Everyone Knows How Much I Love You

by Kyle McCarthy

  When he finally looked at me, the light in his eyes had dulled. “Look, Rose. I’ve actually been thinking this for a while, but this thing about Lacie clarifies it.”

  He rested his arms on the bar, perfectly parallel to the edge. I got scared. Clearly he was ramping up to a speech, and the only time men make speeches is when they need to smash your heart to smithereens and they think they can do it diplomatically. He sighed. “The thing is. I think we should stop.”

  My heart dropped to my gut. Everything got real slow and swimmy, and his words stretched like Silly Putty across the bar to me: “There’s a way that we’re having sex that’s not working for me.”

  “You’re not attracted to me.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “That’s what you mean.”

  We both took a deep, shaky breath. My throat ached as I prepared to hear the familiar words about how fantastic, how fucking fantastic I was, how he really, really wanted to stay friends.

  “This was the thing I was afraid of. That you would take it this way.”

  “I’m not taking it any sort of way, I’m just trying to understand what you mean.”

  “It’s my stuff.” He spoke sadly. “It really has nothing to do with you. It’s my stuff.”

  If I were playing Breakup Bingo I would’ve just gotten the center square.

  “I thought the sex was really good. I mean, don’t you think it’s hot?”

  I knew he thought it was hot.

  “It’s just”—he was speaking slowly—“it brings up something I don’t like in myself. I know this part of myself. I don’t feel the need to explore it anymore.”

  Okay, so, a few times during sex, I’d cried. Just a bit. It didn’t freak me out. It had happened to me before, a hot welling when the wires of sex and emotion got crossed. Not a big deal, but the last time Ian had caught me. He’d been working his fingers into my asshole, working and working them, and I knew he wanted to fuck me there, and I felt trapped, caught, and suddenly there they were: hot shuddery tears shaking from me. He stopped right away. “Oh, honey, honey, what is it?” he had cooed, curling up beside me. “What’s going on?”

  “You’re scared,” I suggested now.

  “Maybe.” He sounded amiable.

  “So don’t be scared!”

  “Look.” He chewed the end of his straw. “I think it’s clear that we’re not good for each other.”

  “No. I wouldn’t say that’s clear at all.”

  “No? You wouldn’t say this thing about Lacie makes it clear? We bring out something bad in each other. We should just stop.”

  “Maybe.” I was thinking hard, scrambling. It didn’t matter what came out of my mouth, it didn’t have to be true, it just had to be convincing enough that he would keep fucking me. “Maybe, maybe we’re just like, interested in different kinds of kink. Like, I like the performance of losing control, this sort of overtly playacting, like, Oh my God, what a big cock you have!, and I think you actually like this more liminal stuff, where I’m actually ambivalent about the stuff you’re doing to me—”

  Two pink blooms appeared on his cheeks. He studied the floor as he blew out his cheeks. “Yeah, uh. This conversation is actually really turning me on.”

  I went hot. Just him saying it: I got hot. But wasn’t this game exactly the game he thought we should stop? “It’s just like, maybe if I sort out my feelings about us having the kind of sex we’re having, I won’t be so ambivalent, and then you wouldn’t feel so weird about it,” I concluded.

  He pushed back from the table. He had flushed a darker pink. “I actually can’t talk about it. It really turns me on.”

  Out on the sidewalk we kissed like crazy. Relief made me giddy. He couldn’t keep his hands off me. So no one was more surprised than me when Monday came and he did not call. Then Tuesday. Then Wednesday. I sent him one text, and he answered a day later, briefly. That was when I understood. We were done.

  There’s the thing when you fall in public, and you get up real fast, smiling, thinking it matters more to preserve your dignity than to figure out whether you’re hurt. There’s the thing where someone says I still want to be your friend, and you say yes, as if you even care about the friendship of a guy who no longer wants to fuck you. And then there’s the thing when you wake up at five thirty in the morning with your heart thumping gone, gone, gone and you think, Actually this is fantastic, when the supermarket opens I’ll be first in line. I’ve been meaning to make some stock, and we could use some more garlic anyway.

