Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2019 by Raphael Bob-Waksberg

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Owing to limitations on space, information on previously published material appears on page 245.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bob-Waksberg, Raphael, [date] author.

  Title: Someone who will love you in all your damaged glory : stories / by Raphael Bob-Waksberg.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2019].

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018042971 (print) | LCCN 2018046016 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524732028 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524732011 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  Classification: LCC PS3602.O255 (ebook) | LCC PS3602.O255 A6 2019 (print) |

  DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018042971

  Ebook ISBN 9781524732028

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover images: (head) illustration by Justin Metz; (feet) George Sheldon/Alamy; (hands) Fabrice LeRouge/Getty Images

  Cover design by Tyler Comrie

  v5.4

  ep

  For Dahvi, the house where my heart lives

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Salted Circus Cashews, Swear to God

  short stories

  A Most Blessed and Auspicious Occasion

  Missed Connection—m4w

  The Serial Monogamist’s Guide to Important New York City Landmarks

  We Men of Science

  Lies We Told Each Other (a partial list)

  These Are Facts

  Lunch with the Person Who Dumped You

  rufus.

  Rules for Taboo

  up-and-comers

  Move Across the Country.

  You Want to Know What Plays Are Like?

  the poem

  The Average of All Possible Things

  More of the You That You Already Are

  We will be close on Friday 18 July

  Acknowledgments

  Credits

  A Note About the Author

  The date is going well. He’s handsome, and charming, and everything he claimed to be on the website. She likes him, she decides. He’s the kind of guy you could introduce to your friends, she decides.

  After dinner, he invites her back to his place. He opens a bottle of wine and pours her a glass. He also offers her a tall, skinny can with a rubber lid: “Salted circus cashew?”

  “What’s a circus cashew?” she asks.

  “Open it up,” he says. “See for yourself.”

  She looks at the can. The label says, The Cashew Company’s Very Own, and then in big, bold letters, SALTED CIRCUS CASHEWS, and then in smaller letters, TASTY! SALTY!, and then in even smaller letters, INGREDIENTS: CASHEWS, SALT, and then on the side there’s a drawing of a man with a whip—a lion tamer—the whole design of the can is circus themed—and the lion tamer has a speech balloon coming out of his mouth and inside the speech balloon it says, HELLO, FRIENDS! Please enjoy these freshly salted circus cashews, courtesy of The Cashew Company. Made with the finest ingredients, combined to perfection, this can contains only the best salted circus cashews; there certainly isn’t a fake snake wrapped around a spring that will jump out and startle you when you remove the top, if that’s what you were thinking. No, no, perish the thought, only cashews here, I swear to God. I am being one hundred percent sincere about the cashews. Why would there be a snake in here? That’s crazy talk. Look: if you open this can and a pretend snake jumps out at you, then you have my permission to never trust me again, but why would you want to miss out on the opportunity to eat delicious salted cashews just because of the slight off-chance that this is all an elaborate ruse to make you appear foolish? Okay, I see you are still not opening the can. And I understand that. Maybe you are right to be cautious. You have been lied to before, after all. Your heart is weathered and scarred, mishandled by many, eroded by time. You’re no dummy, and yet repeatedly, you stumble over the cracks of your cobblestone heart, you let your naked foolish hopes get the better of you. Per-haps every can of cashews has a fake snake lurking, but you keep opening them, stupidly, because in your heart of hearts you still believe in cashews. And every time you discover the cruel fiction of the cashew can, you swear to yourself you’ll trust a little less next time, you’ll be a little less open, a little more hard. It’s not worth it, you say. It just isn’t worth it. You’re smarter than all that. From now on, you’re going to be smarter. Well, I’m here to tell you that this time will be different, even though I have absolutely no evidence to support that claim. Open this can and everything will be okay. The salted circus cashews are waiting. They are so savory and delicious. You will be so glad you put your faith in me. This time is different; I promise you it’s different. Why would I lie to you? Why would I want to hurt you? This time there is no snake waiting. This time things are going to be wonderful.

  short stories

  There are two kinds of people, he thought: the people you don’t want to touch because you’re afraid you’re going to break them, and the people you don’t want to touch because you’re afraid they’ll break you.

  It occurred to her that she loved the idea of being in a relationship more than she loved any person she’d actually been in a relationship with.

  “You’re not like other girls,” he said to every girl.

  She told him she loved him and cared about him, and he was so dizzy in love himself he didn’t realize she was breaking up with him.

  He didn’t trust anyone who looked better in photographs than she did in real life. He was working out a system where eventually he wouldn’t have to trust anybody.

