Dating Tips for the Unemployed

by Iris Smyles

  TO DO

  Rent soul to Devil.

  Bring maxi pads back in style, the way I did leg warmers.

  Study plants and save money by learning to photosynthesize my own food.

  Laundry.

  I think I’m having a midlife crisis, which is annoying because I haven’t resolved my quarter-life one yet, but also encouraging, as I’ve got the jump on all my friends. Finally, I’m precocious. I’ve started reading self-help books about the trials of dating in the second half of your life, and yesterday I saw a program on PBS about Baby Boomer dating called Life (Part 2). The older women had short spiky hair; it’s easier to manage. And their breasts were huge. Are my breasts going to get that big? Will my hair, so lush and unruly now, one day prove so manageable?

  TO DO

  Try to popularize saying: “I smoke like a fish that smokes a lot.”

  Introduce upside-down question mark from Spanish to English and use at the end of sentences to connote irony.

  Write screenplay about a contemporary Virgin Mary in New York. Replace Immaculate Conception with Immaculate VD for a modern twist.

  Consumed by thoughts of death. Was reading some essays by Joseph Epstein last night; he talks a lot about accepting death as if it were just the next stop on the train. I couldn’t sleep. Maybe it’s harder for me to come to terms with death, since I haven’t yet come to terms with life. I’m worried I’m running out of time.

  PR IDEA

  Write blurbs for my first book inside new books by authors I admire. Cover blurb with Post-it note and hit up crowded book signings where authors are appearing. Ask them to sign beneath my blurb and then use signed blurbs on future book jackets.

  “Like Proust but less effeminate.”

  —Milan Kundera

  “Ms. Smyles writes like Norman Mailer might have were he not such a pussy.”

  —Salman Rushdie

  “Not since Salman Rushdie has any writer so deserved a fatwa against them.”

  —Ira Glass

  “What Proust did for naps, Smyles does for the alcoholic blackout!”

  —Frederic Tuten

  “Iris Smyles writes like Updike practiced infidelity—exuberantly!”

  —James Wood

  “I laughed, I cried, I brutally murdered a homeless drifter whom no one will ever look for. You will love this book.”

  —Francine Prose

  “My favorite writer.”

  —Tom McCarthy

  I think I might have empty nest syndrome. I wandered into Pier 1 yesterday and considered buying a hand-painted toilet scrubber—anything to fill the void. Been feeling pretty bad lately, like I betrayed my parents by growing up. Like families don’t work unless there are babies to take care of. On visits home, everything’s terrible. We’re all so tall, my brothers and I, which makes us seem even more single. We’re three tall adults with nothing in common, three overgrown children hanging around the kitchen drinking coffee. We talk so loud, like babies wailing to be picked up. I think my parents are shrinking. Sometimes they remind me of key chain ornaments.

  IDEA FOR A BOARD GAME

  The Game of Death! Combine elements of the Game of Life and Monopoly to make a new game of “far-out funereal fun!” Compete against other players who are also trying to get their affairs in order before it’s too late. Challenges include making out a will for surviving players! Outsmarting the government of its inheritance tax! Setting aside money for a good headstone!

  A special “writers edition” can include the challenge “Selling your papers to a university library!” Sontag is at UCLA. Robert Frost is at NYU. Is Harvard’s library in the cards for you, or will it be a shelf near the men’s room at Nassau Community?

  Pick a card: “There are only a few coveted plots available at Père Lachaise. Roll the dice to see if you will spend eternity there next to Colette, be buried in unconsecrated ground like the fifteenth-century French actors who refused to renounce their profession before dying, or just disappear among the dead in Hart Island like Dawn Powell, whose executrix refused to claim her remains.”

  Being my own Boswell has not been easy. Indeed, sometimes I wonder what I might have accomplished had I put a fraction of the energy into my life, as I have into my plans for literary immortality. But only some times. Other times I think about crafting the perfect epitaph:

  “Fine, How Are You?” would look good on a marble slab. And when mourners pass my plot on their way to someone else’s, they won’t think me rude.

  “Hope I didn’t leave the stove on” is honest, but lacks solemnity.

  Or perhaps in granite, I’ll tell it straight:

  IRIS SMYLES

  February 28, 1978–

  Even Then She Knew

  Exit, pursued by a bear.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, A Winter’s Tale

  Lions and Wolves

  THE SMALL LITERARY MAGAZINE I’d founded was in its second year when, instead of publishing another print issue, I decided to put on a show. Closing my eyes, I could already see Philip Roth performing a ventriloquism act, John Updike playing the water glasses, and Joan Didion in a tap-dancing battle with my friend Reggie. There’d be a tweed-clad kick line made up of tenured professors: “Ladies and Gentlemen,” I’d announce in my blue tutu from the side of the stage, “I give you the Tenurettes!” And then Harold Bloom, Judith Butler, and Henry Louis Gates would hustle out arm in arm, kicking in unison, the audience exploding in mad applause.

