Everyone Knows How Much I Love You

by Kyle McCarthy

  My laugh was a nervous exploratory trill. “How long will what take?”

  “She just needs a model. She just needs to see how it’s done. Then, moving forward, she can write her own. But she’s spent a lot of time on this paper. Too much, in my opinion.”

  The tabby, rebuffed by Ervin, prowled to me and, with a delicate corkscrewing motion, a twist both controlled and voluptuous, flopped on her back, offering her belly.

  “You mean you want me to write her paper for her?” I tried to keep my voice in another country, far from accusatory; I asked in the spirit of a foot soldier prospecting her mission.

  “Well, just provide a teaching aid. Give her a model.”

  I petted his cat to soften my words. Her nose was dry against my fingers. “I don’t write students’ papers for them. I just don’t. I don’t do it.”

  When he spoke again there was in his voice all the gravitas of true suffering. “When Isabel was two years old, a taxi came up onto the sidewalk and hit her stroller. Right on Madison Avenue. She was in the ICU for four days. The worst”—he leaned forward—“four days of my life. I just—you can’t imagine. My little girl. We didn’t know what was going to happen.”

  “That’s terrible.” I meant it. If it was true, it was terrible.

  “Thank God we made it through.” Ervin sighed.

  The cat, with a languid slow stroke, swung out her paw and snagged the hem of my blouse. Carefully, all the while making eye contact, I unhooked the claw.

  “But as a result, sometimes Isabel has trouble getting her thoughts onto the page. Abstract reasoning. You must never”—he held up his hand—“ask her about this. It’s been a real struggle. But that’s why I knew you’d understand.”

  “But I don’t understand,” I said quietly. “If it’s difficult, she needs to try harder.”

  “Absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, we really appreciate all the help you can give. We’ll see you next week?”

  With the same slow underwater motion the cat again swung her claw, and this time she ripped loose from my thumb a crescent of skin.

  “Your cat got me.” I held up my hand with its bulbing red blood.

  He laughed. He laughed for so long I became uneasy. Then, abruptly: “So, let’s say it takes you three hours. That’s fine. We can cover that. Just show her what real writing looks like. You’re a smart girl.” He rolled up Isabel’s paper and swatted me on the shoulder. “Careful. You’ve got blood on your hands.”

  * * *

  —

  On my way out I saw Isabel in her office and waved. She beckoned me over and announced, “He’s completely insane.” The blue light of her phone bathed her.

  “Who, your dad?”

  “He wants me to completely rewrite my paper for, like, the third time. Wasn’t that what he was saying to you? But he can’t make me. He’s not my teacher.”

  She was right, so naturally I said the worst possible thing: “He just wants what’s best for you.”

  To my absolute horror she began to cry. Softly at first, just a crinkling at the eyes, and then full-out, shoulders shaking, nose-running sobs.

  “It’s okay,” I cooed. “It’s okay. Why do you care about this paper so much? I promise you, it’s not even that important.” I circled my hand in the vague direction of her back, afraid to touch her.

  “But, but,” she gasped, “it has to be perfect.”

  “But why?”

  “I can’t believe you’re even asking me that!” She literally stomped her foot. “Basically this is the most important thing I’ve ever written in my whole entire life! The whole fate of my life is being decided right now.” She swung her fists around.

  “Isabel, Isabel. It’s okay. I hate to tell you this, but where you go to college—it actually doesn’t matter that much.”

  She straightened, and her face hardened.

  “It’s true. You’ll make some friends, you’ll take some classes, and then you’ll graduate. Wherever you go, you’re going to have a good life. That’s just”—and who knows why I said this—“that’s just especially true for you. Your life is going to be fine, no matter where you go to school.”

  Her face contorted itself into something resembling hate. It was the most reaction I had ever elicited from her. “Where did you go to school? Harvard?”

  “Yeah, Harvard,” I reluctantly admitted.

  “So it’s easy for you to say!”

  “No, yeah, no, that’s right, that’s true, but, um, you know, the general point still holds true. So”—I tapped her shoulder—“don’t drive yourself crazy. Don’t let them steal your adolescence from you.”