  But first, because you are an obedient child, you sit at your desk with a cup of coffee trying to write about a thinly fictionalized boy, but quickly you discover that your brain has been colonized by a real boy, and you think, It’s a relief, really and But you wanted this too and Obviously he cares about you, this doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about you but you don’t care that he cares about you, you care about him saying, You’re so wet, saying, Oh my God, your pussy feels amazing, and then you’re—what? Turned on and sad? Furious and heartbroken and wet? It’s a mess. It’s time to go to the food store.

  Two hours later, Lacie stood in the doorway to the kitchen wearing nothing but her underwear and one of my T-shirts, which naturally looked amazing on her. Clearly baffled to be smelling carrots and onions a half hour before breakfast, she nonetheless tried to play it cool.

  “You’re making stock,” she observed.

  “Yeah, I don’t know, I woke up early, I can’t get any writing done, I figured why not?”

  She took in the bubbling pot, the green plastic bag. “You went to the Co-op.”

  “Yeah, there was no line. I should always go early in the morning.”

  She cocked her head—that classic Lacie move—trying to decide what all this meant, but in the end all she said was, “That’s awesome. Maybe I’ll make risotto tonight.”

  * * *

  —

  For days it went like this. I woke up, heart pounding, splintery with grief, bright with the knowledge that he was gone. Anything remotely like sitting at my desk was impossible, but the thing is, when you wake up at six A.M. and you can’t write and you don’t have to tutor until four P.M., there are a lot of hours to slaughter.

  So I taught myself to bake bread. I took over feeding the sourdough starter. I scrubbed the woodwork, because God knows the last time that had happened, and replaced the lightbulb that had burnt out in the coat closet. Once the light was fixed I could see how much dust had accumulated down among our winter boots and summer sandals, so I took out all the shoes and the shoe rack, and then I matched up all the fallen gloves with their husbands, and dusted, and then I thought, I might as well mop, and really the closet looked so much brighter than it had before, and I was sure Lacie would be overjoyed with the bright yellow silk scarf that I had discovered crumpled in the back on the floor, especially since I had soaked it in warm water to remove the dirt, but she only took it between her fingers as if it were a letter from a foreign, possibly hostile country and said, “You’re not pregnant, are you? It seems like some nesting instinct in you has gone berserk.”

  I laughed as if this were the funniest thing she had ever said, and she did her head cock as if pretending to consider for the first time whether I was “sexually active,” and then she said, “Well, I think you’re working too hard, but it is really nice to have all that stuff taken care of,” and I saw that Lacie was not as indifferent as I had thought to who was doing which household chores.

  So I kept on cleaning. I stepped up my relationship with the toilet-bowl cleaner and started shopping for household goods. The oven door had squeaked since I moved in; with a can of WD-40 I silenced it. The shoe rack had a loose screw; I tightened it. Nothing I did was that complicated or technical—certainly it all seemed worlds easier than the magic Lacie regularly conjured from the kitchen—but I felt a little butch wit
h that blue spray can, or sticking a Phillips head in my back pocket. I was the man of the house, fixing things up, if the man of the house could also be a lovesick little girl.

  Would he text? Would he call? I daydreamed about his call, I daydreamed about what he would say, I composed his speech in my head. I told myself to stop it, to get back to work, to finish my draft. I told myself to imagine that the boy in my novel was Ian, so I could sublimate my daydreams into art, but everything I wrote was shit. It was literature. It was a lie.

  Then I fell asleep for an hour. When I woke up I thought, in wonder and amazement and hope, Oh my God, it’s noon on a Tuesday, and I’m napping? Is it finally happening? Am I becoming a Depressed Girl?

  If I were a Depressed Girl, Ian would definitely fall in love with me. Later, in my slim autobiographical novel, I’d describe how I’d felt faint when he’d proposed.

