by Iris Smyles
At my apartment, we painted it black and then attached it to his shoulder using high-powered magnets, which I sewed into his jacket—“The Raven.” I tied a white scarf around his neck and he shaved parts of his beard to match Poe’s. I wore an old-fashioned lace dress and painted on a pallid, deathly complexion. I blended dark circles under my eyes and made my lips slightly blue with just a trace of blood trickling from one corner. Philip set the timer on his camera and we took photographs together as Edgar Allan Poe and Virginia Clemm. We had to take a lot of them because in each one Philip was smiling. I kept having to tell him, “Stop smiling! I’m dying! Doesn’t that make you sad?”
We went uptown to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to see the original Nosferatu with the church organ playing in the background. Afterward, there was a procession of ghouls, and some puppeteers made these giant papier mâché skeletons dance. Every now and then, I’d reach into my purse and pull out my handkerchief, a lacy white cloth I’d doused with fake blood, and cough into it tragically.
On the subway after, a homeless man called across the car. “Excuse me, Miss, but I think you’re bleeding.” He pointed toward his mouth, to the spot where I’d painted a thin trickle of blood on mine. I smiled proudly and explained it was part of my costume. He laughed and examined both of us. “Let me guess,” he said, and began quoting lines from “The Raven.” “I love Poe,” he told Philip. And then he looked at me and recited, “My love and my life, my Annabel Lee in a kingdom by the sea.” I looked at Philip and smiled because here was one more reason for him to love me, because I was building such a strong case.
By the end of the night, Philip acknowledged that it had been a good costume. And by the time we got back to his place and were taking off our clothes to prepare for bed, he even began saying that his costume was better than mine. I was in the bathroom wiping off my pallid complexion and looked out to where he was sitting on the couch, picking lint off his black sport jacket. “But it can’t be,” I said. “It’s our costume. Mine is yours!” But he kept insisting his was better.
We went to bed after that. We had sex, and then he turned over on his side to face the wall. I lay awake awhile longer, staring at the dusty stuffed animals his ex had given him when they were sophomores in college—“It’s an inside joke,” he’d told me when I asked about them—still artfully arranged on his windowsill.
On his Friendster profile, he’s labeled his photo, the one with me cropped out, “Edgar Allen Poe.” It’s one of the many photos in which he was smiling because I was dying. In the bottom corner, the lacy shoulder of my costume is just visible. “Single,” it says under “Relationship Status.”
Through the novelty shop window, a dusty Monica Lewinsky mask stares back. I have a few minutes to kill and debate whether or not to go inside. I look past the mask display toward the multi-colored streamers, shiny greens and blues dangling down from the ceiling, and then go around front to the entrance. A bell rings as I enter.
The place is packed solid with fake cobwebs and plastic vomit and hand buzzers and wax lips and masks and streamers and confetti in every color. I wander up and down the aisles, past a unicorn costume in sizes small and medium, past balloons organized by color, past capes and plastic swords, daggers and police badges. The room is quiet and smells faintly of the baby powder in which new whoopee cushions are stored. The scent, like church incense, is calming and familiar. I run my hand over a three-dimensional paper pineapple, try on a witch nose, a mask of Zorro. On my way out, I stop to buy a pack of gum and impulsively grab a handful of Chinese finger cuffs from a large jar next to the register.
I get to the restaurant a few minutes late. Philip is already there, standing out front and looking toward West Fourth Street. He has one hand in his pocket; with the other, he smoothes his hair. Why do I always see him first?
“Hi,” I say, and he turns as if surprised, as if he hadn’t been expecting me. “Hi,” I repeat, “Sorry I’m late.” I smile and then feel my heart clench into a fist. I rescind my apology, tell him that I owe him nothing, certainly not “sorry,” and proceed to end things once and for all once again, right there beside the stop sign. I lean against the stop sign and stare hard across the street. He watches me lean. Then we go inside and order a bottle of wine.
We’ve been secretly seeing each other for almost a month. It started when I ran into him at Reggie’s birthday party and has been going on almost every day since. We’re not back together. We only see each other to break up, to discuss how we won’t be seeing each other again. Then, when we’ve said all we have to say, we have sex.
The menu has few choices. I keep my eyes on it, reading the description of each dish carefully, giving Philip ample time to study my indifference to him. The waiter arrives and I order a pasta. I watch Philip order. I watch his mouth move. I watch his lips, cruel.
After the waiter has gone, I say, “Henry James wrote that in every woman’s life there is a man with a mustache.”
“What’s that mean?”
“That every woman at some point has or will date a villain.”
“A villain?”
“Usually he is very handsome. Usually he has a mustache.”
“I don’t get it,” he says.
“He doesn’t love her!” I say a bit too loud.
The waiter brings a bottle of wine, uncorks it silently, and pours a little into Philip’s glass. Philip goes through the ceremony of swirling, sniffing, and sipping, before setting the glass back on the table and nodding.
“I have great news!” I continue after the waiter has gone.
“Oh?”
“I realized something today.”
Philip takes a sip, sets his glass down. “What’s that?”
