To Be Honest Page 25

  Because the rule of opposites wasn’t reliable or consistent—we don’t always speak in opposites—I was left to the paranoid task of recognizing what to take at face value and when to search for subtext. I soon also found that the rule of opposites didn’t only help me read people; it allowed me to guess how I’d be read. Stating plainly how I felt could ensure that I wouldn’t be believed.

  To communicate that I was upset, it was better to snap that I didn’t care; this was how upset people usually behaved. To hide my money problems, I could casually mention being broke; this was how many people with money spoke. If I wanted to appear confident, I couldn’t just say I felt confident. The cocky pool shark says, “I play a little here and there.” The successful person says, “I do all right.” When I admitted I wasn’t a real piano player, that I’d taught myself and didn’t deserve the gigs I had, some would misinterpret me as a virtuoso.

  While I was still in the thick of thinking about all this and applying it to every area of social life, a friend confronted me, wanting an apology. I’d not yet figured out how to say I was sorry in a way that people appreciated and I wondered if the rule of opposites could help.

  I’d often annoyed people by apologizing unprompted.* It was my instinct to confess and say I was sorry whenever I felt I’d done something wrong. Still, when someone actually wanted an apology, my most genuine attempts only enflamed their resentment. I hadn’t yet determined why.

  “You’re always talking about someone else!” my friend told me. “There’s always someone whose music you love or who’s the funniest person you’ve ever met or someone who told you the most interesting story. It makes me feel so boring and bland and awful.”

  It was a valid complaint; I did often gush about other people. It was a holdover from the honest days. My usual strategy here would have been to immediately say sorry for making her feel that way, to promise to stop talking about other people, and to try to reassure her that I found her funny, talented, and interesting too. Because this type of apology always failed, I considered the rule of opposites: a normal person might deal with guilt or shame by refusing to apologize. My sorries likely rang false because they came too quickly, too easily, too articulately. I hypothesized that she might respond better to avoidance.

  I feigned indignation, launching into a series of transparent, clichéd evasions. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” I barked. “I don’t say anything like that! You’re the one who’s always talking about someone else! What about all the ways you make me feel awful!?!” I sensed that I’d done a good impression, that she read my manic denials as expressions of insecurity and shame. After a while of this, I started averting my eyes and pausing for long periods as if I couldn’t get the words out. When I finally said, “Sorry,” she smiled warmly and hugged me, satisfied. This was the first time someone accepted one of my apologies.

  Sometimes to be believed, I had to lie.

  I felt like I had fallen into a language-immersion program where I couldn’t speak without first translating my thought into a new dialect. I’d write an email with what I wanted to say and then reverse each line before sending. Every day was opposite day.

  My highest-paying piano-playing job was at a restaurant owned by a woman I disliked named Gwen. The job didn’t require dealing with her much, but when forced to interact, I used it as practice for keeping my mouth shut. I listened to her paranoid ranting about conspiracies between her employees and friends, who she believed were out to get her. She’d make impulsive, brutal decisions like firing everyone in the kitchen for not respecting her enough or telling the piano players they no longer got free drinks because they were taking advantage of her generosity. I’d act as if I’d seen nothing out of the ordinary.

  One day, I received an email from Gwen with a new employee contract. I’d played background music at several restaurants before this, never with contracts. Perfectly in line with her unreasonable character, the contract was long, full of nondisclosure agreements and gag clauses, and threats of expensive lawsuits. The contract even said she could respond preemptively to any “perceived threat” to her business’s reputation. If Gwen could have included “under penalty of death,” she would have.

  I suspected that Gwen had updated the contract because her employees kept quitting on bad terms and telling horror stories about her abuse. The contract would give her the option of potentially hounding these ungrateful former employees with lawsuits. Though her contract wasn’t likely to hold up in any court, I feared it would embolden her to threaten and harass us. She had money and we didn’t. I felt certain I’d soon leave the job on bad terms myself, so I couldn’t risk signing it. Unfortunately, I wanted to keep the job.

  My first instinct was to tell Gwen straight-out that contracts wouldn’t solve her personal issues, that she should instead put her effort into getting along with her employees. By now, I’d gathered that this kind of response didn’t help anyone. I hoped I could use dishonesty to keep the job without signing anything.

  I’d observed that when I made Gwen happy, she’d avoid spoiling the positive moment. I thought if I could compliment her enough on what she felt most insecure about and portray her life in a way that matched her desired vision of herself, she would be more receptive. I came up with a wild scheme to attempt to blame the bad contract on her enemies, to convince her that my refusing to sign meant I was on her side.

  I wrote to her; I didn’t want my face to give me away. I started by telling her how anxious I was about writing. I’d learned that referring to myself as anxious or embarrassed made people automatically relate and sympathize, or at least feel comforted to know I wasn’t taking an offensive or combative position. Then I got to the big lie: I said I’d shown the contract to a lawyer. That way, any criticism of her or the contract would come from him, not me.