  After the wedding, I’d become frightened of certain streets. I’d cry often and forget to eat. Naturally, he’d be unspeakably good to me, so I’d have to do something truly unforgivable, like fuck his best friend, leave without warning, or give away his cat. In a foreign country, I’d tell lies to well-meaning strangers. I’d have meaningless, degrading sex. I’d spend a decade drinking too much, sleeping too much, sleeping with the wrong people in a studio apartment containing nothing but a mattress and a milk crate, only to emerge from this wasteland with a fully formed literary voice that described this torpid self-destruction in limpid, quasi-spiritual prose which would immediately earn unanimous critical acclaim, and all the disciplined little twats who had actually been writing for all the years that I had been depressed would just about expire from jealousy and frustration.

  But who was I kidding? I was a disciplined little twat. Even as I lay on the couch pretending I was too sad to move I was making to-do lists in my head. I would never weep poetry from my fingernails. There was no sense in wallowing. I got up and got back to the desk.

  When I got there, I found an email from Isabel. No content, just a single attachment. “College Essay.docx.”

  WHAT WOMANHOOD MEANS TO ME

  By Isabel West

  There is a boy in my grade. Actually I should say, there was a boy in my grade. Last year he announced that he was actually a woman. He started wearing dresses to school and sitting with girls at lunch. Everyone was very respectful except for some guys on the soccer team who did some disrespectful things, but they were punished and school guidance counselors came to all our classrooms and led a discussion.

  I have always been very excepting of Jewel. Her new name is Jewel. But secretly I have a hard time seeing her as a real woman. A bunch of my friends talked about it and we agreed. The thing is that Jewel never got her period. Getting your period the first time is weird. My mom said, “Now you’re one of us!” and hugged me, and I felt sort of freaked out inside, like I had turned into a monster.

  But now I like getting my period. Not all the time, but sometimes. It makes me feel really powerful and proud, like look, my body made this. Sometimes women who get eating disorders don’t get their periods anymore. It’s because their body is too weak. I am proud that this never happened to me.

  I’m not saying that Jewel isn’t a woman. She is. I’m not transphobic. But for me, I realize, my identity as a woman is the feeling that I have about my period, kind of embarrassed, kind of think it’s cool. That is what being a woman means to me. You’re just like a man, except you also get to do all this extra cool stuff, in your body, without even really meaning to.

  I wrote back to Isabel right away: This is amazing! So great. Maybe the best thing you’ve ever written. Just make sure you’re always using the right pronouns, and watch the difference between “except” and “accept.” Otherwise, great! I’m proud of you.

  Yes, she had written it fast. Yes, she would get pilloried for that opening. But at least she was finally getting weird.

  That night, Ian came over. Don’t get too excited: with Lacie. From my room I heard them talking in the kitchen. For a while I pretended to read The Book of Disquiet, as lonely as I’d been since moving to New York. It would’ve been better, I thought, if they’d just gone back to his house. I could’ve been truly alone.

  But when I walked past her room after brushing my teeth, Lacie called, “Rose? Come here.”

  The door was open a crack, and I pushed inside. Lacie and Ian were in bed. Lacie had on some old gray tank that made her boobs look big. Ian was in a white T-shirt. Being so close to them made me flush.

  “Come over,” she commanded again. “We were just reading.”

  Ian held up a pink paperback covered in ghoulish cartoons. “Do you know Angela Carter?” I shook my head no. He didn’t seem embarrassed. I wondered whether this was some kind of dare.

  “Listen for a while,” Lacie said. “She’s so good.”

  I inched forward. There was the usual chaos: clothes in mounds and heaps, books and dirty glasses everywhere, unspooled yarn. Her paisley duvet had been pushed off the bed—too hot, the heating in the building was manic. The top sheet was up around their waists. Beneath the sheet, their legs. There was nowhere to sit but the bed, so I perched and listened to Carter’s demented fairy tale.

  In “The Bloody Chamber,” a young bride is whisked away to a remote castle by her new husband, a wealthy older man whose two previous wives died under mysterious circumstances. The castle is huge and dark, with many rooms, one of which is forbidden. Immediately upon arrival, he deflowers her in a tower filled with white lilies and endless mirrors. Then he leaves. Alone, she roams the halls, drawn inexorably to the locked door.

