Adverbs Read online

  Adverbs

  Daniel Handler

  The author would like to thank the following people: Lisa Brown, Charlotte Sheedy, Ron Bernstein, Dan Halpern, Susan Rich, Josh Greenhut, Darla Spiers, Kezia Pearlman, Paula Sharp, Ayelet Waldman, Helena Echlin, Dan Clowes, and Amanda Davis, much missed.

  for Rook—

  for whom else the book on love?

  What do you mean where does the music come from? Where does the music ever come from? The guy says to the girl Something is on my mind and the girl says Really? What is it? and somebody in the orchestra hits a note and they sing. That’s where the music comes from.

  —MORRIE RYSKIND ON THE SET OF A MARX BROTHERS MOVIE

  Adverbs:

  Epigraph

  Immediately

  Obviously

  Arguably

  Particularly

  Briefly

  Soundly

  Frigidly

  Collectively

  Symbolically

  Clearly

  Naturally

  Wrongly

  Truly

  Not Particularly

  Often

  Barely

  Judgmentally

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Daniel Handler

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  immediately

  Love was in the air, so both of us walked through love on our way to the corner. We breathed it in, particularly me: the air was also full of smells and birds, but it was the love, I was sure, that was tumbling down to my lungs, the heart’s neighbors and confidants. Andrea was tall and angry. I was a little bit shorter. She smoked cigarettes. I worked in a store that sold things. We always walked to this same corner, Thirty-seventh and what’s-it, Third Avenue, in New York, because it was easier to get a cab there, the entire time we were in love.

  “You must be nervous,” she said when we’d walked about two puffs.

  “Yes,” I said. “I am nervous. I’ve never been to a reading of a will. I didn’t even know they still did things like this, read wills. I thought it was, I don’t know, a movie thing. In a movie. Do you think everybody will be dressed up?”

  “Who cares?” Andrea said. She threw down her cigarette and ground it out with the heel of her shoe like a new kind of halfhearted dance. “Look,” she said, and shaded her eyes with her hand for a minute like she was actually looking at something. I turned my head to see. “I just mean, look,” she said, cupping my head with her hand. “The expression I mean. Look, I’m trying to be nice, but I’m scatterbrained right now, if you know what I mean. I’m frightened by your behavior. I woke up this morning and you said good morning and I said good morning, what do you feel like doing today and you said well I sort of have to do this thing and I said what thing and you said go to the reading of my father’s will and I said what are you talking about and then you told me your dad died. This morning. I mean, he died two weeks ago but that’s when you told me. That’s when you told me. I’m trying to think that you just must be in shock that your dad died but it’s very, very, very, very, very, very difficult.”

  “He’s not really,” I said, “my dad.”

  Three cars went by.

  “What do you mean?” she asked. “What are you talking about? What could you possibly mean? He is your biological father and raised you, along with your mother, in the same house, for eighteen years. He carves the turkey at Thanksgiving and when I met him three years ago I said it’s so nice to meet your father and he didn’t even blink. How can you say that? What can you mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and we reached the corner. The street was a yellow streak, however many yards wide, cabs and cabs and cabs and the occasional car that wasn’t a cab so the whole thing looked like a scarcely-been-touched ear of corn. I put my hand up and one stopped. I opened the back door and Andrea just looked at me. I put one knee into the cab, half-sitting in it, almost kneeling as if the cabdriver, whom you’ll meet in a minute, had just brought me up curbside to ask this tall angry woman to marry me. She wasn’t going to say yes, I realized. She was never going to say yes.

  “Why are you acting this way?” she said. “You’ve never acted this way. Usually you’re, I don’t know. Usually we’re eating at diners and taking money out of our ATM machines, a normal person. What is—”

  “You don’t have a chance,” I said, “to act like this in a diner.”

  “Please stop,” she said. She smeared one finger underneath her eye, although she wasn’t crying, just finishing a finger painting of herself. She was done. “This is worse than the last time,” she said.

  “I think I should go to this thing by myself,” I said, and sat more. “I think you should go home to the middle of the block and I’ll go someplace in this cab. I’ll be back later or something.”

