Everyone Knows How Much I Love You

by Kyle McCarthy

  “Right.” I tried to keep my voice even. “I mean, she’s just seventeen. She’s not well versed on the difference between earthy and airy.”

  “Really? I feel like when I was seventeen I knew the difference…”

  Lacie’s voice went all wandery, trying to remember our youth. Annoyance flicked me. Why couldn’t she just call the little girl a bitch? All I wanted from friendship was the assurance that I was right, but put-upon, that furthermore all life’s troubles were really only hilarious episodes, nothing so dark it couldn’t be reframed as a one-liner. But there I was, in that room, still trapped with myself. Earthy. Lacie wasn’t any help at all.

  “Whatever. It doesn’t matter. It’s just, she’s so feminine and girly in this way that kind of mystifies me.”

  “Well, at least you’re working again, right?”

  “Yeah, totally.” I sipped. Something snagged: the check written out to Lacie tucked in my top drawer. “I still don’t—”

  “It’s cool, it’s cool. I told you, whenever is fine.”

  I sighed. “Thanks. It’s so humiliating.”

  She looked away, though because she wanted to give me privacy or she actually hated this money business, too, I couldn’t tell. “What’s going on?” I asked. “What’s up with you?”

  “Nothing. Ian is driving me insane.”

  My mouth was suddenly too wide for my face. “What’s he doing?”

  “He’s just working a lot. He’s at the studio all the time.”

  “Hmm,” I said neutrally. “He’s got that show coming up.”

  Lacie scowled over her glass, but the scowl already had some self-mockery in it. “I don’t like it,” she declared. “Obviously all the attention should be for me all the time.”

  “Obviously.” I grinned. “Me too. All the attention all the time.”

  It was like any other evening, our little routines and jokes, except that I still had something itchy in me. I still needed out of myself. “Attention is good. But not attention from a dumb teenage girl. Earthy. It sounds so musty.”

  “You’re not musty.” Lacie stretched her arms overhead. “You’re fucking hot. You’re beautiful. That girl is just jealous.”

  “Yeah.” Something pinchy and mean rose up in me. I wasn’t getting what I wanted from this conversation; there was something dismissive in her reassurances. I drained the last of my glass. “Whatever. I’m going to bed.”

  “And earthy can be a good thing…” she called as I drifted down the hall, and I shouted back, “Yeah, totally,” and shut the door and got out my phone. Fiddled with it. No new texts, no new emails. The weather was still the weather.

  The thing was, I just needed to say to somebody, “This girl thinks I’m a dirty hippie,” and have them exclaim back, like a friend, like any normal friend would, “What? Oh my God, that’s ridiculous, what a stupid rich girl; her brain has been lobotomized by Instagram. You know how it is. Kids these days.”

  That’s what a friend was for. And Ian was my friend. He had told me to text him. So I did.

  Descending the endless escalators at Smith and Ninth, walking past bodegas and skittery paper cups, I imagined in the swirl of sulfur lights an act of violence. A mugging. My body slammed by a city bus. The call to Lacie, her question to me: What were you doing there? To distract her I’d have to get seriously fucked up. Hurt. Hospital.

  Beneath the BQE I walked, and around the projects, deep in this bad line of thought. Unlucky. I forced myself from violence to Isabel. What if she were with me tonight? I would point to the trash and the silent, dark-coated men and say, This is New York too. This is what they’re hiding from you.

  At the bar Ian was wearing a T-shirt the color of sky after rain, a depthless bright blue. After my dark thoughts, and amid the steamed windows and piled coats, he shone out, fresh and cool. When he turned I tried to kiss his cheek, but my mouth ended up by his ear.

  He smiled distantly. He was so big and blond; his effusions of hair and skin, his broadness, his maleness, delighted me, so rank and hairy and even slightly repellant, so corporeal. So different from my last boyfriend, Alex, who had been petite and pristine.

  While I was sinking under his spell we were saying hello, I was ordering a Vinho Verde, Ian was unfolding a twenty, I was saying no, no, and he was saying yes, yes. Let me. In the back room a gypsy band jigged, and beneath their screaming fiddle and nervy tambourine there were glasses clinking, people shouting, a man’s rumbling laugh, and yet it felt very quiet to me, very quiet and slow, there in that dark, humid bar with the blue light of his shirt.

