by Iris Smyles
One of the girls sat down on the curb out front and began throwing up on her shoes. “Sweetie, sweetie,” her friend said as she pulled her hair back. Billy made a joke about her being allergic to shellfish, then added, “Seriously, though. Drunk women are so unattractive.”
“Yeah,” I said, watching her as we walked by. “Poor thing,” I said, as if it were her that I was pitying.
The truth is when I stopped drinking, there was nothing casual about it. And when Billy and I ran into each other that first time at Macy’s, it had been months since I’d spoken to anyone. Outside of the two classes I taught at a local college, and the occasional phone call with my parents, the only time I heard my own voice was at checkout counters when I’d buy something, or when the cable guy came over to install my new box.
Cutting alcohol out of my life left a giant hole in its center. In an effort to replace drinking with other activities, I began watching TV and shopping obsessively. All the money I’d previously spent on booze, I now spent on cable and in shops all over Manhattan, buying things I hadn’t realized I needed until I set foot in the store. I bought a curling iron (still in its box), though I have naturally curly hair. But what if I want to augment the diameter of my curls? I thought one afternoon, weighing the pros and cons in a brightly lit aisle three.
My apartment, cluttered with gleaming new things, had become a storage unit. There I sat among my acquisitions, like a bored pasha still unsatisfied. It was so crowded, I couldn’t stand it. So I’d go out again. Wander the streets. But since it was winter and too cold to spend much real time outdoors, too cold to sit in the city parks and daydream, I found myself visiting the shops again, just to see people, just for the view.
The larger department stores are best. Some of the best views in the city are from inside the big stores. The view from Filene’s Basement, located unexpectedly on the fifth floor of a building overlooking Union Square, is beautiful at night. Macy’s has the loveliest escalators—wooden, antique, from some other New York that existed before I was born. I’d go to the Brooks Brothers flagship store on Madison, whose fitting rooms made me feel like I was in a country club, visit the sweaters, run a hand over the cable knits, which calmed me down, then head over to the fourth-floor windows to take in the view.
I hadn’t isolated myself on purpose. In the beginning, I tried to be social. But the situations I’d once reveled in—house parties with nothing but beer to qualify them as parties—without alcohol had no savor. Clear-eyed, chatting with someone I’d never see again, someone I never wanted to see again, I’d wonder: What am I doing here? Is this fun?
How had I ever managed to make a game out of a roll of Scotch tape? I thought, when Felix handed me the dispenser and tagged me “it.” How had I ever managed to fall in love, and with such frequency? Love is blind, I thought, only when you’re blacking out.
I stopped going to parties, stopped seeing friends, stopped dating. I began reading more. In quiet crisis, I dug up my college copy of The Myth of Sisyphus; I struggled to imagine Sisyphus happy. I took long walks along the cold Hudson until I couldn’t feel my hands in my pockets, hung out in the reading rooms of public libraries, rented French films, saw the whole of the New Wave. I looked up at the sliver of sky between buildings, watched the clouds pass quickly, and felt the world really large. I wondered of my place in it. I ate dinner alone and cried into my single slice of pizza, thinking of Epicurus’s axiom, which I’d read earlier in one of the thirty library books on rotation in my apartment—thirty was the limit one person could have out at a time—“Before you eat or drink anything, consider carefully who you eat or drink with . . . for feeding without a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf.” I chewed silently and wondered if I was a wolf.
I stopped answering my phone, which had previously rung at all hours, as anyone who needed a drinking partner always knew to call me. I put off returning calls until I stopped bothering to return them at all, not wanting to see or speak to anyone. What was there to say? Having spent the last ten years in a manic state of celebration—every day was a holiday, every hour a cause to corral friends, chat up strangers, dance, drink . . .—the change was confusing. I was a party girl, a people person, a person with a social circle so large I could endeavor to make a feature film on the basis of favors. And yet, here I was presenting a definite misanthropic streak. A streak so wide and long, it covered my whole body.