“I don’t love you,” I say, smiling brightly. I raise my glass for a toast. “As a matter of fact, I don’t even like you!”
This is how I do it. I tell him I hate him, that he disgusts me. I text him, “You’re filth!” and then reluctantly agree to meet him just one more time. Over dinner or drinks, I break up with him because he doesn’t love me, and then he pursues me, because when I’m leaving, he thinks he does. Pavlov trained his dog to salivate with a bell, and I am training Philip to love me with goodbye.
I catch sight of the waiter on the other side of the room. “Water,” I mouth, as if I were crawling through the desert. Philip unfolds his napkin and spreads it across his lap. The waiter approaches with a pitcher and two glasses. He begins pouring, and after just a dribble I motion for him to stop. I pick up the glass, swirl, sniff, and swallow before setting the glass down and nodding. Then I motion for him to pour the rest. When the waiter leaves, Philip says I’m rude.
“He knew I was kidding. You’re just upset because he and I were laughing at you.”
“He laughed,” Philip says, “because he wants a good tip, but he was obviously uncomfortable. You’re completely oblivious to the feelings of the working class.”
“I find it very interesting how sensitive you can be to the waiter’s feelings, indeed, to the feelings of an entire class, yet when it comes to mine, you remain conveniently in a fog.”
He takes my hand where it’s resting on the table. I leave it there a moment and then pull it away.
I sip my wine. “I went to see that Woody Allen movie, Match Point.”
“I saw it, too. Did you like it?”
“The main character, the murderer, reminded me of you. He’s just a little more ambitious is all. With him, there is a more exciting mix of good and bad qualities, while with you, it’s all bad, which is why there is no movie about you. It would get bad reviews.”
“How many stars?”
“No stars. Zero stars,” I smile.
The waiter brings our food and asks if we’d like another bottle of wine. I say that another bottle would be a “catastrophic success.” Philip agrees on my motion to “surge,” and nods for him to bring a second.
I decide it’s time and open my mouth to tell him we’re thro
ugh.
“I think,” Philip says before I begin, “that I’m in love with you.”
I stare at him stonily. “You think you’re in love with me. You think so, but you’re not sure?”
He looks at me looking at him. “No,” he says after a long pause.
“Well, thank you so much for telling me that, Philip. I think I don’t give a damn what you think.”
He looks down. His eyes glisten in the candlelight. He looks out the window and I look at him. Then I remember myself and look out the window, too.
The waiter takes our ruined plates.
“I Googled “sadomasochism” the other day at work. I think I have it,” I say, alluding to the turn our sex life has taken recently.
It’s become increasingly fetishistic. Last week, we rented porn and then stopped in one of the sex shops in my neighborhood to buy sex toys. I felt shy and didn’t know what to get, and so I told Philip I’d leave it for him to decide. Philip proceeded to buy a cock ring and some other stuff that would enhance only his pleasure and then flirted with the woman behind the register when she rang us up.
“You can’t have it. It’s not a disease,” he answers.
“Well, however I caught it, I think I’m a masochist or something. On Wikipedia it says there are two kinds of masochism, the normal kind, which involves restraints and physical punishments, and then another very rare form where the person gets turned on by being emotionally humiliated. Leave it to me to catch the unhealthy type of masochism. You probably gave it to me,” I say accusingly.
The waiter refills our wine glasses.
Philip tells me how much he enjoys my blog and then proceeds to critique the writing in some of my more recent posts, saying which posts are good and which posts need work. He goes on about how interesting it is to read about himself.
“Why do you assume everything is about you?”
He shrugs. “I thought Philip Has A Small Penis Blog was about me.”
“Well it’s not. It’s about me. Some things are about me, you know. God! Being with you is like an exercise in feeling unimportant.”
“Yes, I read that on your blog.”
I sip my drink.
“So then, why are you with me?”
“I’m not. I only came here tonight to give you the courtesy of telling you in person.”
He pays the bill and we leave. He walks me to my door and then says he wants to talk a bit more about the breakup. He says he isn’t ready yet to say goodbye. He looks at me longingly. He begs. I concede. “Fine, but only for a minute.”
He enters first. I lock the door behind us and follow him into my bedroom where he’s already standing at the foot of the bed. He says, “I’m going to humiliate you now like your disease demands.”
He tells me to take off my clothes and I do.
He tells me to lie on the bed and I do.
He says, “I’m going to tie you up.”
He looks around for something to tie me with. I look around and spot my purse.
“Here,” I say, producing the Chinese fingers cuffs. “We can use these.” I reach my hands behind me through the headboard and secure my fingers inside the cuffs. I pull my hands apart to show him that I’m trapped.
He tests my restraints by pulling at my wrists. Satisfied, he gets up and stands at the foot of the bed. Methodically, he takes off his clothes and folds them. For a few seconds, he stands there naked and watches me. I turn my head to the side. Then he takes my ankles and pulls me roughly toward him, stretching my body across the bed. He spreads my legs wide and says, “Wait here.”
He closes the door to the bathroom. I hear the shower running. After fifteen minutes he returns with wet hair and looks at me lying exactly as he left me. He kneels on the bed between my legs and lifts my hips. He says, “I’m going to fuck you now, Iris.”