  Since learning the name of Ian’s gallery—Milk and Honey—it had made me cringe. It seemed too blatant a celebration of gentrification, though it was hard to deny the sentiment: Red Hook did seem like the Promised Land, not least for Milk and Honey’s monthly parties, which had become the thing, a free bacchanal where a band played, drinks were served, and all the artists and scientists and philosophers whom Johan Lundberg, the very pale blond Danish founder, had gathered round him opened up their offices and studios.

  It all sounded annoyingly hip to me, the kind of New York thing simultaneously overcrowded and over, but I wanted to support Ian, as a friend, by going.

  It does not exactly take a genius of self-perception to see my true motive.

  Lacie, of course, did not know anything about my true motive. Or she pretended not to know, or I was pretending that I didn’t know that she knew, or she was pretending that she hadn’t guessed that I was pretending not to know that she knew. By the time of Ian’s opening, we had reached a hall of mirrors. Her façades, the refractions of knowing, were so convoluted that I couldn’t even guess at which level we were operating.

  Just this morning she had said, “Do you think it will be weird for you and Ian to see each other?” but when I asked her what she meant, she only shrugged and said, “I don’t know. It’s so public, and it’s his art,” as if that made any sense at all.

  Regardless. When I told her I’d see her that night at the show, she hugged me—which she didn’t often do in those days—and said she’d see me there.

  * * *

  —

  I arrived late. In the stone atrium, a swing band had taken the stage, white guys in goatees with trombones, and I bobbed briefly in the sea of Brooklyn plaid. Behind a card table a woman in a cream-colored dress with sleeve tattoos was pouring wine. I opened my wallet and caught her violet eyes, mouthing red.

  When she handed me my plastic tumbler, she gave me a shy, pleased smile. As I drank, I thought it must be clear how much I needed it, my tension and anger X-rayed by this priestess of boxed wine. I asked for another. She hummed faintly under the music, a simple lulling tone.

  I drank from the second glass of berry-black wine until Ervin had melted from me, and the high vaulted ceilings were a cathedral’s, and the party a glittery, shimmery net of meaning. Sobriety, I thought: nothing but a deliberate dodge of beauty.

  Walking away from the band and the booze, I found beneath a soaring keystone arch a heap of dirt. Sculpture. In a shadowy corner where once longshoremen had stacked burlap sacks of coffee and crates of alcohol, a flickering film loop showed a hanging; endlessly the hooded body dropped. In the light of a camera obscura I observed a pregnant belly, bare and fuzzed like a peach. Thank God a 3-D printer had been fired up; in four hours we would have a fork. The showstopper, Johan’s own contribution, was an upright transparent coffin containing a human collaged from a million tiny cutouts of butterflies. I spent a long time looking.

  On the second floor there was a giant cocoon suspended from the ceiling, knit entirely from ruby-red yarn. I climbed inside. The yarn was soft but strong, tightly woven, and the whole hammock swayed when I entered. Instantly the chatter and music softened, and the sterile blue-white gallery lights
sank to a warm pinkish glow. A wave of luxuriant warmth swooned over me. Eyes closed, I listened to a fiddle playing down below. Its twang awoke some restlessness in me: I wanted to share. Where was Lacie?

  When I wriggled from the red cocoon, I saw a little sign that said LUCINDA SALT. What? My brain assumed an error. Not until I took from a hard, clear folder one of those heinous artist statements did it quite register: Lacie had a piece in the show. Lacie had a piece in the show.

  I found her down the hall, talking to some skinny Muppet-like hipster, but as soon as she saw me she broke away. In public we were each other’s priority.

  She was wearing a white dress, like the woman behind the makeshift bar, but Lacie’s was vintage shirtwaist with mother-of-pearl buttons, over which she had slung a kind of bolero jacket. It looked absurd, and bold, and she wore it very casually. My black jeans and cardigan, chosen to seem like I didn’t care, suddenly seemed shoddy and shapeless. “Do you like it?” she hummed in my ear. She must have seen me climb out of her creation.