  Our silence stretched like honey from a spoon.

  He had dark eyes, deep and pooling, nearly black. Eyes that talked for him. He wasn’t afraid of silence. A minute after my arrival, we had already lapsed into one.

  Then the conversation shuddered to life. I asked about his show; he complained about the curator. He asked about my writing; I complained about Portia. We agreed that art was a bitch. I said that I thought Lacie was a frustrated artist: all those craft projects around the house, but stuck in an office all day.

  “Maybe. I’ve thought the same thing a few times.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “She can be a little scattered.”

  “Well, the house is very scattered.”

  He laughed ruefully. “It drives me nuts.”

  I flashed on his studio at the Barn: pigment plastic-wrapped, brushes soft and clean, yellow babouches lined up by the door.

  “I like it,” I told him. “Maybe it’s a little overwhelming. But it always feels like there’s stuff going on. It’s so alive.”

  “Yeah, with Lacie, there’s always something happening.”

  I felt then how we could make a project of Lacie. Pool our observations, fuss over her psyche, and speculate, as we had done the other day. It would make us close again, but I didn’t want to do it that way.

  As if he had heard my thoughts, he said, “You too.”

  “What?”

  “You too. There’s a lot going on with you too.”

  “Oh, thanks.” All I wanted was his praise, but getting it was too much; I squirmed away, and he leaned close.

  “No, I mean it. At the Barn? You were the hardest worker. You were up before everyone else. You were in deep. We could all tell.”

  “I’m a mule.” I grinned coquettishly from my wineglass’s rim. “Just plowing ahead.”

  But he didn’t take the bait and flirt back. Instead he got serious, more serious, which I didn’t think was possible. With those brooding eyes and hulking shape Ian’s default was serious, so when he actually got serious, the solemnity about knocked you over. “This novel,” he said quietly, “it’s the one from the Barn?”

  “Yep.”

  “Good.” He nodded somberly, as if he had been personally worried about my novel. “I have a feeling it’s going to be really good. Don’t stop working on it.”

  He cares about my writing, I thought, but he doesn’t even know my writing. He hasn’t seen it. He cares about my writing, but not about me. Which I recognized, even in the moment, as a stupidly self-pitying thought.

  But now we were in another silence. His eyes flicked around the bar. He was bored. Misery stamped me. I bored him. What did Lacie say to him? What did they talk about? I could feel the word earthy like soil in my mouth. How I longed to spit it out.

  I took another sip of wine—like tasting sky—and said, “Do you think I’m earthy?”

  “Earthy? No. What are you talking about?”

  “Just this girl.” I told my latest Isabel story.

  Ian snorted. “Why?”

  “I don’t know! That’s exactly the thing. How could she tell?”

  “No, I mean, why did it hurt you? Why do you even care what she thinks?”

  Why did I even care? Oh boy, could I explain that one. “I though
t I had shed my old dirty hippie persona, and it totally freaked me out to think it was still visible on me. Like everyone can see this thing, that I’m earthy, that I’m not sexy, like I don’t register as sexual, but I can’t see it, I’m completely oblivious to it.”

  “I think you’re sexy.” He was serious.

  “Well, that’s nice of you.”

  “No, I mean it. You’re sexy. You’re totally hot.”

  Exactly the phrase Lacie had used. Lacie. She was sexy. Even back in seventh grade we knew it. “I remember,” I said, “being at a school dance in middle school, standing on the edge of the dance floor, and not knowing how it started. How to begin.”

  “How to become a sexual person.”

  “Yeah.” I dug my eye sockets into my palms. “Like how to announce it. Maybe I still need to announce it.”

  The rec center. Shellacked pinewood floors, a long, low room, a tiny stage up front. Blue and pink lights. The crooning harmonies of mid-’90s pop. Sitting on a vinyl bench, waiting and waiting for a boy to come over to me. Watching Lacie on the dance floor. Watching Jesse Grogan’s hands cup her butt. Her blue-jean butt. How could she stand it? Other girls were asked, girls who were as nerdy as me, who got grades as high as me. Girls with glasses. Girls with braces. But nobody came for me.

