Everyone Knows How Much I Love You is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Kyle McCarthy
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Forrest Gander for permission to reprint an excerpt from As a Friend (New York: New Directions, 2008) by Forrest Gander, copyright © 2008 by Forrest Gander. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Hardback ISBN 9781984819758
Ebook ISBN 9781984819765
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Donna Cheng
Cover photograph: Christina Krutz / Getty Images
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Part One: The Joining
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Part Two: Earthly Delights
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Part Three: Expulsion
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Everyone knows how much I love you.
All your gestures
Have become my gestures.
—Variation by Forrest Gander on a translation by Kenneth Rexroth of an anonymous Japanese poem
Is love the word for these strange deep ancient affections, which begin in youth and have got mixed up with so many important things?
—Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary
As many times as I’ve tried I can’t go back. As many times as I’ve sat writing at my desk—so many different desks, in so many different cities—that exact moment on the road remains blank. What was in my mind? I’ve tried to find it. I’ve conjured. Fibbed. Faked it, and let it remain the lie in the middle of my novel, the improvisation, the patch. The caulk over the crack in my memory.
At the time everyone wanted to know what I’d been thinking, and maybe lying so often lost me access to the truth. Not the truth, but the feeling. “You just…overshot the curve?” my mom said. “Was there a deer?” a cop asked. “Another car?” his buddy guessed. They were so desperate to understand. To diminish what I’d done. Decipher it. “So you swerved…”
I did swerve. But it wasn’t a flinch. It wasn’t a mistake. There was a column of rage in me, a crackle of blue flame, clarifying. The whole problem—as I recall—was that Leo kept talking. Leo wouldn’t shut up. It was past one in the morning and he wouldn’t stop talking about Lacie and so I turned the wheel.
Did I simply want to scare him? That might be too generous. But even now, all these years later, trying once again to summon the moment, all I find is static.
The moment afterward I remember. The moment afterward, indelible. Before the sirens, before the ambulance, before all the flashlights and noise and shouting, there was just a quivering hush, the trickling creek, and my beautiful boy, my best friend’s boyfriend, his warm blood all over my lap.
August, and a gray sweaty shimmer lay over Bryant Park. Cops stood around looking bored. A homeless man keened. Women in pencil skirts unwrapped greasy sandwiches with quick, surgical fingers, or forked up massive bites of salad. They ate quickly, alone; they had come to enjoy being outside, in this “urban oasis,” yet their shoulders were hunched and their eyes lowered.
But who was I to judge? I, too, sat at a little green table with my shoulders hunched; I, too, tapped my cell phone and darted my eyes. Wishing I had chosen a coffee shop—someplace normal—though at the time Bryant Park had made sense. Lacie lived in Brooklyn; I was staying with my cousin in Queens. There was the meeting with Portia Kahn, my so-called agent, which would bring me to Midtown anyway. And I was broke. Even four dollars for tea—especially four dollars for tea—seemed unbearable to me. So I had suggested this glade of green where we could sit for free.
While I waited I watched a woman at a sandwich kiosk feebly disguised as an antique gazebo. She wore a loose black jumpsuit and espadrilles. She had a tote bag. Her brown curls were carelessly pulled into a messy topknot. She was not like the office drones; in fact, I could almost imagine myself, once I had settled into my New York life, dressing something like her. Up at the green-black trees she gazed. Then she turned.
Everything slowed. My lizard brain knew her. Even from across the park I knew. That tilt of the head, the squint as she scanned the tables. I had a sudden instinct to hide. Too late—she had spotted me, was even now rushing across the park, calling “Rose!”
Then she stopped short. We met each other’s eyes. We stared deep. We looked the way you look in a mirror when you are alone: blatant, utterly unself-conscious. “Wow,” she murmured. “It’s been so long. It’s been forever.”
Time had sharpened her face, and it was strange to see her with a few strands of silver hair. Yet in her gray eyes, and the vexed, pointed chin, there was still Lacie.
The spell broke—she broke it with a tentative smile—and we embraced. Inside my arms she smelled of sweat and summer. Everything came back to me. Lacie, Lucinda Salt. Here. I shuddered.
She pulled back. “Want to sit? Do you still have some time?”