  “I love it, oh my God, Lacie, I had no idea you had something in the show. Why didn’t you say something?”

  Even as I spoke I was remembering the red yarn at the house, cardboard boxes mail-ordered, full of soft garnet spools, so deep and plush I couldn’t resist plunging in my hand, as if plundering a chest of rubies. She had said something. She had told me she was making a cocoon.

  “It was just so last-minute, I wasn’t even sure it was going to happen,” she explained. I could tell she was downplaying it. I felt worse.

  “So you’re an artist,” I said unsteadily.

  The truth was that I had never thought of Lacie’s crafts as art. True, she was a founding member of the Aftselakhis Spectacle Committee, which every year put on a Purimshpil of impeccable leftist credentials, collaborating with formerly incarcerated women or nannies from Domestic Workers United on bright giant puppets and curtains and papier-mâché masks, but though many jars of sequins were used, and many tambourines played, it had never seemed very serious to me.

  She cocked her head. She took my measure. “I make things,” she said lightly, and I murmured a bit more about how much I liked the cocoon, how I felt it had held me, and then I said, “Take me to Ian’s art.”

  When we reached his studio there was a pair of teenage girls whispering on Ian’s couch, little ghosts of our past selves. When they saw us they hurried out, still giggling and whispering.

  “You can stay,” Lacie called after them, but they were gone. “They looked like high-schoolers,” she added. “What are they doing out so late?”

  I was too distracted to answer. For the open house Ian had draped his studio with swaths of velvety pink and Prussian-blue fabric, the better to show off his spindly gold sculpture, great architectural models of dream homes that could never be. “They’re beautiful,” I breathed.

  “Oh, yeah. Haven’t you seen his work before?” Lacie got out her phone. “Where is he? He said he’d be a little late.”

  Until then, I had only seen his work in little glimpses. He was protective of his creations, and usually kept them covered, but now I could look all I wanted. I approached a teepee, maybe a foot high, that swirled upward without a lid, like a cone that never closed; it made me imagine the night sky, navy etched with silver.

  This is art, I thought, but that was mean, and I didn’t even believe it: what Lacie had made was art too. I knew it, but I was simmering, not exactly with anger but with the growing conviction that I didn’t know her at all.

  “Come on, let’s sit on the couch.”

  We collapsed onto the sagging plum monstrosity, and Lacie started talking to me, fluidly and rapidly, pulling at my arm to keep my attention, while I darted surreptitious glances, trying to see more of Ian’s dream models.

  We passed her silver flask between us, giggling at the dark figures that hesitated at the door, safe inside the insular cape of our company. Soon, drinking, I forgot about Ian and his sculpture, which seemed, the more I drank, annoyingly cerebral anyway. What I wanted was more: more Lacie, more intimacy, more us. In a conversational lull I took her hand. Uncurling her fist, I said, “You know what I was thinking about today? Remember the letter you wrote me the first time you had sex?”

  She laughed. “I never did that.”

  “You wrote me a letter. It was really sweet. ‘Today the grass grew and Leo and I had sex.’ Don’t you remember?”

  “No way.” She nestled her head against me. “Were we apart or something?”

  “No, I think we were just—young enough that sex felt hard to talk about. That’s all.” She looked skeptical. “We were really young. Nobody now is ever that young.”

  “Why were you thinking about all of this?”

  “I don’t know, just thinking about Isabel.” Lacie’s eyes flickered dead with boredom, but I couldn’t help myself. “She’s so sexualized. Before she even knows what it is, she’s in it.”

  “I’m sure she knows what sex is.” There it was, the way she cut between warmth and irony. It drove men wild; it drove me wild too.

  “I think we had a code,” I said loudly. “Didn’t we have a code? I think we had a virginity code. God. Remember when we used to walk to the Acme and get those vegan moon pies? I thought they were the most delicious things in the world.”

  “Why are you talking about this?”

  “It just seems like we fell out of time.” My tongue was not so agile in my mouth.

