by Iris Smyles
Relatively sober this time, Felix immediately took a shine to May and went ahead and introduced himself, as if for the first time. May is very pretty—she’s petite, wears her dark straight hair in a bob, has big blue eyes like fishbowls without fish, and looks like a film star from another time, beautiful in a way that women aren’t anymore. When she first got to school, she didn’t think so though. She thought she was fat and talked all the time about how she wasn’t fat but just healthy. I told her she looked like Mae West. She told me Mae West was fat.
May is from Alabama and has down pat that Southern Belle sweet-and-cruel-way-of-being that just accidentally tears men apart. The way it works is that she never seems to know she’s being cruel, which is what enables her to be sweet at the same time, which makes the boys she’s cruel to like her even more. She doesn’t like them though is the thing, so she’s unaware of her power.
For most of college May didn’t have a boyfriend. She dated now and then, nice looking boys a little soft in the arms with fine manners whom she’d accidentally destroy before finding their pleading remnants too disgusting to tolerate—they’d save flowers that fell from her hair and months later, commemorating the day of their meeting, present them to her inside jewelry boxes cupped repulsively in shivering hands. No wonder she was still a virgin. Or, she’d date guys with way too much game, handsome men who’d cast her off right away because now it was she who liked them too much, her hands that shivered repulsively, because she was not cruel at all, but looked at them too long with her terrible, pleading, fishbowl-without-fish eyes.
Felix, on the other hand, isn’t handsome at all. He is striking, maybe even ugly, but the kind of ugly that in the eye of certain beholders (May’s, it turns out) could be taken for beautiful. Extraordinary-looking is the best way to describe him. He has a giant nose, a sort of monument to noses, a parody of a nose really, right in the middle of his face, which is where a nose should be, I guess, and then all this wild curly brown hair—now there’s some gray in it—sprouting from his head like a set of disordered but brilliant ideas.
He was standing under his hair at the bar that night—much more composed than when we saw him at the party two years earlier— performing an elegant lean with a look of half-seriousness, as if in his mind he were telling a very cool joke and were taking his sweet time with it. May was ordering her second Amaretto sour, when Felix said, “Hi,” or something similar, and gave her a look like he was really about something, so says May.
Then, channeling Mae West, May looked him up and down and asked, “Is that Deadeye Dick in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?” He had a Kurt Vonnegut novel tucked into the front of his jeans where a pistol would have been if this were an action movie. After that, May began to lean too and they talked for a while about their shared love of Vonnegut. May didn’t know what came over her, she told me later, just that all of a sudden she found herself possessed of a wit and self-assurance she never imagined she had. She fell for him that night.
I liked them as a couple, I told her at home after, mostly because I could draw caricatures of them together pretty easily. I had just started to draw, mostly when I was stoned or in class, or both as it often happened, and I would practice by drawing people I knew. I found my ability to draw people increased with the amount of time I spent with them and so got to know which of their features were the most telling. I particularly enjoyed drawing May because I knew her so well and also because she sort of looked like a cartoon already, which made it easy.
Just like May, Felix looked completely unrealistic in person. I mean I was able to draw him perfectly on my first try, that very night, while they stood chatting at the bar. When May introduced me a few minutes after, I showed them the napkin on which I’d drawn their joint portrait. Felix, leaning in, his hair a third party; May, looking away, glamorous, aloof.
They agreed with me that it looked much more like them than they did, and I ordered my third whiskey while they continued to eye each other. Finding little else to do—I wasn’t attracted to anyone at the party myself—I decided to spend the night brokering their first date, negotiating the exchange of phone numbers so May could play it cool, as if his calling were a matter quite beyond her concern.
I was only returning the favor. I often asked May to field phone calls from my own boyfriends, arrange with them the particulars of my dates, or else provide them with small talk until I was ready to talk myself. “Hand me the phone once you’ve tired him out,” I’d sigh, lying in my bed as she chatted them up. Sometimes I wouldn’t bother talking to them at all. We’d call it a “science experiment,” and I’d just ask her to pretend she was me. “Like a placebo Iris.”
Hanging up the phone, she’d submit her report, describing to me in detail how the conversation went. “Fascinating,” I’d remark. And then, analyzing his response, I’d try to determine whether his feelings for me, “his symptoms,” as I called them, were real or psychosomatic. “Love is a disease,” I told May. “The question is whether it’s viral or bacterial.”
I’d roll a joint, we’d get high, and then I’d record the results of the “experiment” in a chemistry ledger I’d purchased from the college bookstore for just this purpose. I’d draw up elaborate tables and charts in the rigorous fashion of the lab reports I’d submitted in high school—I got very good marks in science incidentally—and then we’d discuss my findings over margaritas.
Seeing as May and I pretty much shared everything, I figured why not share this, too. I went on my dates alone, of course, but found the reporting of them after to be much more fun. Whether or not it worked out with each guy, after a while, hardly mattered. How paltry love and heartbreak began to seem in the face of so much cold hard science.
