by Iris Smyles
“Then I hope I never see it,” he said, surprising me with a smile.
That was about a month ago, when Glen and I were still getting to know each other and talking a lot, very carefully passing over conversational lulls, as if silence were a dangerous moat surrounding the relationship castle.
Martin, my ex-ex-boyfriend, used to complain that I talked too much. I complained that he didn’t talk enough. He said it was because I didn’t give him a chance to talk. I said I spoke a lot because he wasn’t speaking and someone had to and, anyway, “I make suggestive pauses, which are cues for you to enter the conversation.” Then I made a suggestive pause. He didn’t say anything, and shortly after that we broke up.
“I’m testing out my Roomba,” I told Glen an hour after our first kiss. He’d called me as soon as he got home. “I can’t stop thinking about you. Did I wake you? Is it too late to call? What are you doing?” he asked. And then, “What’s a Roomba?”
“It’s a robot vacuum. It vacuums all by itself. My parents gave it to me for Christmas. What are you doing?” I returned.
“Listening to music. Thinking about you. Wondering what you’re doing. Calling you to find out.”
“It’s an amazing device,” I said, sitting down, watching the Roomba spin through the room. “I’m going to decorate it with rhinestones, and then I’m going to name it. Do you have any pets?”
“Not since I was a kid. You?”
“I have a ficus named Epstein and a stuffed animal, a golden Labrador, named Herbert. Also a stapler with a lot of personality. It’s white and from the side looks like Moby Dick. I feed it staples when it gets hungry. But I haven’t given it a name.”
“I can’t wait to meet them,” Glen said, yawning. “I used to have a pencil that looked like Captain Ahab.”
“Really?”
“No, it looked like Serge Gainsbourg.” He paused. “So what kind of music do you like?”
Brilliant people talk about ideas. Average people talk about events. And stupid people talk about other people. Eleanor Roosevelt said that. What kind of people talk about nothing?
“I’ve decided to name my Roomba ‘Oedi.’”
“King Edward!” Glen sang in a magisterial voice.
“No, Oedi, as in King Oedipus, because he blindly roams my apartment like Oedipus blindly roams the earth in self-imposed exile after he kills his father and marries his mother. Though my Roomba has no eyes, he has acquired ‘insight,’ for how else would he be able to navigate my living room and pick up the dust so effectively.”
“I like to read, too. I just reread Reclaiming Your Life. It’s seminal. The word comes from semen, but I don’t mean it that way. It’s totally helped me heal the wounds of my childhood.”
“I love self-help! Did you know the self-help movement actually started with AA during the Great Depression? It has its roots in a very American, pre-FDR, ruggedly individualistic, let’s-pull-ourselves-up-by-our-bootstraps idea of things, which is so different from the kind of New Age narcissism surrounding the self-help industry today.”
“Alice Miller’s pretty much my favorite author.”
“I found this great book on the dollar rack the other day: How to Get the Upper Hand. It’s about getting the upper hand. Also, I found this weird pamphlet at the checkout aisle at the A&P called Why Am I Dancing Alone? It’s about being single and has all these wonderful nineteenth-century illustrations of women in long, lacy frocks looking unbearably lonely on the dance floor. Now I’m reading Hot Monogamy: How to Get the Sizzle Back.”
“The Drama of the Gifted Child is also very good. It’s my emotional toolbox.”
“What I love is the calm, firm tone of self-help. The writing is so persuasive. I always end up thinking I have whatever problem I’m reading about. Like the other day I was reading this book about how to cope with erectile dysfunction, called Coping with Premature Ejaculation: How to Overcome PE, Please Your Partner and Have Great Sex.”
“I don’t know it.”
“It was so well-written that for a while I really believed the author was talking about me. And then I remembered I don’t have a penis. I don’t know. It’s just nice to feel you belong every once in a while even if you don’t have a penis. And then, also, I think it’s good to be reminded that the feeling of belonging or not is pretty much an illusion, that life is 99 percent sales, 99 percent seduction.”
