by Iris Smyles
He can’t just apologize and say he won’t do it again. No! That would be too easy. Instead, he has to tell me, still chewing, that I’m the one who’s wrong, that if anyone should apologize, it should be me, because I hurt his feelings. Then he says I should be happy about his chewing, because it means he feels comfortable enough not to pretend to be someone he’s not. “Please pretend!” I beg. And he laughs, thinking I’m kidding. Then, after he asks what I’m thinking a few times—“I read somewhere that there’s a chemical in women’s bodies released after sex that fosters feelings of attachment to one’s sexual partners”—he asks me out for the weekend.
Last Friday I cooked dinner and rented a documentary on the Franklin Expedition. Billy brought over his worn copy of Ishtar, which I consented to watch after—Ishtar being one of my favorite movies, too. I took the DVD from him and laid it on top of the TV, then sat down beside him, curling into his embrace.
8
In 1845 the Franklin Expedition set out among the uncharted, icy waters of the Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage, an invaluable if fabled trade route that might link, crucially, the Atlantic to the Pacific.
For centuries, explorers had ventured north in pursuit. Unlike previous efforts, however, Franklin’s ship was equipped with every advantage of the modern age. His voyage would be easy, it was supposed, their mission to be completed within one year of their departure. But just in case, they brought enough canned food—a modern innovation—to ensure survival for many years. Among the cans, they stocked lemon juice too, to stave off scurvy, which had crippled previous missions. Their ship, large and imposing, had everything, even a library, so that, in the event of having to winter over, the crew might read and also stave off boredom. An undernourished mind, it was understood, was as great a threat as a malnourished body.
Bad luck found them early. Near Beechy Island, their ship got trapped in the ice, and there they remained for five winters. Patiently, the crew waited, expecting that eventually a path would clear. But unlikely weather conditions worked against them, and on those particular summers, the ice never thawed.
According to the logbooks, the crew managed well at first. Ironically, it turned out, the seed of their doom had been planted in their sustenance; the cans containing their food had been made with lead. Aside from fatigue and a blackening of the skin, one of the chief symptoms of lead poisoning is paranoia and dementia.
After they consumed the last of the poisoned food, hungry, sick, and unable to think clearly, the men turned on one another. Some resorted to cannibalism. Others, in a last-ditch attempt at survival, took to the land, packing up a smaller boat filled with personal items, which they then dragged for miles across the snow.
Not one of Franklin’s men survived.
9
“Iris, you make me crazy,” Billy moaned.
I popped my head up from what I was doing. “Like lead?” I asked, examining his face.
We were in bed after having watched the documentary on the Franklin Expedition when, with Billy’s penis in my mouth, it dawned on me: perhaps sex had made us irrational the way lead had Franklin’s men. For the sex renews us, spurs us on, but to what?
“Remind me to get vaccinated.”
“The flu vaccine is a tool for mind control.”
“How’s that?”
“If I have to explain it to you, then you’re more brainwashed than I thought.”
“ . . . He had all these unresolved issues from childhood and ended up giving himself cancer.”
“You can’t give yourself cancer, Billy.”
“Well, that’s just the fluoride talking.”
“The pyramids weren’t tombs like they want you to believe but early nuclear power plants. If you look at all those small tunnels, for example, what were they for?”
“For the thieves to get in and out.”
“It’s amazing how much more advanced than us they were. I mean, we still don’t know how they built them!”
“You say that as if today’s developers all want to build pyramids but have to settle for glass high-rises. We’re pretty advanced, too.”
“That’s what they want you to think.”
Whenever I try to end things with Billy, he says he doesn’t think breaking up would be good for the long-term health of our relationship. And though this doesn’t make sense, sense has ceased to matter. Yes, Billy. Onward! Into the ice! Into the blinding white!
No one knows exactly what happened to Franklin’s crew. Their story has been pieced together from the recovered logs of crew members, from bodies exhumed from icy graves, and from secondhand accounts of the local Inuit population who’d briefly come into contact with the group.
The strangest thing about Franklin’s story is that while he and his men struggled to survive, while their plight grew worse and more harrowing by the day, the Inuit people living alongside them were thriving.
We meet regularly now in public places, at the movies, on busy sidewalks, and at restaurants surrounded by happy couples. Every date with Billy offers some new horror; he’s taken to wearing a shark-tooth necklace. But rather than despair of these developments, I’ve taken to viewing them as but one more test of our endurance.
“Relationships take work,” Billy says, and I nod. But at what point does perseverance become insanity? How much more should we endure?
The Franklin party would not give up their boat; when it would no longer carry them, they carried it, dragging it through the ice for miles.
“What are you thinking?” Billy repeats.
I am thinking that if a PBS documentary were made about our relationship, complete with voiceovers, photos, and accounts from our journals giving detail of each terrible date, among the assorted artifacts would be testimonials from the patrons who sat beside us at the restaurants where we were last seen as a couple.
“Yeah, we saw ’em,” one of them might say. “No, I don’t know what happened, why they didn’t make it. After a while, they just stopped coming in.” And when asked if they could recall anything else, anything that might help historians piece together what happened to those two who ventured out, so confidently at first, on their first date, the man would shrug and put his arm around his wife. “No, not really. Just that they looked hungry.”