“So much time,” I said, and then regretted my honesty. I couldn’t stop looking at her. Her eyes, I thought. What drives men crazy are her eyes.
She had come back into my life in that most quintessential of contem
porary ways, the email. A shy, tentative email. Twelve years it had been. Not a word since high school, and then suddenly her name on my screen. I’ve been seeing someone you know…Ian, apparently, had brought up my name; he had been the one to share my email address.
“I can’t believe you know Ian,” I said once we had settled ourselves at my table. I tried to keep my voice offhand.
“I can’t believe you know him.” She twisted the cap off her iced green tea and took a tiny, nervous sip. “When he was like, ‘My friend Rose is moving to town,’ I thought, I used to have a friend named Rose…”
Used to, so casual on her lips, startled me. I tried to match her bright tone. “So you guys are dating?”
“Apparently.” An ironic twist to her lips. “I hope you don’t mind me reaching out. It was his idea.”
In the hollow of her throat, a tendon was jumping. I felt it in my own neck. The rigid angle of her arm: my arm, too, was oddly bent. Always between us there had been this symmetry, this sympathetic pain, born of thousands of hours of sleepovers and creek walks, born, I think, of being children together. A kinship between our cells. I realized what I should have known right away: she didn’t want to be here. She had come for him.
We locked eyes again, and in that moment I knew—but the kind of knowledge that is like a dream, so that you doubt it afterward, if you even remember it—that I had haunted her twenties the way she had haunted mine. I had lived inside her brain. I knew it.
“How did you guys even meet?” I found myself saying. “How long have you been dating?”
“At a gallery. I don’t know, like, six months?” She pursed her lips, as if to say, Who even keeps track? and then continued unwrapping her sandwich, a steaming mass of avocado and slippery roasted red pepper. “Do you want some?”
“No, no, I’m fine. I’m not going to take your lunch.” I rolled my eyes to underline the largesse of such a gift. “So where do you work? Somewhere near here?”
“Yeah, it’s a magazine. I do graphic design.”
“Oh, nice. What magazine?”
“Tablet? It’s Jewish. It’s small.” She nibbled the edge of her grilled bread, then looked at it quizzically, as if it didn’t taste quite how she had expected. I squelched a smile, and when she met my eye, something unlocked between us.
“A panini’s really just a grown-up grilled cheese, isn’t it?” she asked, and I giggled and agreed.
After that, we talked more easily. I described my horror of the subway platforms, hellish in the August heat, and she commiserated, saying that summer in New York made everyone “completely hysterical” and “basically insane,” and then telling a long elaborate story about the night she bought an air conditioner, all the cabs and tips and smiles it had taken to get it home, the drama of installation, the fear that it might tumble from her fourth-floor window. When she told me about waking up in the middle of the night to pat it, as if it were a fussy baby, I laughed and laughed, more from relief that she was being nice to me than anything else.
We chatted a bit, too, about the past decade. Not high school, not college, but our twenties: her stint in art school, the series of graphic design jobs she had held, my peripatetic wandering across the country, the time in Iowa and Oakland, the stints in Montauk and Nebraska.
“Iowa?” Her gaze sharpened. “Iowa City? The Workshop?”
This was a revelation: in certain New York circles, the entire state of Iowa was reducible to a single graduate program. I nodded, thinking she would be pleased, even impressed, but instead she pouted. “You’re not writing plays?”
In high school I had written a one-act in which the biblical Eve fights with the biblical Adam, then stabs him in the heart. Senior year, it had won all sorts of prizes, local and eventually national, but before that, when it was just an extra-credit project for English class, I had cast Lacie as Eve, and her boyfriend, Leo, as Adam. For six glorious weeks I had rehearsed them in the English teacher’s classroom.
“Oh, that,” I said now. “That was just kind of a high school thing. In college I got more into fiction writing.”
“But you were so good!” she protested.
I caught my breath. She did not sound upset, did not sound like she was even thinking of the accident.
“I just got into fiction,” I said again, more firmly this time, and she dropped it, asking instead what I was up to in New York.
“Oh, just—writing. I’m working on a novel.” I flinched. “I’m going to try to tutor rich kids too. I think it’s the easiest way for me to make money. I mean, without taking off my clothes.”