He says my name over and over. He says my name until he comes and I come and I push my fingers together and I free myself from the cuffs and I wrap my arms around him and I pull him into me and let out, “I love you, Philip.”
He rolls off.
“I mean, no, I don’t! That was a mistake. I said that by mistake. I don’t love you. I don’t love you.”
BOOK III
CHAPTER 6
EUROPE
There is always some specific moment when we become aware that our youth is gone; but, years after, we know it was much later.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
MARTIN WAS TWENTY-FOUR when we met and had been working for two years as a paralegal at a large firm in Manhattan. He opened his letter of acceptance to law school before our third date, and told me in a cab stalled in traffic crossing Central Park that he’d be starting in the fall. He was a year older than me, born and raised on the Upper East Side, had asthma since childhood and an unexpectedly muscular build. He was passionate about ideas, paradoxes, and also efficiency; he lectured me on escalator etiquette—“the right lane is for standing, the left for passing”—and on making trash as compact as possible by crushing orange juice and milk containers to reduce volume. “You’re throwing away air!” he complained, holding a carton I’d just discarded. He blushed easily, always told the truth, and wore glasses that required constant adjusting. “Life,” he told me, adjusting them, “is about learning.” He taught me tennis (or tried), the correct way to eat sushi, and how to open a bottle of beer with a plastic lighter. He played piano, read philosophy, enjoyed basketball, The Simpsons, and getting stoned. He was six-foot-two and had to lean down, removing his glasses first, to kiss me.
We met on a Thursday, at an ’80s party in the beginning of spring, after standing for a while side by side at the crowded bar. Four days later he called me from an unused conference room at work. I was standing in the middle of my living room, staring at all my T-shirts.
“Who?”
“Martin. It’s Martin from the other night.”
He asked me what I was doing. I confessed I’d always had problems answering that question as “observation alters the outcome of the experiment.” I’d just finished heating a Hot Pocket and didn’t want him to know. He said he found my honesty refreshing and called me Schrödinger’s Cat. I got touchy and said I was no one’s cat. Then he described a few of his favorite paradoxes and invited me out for a drink.
We went out that Friday and the Sunday following, and then a few days later, and then all the time. It was a few weeks after our first date when he came to my apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and we walked over to the Hudson River and watched the sun set over a BMW car dealership. “This is my favorite spot,” I said, and showed him to the top of a metal garbage bin outside an old warehouse overlooking the West Side Highway. “I come here a lot by myself.”
He sat upright, and I lay on my side resting my head on his lap. He ran his fingers through my hair and the cars whizzed by and the sun made the river pink and silvery as it dipped below the BMW sign. Then Martin explained to me what he thought about love, what he believed it meant in concrete philosophical terms. He’d never had a serious girlfriend before, he confessed, but he had ideas. He said he loved me.
I
1
“Where are we?” I asked, when I finally came to.
Martin stared out the train window, at the overgrown shrubbery obscuring the view.
“Where are we?” I repeated and leaned over to kiss him. “What’s wrong?”
“Other than the fact that my pants are still wet?”
I yawned. “Why are your pants wet?”
There is a curse on Thebes because the previous king was murdered and the still-unidentified killer has gone unpunished. Oedipus, the current king, has vowed to protect the city by finding the murderer and bringing him to justice. For most of Oedipus Rex, Oedipus chats with the blind seer Tiresius about who could have done it, while Tiresius repeatedly warns him, “you don’t wanna know.” Instead of taking the hint, however, Oedipus goes on declaring he does want to know, that he will uncover the truth no matter what the cost. And so
the audience watches nervously, for we know what Oedipus doesn’t, which is that Oedipus himself is/was the murderer and that in pursuing justice for the kingdom, he is pursuing his own downfall.
This is what it’s like when you get drunk, black out, and wake up on a train heading toward Patras and ask your boyfriend what’s wrong. You have two choices: Pursue the truth and restore order to the kingdom by accepting whatever consequence comes from knowing, or go on accursed, wondering why your boyfriend has wet pants and pulls away when you try to kiss him. Confront fate and save Thebes? Or hide and keep running from the disasters that will inevitably plague all your future affairs? The previous king was dead, and Oedipus didn’t know who killed him. Martin’s pants were wet, and I didn’t know why. I steeled up and asked him a second time.
The truth is revealed. Shocked, horrified, Oedipus puts out his eyes (using the dress pins of his wife/mother who’s already hung herself in their bedroom), thereby exchanging physical sight, which has steered him wrong, for “insight,” as possessed by the blind seer Tiresius. Like looking directly at the sun, the complete truth, Sophocles implies, is potentially blinding.
I blinked at Martin and then looked away as if from a blinding glare.
2
We’d known each other only two months when we decided to take the trip. Martin’s parents drove us to the airport. We took backpacks instead of luggage, two novels, and Wittgenstein’s Blue Book. Martin’s father unloaded our bags from the trunk, while his mother took her time kissing us both goodbye, telling us to be sure and take plenty of pictures. “It’s wonderful to have pictures from your twenties,” she said wistfully.