Thus I began setting up for the experiment of May and Felix. Donning my imaginary lab coat that night at the Three of Cups bar, I told Felix that he could pursue May provided he honor certain protocol. “I’m going to give you May’s phone number along with this brief list of rules. Be sure to identify yourself politely when you call, or I won’t put her on with you.”
2
“319!” Felix said, raising a hand to high-five us both. We were sitting on our couch—well, they were. I was bouncing a few feet away on our mini-trampoline. Felix high-fived May and then got up off the couch to high-five me and also pass the joint.
It was around 4:00 AM, and we’d just gotten back from karaoke where May had introduced her new boyfriend to our group. It was the first time May had brought a guy—usually she came alone, that is, with me—which made it that much worse when each of our friends, one at a time, said, “You do realize you’re dating a male version of Iris.” “My nose isn’t that big,” I protested drunkenly. May protested, too, though vaguely with a “No, he’s not.” The likeness became intolerable when The Bastard went on stage and sang “Just a Gigolo,” not knowing it was my signature song.
I hadn’t noticed the resemblance before that, but after everyone said it, I began to see it, too. It was, I suppose, a big reason why Felix and I got along so well and yet never felt even the remotest physical attraction—it was as if we were each other’s long-lost brother and sister. We both have big noses, wild curly hair, and a tendency to become the life of the party, or its death, depending on how heavily we’ve been drinking.
In fact, when I first saw Felix at that dorm party—the one he doesn’t remember—tripping over things and carrying on badly, I’d cringed with recognition. Comparatively sober for the moment, I’d felt as if I were watching myself on a different day. So much so that when the guy next to me passed a mean remark about Felix, without even knowing him, I’d rushed to his defense, not because I’m heroic, but because I was defending myself.
May and I, on the other hand, are nothing alike. Though we do share a tendency toward excess, the respective outcomes of our indulgences are quite different—while May might get too drunk and fall asleep, I might get too drunk and set something on fire. Further, while May is petite and sha
pely, I am tall and rangy. I’m more Laverne than Shirley, you might say, less pretty if more likely to sport a large embroidered I. I raise all this only to supply some possible reason why May, at that time, was regarded by all who knew us as “Iris’s sidekick.”
Certainly neither she nor I defined our relationship this way. Quite the contrary, we saw ourselves as partners, equal halves of a dynamic duo always in complete accord. Indeed, were we sold a motorcycle with a sidecar, there would have been no argument about who would sit where. She’d choose the motorcycle, happy to take charge at the wheel, while I’d choose the sidecar, preferring the role of passenger as if it were a limo.
My point is that though others may have defined her in relationship to me, she did not. So when she finally found a boyfriend, The Bastard moreover, I think she was excited to shed her old role. It was naturally upsetting to her then, to have this new relationship defined as just an echo of her relationship to me, as if being my sidekick were a fate she could not escape: May, a bizarro Oedipus, running from 319 and choosing Felix, only to discover that in choosing Felix, she’d in fact chosen her roommate once more.
“319!” Felix said again. “It’s fate!” he went on as I passed the joint back to him.
We’d been talking about NYU and the dorms, and had stumbled onto the uncanny fact that Felix had lived in the same Fifth Avenue dormitory that May and I shared two years prior when we’d been randomly assigned to each other as roommates. Not just the same fifteen-story building, but the same floor, and not just the same floor, but the same room—319. And which bed did Felix occupy? Mine.
“My eyes!” May cried, after some ash from the joint flew up into them. Blinking in pain, blind for the moment and leading with her arms, she ran to the bathroom screaming, in order to splash some water on her face.
How bizarre it was to reflect back four years, to recall the many conversations May and I had before falling asleep. How bizarre to think of Felix lying exactly where I’d lain two years before, to think that if you could dial back time on one side of that room, it would have been Felix and she that were randomly assigned to each other. It would have been Felix with whom she would have shared so many secrets.
3
Felix and May were soon a couple. They spent the normal amount of time any couple might spend alone, but then, seeing as we all got along so well, they also spent time with me. And so, for a while, the three of us became something of a gang. Then when I had a date, the gang expanded to four. Then once when I didn’t have a date, Felix asked if he could bring his friend Reggie, who had just graduated from a college down South and who was in New York for a temporary consulting job. Then, after a while, Reggie and I started dating, too. Sort of.
Here’s a little lesson in Physics: While celestial bodies are governed by the laws of attraction, some other kinds of bodies—mine and Reggie’s, for example—are governed by the laws of boredom. Imagine for a moment a satellite orbiting Earth for no other reason than that it has nothing better to do. An orbit only aping paths defined by known physical laws but fundamentally free of any actual gravitational attraction. This was my relationship to Reggie, one of those attempted flirtations where you try to manufacture pull, but finally feel nothing and after a while just give up and turn on the TV.
More bored to Reggie than attracted to anyone else, every now and then we’d find ourselves alone—he was there, I was there, and for a little while, there we were—and kiss. But sharing a joint with May and Felix a little later, the kiss would be forgotten. That is until the next time Reggie and I found ourselves alone, thrust against each other once again, unable to resist the physical equations of the bored state.
