by Iris Smyles
I took a deep breath to keep from throwing up. I thought of Camus’ suggestion to imagine Sisyphus enjoying his curse—his actually being happy to roll the same rock up the same hill for all eternity—and did my best to enjoy mine. Miserable, I started to laugh.
Martin caught my eye and smiled. Then, lifting his index finger from where his hand was resting on the table, he pointed at me—a familiar gesture. It meant, “You. You’re the one, and you know it and I know it.” If we were at a party and ended up on opposite sides of the room, he’d catch my eye and raise his finger just like this, so that only I’d see. Sometimes I’d blush and mouth, “What?” And he’d mouth, “You know.” Or else he wouldn’t say anything but just keep pointing silently, resolutely, and it felt like we were tied to each other by an invisible string, connected no matter how crowded the room got, no matter how far apart we grew—then he remembered he was still angry and stopped. After a moment, he shut his eyes.
We’d been dozing for some time when suddenly there was a great buzzing, like a muted chainsaw or a swarm of locusts, interrupted now and then by a loud thud. I blinked wearily and looked around. Surveying the car, my eyes fell upon a hideous insect. It was the size of a tennis ball and its body, furry and stout, was flanked by horrible wings. More beast than bug, outside the movies, I’d seen nothing like it. Silently, I rose up. The sound grew louder. It was coming toward me. I screamed.
Martin opened his eyes. “What the hell is that?”
“A dragon!” I squealed.
Quickly, Martin took my hand. We ran through the car.
“Duck!” he yelled, as it zoomed over our heads.
We zigzagged toward the other end. It zigzagged after us.
The Overseer stood up and motioned for us to be still. Obediently, we froze, our backs against the far wall, watching as the beast came at us once more. Then, throwing his arms over my head, Martin pulled me into him before the bug crashed into the wall behind us and fell heavily to the ground.
Disoriented, its buzz intermittent, it bounced weakly at our feet.
Calmly, the Overseer approached, reached down, grasped it firmly by one of its wings and, looking toward the half-open window, flung it out.
The car was quiet but for the chugging of the train. The Overseer looked at us—wild eyed, breathless—and let out a laugh. He returned to his seat, then turned to us and added, “Ella Katse.” He pointed to our booth. “Is okay,” he said. “Is okay now.”
Tentatively, Martin and I sat down.
“That was crazy! What was that?” he whispered frantically.
“A chimera!” I said excitedly, leaning across the table. “Did you see it up close? It had the body of a goat and the head of Pat Sajak!”
For the next three hours, we were besieged by Pat Sajak bugs. “They must be local to the area,” Martin said, as the Overseer calmly removed another that had landed, this time, on the table exactly between us.
The train chugged along in the hellish heat. The sky rained monsters. And as conditions around us worsened, things between us got a little better. United against the terrifying perils of the underworld, we were able to forget for a little while about our argument. And slowly, perhaps exactly at the speed of a train inching its way toward Patras, the previous night receded into the past.
“You know, the ancient Greeks believed the Chimera to be a harbinger, a sign that a storm was coming or a volcano was about to erupt. It foretold all kinds of natural disasters,” I said.
“Falling in love chief among them,” Martin answered. Then, reaching his hand across the table, he laughed. “You’re a catastrophe,” he said. My eyes filled with tears. “My catastrophe,” he added and squeezed my hand. Martin stood up and came round to my side of the table. He sat down beside me and found my hand again. I started to apologize, but he cut me off. “Let’s just forget it,” he said and fixed his gaze on our window, on the non-view we shared. We stayed that way for the next few hours. And like that, with a promise to forget, we began a relationship that would last three years.
III
1
Sometimes I wonder if we hadn’t gone to Europe that summer, would we have broken up sooner? Urinating on him in New York, for example, might easily have been a deal-breaker. He’d wake up in his apartment the next morning, find his pants hanging in the shower where he’d left them to dry, and think, “No, perhaps I won’t ask her for another date after all.”
