Dating Tips for the Unemployed

by Iris Smyles

  “It’s much smaller than I thought it would be,” Jacob said, scanning the Great Lawn for a place to set up.

  Jacob, my friend from college, had planned the game a week in advance, but then canceled and rescheduled and canceled and rescheduled, as the weather report changed and our faith in meteorology fluctuated. Most of his friends hadn’t shown because the weatherman predicted rain finally, though now the sky showed no signs. Sitting Indian style, pulling at the grass, we took out our phones. “I did show,” some said or, “I left an hour ago”; “I’ll be there in an hour”; “I don’t care for Wiffle ball.”

  We had to modify the game to suit our limited company. With three players per team, we made a line instead of a diamond—first base, a pitcher’s mound, home plate and a catcher behind. A batter would race to first only to race right back. The teams were made up of the Doctor, whom Janice was dating; Dave (Jacob’s friend from his hometown of Atlanta—“Atlantis,” he liked to say, “my lost city”—who was just out of a relationship and taking the game very seriously; he could not afford to lose again, at least not again this week); and me, a little drunk, with pulled grass decorating my hair (“Lady of the Grass,” they’d call me later) and coy looks to Philip on the other team. The other team: Philip, my new boyfriend; Janice, my friend from graduate school; and Jacob, perennially unattached.

  Jacob served first. The ball cracked soft against my bat and I took off, passing Jacob, nearing Philip, who was crouched low to receive his pass. I ran straight into him, fell on top laughing—a tackle—which informed our revision of the game. “Wiffle Tackle,” we called it after that.

  “Ooouuut!” Jacob said, and I crawled back to home plate.

  “The Doctor,” as we called him—because he was one and this was so funny—Ben, couldn’t hit the ball. He was tall, muscular, capable, good with his hands, a surgeon, but he couldn’t hit the ball. He kept trying to use one hand—the yellow plastic bat in one hand—and as the game wore on, he was unable to make contact. Everyone began giving him pointers. Even I tried to show him how to hold the bat, but nothing. You could see his self-esteem waning, his giving up with a “whatever” attitude, as Janice struck him out again and again. Poor Janice.

  When Philip threw them easy for me, I complained and said I knew what he was doing. “Don’t give me special treatment just ’cause I’m your girl.” Denying the accusation, he lobbed another slow one, and I ran to first base as if it were the first and last kiss of my life. But the game wasn’t high stakes for us really, not like it was for the others. They needed to win, while Philip and I already had it all. At one point he sat comfortable in the outfield looking up at the sky, letting the Doctor take his swings. Philip sipping tepid beer, Philip puffing on a cigarette though he didn’t smoke—why not take up smoking? He blew a ring.

  The day was ending, and the snack vendors were leaving the park. I spotted a silver cart glinting in the sun, as it moved up a distant hill. Hungry, Janice and I chased after it. We ran and I told her, “Quick, he’s going that way! Isn’t Philip handsome, isn’t he the most handsome?” And she said, “Can you believe he couldn’t hit the ball, not even once, zero contact!” I said, “He told me he loved me this morning,” and she said, “Why wouldn’t he use both hands?!”

  Then we took our bikes to Sheep Meadow, telling Janice and Ben before we left that we might meet up with them later for dinner. Janice wanted to. “Sure,” we said. “Later.”

  Philip and I took off and found his friends at the other end of the park. They all had bikes, too, and we laid ours among them. We sat far away from each other, our legs outstretched, and drank mango mojitos from an illegal vendor nearby. And then I became the Lady of the Grass veiled by handfuls that rained over me and Philip as I baptized him. Our feet touched while others spoke, and we smiled about what we knew. What did we know?

  The storm was coming, but we held out until thunder cracked loud just beyond the trees. The sky changed suddenly. The clouds began rising over the meadow, rising after us, so we took up our bikes and left to race the storm home.

  The rain caught us. We rode beneath it to his place on the east side of Tenth Street. Later I would joke that that was the source of all our problems, that we lived on opposite sides of Tenth Street. I rode behind him much of the way, though occasionally I’d speed ahead to show my independence. I would ride without looking back, knowing he was watching.