  Excited and in need of a few supporting acts, I placed an ad in Backstage:

  Acclaimed literary magazine seeks unpaid, non-union actors for its upcoming vaudeville debut! Seeking singers, dancers, comedians, magicians, harpists, water glass players, contortionists, ventriloquists, puppeteers—shadow and corporeal—balloon animalists, burlesque dancers, and any other acts of note. (BA required, PhD preferred.) Mail headshots and résumés to: 689 West 10th Street, Suite 3D, New York, NY 10019.

  Becoming more ambitious, I decided to film the audition and make a documentary of the making of the show. I had no budget, however, so I had to pull the whole thing off on favors, which is why nearly everyone involved I had either dated, was dating, or “might consider dating once production wrapped,” I told Jerry, after he returned with our third round. Preparatory meetings at my apartment were a minefield of sexual tension and resentment.

  The audition was on a Saturday in the basement of Union Square’s Vineyard Theatre—a guy I kissed at a New Year’s Eve party loaned me the space. I’d assembled a three-camera film crew, a panel of six judges, a few stagehands, and a guy in a gorilla suit just in case. Vlad showed up near the end of the day and took his place on a small platform.

  I asked him to state his name for the camera.

  “Vlad.”

  Vlad told a few jokes in a corny Catskill-style routine and then improvised a song with our accompanist, Jack, whom I kissed once while drunk and then pretended later, when he tried to bring it up, that I didn’t remember. Then I asked Vlad to try his hand at the water glasses and, after that, to give a go at making “Shakespearean balloon animals.” A few balloons burst before he was able to make a snake and, finally, a pirate hat, which he placed on my head.

  He was handsome and had great stage presence, I noted in a conversation with the panel after he’d left the room. Jack, the accompanist, said he was pitchy.

  That was almost a year ago. Production on the film has since stalled. I have twenty hours of gold, but it needs to be edited. For a while I had this guy Roger editing, but then he got a girlfriend, so I had to find someone new, which ended up being quite hard as I wasn’t dating very much at the time. Figuring I should finish the movie before mounting the show, I ended up not contacting Vlad for callbacks, and then eventually the show itself fell away.

  After that, every once in a while I’d recognize Vlad on television. In various TV commercials, he’d been cast in the role of regular guy/husband/father. In one public service announcement, he played a clean-cut bus
inessman who reluctantly agrees to have happy hour drinks with some colleagues. One of them says, “Come on, just one drink!” and Vlad finally relents. “Just one drink,” he says, as they pat him on the back, before he winds up in a crack house alone later that night, and then in the hospital the next morning after having accidentally overdosed on speedballs. Cut to his pregnant wife driving him home in silence, before she parks their SUV in the driveway of a large suburban house. The babysitter opens a heavy oak door to greet them, and a little girl runs out smiling. “Daddy!” she says. And Vlad booms, “There’s my girl!” and picks her up lovingly. Then a voiceover says: “Sometimes even one drink is one too many. Know your limits. Other lives depend on it!” Then the camera closes in on Vlad’s bloodshot eyes next to the fine blonde hair on the back of the head of the little girl he’s still hugging. He looked really handsome, I thought, and I was touched by his rapport with the kid playing his daughter; I couldn’t help but think he’d make a great father. I liked this best of all his commercials, much more than the one where he eats fiber-enriched cereal and discusses it with a neighbor.

  And then eight or nine months after the audition, I ran into him in the men’s department at Macy’s. I was trying on an orange cable-knit sweater over my clothes, when I spotted Vlad wandering in the aisle separating gloves and sweaters. My first instinct was to hide. That’s what I usually do when I run into people I know during daylight hours. But then five minutes later he wandered by again in the other direction and caught me staring at him. I turned away quickly but then thought, Well, why not say hello?

  “Vlad?” I said, approaching tentatively.

  He seemed not to recognize me, so I launched into a brief summary of how we met.

  “That was a strange afternoon,” he replied with a smile.

  “Yes,” I said, sweating beneath the orange sweater. I pulled it over my head. “I’m not gonna get this, I don’t think,” I stammered, laying it on a pile of similar sweaters.

  He looked at me curiously.

  “It’s big.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “So,” I said, looking out over the department store with feigned nonchalance—I’m very shy when not unconscious. I passed a hand over the nearby cashmere to calm my nerves. “I come in here sometimes to blow off steam,” I said, feeling the need to explain myself. “What’ve you been up to, Vlad?”

  He looked at me for a moment longer. He had piercing blue eyes, strangely shaped, and long eyelashes that made him look like a cartoon wolf, a friendly one, like a wolf in a Disney movie that’s been orphaned and raised by hedgehogs who like to sweep the forest with little hedgehog-size brooms. “Call me Billy. Vlad’s my stage name.”

  “Billy.”

  “I mean it’s my real name, well, Vladimir is, but I don’t use it in real life. Everyone calls me Billy, which is the English equivalent of Vladimir. Well, ‘Universal Ruler’ is, but it’s a bit awkward to ask people to call you that, so everyone just calls me Billy.”

  “Okay, Billy.” I smiled and caressed an embroidered whale.