  “I never thought I could be this happy,” she imagined one day saying to someone.

  “I don’t even think about you,” he couldn’t wait to tell her, just as soon as she called him back.

  He had this really amazing party trick where sometimes he could go a full hour without even once being suddenly reminded of the paralyzing truth that his life was finite and unrepeatable.

  It occurred to her that she loved the idea of her husband and children and all her friends and her job and her life. She loved the idea of everything.

  There are two kinds of people, he thought: the people you don’t want to touch because you’re afraid you’re going to break them, and the people you want to break.

  A Most BLESSED and AUSPICIOUS OCCASION

  So if you ever want to hear a whole bunch of people’s opinions about the Right Way to Have a Wedding, the best thing to do is tell people you’re getting married, and then I guarantee you will be up to your armpits in other people’s opinions. For me, personally, the hearing everyone’s opinion part was
not the number one reason I asked Dorothy to marry me—I asked her to marry me because I love her—but as soon as we tell people, everyone takes this as their personal hand-delivered invitation to tell us exactly what we must do.

  “You must line the aisle with candles,” says Dorothy’s best friend Nikki, like as soon as we tell her, like before she even says congratulations. “And the candles should ascend in height, all the way up the aisle, as a symbol for how your love and commitment grow stronger and burn brighter every day.”

  “We’re trying to keep things small and simple,” I say. “We really don’t want our wedding to turn into a big, complicated production.”

  “But, Peter, you have to have candles,” Nikki says. “Otherwise, how will the half-blind love-demon transcribe your names in the Book of Eternal Devotion?”

  “Ooh.” Dorothy cringes. “I forgot about the transcription of names in the Book of Eternal Devotion by the half-blind love-demon.”

  I squirm. “You don’t think that’s a little old-fashioned? I mean, my cousin Jeremy didn’t have candles at his wedding, and his marriage turned out fine, even without the love-demon’s transcription of names.”

  Dorothy darts her eyes at me and I know what she’s thinking. Wasn’t my cousin Jeremy just last week complaining about the new carpets his wife bought for the second Flailing Sanctuary they installed in their aboveground Prayer Hut? Maybe they’d have better communication skills if they’d had candles at their wedding so the half-blind love-demon could accurately transcribe their names in his book. I can tell this is a battle I’m not going to win, but I stress again, “Obviously, we can’t do everything. We’re trying to keep things simple.”

  Nikki is unmoved by this argument. “Okay, but how complicated is it to get candles? I’m not saying you should rent a blimp or something. It’s candles. You can literally get them at the Rite Aid.”

  Dorothy looks at me with her big hazelnut-chocolate eyes and I know this is something she wants—even though she’s the one who said in the first place that we should keep things simple.

  “Well, let’s just see what they have at the Rite Aid,” I offer.

  Dorothy lights up like the Yuletide Hogfire and I resign myself to the idea that we are definitely going to have candles of ascending height lining the aisle at our wedding.

  But the main thing everyone has an opinion about is when in the ceremony to sacrifice the goats to the Stone God.

  “You want to do it early,” says my mother. “That way you get it out of the way and everyone knows the Stone God has been appeased, so this is a legal and blessed marriage.”

  “Are you kidding?” says my little brother. He’s studying to be a goat slaughterer at the university, so of course he has a lot of ideas about everything. “You know how much blood that is? You have to do the slaughtering at the end, otherwise you’re going to slip in goat guts while you’re doing the Dance of the Cuckolded Woodland Sprite and the blood will get all over your marriage cloak and the video will end up on one of those wedding fail blogs.”

  In that moment, I don’t have the heart to tell him we’re not even planning on doing the Dance of the Cuckolded Woodland Sprite, and we probably aren’t going to be wearing traditional marriage cloaks, and we definitely aren’t hiring a videographer.

  My mother shakes her head. “It’s actually not that much blood”—she looks right at my brother—“if you get a good slaughterer.”

  His face gets all flush like it always does when he feels like no one’s taking him seriously. “Even if you get the best slaughterer in town,” he says, “even if you get Joseph the Forever Sanctified—”

  “Please,” my mother scoffs. “You couldn’t get Joseph the Forever Sanctified with this little notice.”

  “Even if you could,” my brother says, “I’m telling you it’s going to be a lot of blood.”

  Dorothy puts a napkin over her pasta marinara: “I’m done eating.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say on the drive home from the Olive Garden. “I know my family’s a little intense.”

  “I love your family,” says Dorothy. “They’re just trying to help.”