And another little lesson, this time in Biology: After graduation, I left for Greece, where I remained for the next four months. By the time I returned to Manhattan in the fall, things between May and Felix had gotten serious. The symptoms of their relationship had progressed and like a chronic condition, Felix was flaring up daily; he’d practically moved in with us.
You know how Lyme disease makes you not want to do the things you used to want to do? May’s relationship with Felix was sort of like that. She rarely wanted to hang out with me anymore and after a while, I hardly ever even saw her without him by her side. May and Felix were, “like, best friends,” May told me privately, during one of the few lucid moments that very occasionally punctuated her fever. Outside of that, she’d completely stopped reporting on their relationship to me, but had actually begun reporting on ours to him.
She’d slip out to the corner deli to buy crackers or crazy straws for Felix—“he likes the ones shaped like flamingos”—and Felix would come up to me and say, “Maybe you should clean your hair out of the shower drain after you’re done, Iris. It’s not fair when May and I end up doing it.” I contemplated reminding him that May was my roommate, not he, and considering the fact that he was an unpaying tenant, it was actually quite fair that he not only clean the shower drain but also sweep and mop the living room. Instead I apologized. Though Felix was out of line, May had a point. But I had a point, too, which was this: Judging by the seriousness with which your illness is progressing, perhaps it’s time you two seek quarantine—I’m paraphrasing. “Maybe you guys should get your own place.”
May did eventually move out. And then I met Martin and came down with the fever, too. We got pretty serious and then, you know how it goes. How many close relationships can a single person juggle? In the beginning, May and I still saw each other; we went on a few double dates. But gradually, we saw each other less and less until eventually we did not see each other at all. It was the exact opposite of a big deal. It was more like the end of the world.
Just another word or two about Physics and the Second Law of Thermodynamics in particular: When I was a kid I thought often about what the end of the world would look like. I mean, the edge of the universe, how does that work? What exactly is the border between something and nothing? But now I see I was thinking about it all wrong, that there is no edge, no hard and fast end of the world, just like there is no end to certain friendships. People, like stars and planets and everything else, just drift apart.
May and I were like space. We didn’t end our friendship as much as let it go. Things got cold, the universe expanded between us, disorder replaced order, chaos and entropy and all that. Cosmic stuff. Until I didn’t even know her phone number anymore, until the next thing I knew about her was coming from Reggie’s mouth two years later after I ran into him downtown, on line outside The Halloween Store.
I looked up from my book—The Elegant Universe—and there he was cued up right behind me, the laws of boredom thrusting us together once again. He’d ended up settling permanently in New York and was renting an apartment in the East Village, he told me. And hadn’t I heard? May and Felix had gone out to L. A. about a year ago and were living together over there, trying to break into movies.
I told Reggie my idea about the end of the world, about expansion and cooling and increasingly entropic conditions resulting in a state of perpetual California—I’m paraphrasing.
“Yeah, L. A. sucks,” he replied, before craning his neck to see inside the costume shop window. “So what are you going to be for Halloween?”
“Oh, I have my costume already squared away. I’m just here to buy a mustache for Martin’s costume. Martin’s my boyfriend,” I explained.
4
Martin and I were going as “The Damsel in Distress” and “The Villain,” archetypes from the silent film era. I’d built a stretch of train tracks extending five feet, out of some balsa wood, nails, and silver spray paint, and planned to tie myself to them. My idea was to carry them around on my back, as if I’d been freed by cutting the tracks instead of the ropes. The rest of my costume was an old-fashioned, damsel-like lace dress.
The idea was born out of Martin’s unwillingness to participate altogether. Martin said he hated Halloween and never ever dressed for it, so I had to come up with a couple’s costume that wou
ldn’t require much on his end. It was a battle just to get him to don the mustache and black hat—barely a costume at all—and he refused “on principle” to take part in any of the preparations, which is how I ended up at The Halloween Store alone.
We’d had an argument before I left. I asked him why he couldn’t just dress up because I wanted to and not make such a big deal about it. Martin said he was being civilly disobedient as a way of defying my increasingly totalitarian reign over his life. I said that he was the dictator, and why couldn’t he just compromise? I told him that Halloween was important to me, that it would be fun—I said this while crying.
I pointed out that I’d attended multiple Seders and Yom Kippur suppers for his religion, and he said Halloween was not my religion and my comparing it to his religion was further evidence of my being an anti-Semite. Somehow all our arguments, which were increasingly frequent, ended up with his declaring me an anti-Semite. I said that was unfair, and he said my resorting to tears was unfair. Then he said he’d wear the mustache if I got it for him, but that’s it.
So I got all the stuff—including the mustache—and was very excited. I hadn’t observed Halloween in two whole years, not since I met Martin because I’d been too tired and depressed about my new life as a schoolteacher to make the effort. That, coupled with the fact that I’d recently stopped flying in my dreams, suggested a significant psychological shift about which I was deeply concerned. I felt my soul was dying and I didn’t know what to do. Martin said this was called “growing up.”
When I arrived at his place with the supplies, Martin was in a miserable mood and made a big show of it; it was like he put himself in that mood just to get back at me. I persevered. I handed Martin the black hat and mustache and offered to help him prepare the rest of his look.