“What kind of pornography do you like?”
I wasn’t always so easy to talk to. As a child, for about seven years, I hardly spoke at all. I went to ballet school five days a week and never said a word the whole time I was there. If anyone asked me a question, I’d just nod or make a face as if I could communicate in no other way. My classmates and teachers assumed I was mute.
In the beginning, I was just shy. Later, I wanted to talk but didn’t know what to say. And then after that, once I’d gotten in the habit of not talking, it was too difficult to start. What would I say first? When you think about it—and you think about it a lot when you’re not speaking—how much of what is said really needs to be? Trapped within the ice I’d failed to break, I’d watch my peers chat boisterously as we changed into our pointe shoes. I wanted to talk to them, lots of things would cross my mind, but then, why say one thing and not another? And then, why say anything at all?
My silence became so loud that to speak, I felt, would require my screaming over it. It was June when I stood in the wings in my tutu. It was the end-of-the-year recital, and I was waiting beside a classmate, who, nervous for our upcoming performance, was pacing back and forth. “Oh my god, I’m freaking out! Oh my god, my heart is racing!” she said over and over.
I commiserated by stretching my mouth into a friendly line.
“That’s it. I’ve officially lost my mind; I’m actually talking to a person who can’t even speak!” she said finally, looking at me, as if I were not really there, as if the whole time she’d been talking, she’d been talking only to herself.
“I can speak!” I blurted out, just to prove my existence. Then on cue, Tchaikovsky—eight counts—the two of us fluttering onto the stage like interrupted moths.
I think that’s why today I talk so much. I’m afraid that if I stop, I might not be able to start again.
If you date at all often, you can’t help but develop a talking routine. The same questions come up again and again—about childhood pets, about your family, about your education—and having responded the same way so many times, you begin to refine your answers.
“I had a pet peacock when I was twelve. He emerged from the woods behind our house one day and stayed. We named him Dan, Dapper Dan,” I told Glen on our second date.
“I had a rock,” he answered. “His name was Stony. Tony for short.”
For a while I worried that something about me was silencing men, because all my former boyfriends had started out talkative, but then eventually, after we’d been sleeping together awhile, just sort of clammed up. But now I think they were never very talkative, that they only talked in the beginning as a means of seduction, so that once our relationship was settled, there was nothing left to say—so they chewed.
“Martin!” I’d say, two years into our relationship, interrupting another of his long swampy silences. “Martin!” I’d repeat, thinking perhaps he hadn’t heard me when I asked what he thought of the low-pressure system expected to move into our area from the south. After only the scarcest reply, he’d stare off at the exposed brick decorating our favorite restaurant. “What are you thinking?” I’d finally ask.
He said such questions—what are you thinking?—put too much pressure on him, that if I gave him time to think, he’d introduce a topic on his own. “Okay,” I said, sitting back silently, watching him chew while I waited, indefinitely.
The same way some anecdotes are regularly trotted out on first dates, others come up frequently on or near the last ones. My telling of the chicken story, for example, is something of a breakup harbinger. “So I picked up the
chicken and started waving it. ‘You see this chicken!’ I said. ‘You see it . . .’” With fervor, I’ll be relating the situation, when a sense of doom begins to wash over me.
Back in college, I told the chicken story to Jed after we’d been seeing each other for about a month. He capped my tale with “I’m tired of The Iris Show!”
“Pathetic!” my friend Caroline said on the phone later that night. “He’s just jealous because his show isn’t as good as yours.”
“You think so?” I sniffled. “I feel like my show’s been canceled and taken off the air.”
“It may not be popular, but it’s a favorite with the critics,” she said supportively.
My new boyfriend Glen calls all the time just to talk, which I’m not used to. The phone rings and he says, “What’s up?” and then waits for my answer. My first impulse is to say, “Nothing. Nothing’s up,” but then I worry he’ll find me boring, so instead I struggle for something interesting. “Well, before you called I was thinking: you can’t undo popular linguistic errors and shouldn’t try. There is no going back from ‘irregardless,’ for example. The only way is forward. For that reason, I’m trying to popularize the word ‘dis-irregardless.’ This way, the two prefixes will cancel each other out, bringing us closer to the original, correct ‘regardless.’”