Sober, I was impossibly critical. A tense double of the girl so eager to find common ground with everyone—a taxi driver who stopped the meter and took me for a joy ride round the city and later sent me letters; a homeless wino I met on Phatso’s stoop with whom I chatted and drank for two hours, making me late for my date; the daytime drunks in a dive bar behind Port Authority, one of whom stole my wallet but then kindly mailed it to me afterward, having removed only the cash; a pimp; his brother the thief; a semi-homeless coke dealer named Carl; a slew of Russian mobsters in Brighton Beach one June just after graduation; a 1980s roller-skating champion who’d fallen on hard times . . . And as for love, if I couldn’t find someone to inspire it, I’d go to work transforming them through my special art. Like a painter creating beauty through his depiction of the mundane, the swallow was my brushstroke; I’d drink until a man’s eyes twinkled like Van Gogh’s stars. Sometimes this required a lot of drinking, and here I’d demonstrate my romantic pragmatism, my dedication to things fine. Nobly, for art’s sake, I’d drink until I passed out.
But that was then. Now, I stayed home watching TV for the first time in years, missing the company of others, desperate to avoid them, recognizing Billy.
Our second date was a little more choppy, though Billy seemed not to notice. At Sammy’s Noodle Shop on Seventh, he slurped his noodles happily, then suggested we head over to the theater; we had plans to see a movie called Bicycling with Molière. “Something you should know about me is that I love movies,” he told me before we walked in, as if this were a hang-up peculiar to him and not the focal point of a major industry based in California. “Consider me warned,” I said, as if our date were occurring on a sitcom. Canned laughter. Why am I so critical?
We took seats in the middle of the middle row, in accordance with his system. I didn’t care where we sat. I was distracted with wondering when he was going to kiss me. If he would do it at the end of the evening when we said good night, if I’d be expected to kiss him, or how exactly the whole thing worked. I’d kissed plenty of men, but when I thought about it, after high school there were very few first kisses I actually remembered. What I remembered instead were nights of heavy drinking, waking up next to a date, our heads already close on the pillow. We’d kiss very probably because we’d kissed already.
But how do you go from talking at a polite distance to kissing, I wondered. I’d wondered the same thing as a teenager, but couldn’t remember arriving at any solution. How could I be so old and still not have that figured out?
Billy asked if anything was wrong.
“Me? No,” I said. “I’m just, umm, hot,” I added, and proceeded to take off my jacket. “Can I put this on the chair next to you?” I said, and leaned over him to lay my jacket down on his side.
“What?” I asked, in reply to his stare, my face still in front of his, which is when he started to lean toward me. Naturally, I moved back, thinking I was in his way. But he followed, leaning forward still more. So, I continued leaning back, and he, farther forward, and so on until my back was pinned to the chair and his mouth was against mine. Frozen, I tried to make sense of the situation. After a second, he sat back again in his own chair. “That was even better than I imagined it,” he mumbled.
“Oh. Were you trying to kiss me?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, shaking his head.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t understand. I have very bad reflexes, and by the time I realized it was happening, you’d stopped.” I sat still for a moment and then said, “If you want to do it again, I’ll be ready this time.” And so he did it again a
nd I was ready and then the movie started.
On our next date, conversation was stiff. Again Billy seemed oblivious, which was, in a way, comforting. He studied the menu carefully, as if it weren’t the same menu as last week. We’d gone to Sammy’s Noodles again, this time in their East Village location. I worked hard trying to think up things to talk about. I mentioned a book I’d just started reading. “Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea. It’s a true story,” I said.
“That would suck,” Billy said. Then, closing his menu, he looked up. “You look so pretty today.”
I blushed.
We talked until the food arrived but were unable to hit on any good conversation. I wished we could just kiss so that we wouldn’t have to talk. I wished we could just skip over the whole getting-to-know-you part. I wished . . .
“Did you know that there are one million bricks in the Empire State Building?” he asked. “I picked up that fun fact from a box of Cracker Jacks. I should warn you, I love Cracker Jacks and fun facts.”
I decided I needed to sleep with Billy immediately. Quickly, before he said anything else. Quickly, before I got to dislike him. Quickly, before I didn’t want to sleep with him anymore. Quickly, before I never slept with anyone ever again. Billy went on about the fruit shakes he’d been making lately, to which he’d recently introduced papaya, and for a moment I considered thanking him and saying good night. But then, did it make sense to cut it off now? And do what? Go home? Alone?