  “What do you—” She stood on the corner and wiped her eye again but now she was crying. Somehow she was crying by the time we reached the same corner and were almost all the way into a cab. “I’m going,” I said, and shut the door. She stared at me through the window like I was maybe nothing. The cabdriver asked me where I wanted to go and I told him Seventy-ninth Street and then I apologized for making him wait like that at the corner and told him I would give him an extra couple of bucks or something. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, and looked at me in the rearview mirror, a polite smile. His eyes veered off my reflection and onto the reflection of the traffic behind us, so we could merge, and we merged, and that’s when, immediately, I fell in love with my cabdriver.

  “I changed my mind,” I told him. Then I decided I shouldn’t tell him, not yet. His cab number was 6J108. His first name was Peter, I saw, and his last name looked like somebody had just dropped their forearm onto the typewriter keyboard, someplace in Europe I guess. “Penn Station. I have to go somewhere.” I felt the weight of the lie I had told Andrea, enormous and undeserved, and vowed I’d never do something like that again. But not telling Peter everything that was in my heart wasn’t a lie, right? That was just good timing. That was just being sensitive. “I don’t have to go somewhere,” I said, “not really. But I think I should go somewhere.”

  “Okay,” he said. It didn’t make a difference to him, and I loved him all the more for it. We turned left.

  “You have pretty eyes,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Peter said. “It’s pretty nice. Since they cleaned it up.”

  “So you’ve had surgery?” I said. “That’s okay. Some people think it’s vanity, but I don’t think it’s any more vain than buying a sweater. It’s funny we’re talking about sweaters, because I lost one in a taxi once. It was blue, a nice shade of blue. Andrea and I—that’s the girl, Andrea, who kept you waiting because I was breaking up with her—we were first going out. This was maybe three years ago. We caught a cab at the very same corner, actually, where I met you, Peter. And we were chatting about this and that, on our way to a party. I think a party, and we started kissing, and you know how that goes.”

  “Shit!” Peter said. Somebody in front of us had done something.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t mean to distract you. To make a long story short we lost the sweater.”

  “If it’s okay,” Peter said and pulled up to the curb. To my dismay we were there already. I rolled down the window to get a better look. Penn Station swerved to the left, and for a moment I thought there had been another catastrophe, but it was just me, swerving to the right. Peter was parking the cab in a rare empty spot across the street, one kernel of corn sticking in the gap between somebody’s teeth. “I gotta have a cup of coffee,” Peter explained. “So I’m going to stop here, if it’s okay?”

  The clock in his car hadn’t adjusted to daylight saving time yet and said it was fou
r-fifteen when it was really five-fifteen. Peter probably didn’t have time to fiddle with it, or it was tricky, as car clocks are. I didn’t mind. You can’t mind these things, you just can’t, for to dislike what makes a person human is to dislike all humans, or at least other people who can’t work clocks. You have to love the whole person, if you are truly in love. If you are going to take a lifelong journey with somebody, you can’t mind if the other person believes they are leaving for that journey an hour earlier than you, as long as truly, in the real world, you are both leaving at exactly the same time.

  He turned to face me and I saw what I owed him. “Here you go,” I said, opening my wallet and handing him something. It was risky not to look at the bill, but I wanted him to know that I considered the commercial aspect of our relationship over and done with. “Here you go,” I said again, because a garbage truck was going by and I couldn’t be sure he had heard me the first time, “and yes. It’s more than okay. I would love to have a cup of coffee with you.”

  Peter was already outside, looking up and down the street and waiting for me to leave the cab and join him. I stepped out and everything looked ugly, spots of gum on the street and smoke in all the oxygen. They say that when you’re really in love, the world becomes gossamer and gorgeous, but in my experience—with Peter, and, I suppose, in a more naïve time in my life, with Andrea and Bob Dylan—the world gets grimy, and the love object is in stark relief from the surroundings. This is love, a pretty thing on an ugly street, and why wouldn’t you pick it up if it appeared in a cab? Finders keepers is what they say, and I wanted to be kept. I could see, in this stark relief, every inch of Peter’s clothing as he nodded politely to me and began to walk toward a grimy little diner place, Sal’s. Black jeans. A sort of olive-green jacket, with a rip on one of the elbows covered in masking tape. Pretty, pretty, pretty.

  I won’t bore you with the details of Sal’s. Peter walked ahead of me to a booth and, after wondering if I dared sit next to him rather than across, I slid into the across seat. Best to give him space. I didn’t let the fact that I apparently no longer lived at Thirty-seventh and what’s-it pressure us into moving in together. I knew I could probably find a studio, month-to-month. Ridiculous maybe, but if you live in New York, real estate decisions can often supersede any other issues in a relationship, and it can be ugly, ugly. “Two coffees,” I told somebody who worked at Sal’s, and they brought them at the exact same time.