“What’s wrong with ‘irregardless’?”
I’m tired of The Iris Show and don’t want to have to explain, so I lie and say, “I’m in the middle of feeding my stapler. Can I call you back in twenty minutes?” Then I text him instead of calling and type that I’m about to take a nap, that I’ll talk to him tomorrow. Not wanting to hurt his feelings, I add an emoticon suggesting how my breasts look in profile. ))
Glen is starting to get on my nerves. It’s the things he says when we talk. Like when he wondered aloud about how many bones make up the tongue bone. I told him there are no bones, that the tongue is a muscle, but he kept insisting he could feel them. I tried to change the subject and asked him how his day had been, but instead of answering, he began counting the bones. Finally, I lost my patience and hung up. A minute later, I called back and apologized. I felt so bad. I told him thirty sounded about right. “Thirty bones, Glen,” I said dejectedly.
I’ve begun to really dread our conversations and so, in the interest of preserving our relationship, I’ve started to avoid him. I won’t answer the phone when he calls. Or else, I try to call him when I know he’ll be unavailable, or when I’m about to get on a train, forcing me to end the call quickly. “We’re going into a tunnel!” I suggest movie dates over dinner dates so that we won’t have a chance to talk, and I make our plans over the phone in loud places—under elevated subway trains, near construction sites.
And then, when finally we do get to talking, I ignore him. I pretend I’m listening and then just think about other things. What shall I name my Roomba? Clothilde? Mr. Fitzsimmons? I should send out a Christmas card next year with a photograph of me and my Roomba and my plant and my stuffed animal. I could write on the bottom: “Happy Holidays from Iris, Epstein, Herbert, and whatever I decide to call the vacuum cleaner.” Should I include the stapler? “What are you thinking?” Glen asks, interrupting my thoughts.
When Glen came over yesterday, not wanting to bicker as we’ve begun to so often, I suggested we write a script for our conversation, “like a game.” My idea was that we’d write the dialogue down and then just act it out instead of talking off-the-cuff as we normally do. Glen’s an actor and immediately thrilled to the idea.
I’d wanted us to write a pre-sex scene dialogue, but then Glen’s writing was such a turnoff. We fought for a while over edits, before, acquiescing, I fed him my line.
“Cut!” he said—all actors want to direct. “Let’s go back and try it again. This time with feeling!”
“I’m so happy to see you,” I repeated, looking up from our script.
My friend Janice wants to talk all the time, too. She’s always calling, asking me to spill the details about my current relationship. Feeling obliged to hold up my end of the conversation, I tell her about my most recent fight with Glen. I tell her what I said and then what he said and then what I said and ask her what she thinks. Then she tells me what someone told her about something she said to her own boyfriend, well, ex-boyfriend now, and how that helped and maybe could help me, too.
“I told him the chicken story,” I confessed to Janice yesterday. “About the lady not packing it separately from my other groceries.”
“How did he respond?”
“He laughed and told me a story about an eye of round.”
“So what’s the problem?”
I told her that I don’t like his laugh. That it gets on my nerves. That the chicken story is not even very funny, I’ve begun to realize. That I don’t know why I’ve been telling it all these years, and then I decided right then that I would stop. “Janice? Are you still there?”
Luckily, Janice is an excellent conversationalist, too, and so she’s unfazed when I go on for too long, knowing instinctively to just use that time to think about what to say next.
“My lips are chapped. Um, yeah, I’m still here.”
I’m starting to think I might actually hate talking. There’s a lot that I could say, I often think, recognizing Glen’s suggestive pauses, but—when I look at my ringing phone and see it’s Janice on the line; or blink at Caroline, who’s waiting for my response; or am out at a party where everyone’s yelling over the music, leaning in close, trying really hard to be heard—there’s nothing much I want to.
