by Iris Smyles
Traffic out front. Deliveries. Buses starting and stopping. People chatting.
I’m trying to whistle. I’m practicing the look-at-the-golf-sticks-on-that-toothsome-retirement-plan, I-wouldn’t-mind-wrapping-my-mouth-around-his-soft-manners whistle one hears so often at the entrance to squash courts and charity galas—the intermediate skill level I’m stuck on. I want to whistle lonesome country tunes in perfect vibrato, but the best I can do is mimic a sick bird. Where is my recorder? Back in Long Island with my parents, in its green sleeve. In my old bedroom, I suppose. Probably under the bed. I used to be pretty good at that. I should find it next time I’m home, bring it back with me, start practicing again.
Sunday.
I’m trapped in my apartment with a crippling hangover and no way out. This happens all the time. It never occurs to me to use the door. Because I know that beyond the door is just more of the same. No. There is no escape. The only thing to do is wait. Or jerk off. But I’ve done that three times already this morning. I’m not a compulsive jerk-off or anything; I just find it helps with hangovers. But I don’t have it in me to do again now. Plus, lately when I do it, I’m possessed of a weird vision. I’ll try to picture myself having sex with someone, when suddenly all the dimensions get warped, and I get this image of myself as a giantess, and the man I’m imagining as some tiny minutia whom I can barely see between my mountainous thighs. It’s disturbing and makes it very hard to come.
On the ceiling, a series of images: all the idiotic things I’ve ever done, all the idiotic things I’ve still to do and, more specifically, all the idiotic things I did last night—the Scotch tape fight with Felix, the disgusting mouth of that guy I kissed at the bar, the water balloons, the neighbor knocking at 5 AM, my tap-dancing back and forth on the coffee table in time to marching band music.
I got this album, Popular Marches, from a street vendor a while back and like to play it when I’m drinking. Something about the drums and horns inspires me. When Souza fills the room, I feel as if my drinking were a heroic act, as if each full glass were a threat to America, as if it were all up to me to knock them back. I’m very patriotic. That’s my problem.
Maybe I should stop drinking. Maybe I should marry Jacob. So what if he’s shorter than me. I need a boyfriend. Someone sensible for whom I could cook sensible dinners. I should stop going out. And stop staying in and tap-dancing on my coffee table. Stop defending my country all the time. Another vision from last night: that guy I danced with, his sweaty face coming toward me.
In the kitchenette, flies circle the sink like buzzards over a body. The sink is full of dirty dishes from the party I threw Friday: a quiet dinner for thirty. It was supposed to be a small affair, but then I couldn’t stop inviting people. What happens is you invite so-and-so and then realize you can’t invite so-and-so and not so-and-so, so you invite so-and-so, too, doubling your list. And then you realize you’ve invited almost all men and so have to double that list by telling each of them to bring dates or be dead to you forever, and then the next thing you know, the neighbors are complaining about the noise pouring out of your intimate soiree, which you ended up hosting on the roof because you couldn’t fit everyone in your apartment, despite the fact that your roof is not coded for entertaining, according to your complaining neighbor, as if it’s your fault the builders didn’t lay any kind of tile or wood over the melting tar destroying your shoes as you offer him a conciliatory meatball. It was fun, but still.
No more banquets. Just sensible dinners for two with my boyfriend Jacob, who wears lifts in his shoes. He and I could stop drinking together. We could experiment with healthy low-fat recipes and, after sharing balanced meals, sit on the couch and take our blood pressure before opening our respective mystery novels in order to read with our feet touching about the cold world and its thrilling crimes.
But I don’t want a boyfriend! I want to be independent! What I want is to finish my own novel. I’d be much more attractive if I published a bestseller, a book about papal conspiracies with a raised font on its cover, or a nonfiction tome about how dairy created the modern world. Something bankers would enjoy. I should land a boyfriend who’s vice president of something, that’s what I should do. Then we could get married, and I wouldn’t have to work anymore and could stop pretending I’m modern and interested in having my own identity apart from his. I could get my hair and nails done biweekly, have parcels from my shopping trips delivered to the house, where they’d remain unopened, their tissue paper clogging the hallways of our baroque mansion’s western wing, in the far end of which I’d recline, miserable, bloated on high-grade whiskey and pills, yelling between massages whenever the fink dare ask me about my spending—“Why don’t you ask the nanny where the money’s gone, you Vice President of shit!”—get married and start living the good life.