  I told her the lawyer had said “upsetting things” and that I defended her, insisting that she wasn’t the type of person who would sue anyone. I claimed to have told the lawyer that this contract surely arose from other employees taking advantage of Gwen, leeching off the beautiful business she’d built. I told her I understood that this contract wasn’t really her, that she’d been driven to it as the only way to protect her hard work. I then asked her if she’d mind if I didn’t sign it. “It would really mean a lot to me,” I told her. It was, by far, the craziest progression of lies I’d yet attempted.

  Gwen replied that she was amazed at how much I truly understood her. She repeated back to me most of what I’d said, echoing that she didn’t like the contract either, that she’d felt forced to draft it to protect her family and livelihood, that she’d never sue anyone. She told me she liked working with me because I was someone she could trust and thanked me for being so candid.

  Around that time, I picked up my guitar amplifier from the repair shop and I found that it was still broken despite being allegedly repaired. I told the store worker, “It’s still buzzing.”

  “Oh, that?” he replied. “It’s supposed to buzz like that.”

  I knew he wouldn’t help if I pointed out this attempt to gaslight me. But I still needed to somehow demand that he fix the buzz. A unique lie came to me. “Oh yeah, I know,” I said. “It’s just that I asked the guitar tech to customize the amp to remove the usual buzz.”

  The store worker nodded and pretended to look at the repair slip, “Oh, right. Okay, that’ll be another week.”

  The jury had been impressed with how I’d talked my way out of signing the restaurant contract, but they didn’t like my lie in the guitar shop. “He was being a jerk,” someone said. “You should have stood up for yourself.”

  I laughed. “I’ve stood up for myself enough. I know what it feels like. It’s time for me to try to make things pleasant.”

  * * *

  Sometimes I’d go out with someone once or twice and not want to see her again. Rejecting people struck me as the greatest etiquette challenge.

  Women usually rejected me with a method
I called “the infinite flake,” in which they made and canceled dates with me until I got the hint. The one time a woman told me explicitly that she didn’t want to see me again I thanked her for her directness. She appreciated being appreciated. When I asked why she didn’t want to see me again, it became clear that her directness had limits.

  The jury couldn’t think of a rejection method they liked. They complained about lovers ending it too soon or too late, about being too brutal or condescendingly comforting. They complained if the rejection wasn’t face-to-face but also found fault in all rejection locations. One juror said the dumper’s main responsibility was to convince the person being dumped that the problem had nothing to do with her. “Say you’re suddenly moving to a foreign country,” she told me. “Or that your family was just killed in a car wreck. Or that you realized you need to experiment with your sexuality by sleeping with men.”

  “But what if she finds out I lied?” I asked.

  “She’ll have moved on already and won’t care,” the juror replied.

  I didn’t like this advice, but it got my mind working. A merciful rejection had three requirements: clarity, closure, and an unrelated excuse.

  Thinking about my past apology issues gave me a solution: if I didn’t want to see someone after a first or second date, I could text an unprompted apology. Then, she’d reject me. I named this technique “sorrying.”

  I tried sorrying a few people and it worked perfectly. No one replied, which meant no one felt rejected. I believed I’d found my most brilliant mutually beneficial lie until I told the jury.

  “Your lies aren’t normal anymore,” they insisted. “You’re manipulating everybody. It’s creepy.”

  “But they’re mutually beneficial and victimless! I’m considering other people’s feelings and giving them what they want!”* I told the jury, “If you didn’t know my thought process and dealt with me, you’d feel great about it. It only bothers you because I’ve explained it. Even in this conversation, the only thing bothering you is my being honest.”

  Eventually, I stopped discussing my adventures in deception. Others would appreciate my lies only if I never revealed them.†

  At the restaurant where I played piano, I was introduced to a friend of a friend. After ten minutes of one-on-one conversation, she said, “You’re the most dangerous type of person.” I asked her what she meant. “You make everyone feel special,” she said, eyeing me with bitterness. “But they aren’t special to you.”

  Because I felt she’d been straight with me, I felt invited to be straight back. “I used to only make someone feel special if I meant it,” I told her. “The ones I didn’t make feel special were offended. I was told that it was polite to make everyone feel as if I liked them, even if I didn’t. Now you’re bothered when I’m disingenuously nice?” I told her the story about Chekhov. She just shook her head.

  I realized that she was right, in a way. My comfort with personal questions and stories could create a sense of intimacy in the other person without my feeling intimate at all. I’d talk like that to anyone who would let me, inviting people to feel vulnerable without risking anything myself. Intimacy without vulnerability was a weapon.

  I was still trying to get people to be honest with me. It now seemed I should approach vulnerability the way I’d approached apology: I could fake being guarded and unspool slowly, unveiling one personal detail at a time, hesitating in order to show that my honesty was special, only for them.

  Once I had this thought—that even real intimacy would, in the long-term, require a tremendous amount of lying—I felt like I’d gone way too far.