  “Um,” Peter said. He looked confused.

  “I understand,” I said. “It’s overwhelming, isn’t it? I’m sorry, I’ll shut up. You talk. Milk?”

  “I don’t have a lot of time,” Peter said, taking it black. I made a note for the coffees we’d drink in the future. “I’m sort of on a schedule.”

  “I understand,” I said. “We can just take it easy. I should probably catch a train at some point, see my dad, tell him what happened.”

  “Okay,” Peter said, but I could tell it wasn’t okay. He was looking over my shoulder, making a little jiggling motion with a clasped hand, like he was running a pen through the air.

  “I guess I could say it in a letter,” I agreed, “if that would help things any.” The check came and I threw another bill on it without looking. “But it’s really quite simple. Amazing, isn’t it, that something like this happens so frequently yet it boils down to three simple words.”

  “Yeah, um, okay,” Peter said, and swallowed the rest of his coffee. He was bracing himself, I realized. He thought maybe I would reject him. I reached across the table, over the bill, which I now noticed was a five, and tried to take one of his sweetly veined hands. He pulled away, stood up, snakebit.

  “What are you,” he said, “some kind of faggot?”

  “Not if it upsets you so much,” I said. I remained sitting, looking up at him like a visit to a volcano, my Vesuvius, my Mauna Loa, spouting love lava all over this ugly, ugly town. “Labels, Peter. That’s all. Labels. You know?”

  “How the hell you know my name?” he asked and backed up five steps. He bumped up against somebody, turned around quickly with a half-wave of apology. It was somebody he didn’t know. He had bumped up against a stranger. “How the hell you know my name?”

  “Peter!” I cried out, and he left me in Sal’s. I hurried the length of this stupid restaurant. Why had I come here? Why not show him a little respect, a salad, sushi? I had the money. I could spend it all on him, my Fuji, my Etna, what did it matter? My father wasn’t dead, but when he died I would surely get something, and by then, I was positive, I’d be assistant manager. We could manage. This real estate jungle couldn’t tear us apart. “Peter!”

  But Peter was already at his cab, looking at the ground and shaking his head in a tired, self-hating gesture. Denial, probably, the great exhauster, or maybe just a weary glance at all that sidewalk gum. The world was caving in on him, too, but my love wanted to run for it. Afraid of commitment, like all single men, he wanted to slipstream forever, picking up whatever stranger spotted him first. “Peter!” Without answering, he took his black jeans and jumped into his cab and merged, looking, I knew, into his rearview mirror at the reflection of traffic swarming around us.

  “I love you!” I called. Peter went by, and then a bus, with black smoke behind it like the appearance of an evil queen. For a moment Penn Station shook in turmoil, a bubbling and gaseous Penn Station, but then the smoke cleared and the building was fully upright, proud as the truth printed out in big bright stencils: 6J108. I would find him, my Mount St. Helens, I could find him anywhere. He was a landmark. I waved both arms in the air, joyous giddiness for all the cars to see: Peter, Peter, Peter. I stood at the curb and waved, semaphored, signaled. I hailed him, my active mountain, my hole in the sidewalk that led to the center of the world. I knew if I waved long enough he would pull over and take me where I wanted to go.

  obviously

  The movie was kickass, which was appropriate, because tonight it was called Kickass: The Movie. It was a sort of action-adventure thing starring two women and one man, and another man who was the villain, and they all said funny lines sometimes, so I guess you could call it an action-adventure comedy except it was not a comedy in the traditional, classical sense, not in the way Ms. Wylie called it. Lila and I were in the same English class and we both worked Saturdays and Thursday nights at the Sovereign Cinemaplex, and I guess if I were a little braver I would have asked her something like, “Do you think Ms. Wylie, who we both have fourth period, would call Kickass: The Movie a comedy in the traditional, classical sense?” and we could have that conversation, and it would lead to other conversations, during the flat and lonely times in the Sovereign, when all the people had paid their money and bought their girlfriends popcorn and handed their tickets either to Lila, if they used the right-hand escalator, or to me at the left-hand one, to be torn in half, the emptied-out times when all the happy people were happy in the dark, and Lila and I just stood around at the bottom of the whirring escalators, taking nobody up and up and up for the big show. But the thing is, that line about Ms. Wylie is sort of lame, and I think Lila would just roll her eyes, which are green and thick with black eyeliner and beautiful.