Under my coffee table I spot a few pot seeds, the burned paper of a roach, a bottle cap—“Drink Coke, Play Again”—and an uncapped Magic Marker from when we played the let’s-throw-Magic-Markers-at-my-ceiling-fan game.
A broken cigarette; I put it in my mouth. No light.
I hoist myself up, pad over to the stove, and set the thing on fire, nearly singeing my eyelashes in the process. Need the lashes, Ms. Smyles! No vice president is going to marry a lashless freak. The cigarette burns my throat. I never enjoy cigarettes, yet I continue to smoke them. If only I could apply that kind of discipline to my writing.
My book. Yes, the book. If my book were really good, I might skip marriage altogether. I could live alone, clothe myself in lavish silks and turbans. Start penciling in my eyebrows. I could pay servants to act as my friends. I could stage elaborate tests to see who of my friends/servants truly care for me and who are just in it for the trickle-down of my wealth and status. And then when I found out, fire the true friends. I could become very eccentric, stop clipping my fingernails, let them grow long and curling, never leave my bedroom, take to peeing in jars. I could get a small dog and fill the estate with oil portraits of him dressed variously, in a spacesuit, on a clam shell . . . I should get to work.
But I can’t write now. Not in this heat. Not with this hangover. Tomorrow, once my head is clear. Tomorrow. Another vision from last night: Reggie’s face. He was so mad when I brought all those guys to his place. But I made it a party! Why did I kiss Jess’s friend Tom? Because his face was right there. Jess is never going to call me now. Which is good because I can’t afford to be in a relationship, and if I go out with Jess that’s exactly what it will turn into, and I need to stay focused on my book right now. The book is the key! Thank god I kissed Tom. Kissing Tom was really the best thing.
I can’t breathe; the cigarette tastes stale. Perhaps I should go to a tubercular sanitarium, like in The Magic Mountain. Convalesce for a while, write my book on the horizontal. I don’t have the stuff to get into Yaddo, but a sanitarium might accept me if I did enough damage to my lungs. Must build up to a pack a day.
I should do something. Writing is out of the question, but I can’t lie here all day either or I won’t be able to sleep tonight, and then tomorrow will be a wash, too. Tomorrow, I’ll put pants on as soon as I get up. First thing. Nobody changes the world in their underwear. I’ll say that in my Paris Review interview when I talk about my process. I’ll tell them all about my collection of slacks. I should go for a walk, that’s what I should do.
Outside, the heat hits me like a rogue wave. But then, there is a slight breeze, and it feels altogether much better than it felt upstairs. Why didn’t I leave earlier? Why all that stewing? Why always surprised by the very same surprises?
I overthink things is the thing. And in all that thinking, I just can’t see my way around the present. A hot day feels like it’s going to last forever. Like there was never any day before, and there will never be a day after, so I might as well just stay very still and try to get used to it.
You know those people you see in the hot car on the subway? You know how in the middle of the summer, when you board the
subway in the middle of the day and the car is stiflingly hot because the air-conditioning is broken, and so the compartment is all but empty, empty but for a few weirdoes who are sitting by themselves, staring and sweating, and they kind of watch you as you go through the double doors to the next car, which is cool and fine and normal? That’s me. The weirdo looking at you as you leave. I stay in the hot car. I just figure once I get on, that’s my lot.
I don’t need an island; I could get stranded on a desert square inch. There could be a mini-mart around the next corner, but I’d just lie down, telling my thirsty companion, “Take whatever’s left of the water and go! Leave me here to count my time upon the sand. But if you do survive, tell them my name. Let my memory live on through you and your children—tell them I was pretty!”