Next to the writer of real estate advertisements, the autobiographer is the most suspect of prose artists.
—DONAL HENAHAN
My Real Estate Agent’s Beard
ANY REAL ESTATE AGENT will tell you, if you don’t sell within the first few weeks, you’ll not only have to lower your asking price, but must seriously consider throwing in a washer and dryer. That’s just the market.
I’m on the marriage market, my parents recently reminded me. And because I’ve been on sale a little too long now, they decided to throw in a condo.
We closed on June 4th, and the days leading up to it were a whirlwind of negotiations: transfer taxes, inspections, contracts brokered by The Corcoran Group, promises of quiet and parking spaces, Facebook friendship requests, and long looks between me and my real estate agent.
Should I tell you next about my great apartment in Brooklyn, about the ample square footage, the wonderful water pressure? Or should I tell you more about my real estate agent’s beard?
He has this long full beard that makes him look like one of those aliens on that old TV show Lost in Space. One of those aliens the main characters find living alone on an otherwise uninhabited planet. An alien that starts out very nice—he may even offer you alien cake—though the visitor’s suspicions build with every forkful.
“What a shady business, selling!” I told Lawrence, as we looked over at Manhattan, on what would soon be my balcony. “One rung up from a used car salesman,” he said. Dating a real estate agent is the adult equivalent of dating a boy who smokes cigarettes and works at a bike shop. “My high school sweetheart smoked cigarettes and worked at a bike shop,” I told him. “He’s a real estate agent, too.”
It had been a long time sin
ce I’d been alone with a man, and there we were, all alone, on the final walk-through to check the faucets and light switches. Lawrence had just finished remarking on the spectacular city views as described in his New York Times listing, when he asked me, “Are you going to write about this?”
“Write about what?”
“Me and my beard,” he smiled.
“What is there to say about you and your beard?”
We stepped back inside, and I asked if the windows would be washed before I moved in, what kind of tiles would be installed on the terrace, and if the banister on the stairway would be varnished. Then I said, “Actually, I might write about this in a few years; it takes me time to figure out what I think. If I do, I’ll tell you and point out which character you are [this is you, Lawrence, I am writing about you now], otherwise you might not recognize yourself, and the events, too, might seem different from how you remember them. You may recall a different apartment, for example, an entirely different view; you may even think you’re me.”
“Have you seen Lost in Space?” I asked, before leaning over to test a light switch directly behind him. “No,” he said, and his Corcoran Group cologne swirled all around me. “Should I see it?” he asked, his face close to mine. “No,” I said, smiling, as if that were my answer to everything.
“Besides actors, real estate agents are the only professionals who use headshots for their work,” he noted. We were standing on the roof.
Accompanying each of his emails is a photograph of Lawrence, licensed real estate agent. In the photo he is clean-shaven and angular, though the first time I met him, he was hidden behind a thick tangle of brown hair.
“Did you grow a beard because you were worried you were too handsome?”
“I’m not handsome,” he said.
“I think beards are an act of aggression against women. They’re unattractive. They say, ‘It will be up to you to figure out how to like me.’”
“Really?” Lawrence asked.
“Really.”
I tested the doorknobs, and Lawrence told me a little bit about himself. “My parents are wealthy, too, you know. I grew up on a large farm in Australia.”
“I see a problem,” I announced, emerging from the bathroom, before asking him to step inside. Standing beside him, I pointed at the wall. “There is no towel rack or toilet paper holder!”
“It’s easy to install. I can help you with that.”
“You personally?”
“Me, personally,” he confirmed, two inches from my face. “I help a lot of my clients after their purchase.”
I turned and walked ahead. Lawrence followed at a polite distance. I looked in the bedroom closets, while Lawrence surveyed the view—a large picture window next to where my bed would be, opening onto a panorama of the many smaller buildings surrounding mine, my neighbors’ windows and their neighbors’ windows, above which loomed the Manhattan skyline—“Such a great view,” he repeated.
I turned from the closet. “Yes,” I said. “It reminds me of Rear Window, which won awards for its set design. I love most if not all of Hitchcock’s window treatments.”
We made our way to the front balcony, to a large glass door, which he opened before stepping out. I stepped out after, but carefully, for the landing was narrow. “I’m afraid of heights,” I said, holding on to the railing. “Me too,” he said, putting his hand beside mine. He looked at me. I squinted. “So why are we out here?”
Lawrence met my parents at the closing. They spent the day together. I was at work, speaking at a literary conference, talking about the difference between fiction and nonfiction, and trying to conceal the fact that I hadn’t published much of either.
“Such a nice young man,” my father said later that night. “He takes very good care of his beard.”
“He says he shampoos it,” my mother added.
Such a nice old-fashioned way to meet a man, I thought, him knowing my parents, my income, my marriageability.
“That makes you a very good catch,” Lawrence said, referring to my parents’ upcoming fortieth anniversary. We stepped off the balcony. “My parents would still be married had my mother not died. I don’t hold with divorce,” he said sternly.