“Billy,” I said playfully, “make a muscle and let me feel it.”
“Wow,” I said, reaching across the table. “The fruit shakes are really working! Your willpower is astounding.”
A few hours later, in his apartment, on a mattress on the floor, under his covers, without our clothes, Billy curled up behind me like a frightened chipmunk, or an injured cocker spaniel, or an affectionate monkey on my back. Something like that. He held me tightly long into the night, occasionally nuzzling his face into the nape of my neck.
I couldn’t sleep.
Who is Billy? I began to wonder, adjusting his arm still draped over me. And who does he think I am that he is holding me so tightly? What am I doing lying here next to a relative stranger? But then, we just had sex. Are we still strangers? How much closer can two people get?
My mind raced. I wanted to get out of bed and reread Camus, practice happy thoughts about Sisyphus and his rock and his hill, as I’d gotten in the habit lately when I couldn’t fall asleep—another side effect of sobriety, not being able to pass out. But I was afraid to move, so I just lay there, thinking: Imagine Sisyphus naked. Imagine Sisyphus having sex after the third date. “I’ve got to get up early for work,” imagine Sisyphus saying, motioning out a girl’s apartment window to a hill in the distance. “That stone’s not going to roll itself.” Imagine Sisyphus lying next to me on a mattress in Chinatown. What if Billy thinks this is as weird as I do? What if he wants me to leave as much as I want to leave? Do I want to leave?
Suddenly everything struck me as completely out of order. My being sober again as if I’d never been drunk. My feeling like I was sixteen but also feeling like I was running out of time. I felt young and old and excited and terrified and attracted to Billy and repulsed by him, and I didn’t know which feelings to throw myself at, what feeling to run toward, whose eyes to paint, if I wanted to be blind again, if it was necessary. What was I doing here in this stranger’s arms? What was I doing anywhere at all?
“Billy,” I whispered. “Are you asleep?”
He didn’t say anything the first few times I asked, so I repeated it louder and nudged him until he woke up. “Billy?” I asked, feeling even his name strange in my mouth. I asked him if he thought it at all odd that we should be lying here like this in each other’s arms. “It’s warmer that way,” he said, as if we were lost skiers trapped on a snowy mountainside waiting for rescue and, having come upon a dry cave, had decided to camp there before deducing our best chance at survival meant sharing body heat. “But I mean . . .” and I tried to explain what I meant.
Billy said nothing, but listened. After another moment of holding me in silence, he said, “Fine. You’re right,” and unfastened his arm. Freeing me, he turned to the opposite wall. His back lightly touched mine. I could feel it expand as he breathed.
I tried to move away so we weren’t touching, but the bed was so narrow there was nowhere to go. Blinking in the dark, feeling the room shrink back to its real size, feeling the borders of my body complete against his, I pulled at the covers. After a minute, I said his name again.
“Billy?”
“Yes,” he said immediately.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and waited. “Did I hurt your feelings?”
“Yes,” he said.
I turned over and put my arm around his waist the way his had been around mine. I let my face fall into the back of his neck. I hugged him tightly. We’d have to stay close if we were going to make it out of this cave alive.
We were beating out to New York from Gibraltar, and I dreamt I was standing on the bridge in mid-Atlantic and looking northward. It was a simple dream. I seemed to vow to myself that some day I would go to the region of ice and snow and go on and on till I came to one of the poles of the earth, the end of the axis upon which this great round ball turns.
—ERNEST SHACKLETON
Donner, Party of Two
BILLY AND I HAVE BEEN dating for over a month, and I practically love him. This, despite the fact that he is a little bit stupid, not great-looking per se, that his body has problem areas. Despite his vanity, his too-frequent checkups in shop windows when we walk, in mirrored walls at pizza places, before the medicine cabinet when we shower together, in the sides of Coca-Cola cans purchased from street vendors before he takes a sip. Despite his poor table manners, his chewing with his mouth open and talking with his mouth full. Despite the fact that for the most part I can’t stand him and that frequently on our dates, while he speaks, I find myself fantasizing about dying alone, about freezing in a snowy glen somewhere miles from civilization, my body becoming rigid as I lay motionless and the indifferent snow whirls all around me—I open my mouth and let some flakes disintegrate on my tongue because I’m thirsty, because I haven’t eaten or drunk anything for days, because I took a shortcut on my way to California with a band of settlers hoping for a better life out west. Looking up from where I lay freezing, I blink into the terrifying vast, into the violent white consuming the trees, the mountains, all and everything, until my mind also goes white, and I become more and more tired, drifting slowly into the final sleep. Then, interrupting my thoughts, Billy will say with his mouth full, “You mind if I steal a few fries?”