  Why did that ignored girl still live inside me? Why was I still carrying her around? Men had wanted me since then. Men had chosen me. But still I felt like the girl who hadn’t learned the trick, who was marked as a child, gawky-toothed, small-eyed, unsexual.

  Ian regarded me carefully. Then: “Watch this,” he said, and sauntered over to the bar.

  All night I’d been tracking a cluster of young men in polos and fleece, clean-shaven, their elbows on the bar, looking around like What can you do for me? They were here—I knew—in this odd jazz club as a kind of adventure. Tourists. Young bucks who lived in Murray Hill, made six figures, and thought Brooklyn a lark.

  Now Ian nudged one on the elbow and made some comment. He got a smile, then a nod. I watched, amazed. Ian was good with strangers. It had to do with his beauty; even men responded to it. It was a weight, a force. You just gave in.

  Then Ian was motioning, and they were looking over.

  Furiously I studied the pale carbonation bubbles of my wine. Was I mad? No, more dazzled. Thrilled he would fish a man for me. Looked back: sure enough, Ian and a fleecy finance bro were trundling my way.

  I shot Ian daggers as he slid into our booth. “This is Franklin,” he said calmly. “He’s never been to Red Hook before.”

  “Hey, so.” Franklin was stocky, with square hipster glasses, a crisp navy fleece embroidered with the words Credit Suisse in white. “Does anyone actually live out here?”

  “My studio’s right over there.” Ian didn’t point.

  “Word,” said Franklin, still looking at me. “What about you? Are you an artist too? Everyone here’s an artist.”

  “She’s a writer.” Ian lifted his glass in a toast.

  “Guys. I’m right here. I can talk,” I reminded them.

  Franklin’s buddies at the bar kept glancing over and smirking. “I’m going to buy you a drink,” he announced.

  “Me too,” Ian shouted to his retreating back.

  Left alone, we smirked too. Ian hit my thigh under the table. “He thinks you’re my sister. You’re visiting from Pittsburgh.”

  “You’re such an asshole.”

  “You go to Carnegie Mellon.”

  When Franklin returned—with shots for both of us—I nodded at his pec. “Do you like it? Credit Suisse?”

  He looked self-consciously down, as if he had forgotten the words over his heart. “It’s okay,” he said cautiously. “The work I do is actually kind of creative. Not creative like what you do, but I like it.”

  “Oh, I’m not creative,” I assured him.

  “You are.” He sounded almost petulant. “You’re writing a novel.”

  “How do you know I’m writing a novel?”

  “What else would you be doing?”

  He looked so confused I genuinely felt bad for him. We had probably grown up in similar kinds of middle-class families, gone to similar kinds of upper-tier schools, and now lived in the same city. But somehow we couldn’t comprehend each other. I could see—from his clear plastic glasses, his plaid, even the fact that he was in this bar—that we liked enough of the same things. But we couldn’t find each other.

  To comfort myself I reached under the table and pinched Ian’s thigh. God, the texture of his thigh was just so interesting—so ropy with muscle. To investigate I crept my hand up.

  Then Ian, just as Franklin was explaining his deeply creative work, snaked his arm round my shoulder and kissed me deeply on the mouth.

  “Shit,” Franklin cried. “That’s your sister.”

  Ian didn’t answer. He kept kissing me. I tasted whiskey, burger fat, and the metallic tang of turpentine. When I opened my eyes again Franklin was gone. The blue Christmas lights of the bar spun dizzily.

  “Let’s go home,” Ian said, and we were out the door in a shuffle of jackets and scarves, on the cobblestones of Van Brunt where, crazily enough, a yellow cab was idling.

  “Red Hook’s really hot,” I crowed. “Let’s go to Red Hook tonight.” One of Franklin’s buddies stood in the middle of the street, stunned by our poaching of his cab.