  We rode down Broadway through the traffic, through the flashing lights of Times Square, past red double-decker tour buses and yellow cabs screeching to the curb. Down, down, through the city, the streetlights haloed by rain, painting us yellow, red, and then green. The storm bellowed over us, delivering sharp reproofs, telling us to hurry, that we hadn’t much time. A chorus of drops, a splash of wheels, the squeaking of my own bicycle tires as I slowed to an intersection.

  Everyone else stopped, but we were suspended in motion—Philip ahead of me, cascading into right and left turns, my legs soaking wet and shining in the new dusk, and the city, so beautiful, because it had to be, because it was for us. We roped east and south and east and south until we arrived at his apartment, and I pushed the wet hair from my face.

  We walked upstairs, carrying our bikes the five flights, and then felt bad for Janice and the Doctor because it would all fall apart for them, because it mattered that he couldn’t hit the ball, because nothing like that would ever matter for us. We discussed their situation: “I don’t think she’ll be able to get past this,” I said with concern. “I told her he might be good at Frisbee, that she ought to give him another chance.”

  “A shame,” he mimicked my pity, that everyone couldn’t have what we had. Then he took me in his arms and kissed me, his face wet against mine, his wet hair falling into my eyes. We peeled off our soaked clothes, ordered sushi from the restaurant downstairs, and lay together huddled under his bed covers.

  When the food arrived, we were dry but for our hair. We sat on the couch in our underwear and turned on the TV. We changed the channel a few times before settling on a Christmas movie, speculating at the oddity of a Christmas movie airing in spring.

  “Perhaps the guy in charge of programming knows something we don’t,” Philip said. “That the world will end in autumn,” I answered, “that it’s now or never.”

  We finished eating and finished the movie, and it continued to rain hard, the windowpane banging occasionally from the wind. We laid down before the TV, and Philip pulled me close. Another Christmas movie, followed by another . . .

  “I do love you,” he said, kissing the back of my neck. His arm around my waist, his breath against my ear. “I do love you,” he repeated, as if he knew he never would.

  The Great Lawn stretched before us.

  Catherine . . . was, after all, a rather mature blossom, such as could be plucked from the stem only by a vigorous jerk.

  —HENRY JAMES, Washington Square

  Philip

  Has

  a

  Small

  Penis

  Blog.com

  Monday, 7:30 PM

  My boyfriend broke up with me over Instant Messenger. “I don’t love you,” he typed softly, from his work computer. My mom asked me what happened, so I forwarded her the chat.

  He made a list, which should be clear enough. Still, I had to call and explain: “Mom, I’m selfish and fat. I wash my hair only every other day. I make funny faces in the mirror. I’m bad in bed.”

  It was confusing for her because at Thanksgiving dinner all he could do was sing my praises. “She fucks like a god!” he said, opening the first toast. Everyone thought it was the real thing.

  After we broke up, he agreed to come over. On my couch, holding my hand, he said he’d like to take the pain away. He said, “Is there anything I can do?”

  “You could buy me a blanket,” I answered. I told him that without him I’d be cold. That winter was starting and I’d have to sleep under my coats.

  “No,” he said. “You can call me wh
enever you want to talk though.”

  “But I don’t want to talk. I’m cold. I want a blanket.”

  “Sometimes talking helps.”

  The next day I called three times, but he let it go to voicemail. So I left a message—three of them. The last one said, “Come over and use me for sex. Don’t call, just come!”

  He called and told me he didn’t like the sound of my voice.

  On my bed after, on top of my coats, he held on to my hips and raised me in the air high, so that for a while I was like a bird, flying over him, going nowhere. Then he put me down and said he had to go.

  I asked him to take the spare condoms with him, told him I didn’t need them, that it made me sad to see them.

  He shut the door.

  When I walked into the bathroom, I found them on the sink.

  He came over again the next night. “Leave the condoms!” I announced. “I might need them now that I’m single again.”