  We talked for a few more minutes and then he left. I tried on the orange sweater once more, and then brought it to the register.

  About a week later, I saw Vlad—Billy—again. I’d been sitting on a couch in the living room section of the furniture showroom at Kmart in Cooper Square and reading my horoscope in the Village Voice (“You’re in an excellent position to slip away from certain illusions that enslave the people around you, Pisces. You have an enormous power to rapidly understand new information and acquire new skills.”), when Billy appeared beside me.

  “Whatcha doin’?”

  “Hi,” I said, surprised. I stood up quickly.

  “Can I sit down?” he asked, motioning to the futon.

  “Of course,” I said, and then we both sat down. “I’m not going to get this,” I explained, running a nervous hand over the back of the cushion. “It’s a futon . . .” I trailed off.

  Billy was looking for a Swiffer. “I hear they’re very good on dust,” he said. “What do you use?”

  “I don’t clean. When my apartment gets too dirty I just move.” He watched me for a while and then smiled.

  We talked for another half hour after that. I asked him about life as a stand-up comedian. He told me a few stories. And then he pretended he was my husband and that Kmart was our house. He put his feet up on the coffee table in front of us and, holding an imaginary remote, pretended to change the channel on the cardboard cutout of a TV—“a flat screen,” he called it—set up inside the pressed wood entertainment center across from us. “Would you get me a beer, hon?” he asked, rubbing his belly. He sniffed, “It’s been a long day.”

  He wrote down my number before he left.

  I hailed a sales associate and asked about delivery.

  A few days later, he called midafternoon. “It’s Billy,” he said. “What are you up to?”

  I told him I was at Bed Bath and Beyond on Sixth Avenue and Sixteenth Street, testing the massage chairs. “Don’t move! I’m right around the corner,” he said. Twenty minutes later, he walked in smiling and out of breath. “Oh, good, I’m glad you didn’t leave. I was at home,” he confessed. “I live in Chinatown,” he said, catching his breath. “But I wanted to see you.” He took off his jacket and sat in the chair next to mine.

  “What setting is yours on?” he asked, fiddling with his remote. “Mine’s on Knead.”

  “Full Back.”

  “I’m gonna try Full Back, then. I want to feel what you’re feeling,” he said, before resting his head against the chair. I leaned back, too, and looked out over the pots and pans suspended in the kitchen department across from us. “Oh, these are for you,” he said as an afterthought, producing two brightly colored flowers from out of his jacket.

  A few days after that, we had our first date. We were at a Japanese restaurant and he was perusing the sake menu when he asked me what I’d have to drink.

  “Water is fine.”

  “You don’t drink?”

  “No,” I said, smiling too much. It was the first time I’d said it out loud. I blushed and looked down, worried I might cry.

  “Me neither,” he said. “I’m not an alcoholic or anything—I just made this bet with my brother to see who could stay off the sauce the longest. I have amazing willpower,” he said, and flexed his bicep for me. “Go ahead, see for yourself.”

  “Yes,” I said, squeezing his arm. “It’s true.”

  The discovery that we’d both forgone booze for a while—him “just temporarily,” and me, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe I’ll start drinking again when I’m fifty, like Rocky in Rocky VI, AKA Rocky Balboa, when he gets back in the ring one last time and embarrasses his family . . . or maybe never”—forged an immediate bond between us. We traded stories from our new sober lives and conspicuously downplayed what had led to the decision. It was just something to do, like you might try hang-gliding were it an activity featured in your resort package, or Ritalin if your college roommate had a learning disability. No big deal.

  We talked about our former drinking selves gently, like these great guys we used to know, like dear friends you haven’t seen in a while because their behavior has started to embarrass you, old friends about whom you don’t want to say anything bad, so you glide over criticism and just call them “characters.” “Iris is such a character. She passed out in her hallway and her neighbors found her.” That sort of thing. Of course, I didn’t report that or any other detail. Instead, I blushed. “I’m actually somewhat wild,” I said tentatively, trying to confess.

  He smiled. “I’m sure you’re a party animal.”

  “No, really,” I said, reddening more.

  He paused and looked at me like I was some strange, delightful creature he’d found at a pet store in Chinatown in 1985, like I was Gizmo at the beginning of Gremlins, like he was certain I’d never change.

  “What?”

  “You’re so cute,” he said.

  Our firs
t official date had gone very well.

  It was unseasonably warm for March so, after, we walked around awhile. He offered to escort me home, and on the way, we decided we should stop for ice cream. Outside the Continental Bar on St. Mark’s Place, he asked a pair of punkish teenagers if they knew of any ice cream shops nearby. “Sorry, man,” one of them said. “Could I bum a cigarette though?”

  Billy joked about what they thought of us, boring adults looking for ice cream instead of heroin. We passed a couple of drunk girls outside Nevada Smiths, a big NYU hangout on Third Avenue. In my freshman year of college, I’d gone there with my friend Katie two weekends in a row—we spun each other around to “Dancing Queen” and threw back the shots of Jägermeister some ROTC boys had bought for us—and then never again.