For his part, Billy doesn’t seem to like me either. He thinks I’m uptight and fussy, a humorless downer who won’t just join in the fun and hazard a guess as to what he’s been eating based on the crunching sounds he makes when chewing into the phone.
Since we don’t get along very well, we watch a lot of movies. I prefer to stay home and rent, remaining close to the bed, where we get along best. But Billy’s romantic and doesn’t like sex without a preamble. He requires romance, “closeness and intimacy,” he says. So I do my best to fake it for him.
When he does think I’m using him for sex, he gets testy and wills his erection away. Like the other night, when I tried to roll a condom onto his half-hard penis, and he just stared out the window, refusing to become erect until I agreed to a conversation about our relationship.
I’m romantic, too, which is why I try to keep him from speaking, worried whatever he’ll say might break the delicate spell of our love. My ideal date with Billy goes like this: He comes to my place, where I’ve already prepared a large dinner and so am able to keep his mouth occupied with food. After we finish dinner, but before he’s finished chewing, I steer him toward the bedroom, where we watch a movie of my choosing. I press Play just as he swallows, thereby shutting the window for all possible conversation. If he begins to speak anyway, I�
��ll hand him a beverage.
I prefer long movies; multi-episode PBS documentaries are great for the soporific effect they have upon Billy, who, already full from a big meal, is now silently devouring the large serving of ice cream I’ve just handed him. Should one episode end before Billy feels ready to retire, I can just pop in a second or ninth part of a Ken Burns series, however many it takes. Then, when the moment is ripe and he begins to yawn, I nudge him over to the bed and crawl in beside him. “Would you mind turning out the light?” I’ll ask. Then Billy will lean over the nightstand and discover the condom I’ve placed there strategically, which gives him an idea. Turning off the light, Billy takes me in his arms.
The other night we watched a documentary on the Donner Party expedition that I’d borrowed from the library. I’m particularly fond of survival stories that end in cannibalism. It’s because I identify so keenly with desperation. While most people become desperate over time or due to a particularly harrowing set of circumstances, I was born this way. I think it’s part of my genetic makeup, the way others are born gay or straight, except that instead of preferring men or women, my desperate gene predisposes me to sexual partners who are just not that great.
The way I first consented to have sex with Billy, for example, I imagine to be quite similar to that moment when, stranded on a mountainside beside their wrecked plane, one of the survivors in Alive—based on a true story—tentatively took a bite from his dead friend’s behind. The shame and horror that must accompany such an act I’ve often felt during and after sex with Billy. And yet, I press on, viewing my debasement not as a failure of will but the final measure in a heroic tale of survival. Sex with Billy is a triumph of the human spirit.
Alive, The Donner Party, Arctic Passage, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex . . . I’ve seen and read them all. Always the hit at parties, I’ve fashioned a number of games inspired by these plights. A nice alternative to the popular “I’d Rather,” which asks of each player, “With whom would you rather go to bed” if you were forced to go to bed with either Dan Quayle or Patti LuPone, one of my games asks whom would you rather eat if your plane crashed in the Andes, as did the aircraft of that unfortunate Uruguayan rugby team, and cannibalizing the dead were your only means of survival. It’s a great recourse for when conversation goes stale and your hostess seems not to know what to do. “Let’s draw straws!” I’ll announce enthusiastically, and then begin explaining the rules by way of summarizing the traumatic events that befell a crew of Arctic explorers, or nineteenth-century whalers, or those eighty-seven American settlers caught up in the “westering fever” and looking for a short pass to California in 1846.