  At first, it had felt good to be more compassionate, to try to make people happy. But past a certain point, it felt crazy. Jerks thought I was easygoing. Liars thought I believed them. Flakes thought I trusted them. Because others lied like this too, so many walked around with misguided visions of themselves. People thought their friends liked their boyfriends. Heartbreakers and abusers didn’t know how much pain they’d caused. Even with people I cared about, I’d support their projects no matter how ill-conceived. When they told me their troubles, I’d have solutions, but I wouldn’t share them.

  It had taken me four years to get this far, but I was looking for any excuse to forget the whole thing and be honest again.

  Eve and I had stayed friends, not seeing each other very often but meeting occasionally to catch up. She’d started making electronic music and found some success writing songs and making beats for hip-hop and pop artists while she continued publishing graphic novels. She’d long since dumped the dishonest boyfriend and fallen in love with someone else, a beautiful and soft-spoken musician and illustrator I liked a lot. This boyfriend was also a carpenter and had built himself an apartment behind his friend’s house in Los Angeles. When he invited Eve to move in with him, she decided to leave New York.

  Eve told me she was moving and selling of a lot of her stuff, including a bookshelf I wanted, so I returned to our old apartment for what would be the last time.

  I hadn’t been there in a few years, but not much had changed. We sat down at the sewing machine table and I immediately started sobbing. “I don’t know if it’s weird for me to ask this,” I told her. “Especially when I’ve just walked in. But what are you gonna do with this table?” Eve knew what I meant. “I imagine it might be troublesome to keep sentimental objects from past relationships when you have a new boyfriend, and I know it takes up a lot of space. But if you can’t keep it, I don’t want you to sell it or throw it away. If I have to, I can figure out some way to hold onto it. I just need one of us to have it.”

  Eve smiled, tears running down her face. “I’m keeping it,” she said. “I found a temporary place for it. I want to have this table in my house when I’m old and gray.”

  I was moved by this response, that we both felt sentimental about what we’d had even though it was over. But I was also aware that she was speaking from a nostalgic moment. Eve was leaving New York, the city where we’d spent our twenties together, for a new love in another city. It struck me as impossible that we’d value our relationship like this forever. We still felt this way after four years, but there was no way Eve would want this table in her house in forty.

  I used to tell her I couldn’t just choose to believe something. But now I could. Nothing defined love as much as trusting in uncertain promises, believing the unlikely. So, Eve would be sitting at this table in her house in forty years. This was the truth.

  * Of all the rhetorical-sounding questions I used to use literally, oblivious to how offensive they were, the worst of all was probably, “Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”

  * I suspect even if I asked her now, years later, she’d still lie or refuse to tell me.

  * After a date, if I felt I’d talked too much or forgotten to ask questions or been otherwise self-centered, I’d text an apology. No one responded. Even women who had seemed to really like me would vanish. So I’d stopped texting apologies, no matter how obnoxious I’d been or how regretful I felt.

  * I couldn’t distinguish kindness or social grace from manipulation because it all felt to me equally crazy and unnecessary.

  † This is the main reason I suspect writing this book is a bad idea.

  Chapter 12

  The Mercy of Censorship

  In 2014, I went to a concert in my neighborhood and ran into some friends who recommended an Italian movie they’d just seen.

  “I don’t take recommendations for foreign movies from Americans because it’s a cultural trend to claim to like every foreign movie,” I told them, laughing. “I’ve never heard an American say something bad about a movie from another country.”

  My friends groaned at this comment they recognized as typical of me. But a friend of theirs I’d never met looked on, laughing in amused confusion. Her huge smile expanded and contracted as she laughed, stretching and snapping back like a rubber band. With her unkempt blonde hair and unrestrained smiling, she read immediatel
y as funny, one who could probably find humor anywhere.

  “Sorry,” I told her. “When I get too comfortable, I revert to the kinds of things I used to say.”

  She cracked up. “What?”

  “My parents raised me to be too honest,” I told her. I elaborated and she asked more questions, and I eventually asked her about herself. She explained that she made radio stories out of interviews and that she wanted to discuss this subject more another time.

  We became friends and about six months later, she called me to ask if I’d like to be interviewed by Ira Glass to potentially appear on This American Life. She’d gotten a job working for the show. I said yes, but I didn’t expect anything to come of it. As far as I could tell, the show mostly featured stories of the likable and relatable; I was neither.

  I arrived at This American Life and the receptionist sent me to a waiting room. The office made no attempt to be fancy or romantic. The carpets and couches were gray, the chairs reminded me of public school. I noticed, squeezed between an intern and an air conditioner, a plain white shelf cluttered with awards.

  Ira Glass eventually appeared, thin, with a big face and huge features—what I called a “show-business head.” Conscious that I was interacting with one of the world’s most beloved interviewers, I was vigilant, watching for any sneaky techniques he used to get people to open up. As Ira and I got situated in the sound booth, I felt like I was scrutinizing a sleight-of-hand artist, watching for the misdirection, missing the fun of the trick. All the while, his movement was loose and comfortable, like he just wanted to talk.