Waking up somewhere in the middle of Greece though, in the middle of a month-long vacation with me passed out beside him, what choice did he have but to find a way to forgive me? Then again, if we’d stayed in New York, I might never have drunk that much whiskey to begin with, and so might never have pissed on him at all. If Oedipus hadn’t left home, if his birth mother hadn’t sent him away.... Was his fate inevitable? Was this relationship our destiny?
For the rest of our time in Greece, Martin and I visited a combination of sunny beaches and historical ruins. Our running joke was to feign surprise at finding everything ruined by the time we got there. “Ruined!” we said upon first sight of the Parthenon, before stepping in front of it to get a photo of us together: twenty-two and twenty-four, new statues with our arms around each other.
At the Parthenon we read how archaeologists and engineers were working to restore the ruins by installing new phantom pieces to fill the gaps left by lost parts. When they finished, tourists would be able to see the Parthenon as it once looked to Socrates and Plato and all those who walked through the roped-off structure we now circle. I told Martin about all my visits to the Parthenon as a kid, how my parents toted me around to see ruins all over Greece, how I hated it. “I don’t see why we had to come all this way to see a bunch of rocks,” I’d complained, kicking at the dirt.
Back in New York, I told Martin’s parents the same story over dinner, my cute anecdote about ruins striking me as “a bunch of rocks.” “I didn’t appreciate history then the way I do now, now that I’m grown,” I said, my voice suddenly childish. Asked about our trip, Martin and I talked about our sightseeing, about the oppressive heat on the steps of the Acropolis, about the bargain Martin had negotiated with an owner of a wonderful pension in Positano, about the argument Martin had won while trying to rent a moped on the island of Folegandros—his resorting to the demonstration of a logic puzzle as a way of proving why his American driver’s license should suffice for an international one—about a long afternoon on Santorini’s black pebbled beach, which had soothed Martin’s feet but hurt mine, so he carried me.
We skipped right over the more interesting story of my pissing on him and our being summarily banned from a fleet of Mediterranean ships, and reprised instead our favorite new joke. Passing around our glossy photos, Martin began, “Iris was so excited to see the Coliseum, but when we got there, it was ruined!” We savored this, recited it whenever possible, precisely because it wasn’t very funny. It struck us as the kind of humor that adults might exult in, and by aping adult behavior, we thought we might grow up ourselves—Joke, joke . . . normal.
That summer together in Europe was to be our last as kids.
2
September. 5:00 AM. The alarm clock sounds. I shower and dress in the dark, then walk seven blocks to catch the 6, before transferring to the 4, and heading uptown into the Bronx where I catch a bus and then another bus and then walk six blocks to Community School 4.
“Ms. Smyles! Ms. Smyles!” my students yell. “Raise your hand,” I respond, imitating the woman they think they are addressing. I’m an adult, I remind myself, standing before the room. I’m in charge of thirty-six children. If I am still a child, then what are they?
On the bus after school, my ears ring with my new name. I shut my eyes, hoping to sleep a little before night school. In a café, I prepare my homework, then walk over and up two flights to another classroom for a Teaching English course, followed by another hour and a half commute home, to eat, to sleep, to do it all again in the morning.
Some nights
I go home, grab a quick change of clothes, and catch a bus up to Martin’s on the Upper East Side. With a briefcase full of lesson plans, I look out onto Madison Avenue, into the glittering store windows filled with party clothes I’ve no occasion to wear. Responsible young adults, Martin and I rarely “go out” anymore. We go to dinner.
I buy a Zagat guide. Martin subscribes online. We argue over which rating is more important. He insists “food” while I prefer “ambience” and consider food, provided it’s not terrible, incidental. We gain weight. I learn to cook. On a Saturday, we argue over my roast chicken. He complains I use too much lemon. I cry, feeling I’ve disappointed him.
Our first Halloween together falls on a weekday. Overwhelmed by my new job, I don’t notice the approaching holiday until it’s already upon us. A friend of his comes over dressed as a Brazilian soccer player.