  When I looked in the bathroom after he left, they were gone.

  I took my bike to his apartment at 4 AM and knocked on his door until his neighbors asked if I was a criminal. “Yes!” I said. “A rapist and a thief!” Then Philip let me in. He said I looked ugly and drunk and tired. I said he disgusted me the way he was about to have sex with someone so ugly, so drunk, so tired.

  “You have no integrity,” I said. “I’ve always hated that about you.”

  I left him in bed at 8 AM, and he called me an hour later on his way to work. “Did you steal my keys?”

  “Why would I steal your keys?”

  “They’re missing and it seems like something you would do.”

  “You don’t know the first thing about what I would do!” I said, and hung up.

  Later I texted him, “Check the freezer. I think I saw them in the ice bucket.”

  Yesterday my friend Reggie got mad, because I invited him to lunch and then sat under the table crying. “You need to pull yourself together,” Reggie said. That’s what everyone says.

  I IM’ed him as soon as I got home. “philip,” I wrote without punctuating, “come over and fuck me”

  He said I didn’t seem stable the way I used all lowercase letters, that he didn’t like it when I cursed. He called me a moment later to say, “I don’t like it when you curse.”

  “I don’t give a fuck what the fuck you like, fuck fuck fuck!” I said, and then he came over with the special kinds of condoms, a handful in exotic colors from Condomania around the corner. “Special condoms, because I’m special!” I said, standing over him without my underwear.

  “They’re loosies—like the way you buy cigarettes if you don’t want to make a habit of it.”

  I took off the rest of my clothes and trilled, “I’m beautiful! I’m ten pounds thin!”

  He remarked at how my breasts seemed smaller, barely able to hold his cock between them. Then he felt bad and apologized. I told him to stop. I told him his cruelty made me hot. I said, “Sing to me, Philip, the list of all my flaws!”

  But he wouldn’t. Instead, he wrapped me in his arms. Instead, he said, “Iris, you’re so special, you’re perfect!” “Iris, oh, Iris,” he kept repeating until instead of coming, I cried. And when I reached my arms around him, he came and then receded like an ocean leaving only debris.

  Tuesday, 5:45 PM

  About this blog:

  Caroline said cable helped. When she got dumped, she ordered cable and felt fine.

  “I’m not into TV,” I told her.

  Publishing articles about the size of her ex-boyfriend’s penis proved a big help, too. She published two articles in Playgirl and suggested I do the same via my blog.

  I told Caroline that’s not how I operate. I said, “Caroline, what could possibly come from my typing on my blog that PHILIP HAS A SMALL PENIS!”

  She agreed and suggested I start a new blog just for that, so here it is.

  Thursday, 12:30 AM

  Philip, if you are reading this, I hate you.

  In other news: I’m thinking about moving, but I don’t know to where. I’m too romantic to choose an apartment. What if it’s ugly and stupid, but I love it anyway?

  My realtor says I should make a list of deal breakers, but everything strikes me as negotiable. Of course I want a sunny apartment with lots of space, but is that even possible? How uncompromising should I be? It will help her to help me, she said, if I give some serious consideration to my list.

  I looked at some apartments in Brooklyn today. There’s a bike trail outside one of them, and when I looked out the window I thought I saw you riding by. For a second, it was your gray hair catching the light, and your stupid face looking up at me grinning, grinning as if you’d done nothing wrong, as if you had a right to go on living.

  The apartment is a bargain because it’s on a land lease, which means someone else owns the thing you think you do, and you can be kicked out at any time without warning. I said that didn’t seem like the makings of a good deal, and she assured me the technicalities really didn’t matter, not unlike your mentioning two months into our relationship that you were not officially divorced, you prick.

  I told her I had to think it over, that I still had some questions. Like: Did you sleep with her that weekend in Boston when you went to sign the divorce papers and finally close your joint bank account? And why did I apologize after I asked you this, after I saw the photo of you two kissing that you “accidentally” left out on your coffee table? And why did you answer that I was the most jealous person you’d ever met? Why not the prettiest?

