It doesn’t cost anything to smile!”

  “It costs feeling known,” I said. “And it costs the person I’m smiling at an accurate sense of my feelings. But I guess they don’t care if I mean it; they just want a smile.” Mom was quiet. I tried a slight change in subject. “I heard once that fake-smiling releases dopamine into the brain, so faking a smile makes you smile for real.”

  “Fake-smiling doesn’t make me happier,” Mom said, switching sides.

  “Yeah,” I told her. “I didn’t believe it either.”

  Go for the Bold Statement

  I suspected that packing up the apartment I’d shared with Eve would be a sob spree, and I was right. Moving can be very moving. I couldn’t take a book from a shelf without a photo of us falling out, a heartbreak booby trap. When I moved the couch, I discovered several of Eve’s drawings under it covered in dust.

  I didn’t want Eve to go through what I’d just gone through, so I packed her stuff for her and left it in boxes around the sewing machine table. I didn’t have room for the table in my new apartment. I feared that, wherever Eve moved, she wouldn’t have room for it either. I didn’t want Eve to sell it or throw it away, but bringing it up would give away how much I still loved her; that was the sort of thing I was supposed to keep hidden. I had to decide if it was more painful for Eve to believe I didn’t love her anymore or to know that I did. I’d heard that a breakup was easier if it cut off cleanly, even if the truth wasn’t clean. As I packed up Eve’s stuff, I remembered how just being honest required no weighing of different types of pain, no gambling on which strategy would be kindest or get the most desirable result. It was so much simpler to say whatever I felt and take no responsibility for the response or consequence. Family camp had assured me that “you can’t control events but you can control your reactions.” I took that to mean it was everyone else’s job to manage their own feelings. It was becoming clearer and clearer that these therapy lines were intended for those who felt bogged down by the longing to please others, not to validate the reckless and inconsiderate like me.

  In my new apartment, the walls were unevenly painted and cracking, the floors a patchy linoleum from the 1970s with sinking spots. The “living room” had space enough for my fake-Victorian couches and my broken-down half-size speakeasy piano but not a coffee table. My bedroom only had room for a bed and dresser. The shower was in the cramped kitchen. Since only the living room had any space, I knew I’d be spending all my time there. I invited over an interior decorator friend to advise me. He noticed a couple of vintage mirrors I’d collected and suggested I buy more and cover the wall with mirrors all the way to the ceiling. “Salon-style,” he said. “Like Versailles.” He said mirrors would make the room feel bigger. Even my apartment would now be about illusion. I asked him if people would be put off by a room full of mirrors. After all, I was supposed to be trying to appear normal. He flicked his hand and said, “Always go for the bold statement!”

  So, I set about collecting mirrors. My neighborhood in Brooklyn now had its own junk shops, so each time I found a new mirror, I’d walk it home, carrying it like a shield. Passersby would check themselves out, instinctively adjusting their face to the angle that made them look how they wanted. Even when looking in a mirror, they’d trick themselves.

  Within a few months, my walls were covered with mirror constellations. When visitors came over, I would notice them trying to sit in spots where they could avoid their reflections. I had unwittingly created yet another situation where spending time with me required looking at yourself whether you wanted to or not.

  Lunch with Chekhov

  Over my eight years in New York, I’d had some jobs playing vinyl records at bars or parties. I mostly played old rock and roll, soul, and jazz, which meant it was common for strangers to criticize the music and make irrelevant requests.

  One New Year’s Eve, I was playing records for a dance party of about four hundred people when a young man approached and asked me why I wasn’t playing hip-hop. I told him I loved hip-hop but that I had a different specialization. He persisted. “You know, most deejays play hip-hop.” I told him I understood that he personally wanted me to play hip-hop, but that the audience appeared to be satisfied with old rock and roll; I gestured to the crowd of hundreds of people dancing. He just repeated himself. “But most deejays play hip-hop.”

  On another occasion, a young drunk woman simply asked me, “Could you play better music?”

  In the honest days, I found it hard to get these people to leave me alone. They considered it disrespectful to refuse to engage in conversation or express plainly that I wouldn’t take their requests. On a couple occasions, they demanded apologies, threatened me, or invited me outside to fight.

  In the winter of 2010, I got a gig playing vinyl records one night a week at a small fake-vintage cocktail bar with distressed mirrors and furniture. My first night at this new job, a young woman requested a modern pop song unrelated to the style of music I’d been hired to play. Instead of my old method of telling her I didn’t play requests, I tried dishonesty; I made a big show of telling her how much I loved that song, though unfortunately I didn’t own a copy. This was my first time attempting to hint. Encouraged by what she misread as a positive reply, she told me that she could play the song from her own
device if I plugged it into the bar’s stereo system. A missed hint was just as tiresome as others had claimed. I almost broke character and got candid but I kept my cool and told her I was only allowed to play vinyl. She laughed and told me I was too uptight about the rules; she thought she was being fun. I now imitated an evasion I’d witnessed hundreds of times: inventing someone to blame. I replied that I really wanted to play her request but the owner was a big drag, that he only liked old music, and I didn’t want to get fired. She replied that I should tell the owner this music wasn’t what people wanted to hear. Though I could recognize the positive sides of these new strategies, the conversation wasn’t ending. She was encouraged by all I’d said. I was losing my mind, so I buckled and made a mocking joke: “It sounds like you should be the deejay!”

  She broke into a huge grin. “I should be a deejay!” she said. “I’d be an amazing deejay!” Then she hopped away, much happier than when she’d arrived. I watched her return to her friends, excitedly gesturing to me, probably telling them the story of how I’d ordained her a deejay.

  After that, when a stranger approached me at the turntables, I’d smile, invest my voice with warmth and enthusiasm, and suggest that they should be the deejay. Each time, the person left happy. I’d been mistakenly assuming these people cared about music. They only wanted connection and validation. I had to keep reminding myself that few meant the words they said. Even fewer knew consciously what they wanted, why they did what they did. I made another rule:

  — Don’t take seriously what people say. Their minds are chaos.