  “We should’ve eloped,” I say. “We could have avoided all this stress and spent the money on a honeymoon.” Even as I’m saying it I know that’s a stupid thing to say, because a) what money? The only reason we can afford to have a wedding at all is because Dorothy’s dad is a real mover and/or shaker over at the Divinatory Rune Company and he got his branch to sponsor us. I was a little ambivalent at first about having a corporate-sponsored wedding, but it is Dorothy’s dad, after all—it’s not like we’re just shilling for LensCrafters or something—and if it means we get to have our wedding at the Good Church, with the stained-glass windows and the comfortable seats, instead of the multipurpose room at the rec center, which, no matter how many candles you light, always smells a little like disinfectant and cottage cheese—like as if someone tried to use disinfectant to cancel out the cottage cheese smell, but then it smelled too much like disinfectant, so they brought in more cottage cheese, and they’re still to this day struggling to get the perfect disinfectant-to-cottage-cheese ratio—well, if we can avoid that whole mess, then maybe it’s worth a few tasteful Divinatory Rune Company banners and a brief mention in our vows of the many benefits and useful applications of affordable twice-sanctified divinatory runes. But, furthermore, b) even if we could afford to go somewhere for a honeymoon, we both know I couldn’t take the time off. I’m already planning on working over Harvest Week, since the quarry pays time and a half on all holidays, and I’m counting on that bump to help cover rent while Dorothy’s getting her master’s in social work.

  “Really the only thing stressing me out is the goats thing,” says Dorothy. “Once we figure out what to do with the goats, everything else falls into place.”

  All of a sudden, I have a crazy idea. So crazy I feel like I can’t even say it out loud, but as soon as it worms its way into my head I feel like I can’t not say it, so I blurt out, “You want to just not sacrifice any goats?”

  Dorothy is silent for a moment, and I know that as soon as I stop the car, she’s going to get out and run away and never talk to me again, and the next time I see her is going to be in a photo on the cover of a trashy tabloid at the checkout line with the headline “My Fiancé Didn’t Want to Sacrifice Goats!”

  But instead Dorothy says, “Can we do that?”

  And I say, “Dorothy, it’s our wedding. We can do whatever we want.”

  She smiles, and I feel like how Clark Kent must feel when he overhears someone talking about Superman.

  But doing whatever we want turns out to be a real headache when we’re applying for our marriage license.

  “How many goats are you going to sacrifice to the Stone God?” asks the Woman at Window Five.

  “We’re not going to sacrifice any goats to the Stone God,” I say proudly. “It’s not that kind of wedding.”

  The Woman looks down at her form and then back up at us. “So, just like five then?”

  “No,” says Dorothy. “Zero.”

  The man behind us in line groans and makes a big show out of looking at his watch.

  “I don’t understand,” says the Woman. “You mean like one or two? The Stone God is not going to like getting so few goats.”

  “No,” I say. “Not one or two. Zero. We are sacrificing zero goats to the Stone God.”

  She crinkles up her nose. “Well, there’s not an option on the form for zero, so I’m just going to put you down for five.”

  Next thing I know, we get a visit from Dorothy’s best friend Nikki. “I heard you’re only going to sacrifice five goats.”

  “No—” I start to say, but she cuts me off.

  “If you don’t sacrifice at least thirty-eight goats, my mom’s not going to come. You know she’s a traditionalist about this sort of th
ing.”

  “Well, this wedding is not about your mom,” snaps Dorothy. “We don’t want to do the goats thing, and if she can’t support that—if she can’t support us—then your mom shouldn’t come.”

  “Wow,” says Nikki, and then she says again, for emphasis: “Wow.”

  Of course, my little brother is heartbroken. “What am I supposed to tell all my friends in goat-slaughtering class when it gets out that my brother isn’t sacrificing goats at his wedding? I’ll be a laughingstock!”

  “It’s not about you,” I say. “None of this is about anybody except for the two people who are getting married to each other.”

  “You seem tense,” says my mother. “You sure you wouldn’t feel better if you just sacrificed ten goats?”

  “Ten?!” says my brother. “That’s an insult! Honestly, at that point you’re better off just not sacrificing any and hoping the Stone God doesn’t notice.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “That’s the idea.”

  “Okay,” says my mother, “forget about the goats. But I’m worried about you and Dorothy, trying to organize this whole thing by yourselves.”

  “It’s not a ‘whole thing,’ ” I say. “That’s actually kind of the point, that it’s not a ‘whole thing.’ ”

  “Why don’t you meet with a wedding planner? Maybe having someone else will ease the tension off the two of you.”

  “There’s no tension,” I say, a little too loud and a little too fast, in a manner that makes it seem like there is definitely some tension.