  Why do I know what your ex-wife’s vagina looks like, the really great style of her pubic hair? Why do I know what you were thinking the first time you two met in college? Why do I know what you said and what she said that day in the library and how it was all so funny? Why do I know what you wore on your wedding day? Why did you wear the same thing to a costume party with me? Why do I know that you tied her up and she liked it? Why do I know what she thinks about my favorite things—my books, my songs, a movie we saw together? Why did I need to know what she would have guessed for five down in that Sunday’s crossword puzzle?

  Here is a list of things I could drop on you if it were you on that bike trail, and some reasons—besides the interesting layout and good light—that I might take the apartment:

  It comes with a microwave, which is heavy, and a dishwasher, which would be hard to remove but very effective and not my fault if it accidentally fell from my window and onto your fat head while you were exploring the neighborhood carefree. An iron, hot and terrible, and good for fashioning pleats, might hit you just right. My computer speakers. A mouse-repelling device that plugs into the wall and projects a sound that only mice can hear could pick up enough speed on its way down to knock you unconscious. A lucky horseshoe, which I would have to buy or else break into your apartment and steal the one I gave you. A heart-shaped box of lead. A measles blanket. Dry ice. A Scotch tape dispenser. An American flag might accidentally fall from my window as I was waving it patriotically on the Fourth of July, and smother you while you were launching toward Washington on your bike, ready to protest the cruel ways of our government abroad and also meet girls who are into the same cause, if not on your way to protest loneliness at your favorite bar. A Roach Motel. An orange straw bending at the neck. A bronze bust of Hoover. A live snake. Five of them. Ten of them. The shower curtain rod you said you’d hang for me but never did. My collection of mix tapes given to me by all my ex-boyfriends except you, because you never gave me anything, might fall out my window in a plastic mess just next to you, just below the window of my brand-new apartment with the great light and interesting layout, which you wouldn’t know is mine, because you wouldn’t know that I moved, because you wouldn’t know a thing about me, because I wouldn’t tell you, because I hate you.

  Friday, 9:30 AM

  On Christmas Eve, I rented The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and watched it with my parents. I was home visiting.

  My mother cried, “O
h, god! How can you watch these atrocities?”

  “Shhh!” I silenced her. “You’re killing the mood!”

  “Horrible! How can you sleep at night? No wonder you can’t sleep at night!”

  “It takes my mind off things,” I whispered, over the whir of the saw.

  Saturday, 11:21 AM

  Alistair had excellent gift-giving instincts this year. Having waited until the last minute to do his shopping, the only store open on Christmas Eve was Crazy Billy’s. So, he gave Teddy a bottle of Scotch, my parents a box of fine liqueurs, and me a basket of wine. He’d filled the basket with shredded green cellophane left over from his Dollar store’s Easter inventory—“To my sister, the basket case,” the card read.

  My mother gave me a robe and slippers, understanding my need the previous morning. I’d come downstairs with my hair matted into a shark-fin-like tuft and ate breakfast in only my underwear.

  “Couldn’t you get dressed?” she’d said.

  “Why bother? I’m just going to have to get undressed again,” I said, slurping my coffee.

  When I complained of feeling cold later, she wrapped me in paper towels—unconditional love. And when she ran out of Bounty, she used foil. After, in the kitchen while she cooked, I danced the robot and she clapped supportively.

  For Christmas I gave everyone I love a copy of Caddyshack. Caddyshack for Mom, Caddyshack for Dad, Caddyshack for my brothers.

  Mom opened her Caddyshack.

  Dad opened his Caddyshack.

  Teddy opened his Caddyshack.

  Alistair opened his Caddyshack. I opened a bottle of wine and spit out the cork. “What should we toast to?” I said, taking a hit in the face—a Christmas angel had fallen from the top of our tree. Some branches and then my head broke her fall. “Owww,” I groaned, then picked her up and searched her eyes: Was it an accident or did you jump? Then I tilted her head back and poured in some wine. “To the Merry Gentlemen, god rest ’em!” I heard her slur.