  Ian and I, we kept kissing. I kissed him in the taxi and as he paid and in his bathroom after he had taken a piss. By the time we were on his sink I knew we would fuck. His thumb traced the dip of my bra. He smelled of sweat, whiskey, and wood smoke; the bristly blond hairs of his mustache tickled my sternum as his tongue found my nipple.

  A shrink would say, This is envy, introducing me to a party guest I’ve already met. This is desire, and this is doubleness, and this is fury; this is you kissing inside the bar, outside the bar, in the taxi, in the hall, against the door, on the bed. This is you kissing Ian, and Ian kissing you, and the way it seems hilariously irrelevant, the distinction between desire and action, though actualizing does bring Lacie into the room: with every kiss you are confessing that you would hurt her to get close to her. This is the link between you, this is why you are down on the bed, this is why your clothes are coming off, and you both know it and you keep doing it. If you have your mouths on each other you can’t speak.

  As soon as Leo said yes, we began. I sensed it was important to move quickly, before he changed his mind. Mr. Cowan said we could use his room, and that Thursday, after carefully tacking Lacie’s red scarf over the door, I turned to my two actors, who were sitting side by side, hands folded, waiting.

  Back in February, Mr. Cowan had announced extra credit for anyone who entered a one-act in the Young Playwrights contest. A day later, he added that anyone who performed at Art Night would earn extra credit too—not only the writer but the actors as well. Leo had a C in English; I’d heard him talking to Lacie about how he still hadn’t finished his Beloved paper. True, it had taken some wrangling, but once I had gotten Lacie hyped about a new project, Leo had fallen in pretty easily.

  To say I was glad is an understatement. By junior spring they were nearly mythic in my mind. Their names—Lacie and Leo—sounded so good together, like an indie rock band, and they were weirdly, seductively twinned, both long and lanky and sleepily hot. But it wasn’t just their beauty; it was also that they were leaving me. Sure, now they were careful to include me—Lacie, especially, made sure I was invited to every party and hang—but I knew it wouldn’t last forever. That’s why I had concocted my plan, had lured them, with extra credit and the promise that they wouldn’t have to do anything, to this classroom after school.

  But somehow in all my fantasizing about putting on a play, I had imagined only the camaraderie: goofing off during rehearsals, laughing at the costumes, huddling in the hot, bright wings. I had not imag
ined the first rehearsal, or their blank, expectant gaze. I was used to studying them for clues about how to behave.

  “Okay, um, so. This play. It’s, uh, a retelling of the Adam and Eve story, so basically, like, Eve didn’t mess up, she wanted to leave the garden….”

  Leo was staring at me so deeply that he was either completely engrossed in what I was saying or entirely spaced out. I trailed off.

  Lacie coughed. “Maybe we should just read it.”

  “Yeah, totally. Good idea.” My head bobbed in stupid gratitude. The scripts, which I had carefully photocopied during lunch, were jagged in my hands. Finally I got them onto their desks.

  They both immediately began to scan. I was horrified. This, too, was something I hadn’t imagined. “It’s a work in progress, you know, I mean, this isn’t the final script, you’ll probably think it’s really bad—”

  Leo folded back the top page and kept reading. How could I have thought this was a good idea? I might as well have toddled up and pushed a glittery house of Popsicle sticks into his hands.

  “Rose? Want us to read?”

  “Yeah.” I blinked back my attention from Leo. “Let’s read. Lacie, you’re going to be Eve.” Then I blushed furiously. Obviously she would be Eve.

  They began, and it was bad. Leo mumbled my words softly into the desk, and Lacie spoke in that childish voice I despised, the one she reserved for teachers and other adults. The lines that had sounded so witty in my head were dead and dull.

  Then a kid pushed his face up against the glass and made a farting noise. We all jumped. Word, apparently, had gotten out that Leo Kupersky was in a play. “Keep going,” I instructed, and repinned the scarf.

  But then a funny thing happened. On page twelve, Adam snaps at Eve, “Can’t you appreciate all that we have?” and when Leo said those words, something like real emotion came into his voice.

  Both Lacie and I straightened. “Don’t you have any imagination?” Lacie cried, and she, too, sounded alive, full of feeling, for the first time all rehearsal.