  The story was sexy and disturbing, about complicity and depravity, and as I listened I couldn’t keep my eyes from Lacie’s breasts. Without a bra her boobs were soft and full. I nudged her, and she moved over, so that we could lie next to each other, two little girls sleeping side by side, as we had been at countless sleepovers. On and on Ian read, in a slow, steady voice.

  I wanted to drift my fingers up her chest. I imagined: her eyes would close, and she would settle on her back like a good girl, the obedient and passive girl she had always been, and I would peel up her tank top and bury my face in her breasts. Ian would watch. Ian would grow hard…These were just thoughts, cloudy dream-forest thoughts; they braided with the bloody chamber, the fairy tale with the cock like a sword. Yes, and Lacie would gently turn me over. She would give me to Ian. It was her way, to share everything….

  A heat traveled from my stomach to my toes, a wave of longing so strong I felt ill. Beside me Lacie smelled dusky, of earth and bed, in her thin tank, with her mysterious face, long and plain one moment, incandescent the next. Beside her Ian hulked like a mountain, a dark gravitational force. I wanted them both so badly—the desire was so strong I didn’t have to wonder at its strangeness—that my head went thick and my vision blurry, their voices distant through this haze.

  * * *

  —

  A thousand times I’ve gone back to this moment; a thousand times I’ve replayed the scene, wondering if my nerves failed me, if another way was unfolding before us and we all lacked the courage to take it. What might we have done? What might have grown from it?

  Instead, when the story ended, I stretched and said good night, and they called to me happily, glad for me, and glad for me to go. I thought Ian might catch my eye, let me know he was grateful to me—how mature I was being, how adult, not fucking up his shit, basically being a good girl, a good and obedient girl, submissive as he tossed me aside—but when I stood in the doorway he reached for the water glass and avoided my eye.

  The next night was the gallery opening. First I had to tutor Isabel. When I arrived, however, I was ushered not to Isabel’s but to Ervin’s office, a lavish leather den as large and dark as Isabel’s office was small and white. On the massive cherry desk sat Isabel’s new essay. Behind the desk, Ervin West, a squat, bald man dressed entir
ely in olive khaki, heartily shook my hand. I saw on the essay a big swooping question mark beside the word “period.”

  Ervin, without comment, positioned the paper so that I could see his incredulous markings (he also, apparently, had hesitations about the line I’m not saying that Jewel isn’t a woman and the word “monster”), but I was more interested in him: his shortness, his roundness, his pink, fleshy face and bald, shining head. What an unlikely vessel for such a gross quantity of capital. “What do you do, when you’re not doing this?”

  “What?” It took me a moment to understand. “I’m a writer.”

  We both silently look at the marked-up paper between us. “Writer,” he mused, carefully considering that category of people. “Like that movie. That sick, sick movie. What was it called? With Kathy Bates?”

  “Misery?” A book, you fuck. It was a book first.

  “Misery.” He clapped his hands with delight. “Yes. What a sick movie. I saw her in a restaurant once, Kathy Bates. I just looked at her and thought, Sick, you’re really sick. So. What do you think?”

  The transition was so abrupt that it took me a moment to remember my line: “She’s such a hard worker. So dedicated.”

  “Yes, exactly.” He seemed stunned by my powers of observation. “She’s a very moral being. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but she has a really strong sense of right and wrong. I mean, for instance, in this essay. Whatever its, um, shortcomings. She’s so accepting. We couldn’t be prouder of her.”

  Behind Ervin, the gray tabby padded silently into the room, then crouched, sprang, and landed, silently, on the polished expanse of the desk. Mindlessly Ervin dribbled his fingers over her face, and she began to lick. Her pink tongue—in and out, in and out, a regular pulsing rhythm—sickened me.

  “The thing is,” he continued, “Isabel’s in a place where she just needs to get on with her life. How long do you think it will take? One hour? Two?”