This was my line, and I felt a surge of triumph and relief as I delivered it, thinking I sounded debonair, as if I would strip, if SAT prep weren’t so damn easy.
But Lacie wasn’t that easily distracted. “What’s your novel about? Can I ask?”
“Ah, you know.” I coughed a little. “I’m actually not telling anyone.”
“Oh, okay.” Lacie’s face scurried in understanding. “Yeah, totally. That’s what writers do. I get it.” She crumpled up her napkin and waxed paper. “Well. This is a tease, I know. But I should get back.”
We said goodbye ambiguously. Or maybe not. If I had lived in New York longer, I might have understood that Lacie’s “Let’s hang out sometime” essentially meant “Let’s never see each other again,” but as it was—especially because she gave me her number—I believed her.
Her last words to me were “Well, give me a shout if you’re ever in Ditmas Park.”
My expression must have been blank, because she added, as if I had caught her out, “Okay, technically it’s Prospect Park South, but nobody knows where that is.” She raised her eyebrows at some unspoken irony.
I gulped, nodded, and watched as she walked away. Her loose tendrils, the boxy glasses, the jumpsuit at once unfussy and hip, were all so artlessly graceful, so casually perfect, that from within me came jealousy’s old familiar throb.
After another hour baking in Bryant Park, I was sweaty and damp, yet Portia Kahn was nothing if not gracious when I was ushered into her office, cooing “Such a pleasure!” while ignoring the darkened half-circles beneath my pits. “After all our conversations on the phone.” She pressed my hand. “How long has it been? So nice to see you again. What you’ve written, it’s just incredible. Your voice is so raw.”
If you have been writing in the dark for the greater part of your twenties, if you have scraped by on glorified secretary jobs while your college classmates pulled down six figures at Google or launched themselves into exciting and rewarding careers as immigration-reform lawyers, if on the cusp of your Saturn’s return you moved to a small Midwestern town simply to find relief from all the mind-numbing office work, if you then labored in the cornfields for two years, rising in blue-black January mornings to icicles dangling daggerlike from the attic windows of your garret apartment to write your little thermal-wearing heart out, working and working and working on the almost prerequisite and certainly predictable thinly veiled autobiographical novel, then these words will be balm. Grace. All you’ve ever wanted to hear.
My final year, Portia had come to Iowa as a visiting literary agent. A tiny elegant bird with silver earrings and pearly pink nails, she had stood before us and assured us that she loved the short story, loved a good collection, which we all knew meant: I hate story collections, story collections don’t sell. Like every other agent, she wanted novels.
When she left two days later with a stack of manuscripts I had been confident, though I made a great performance, as did everyone else, of exclaiming over how terrible my novel excerpt was. But I knew: what I had done as a teenager was so shocking that there was no question it would hook her.
When she called a month later, I had again pretended great humility. Alone in my attic apartment, I hummed polite demurrals while she exclaimed, “Rose! You’re so talented. And this
novel! It’s just extraordinary.”
There were, though, just a few things. Some minor points. Questions, really. For the next two hours she talked, and I typed, and when we were done I had a five-page, single-spaced Word document with structural changes, character questions, plot notes, suggestions for added scenes and deleted scenes, narrative arcs that might be “strengthened,” and interiority that might be “more fully revealed.”
But who was I to complain? She had called my novel extraordinary.
So for the next three years I wrote and Portia advised. Always success seemed right around the corner. As I traveled from Iowa to Oakland to Montauk to Nebraska, she followed, a voice on the phone, cajoling and promising, sweet-talking and demurring. Urging me forward, but cautioning “not yet.” Not quite yet.
And now here she was. Draped in black, with the same pearly pink nails and silver earrings, she was still almost unbearably elegant, but when she said, “Your prose has this…” and then avoided my eye to stare into space to find the exact phrase, “granular specificity,” I saw—as I hadn’t before—that behind this smooth woman there was a nerdy girl who had once taken refuge in books. It made me trust her all over again, this dweeby, eager bookworm poking out behind the classy façade of Portia Kahn.
Not surprisingly, she thought the book needed “one last” push, that the stakes of the book needed clarifying. “This depiction of female friendship, it troubles me,” she explained. “There’s so much jealousy in the book. And the best friend. I still don’t have a sense of Lacie.”
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