Lately, I find myself thinking a lot about Dan. Peacocks don’t make very affectionate pets, and Dan was no exception. Dan would perch at the edge of our wooden deck, stately, aloof, content to ignore me but for the leftovers I brought him every day for supper. Growing up, I didn’t have any close friends in whom I could confide, but every day, for a while, I’d go outside and sit with Dan. The two of us, separated by silence and a distance of at least six feet, would gaze out into my father’s yard, a patch of grass bordered by a deep stretch of woods. Eventually, I’d start to tell him about my day, about everything that happened, about some things that didn’t, about what I was thinking.
And then one day Dan left. Celebrating my graduation from elementary school, we had a party in the backyard to which I invited all my classmates. Everyone was talking and carrying on, dancing to Z-100, and singing along to Paula Abdul. Dan said nothing. He just turned and walked back into the woods from which he came. I never saw him again.
For the rest of the summer, I wandered the woods, looking for some trace of him, but found nothing. “Dan!” I’d call, cupping my hands around my mouth. But there was no response.
My father said Dan probably left because of the noise, and then, after that, maybe he just couldn’t find his way home. I find myself thinking about him pretty frequently these days. While other people talk to me, I think of conversations I used to have with Dan. I think: Perhaps I should have listened more.
Two is company, four is a party, three is a crowd.
One is a wanderer.
—JAMES THURBER, “One Is a Wanderer”
The Friend Registry
I’VE BEEN POKED, bitten by a vampire, nominated coolest person, and knighted all in the last week without ever having to leave my apartment. Such are the advantages of social media and yet, still, I find myself alone at dinnertime. According to my online profile, I have over nine hundred friends. So why when my free time kicks in, do I find myself with no one I want to see and nothing I want to do? Wanting to get out of my apartment, sometimes I go and stand around in public places.
My phone rarely rings anymore. It used to ring at all hours, but since I no longer answer, most of my friends have stopped calling. Instead, I receive invitations by email, which is good, as it affords me time I need to compose my refusal. My friend Janice might write and ask me out for dinner, and what I’ll do is write back that I’m way too busy this weekend, how about next month?
I’ll spend the week this way, fielding invitations, worried always about my schedule being overwhelmed, about the unbearable weight of too many social obligations. I knock each invitation back defensively, as if I were playing tennis. No No No. And then the weekend arrives and I find myself with nothing to do, wondering why it’s my lot to always be alone.
Shall I read some Yeats? I wonder, pulling a volume of poetry down from the bookshelf, as I prepare for a quiet Friday at home. And then, no. I put it back, unable to commit to a night of my own company either. Instead, I get dressed and quit my apartment for the streets.
Union Square is nice for standing. Also, some bookstores downtown. I don’t like to sit. It’s too much of a commitment. As soon as I sit, I immediately start thinking: Now what? By standing, particularly at intersections—I like the L transfer at Fourteenth Street, and some parts of Penn and Grand Central—I remain always in transit, which I find comforting and, lately, the only tolerable way to pass an evening. I dislike restaurants, feeling hemmed in and at the mercy of wait staff who might ask how I am tonight. I prefer to make my own dinner or, better, pick up a hot dog and eat while I walk. I like eating things that are perfectly consumable. I like there to be nothing left when I’m finished, no proof of my having been anywhere, no residue. I want to eat carnival food all year round. I want always to be strolling.
When my phone does ring I look at it suspiciously, waiting until it stops before I’ll even go near it. My ringtone is eerie, as if a ghost had just entered the room in a scary movie. Which is fitting as it’s been so long since I’ve seen most of my friends.
I stopped answering the phone about a year ago and stopped calling people back, too. Or else, in order not to be impolite, I’ll call back in a month or three, depending on the urgency suggested in the voicemail. I make an exception for men with whom I’m considering sex. With them, I’ll text or else call from a very loud place so as to be able to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. The elevated train is coming. Let’s just meet at your place at eight,” and end the call quickly.