But now I’m at large in the city! Free! Turning destiny over in my pocket like loose change. A summer day, the air like “free soup with sandwich after 5 PM,” moved by a light breeze as if some good god were blowing on it with poised spoon. Not bad at all. And the sidewalks, lively with bright-eyed pedestrians, the streets full of eager cars, and restaurant doors opening and closing, offering cool air-conditioned gusts to passersby. Vendors set up along the curb, and there’s an ice cream truck and all sorts of wonderful things, and already I’m feeling much better.
I pass a blanket laid out with some fine merchandise on one of the sidewalks not too far from my apartment. I’m accustomed to my neighborhood’s regular roundup of vendors, but this guy’s new, so I stop to get a closer look at his wares, when something colorful catches my eye.
How to Make Sex Fun, a videocassette. Part 3 in the series How to Make Sex Fun. This particular segment involves board games, I’m startled to find as, turning over the box, I’d braced myself for something considerably less literal. But then, why not? Why shouldn’t sex benefit from a little Battleship?
I inquire with the store’s proprietor, the guy lying next to the blanket presumably, about the contents of the companion videos. “What did they offer as fun tips?”
He supplies a quixotic “oh yeah” and lies back down.
He has a point. What could possibly be more fun than board games?
I don’t buy it, though I want to. I decide to think about it more instead, get it on my way home if the interest still holds. I don’t want to act on a rash impulse. I’m too much lately a bundle of rash impulses, tied together with the string from an old box of cannolis. I want to try—I don’t know—to improve myself through a strict protocol of careful consideration. I want to give more thought to this matter than I’ve given to all previous matters, to matters last night, for example. Balance things out a bit the way I do with cabdrivers, tipping some in small change and others in whole bills, knowing this makes it all even in the end.
I keep walking, keep considering, and the questions arrange themselves like this: Is sex fun? The makers of the video assume not and offer a remedy for that via Jenga. It’s an interesting supposition and I tend to agree that it’s not fun, but more . . . sexy. Still, I could stand to learn a thing or three. I decide to make the purchase. Add it to the sex library I keep next to my bed for like-minded guests intent upon their education. I’ll put it to the left of Libido Theory and to the right of Disorders of Sexual Desire, or should it go between The Hand-Job Handbook and Living Sober, a book I read from time to time, from cover to cover, on long nights of drinking alone. By the twelfth step, I usually pass out and upon waking find that someone’s trashed my apartment.
I’m imagining all kinds of sexy fun in the future. This video might really leaven the bread. “Look what I’ve got, Vice President!” I’ll sing, waving the videocassette and a pack of Chinese checkers.
I follow the same streets home and purposefully stop by the blanket boutique, excited now to make this very thoroughly considered purchase. Scanning the blanket though, I see no tape.
No tape!
Not next to the blow-up electric guitar, not next to the single baby diaper, not beneath the gently used Hallmark cards, not under the pile of scrunchies and broken answering machine.
I ask the man lying on his side, his head propped up on his hand. He’s more alert now than he was before. He watches me search. “Where is it?” I ask again. “You had a VHS tape.”
“That’s a good little answering machine,” he answers. “Have the same one at home.”
“Did you sell it?”
“I might have,” he says cryptically, like one of the witches Macbeth meets on his return from the battlefield.
“This is terrible! I really wanted that,” I say, wanting it now even more than when I could have had it. “I needed it,” I double-down.
“Shoulda bought it when you had the chance,” he says, not bothering even to prophesize my coronation.
“Unsex me now,” I say, just because I want to say it, though really it has no bearing on the situation. But if I wait for an appropriate situation, it might never arise, and haven’t I just learned a bitter lesson about waiting?
“How ’bout a phone card,” the man offers. “I’ll throw in this toothpick; still in its wrapper,” he says, holding both before me like ingredients for the cauldron.
“No,” I say, crestfallen, and continue home.