I’d seen the apartment online and wrote him an email. I wrote that my parents were prepared to pay cash, then faxed him a statement from their accountant testifying how much. He called almost immediately after I pressed Send.
“He thinks I’m rich and lonely, but I’m much more than that,” I told a friend, laughing. “I’m also single and unhappy.”
I’m not in the habit of visiting salons, but I got my nails done before I met him at the apartment one last time, this time to test the soundproof windows during rush hour—“I require great quiet,” I said, gazing down at my polished nails (mauve). And then again just before we closed, to check the electrical sockets—I flicked a few switches (French this time). And then again (lavender), before we met at a neighborhood bar where I’d agreed to pick up my keys after he’d spent the day with my parents. It was a hot June night, and I was perspiring—I fanned myself with a wad of bills.
My apartment is modern, airy, and light. It’s so spacious, so well appointed, that I’ve little desire to venture out anymore, though when I do, I feel different. More powerful, more confident, like the casual cruelties of the world can no longer touch me.
“I have superpowers,” I told a friend after my first night in the new place, “a fortress of solitude!” “They won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore,” I added over coffee.
“An apartment can be transformative,” another friend told me, noting my changed disposition only a week in. Quoting Dostoyevsky, he said, “In a young man’s life, three thousand rubles can make all the difference.”
I nodded from where I sat on the other side of that three thousand.
Lawrence came over twice after the closing. The first time he brought me breakfast—bagels with cream cheese—and a wrench; and the second, a bouquet of yellow daisies and a screwdriver. He used the wrench to assemble my new desk and the screwdriver, the dining room table, on which, after, we sat side by side.
The room was filled with boxes, too many to count, so we sat on the only free space just above them, a privileged view overlooking all that I owned, my riches, my palatial estate. I swung my legs back and forth to test his work, and when it wobbled I complained of the shoddy job.
That’s when Lawrence told me his girlfriend was out of town and that I had nice legs. He placed his hand on one of them. “Girlfriend?” I asked. “These old things?” He traced his hand up my leg and asked if I thought he should leave. I said, “Yes, you should leave.” Then I took his hand in mine, pulled it toward me, and then released him.
A few nights later, Lawrence invited me to a party. I accepted and then considered canceling one hour before. I’ll go, but I won’t let him kiss me, I told the mirror. Maybe he has a nice friend who is not a real estate agent, a nice friend who does not have a beard or a girlfriend.
At another new condo on the other side of town, I found myself in a room full of strangers. Lawrence was one of them. The host was Lawrence’s former roommate. A thick, gay black man in a denim jumpsuit and big sunglasses. I told him he looked like a Charlie’s Angel, and he fixed me a drink of seltzer and lime. “I don’t drink either,” Lawrence told me, opening the near beer he’d brought with him. The party was mostly populated by gay men, though there were a few women, too, girlfriends of the few straight men they’d accompanied.
It was the kind of party that makes you think about stealing; if a heart’s not locked up, if you find it on the floor somewhere, is that theft? The kind of party that makes you wonder if you’re capable of such parties. After an hour on the balcony talking to a guy called Nico about the genesis of his name—it was Nicholas, then he spent a semester in Paris—I excused myself to the bathroom.
The door was locked and stayed that way for ten minutes before two men emerged amorously, offering assur
ances that they weren’t having sex. “It’s not what you think,” they told me. I blushed not knowing what I thought. I’d been watching Lawrence across the room.
When I returned, Lawrence said things like “fuck that shit” and spoke about abuses of police power and tax preparation specialists. I told him primly I didn’t care for such language, and then he stood very close, apologized, and asked what I did care for. His Corcoran Group cologne swirled all around me.
Was I having a good time? Did I want another piece of cake? Did I need my drink refreshed? Yes, I kept saying, yes, yes, and before I knew it, it was as if it were my answer to everything.
“How do you know Lawrence?” another guest asked me. “He’s my real estate agent,” I said haughtily. “Lawrence, do you mind if I refer to you that way? May I add you to my staff?” He moved close, as someone made his way through the crowd behind him. “Not at all. You know,” Lawrence said, “Iris has one of the most beautiful apartments in Brooklyn. She got a great deal. And you should see her view!”
We stood on the balcony bursting with people, and I told him his beard made him look like a conqueror. “What makes me look like a conqueror?” “The way you stand. The way you look. The way you conquer.” I imitated Garibaldi drawing his sword. Lawrence looked out over the railing. “It’s as if you were made of marble and standing on a pedestal in a public park.”
He suggested we leave and, taking my elbow, led me downstairs. He hailed a taxi and gave the driver my new address.
We sat on my couch, recently freed from a mountain of boxes. The rest of the room was still stacked high. He swept my legs up onto his lap. Caressing them, he told me he despised liars and cheats. He told me honor was all that mattered in this world. He told me what might happen if he stayed a moment longer. “I will lie beside you and hold you, my face will fall into the back of your neck; I will want to kiss you, to take off your clothes . . . I will want to hold you all night.”