“This party’s going to be great. You guys have to come!” he says, passing the bong back to Martin.
“Can’t,” Martin answers.
I yawn my agreement.
We tell him of our plan to heat a DiGiorno pizza and watch TV: The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror.
I am asleep before the end of the episode.
Is it supposed to be this hard? We don’t talk about it because talking would only make it more difficult, because we’re unhappy, because we’re ashamed.
Born into a world built in our service, we’d been shepherded to schools (Entire buildings were dedicated to the cultivation of our minds!) and had our lunches prepared (Candy bar companies had made things “fun-size” for us!). Only yesterday we were young, aristocrats rich with time. And the way a snob is proud of the money into which he is born, we had been proud of our youth.
And then we lost it. We graduated. We did our best to grow up, though often our best wasn’t very good:
I got drunk at a fundraiser for the private school that hired me a year later. During a dinner auction I placed a bid on airfare to Paris and then at the coat check on the way out, I began hugging a parent who, in a conference one month earlier, had expressed doubts about my syllabus. Two other teachers had to tear me away.
Martin smoked too much pot and then followed it up with too much wine at a fancy Italian restaurant where I’d taken him to celebrate his passing his Tortes exam. Ever decorous, following the first course, he vomited onto his plate.
“Check please!” I said immediately, throwing my cloth napkin over his mess.
“I’m not ready to leave!” he slurred, straightening his back and adjusting his chair. “And even if I were, it’s not your place to ask for the check.”
“I just thought—”
He dressed me down, explaining that by asking for the check, I was siding with the wait-staff. A regular argument of ours—whether or not I was on his side when it came to disagreements he had with his mother, friends, classmates, and now the wait-staff. Instead of making preparations to leave, we resumed our former squabble.
When the waiter did finally come to collect our plates, Martin announced that he had nothing to hide. Proudly, as if he were a magician about to unveil the new location of his vanished assistant, with a flourish he removed the napkin, revealing a neat little mound of puke. “I’m finished,” he declared, his chin in the air.
The way to handle things, he explained to me once outside, was to act as if throwing up on your plate were completely natural. It was they who should be embarrassed for even batting an eyelash. “A good waiter would have known better than to go on staring like that,” he said, scowling.
The Park Avenue wind whipped our faces as we walked home. Martin held me roughly. “It’s a shame,” I lamented half to myself, “that we can’t go back there. I really liked that place. The décor was perfect and the maître d’ so charming in the beginning.” “The food was a three,” Martin sniffed. “Anyway, we could still go back if you’d only just followed along! No one told you to go and make a scene!” he scoffed, as we turned a stone corner and hurried through the December cold.
IV
In the first months our relationship, Martin had given me a tour of his New York, the city of his youth, in ruins all around us. The pizza place he went to every day after school, a favorite bar that didn’t card, a corner of the park where he and his friends used to smoke pot. Walking down Broadway from West Seventy-eighth Street, he laughed while confessing membership in “the pervert club,” what his middle school friends called themselves after spending too many lunch periods prowling the sidewalks for women.
On a weekday evening, following a walk in Central Park, we stopped in a deli and he remembered: “I was buying potato chips right here. It was, like, two in the morning and this lunatic came in and picked a fight with me out of nowhere. We were fighting up and down the aisles. It was like a movie. There were crushed Cheetos everywhere! Eventually the cops came. . . .”
And while visiting his friend Zach at Zach’s parents’ place on Park Avenue, Martin recalled getting caught. We were in the study and Zach was fixing us drinks from a bar hidden theatrically behind a false bookcase next to a real one decorated with family photos, one of a great-grandfather receiving the Nobel Prize. “For something or other,” Zach answered me, before launching enthusiastically into a story about when his mother nearly discovered them smoking pot in this very room. “You should have seen Zach’s face when he heard her coming. ‘Zach!’” Martin imitated her.