  “Yeah. Did we really eat that stuff? It sounds disgusting now.” She smiled, puzzled, but happy to see me happy.

  “We’ve been friends for so long. What is it, like twenty years? It’s just so crazy. Am I even twenty years old?”

  She bobbed my nose. “Square dance. Gym class.”

  “You mean so much to me, and we’re just so close. That’s it. Nothing can break that. I mean, how many people do you know who are actually close to their elementary school friends? Nobody. But here we are. I mean, even when I sleep with Ian, it doesn’t change the basic fact of the situation.”

  “Even when you…” she said in a dazed, wondering tone.

  A flower of frantic love was blooming in my chest; it was imperative that Lacie understand how much she meant to me. “You know?” I said eagerly. “We’ve just transcended all of that.”

  Abruptly she scrambled back on the saggy couch cushions. “What are you talking about?” Her voice was dangerous.

  “Well, it’s not like it’s changed anything.”

  “What hasn’t changed anything?”

  Some of my wine and whiskey buzz dissipated. “Don’t you know?” I said more quietly. Over by the night teepee, a couple was circling; I could feel them listening, even as they pretended deep engagement with Ian’s art.

  “Know what?”

  “Know…” But I could see by her face that she didn’t—and then she did. “Oh my God.” She covered her mouth with her hand. “What? Really, Rose? Really?”

  Just then the warm, full roll of Ian’s laughter came dancing into the studio, noise from another planet. Lacie’s face was a crumbling wall, a dam bursting. “Ian’s here,” she murmured, and reached out, as if to pat my hand. Then she thought better of it, got to her feet, and left.

  I snuck a glance at the couple. They immediately averted their eyes. “Fuckers,” I muttered, and they scrammed. I sat there like a bug for I don’t know how long, thinking—what? At least it’s done? Yes. I was strangely elated, in a clean, shocked way, the way a wound is clean before it begins to bleed.

  My cell phone rang. I pressed it to my ear and bleated, “Hello!”

  “Rose? Ervin West here.” He spoke in a sadly automatic tone. Alone in his dark and dustless office, he must be cupping the big flat iPhone to his ear, watching the squares of yellow light in the luxury building across the street. “I want to have a conversation with you abou
t how you’ve been speaking to Isabel.”

  “How have I been speaking to Isabel?” I watched Lacie speak to Ian as if that would give me a clue. She had him backed against a wall, and their heads were close. There was something sexy, bright and flaming, in her anger.

  “I understand you told her that I’m stealing her adolescence from her. I’m just wondering what you meant by that.” He sounded pleasantly inquiring. Was this how he spoke to the feds?

  “It’s complicated.” I swirled my hand to indicate complicated.

  “What the fuck,” I heard Lacie moan.

  “Well.” Ervin cleared his throat. “I don’t understand how you can call yourself an educator and then undermine the whole project of education.”

  “I wasn’t—what do you mean?” Ian kept looking my way. Then he said something to Lacie, and the two of them turned and speed-walked out.

  Ervin was hesitating. Was he actually thinking? More likely, the noises of Milk and Honey—the new Red Hook—were reaching him. Finally he said, “I can’t employ someone who feels so conflicted about her job. Isabel has enough anxiety in her life already.”

  “Yes, absolutely, I agree—”

  Came the flat spat of cellular disconnection.

  When I took my phone from my ear there was a warm smudge where my cheekbone had been. Silently the numbers climbed on the display, as if our call were continuing. It took time for the network to understand.

  Delicately I tapped off. Took a deep, swirly breath.

  Strangers were looking at me. Then looking away. The scene had become a scene. The party had gotten smeary, turned up and sloppy, with a wobbly, dark hole where Lacie’s emotion had been. I pushed past the spindly, skeletal homes and the textiles of turquoise and green.

  Right, I thought to the 3-D printer, still wearily sawing away. Sure, I told the pregnant belly, luminous like an egg. The boy with the handlebar mustache, the girl with her tits strangely slung together, the hooded body that dropped and dropped: Really, guys? This is what you think about violence? This is what you’ve got?