I look up. Rain is on the way. A summer storm. I round Bleecker and approach my building. Climbing the steps to my apartment, I feel dejected, ravaged again by fate’s obvious proclivity to step around me. Once inside, I proceed to the kitchen, reach under the sink, and pull out my jug o’ gin. Night is upon me, or cocktail hour anyway. Hugging the bottle, I proceed immediately to my bedside library.
“This book does not offer a plan for recovery from alcoholism,” I read. I look over at the darkened TV screen that is not doling out “fun” bedroom tips and take a long slug from the bottle. I read on, skipping to my favorite chapter. “Sorrow is born of the hasty heart, an old saw goes. Other troubles, including an alcoholic bout, can be too.”
The page is worn from use, the type blurry from spills. I put the book down momentarily to attend to my stereo. Popular Marches is still on the turntable. I turn the volume all the way up, strip down to my underwear, and lie back on the floor because it’s hot. It will always be hot. The drums of routine pound out the rhythms of Souza.
My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them.
—MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein
Monsters
LAST NIGHT I WENT TO a costume party dressed as Doctor Who. There are few experiences less rewarding than running into your ex and his new girlfriend when you’re dressed as a 750-year-old Time Lord, and she’s dressed as a sexy nurse. It was the first time I’d seen him since the last time I saw him, and it felt exactly like that.
Luckily, I was being romanced by a Klingon and turned, just at the last possible moment, to become very interested in what he was saying. He loved Doctor Who, the Klingon told me, as the two of them passed by, mellowly holding hands.
“Let’s go to the roof,” my suitor then suggested.
I nodded and let him lead me up the stairs. There I sat down under a great blanket of starless sky and cried. The Klingon sat next to me. “Don’t cry, Doctor,” he said, and gave me a Tootsie Roll.
“Whose party is this anyway?” I asked, chewing.
Then we kissed and I said, “I don’t love you, okay?” and we went back downstairs and danced to “Thriller.”
When I was a kid, my parents owned and operated a party store. On weekends, when other kids went with their family to church or temple, I went with mine to the shop. My mom would set the price gun, then direct me toward a group of Miss Piggy paper plates, Super Bowl–themed cups, or Smurf tablecloths. Prancing through the aisles in vampire dentures and fairy wings, I’d vigorously attack the party supplies. I loved “the store” and loved working, especially at the end of the day, when I’d be allowed to cho
ose my preferred method of payment—three precious items almost always selected from the novelty aisle.
The novelty aisle was filled with wonders: spider rings; finger puppets; red capsules that exploded in your mouth for a bloody effect; wax lips; rubber pencils; tiny pills that, when plunged into water, expanded into planets or dinosaurs; fake mustaches; bubble gum that could be squeezed from a tube; chattering teeth on little plastic feet . . .
Between the odd items my brothers and I took home and the free samples suppliers were always sending my parents, our house was suffused with a bounty of strange treasure: Slime in a variety of colors, a pile of fake shit, a cupboard full of Silly String . . . For most of my childhood, you couldn’t sit down without activating a Whoopee Cushion. Inured to the “novelty,” our eyes passed right over the giant rubber rat guarding our foyer, and were it not for the screaming Jehovah’s Witness who pointed it out, we might never have even known it was there.
Every year, beginning in elementary school, I threw a big Halloween party in our basement and backyard. Always a few friends would come over to decorate, mistakenly thinking this would be fun. But my father, a professional, took party decorations seriously. Running the team of merriment like a drill sergeant, he’d assign each of us specific duties, give mini-lectures on the art of the fake cobweb, the proper inflation of balloons, and lose his patience completely when his helpers lacked what in our house was deemed common sense.
“Iris!” he’d yell across the room, to where I was busily arranging the hair on a severed head. “Show your friend how to do streamers. This is ridiculous!” he’d snap, motioning to the limp ribbon Jason Birnbaum had just hung. I rushed over to demonstrate the correct technique, while my father went on, oblivious to poor Jason, on the verge of tears. “Flat streamers look like toilet paper,” my father told the gathered children. “They mock the room, whereas we want to decorate it!”