  Ask me why people go to the movies. You won’t ask, right? Because it’s obvious. There is nothing complicated about why people would stop driving around Mercer Island, staring out their car windows at those black, petrified parking lots with the birds sulking in the garbage, and come inside where it’s warm and where Kickass: The Movie is playing on two screens at 11:00, 11:45, 1:00, 1:45, blah blah blah, you can see it very clearly from the left-hand escalator and I’ve looked at it a million times. It’s not complicated. First you meet these two guys, one famous and one black, and guess which one dies in the first five minutes? Obvious. And they’re partners, I forgot to say, and the big white guy who always plays the Chief is playing the Chief, and he says the famous guy has to train these two women rookies, one of whom used to be a stripper and the other one I forget. I mean, it’s based on pr
actically the most famous TV show ever, so even if it was complicated you could just stay inside your crampy house and flip channels for five minutes and find an episode which would explain it all for you in about ten kickass seconds, and it’s not complicated. It’s not. Even on Thursdays it’s packed. The villain wants to blow up a stadium full of innocent baseball fans, and guess if he succeeds or if the two women who have to wear tight leather pants as part of an undercover operation manage to stop him, and guess if the famous guy gets to use that top-secret mini-submarine we got to see in the opening credits. Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Obvious.

  The only reason I’m blah-blah talking about it is so that you get what kind of night it was. Late, is what kind, but also obvious, and the obvious part was sort of messing with the kickass part, if you know what I mean. Like, just for instance, standing ten feet away from Lila was sort of kickass, with her nails drumming on the box with the slot in it where we put everything that we rip in half, and with her blue-eyed beauty and with the gum she was chewing and with how lovely she was, in that way that makes you want to find something else lovely just so you can give it to her and see how really kickass it is to have two lovely things next to each other in the Sovereign Cinemaplex. But the kickassness of Lila was a sort of muted kickassness, a kickassness tainted with melancholy, because there was also the obvious part, which was named Keith.

  Keith. Unchivalrous Keith. Keith who picked her up from work every night, and who, if this was Kickass: The Movie, would have a little fuzz of mustache so that we would know what an asshole he was, except this being the real-life Seattle Metropolitan Area there was no way anybody could tell and so he just drove up to the Sovereign and beeped his horn and Lila just pushed open the swinging glass doors with the stupid sticker-heads of all the famous people stuck to them and ran out into the night of Keith without anybody running after her and saying, “Don’t go out there to Keith! The boy who has stood by you, at the left-hand escalator, for nine Thursdays and eight Saturdays, loves you very much, plus his chivalry!” Which is the kickass part on my end, the part I think about every Lila moment, from the first bell for Ms. Wylie to the tearing of every little ticket that is handed to me: the total King Arthur chivalry that sits deep in my puny, frantic heart. Example of chivalry, why am I working at the Sovereign? What is the money for? To buy flowers for Lila and to give them to her. Keith? Honk honk honk, please come running out of the Cinemaplex doors and jump into the seat next to me where there are no flowers and I won’t even tell you how nice you look, I bet. But my secret special kickass chivalry is tainted, obviously, by obviousness. And it’s the obvious thing that it’s not going to happen. Because there might be a suburb of Seattle where a girl says, “Oh my god! Flowers? You are chivalrous, Joe,” and then I win and she doesn’t care that Keith has one of those all-terrain things that will come in so handy when the world ends and we need a nine-thousand-cylinder engine to drive over the hordes of bloodthirsty mutants crawling all over the video-game landscape, or maybe there’s a suburb of Seattle where Lila wouldn’t care whether or not her chivalrous suitor was wearing a fucking WELCOME TO THE BIG SHOW! button on a red why-the-hell-is-it-fireproof Sovereign Cinemaplex vest which is sort of blocking the signals of that hungry heart of mine, and Lila and I drive around this other suburb of Seattle in a car I take care of myself on weekends and tell each other a big bag of secrets we’ve been hiding underneath the beds our parents bought us, tossing and turning over its poky burlap creases and staring out of the window screens at a spooky blue moon that is beaming down secret New York bus tickets of a grown-up love future, and then someplace where the sun is setting or rising she takes her top off, but I don’t live in that suburb of Seattle. I live on Mercer Island, and here we just tear tickets and wait to watch her go home.