Imagining Martin as a kid, I felt a peculiar pang. We lose people to the future all the time. And we grieve; we expect to. So why shouldn’t we also grieve for what the past takes? Before is no different than after really, so if you can miss someone looking forward, you can just as easily miss someone looking back. I saw pictures of Martin—a boy I’d not yet met, would never get to meet—and nearly wept. I missed him so much.
We went for a walk in Battery Park. He bought me a bracelet from a street vendor, a silver chain that looked like monsters holding hands. The day rushed by, was over in just a few hours. The ocean, the sky, the grass roped off, the buildings heaped up against the Southern Bank. The Statue of Liberty, the whole city at our backs. His face close to mine, his mouth, his cold hands. How fleeting is an afternoon, when compared to its memory? The scary stories have it backwards, I think. It is we the living who are the ghosts of this world, we who haunt the past. And the present—Martin’s cold hands touching mine—is just a vapor.
Dining out, visiting museums, kissing on street corners . . . Martin and I soon made new memories. Climbing a fence to play basketball at night, bringing gin and ice to mix cocktails between plays, I blocked too aggressively, too drunkenly, and showing off bumped into a fence, giving myself a fat lip, which Martin kissed.
I was standing at the corner of Eighty-second and Madison when I saw Martin approach on rollerblades. He was coming from the park where he’d been playing hockey with his friends. The sunlight broke through the trees dappling his figure as he sped closer, before he stopped, just in front of me, and took me in his arms.
We rode the Seventy-ninth Street cross-town bus a certain way. I liked to sit in the middle of the extra-long buses with the accordion center. And as it bent back and forth on its way through the park, we’d pretend it was a rollercoaster and raise our hands up over our heads. We were a blur of motion, a changing shape. Together, rushing ahead, claiming the future in the name of the past.
V
It was probably a Tuesday. For most of our relationship it was very often a Tuesday, Tuesday being the most nondescript day of the seven, Tuesday being like the middle of the bread—what my father shapes into dice.
When I was a kid, during summer vacations in Greece, after dinner while my mother chatted with the rest of the family, my father and I took turns rolling his bread dice against the table, arbitrarily trying for double sixes and snake eyes. My mother would pause to voice annoyance, while I would pause to marvel at my father’s wondrous talent. How my father could make something out of nothing, dice out of bread—that was magic! For a few
years, Martin and I were, too. For a few years, we made life out of Tuesday.
We’d just finished dinner and were sitting in the dark on an antique chaise-and-sofa set his parents had given him. We’d ordered Chinese takeout and were opening our fortune cookies by the light of the TV. Martin read his aloud: “You are happy.”
He scowled. “What a rip-off! A fortune is supposed to tell your future, not your present. I hate when I get this kind.” He crumpled the strip of paper and began packing some weed into a glass bowl his friend Zach had given him for his birthday.
“Maybe it is about the future,” I said, still opening mine. “Maybe later on, years from now, you will look back on this moment and see that you were happy even though you didn’t think you were at the time, even though at the time you thought you were unhappy because you figured you’d gotten a lousy fortune that told you nothing at all about your future, though it actually did, does.”
Martin shrugged. “I don’t think so. What’s yours say?”
“‘Life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.’”
“You got the better one.”
“Mine’s less personal. More Western Philosophy than a fortune. You know the fortune cookie was invented in California?”
Martin took a big hit, expanded his chest to accommodate the smoke, and exhaled. Then he had an idea for Western Philosophy fortune cookies and began talking again about Heidegger and the Nazis, the misuses of philosophy, logic traps, and Zeno’s paradox.
He passed me the bowl. I declined. I sipped my gin and tonic and suggested we broaden the line of cookies to include peach-flavored gummy candies shaped like busts of Friedrich Nietzsche. “They’d be small, come four or five to a pack, and we could call them, ‘Peachy Nietzsches.’”
“Existential Chewing Gum,” Martin added. “It would lose its flavor after only a minute, which is to be expected in a godless world. And yet, one must continue to chew. To find meaning in it, even pleasure. ‘Sisyphicous.’ ‘Sisyphusilicious,’” he tried again slowly, puzzling over the pronunciation.
