by Iris Smyles
“Felix has been here every night this week.”
“It’s my apartment, too, and if I want to have my boyfriend over, that’s my right.”
“I’m paying half the rent, not a third.”
“If you were the one with the boyfriend, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.”
“You’re right; I wouldn’t make my relationship your problem.”
Just as we dreaded parting ways all those summers prior, now, though we would never say so, we couldn’t stand to be in the same room together.
“I’m an intruder in my own home!” I complained to Caroline, to The Captain, to Jacob, to Lex, even to Reggie, whom I’d started dating in part just to avoid going home.
“I never liked her,” Caroline said, putting her cigarettes on the bar.
“I don’t get it. If she wants to live with her boyfriend, why doesn’t she just move?” asked The Captain.
“I think I have a lamp fetish,” said Jacob, fondling the price tag on a reading-light at Crate and Barrel.
“Here’s what you say: ‘Fuck you both. Now get the fuck out!’” said Lex, before stealing one of my fries. “I like your shirt by the way. Did you make it?”
“But she’s still my friend,” I told Reggie when he came out of the bathroom and found me in his bed, my “Second Base” T-shirt crumpled on the floor.
“It’s not her, but the situation,” I told all of them, eventually coming to her defense. “It’ll pass,” I said wearily, trying to focus on the big picture, a perspective on which I had tutored May back in college. When faced with the decision of whether to go out on a Tuesday night or stay home and study, we’d weigh the pros and cons, and then I’d tip the scales by announcing, “Big Picture!” Life was about living, I reminded her. “Big Picture!” she’d agree at the bar an hour later, laughing as she raised her glass to mine.
What was important, I reminded myself now, was our friendship, for if I had achieved anything of lasting value while at college, it was this relationship with May. May, with whom I shared everything. May, whom my father sometimes accidentally called my sister. May and I would eventually leave this apartment, and then, a bit more grown up, our friendship would resume its natural course, I told myself, kept telling myself.
Since I’d announced my decision to stay though, conditions at home only worsened. Every time I walked in the door, May would abruptly stop speaking—while I had retreated inward after graduation, May had become more social, having new friends over to the apartment almost every day—and I was certain it was because she had been talking about me. Silently, I’d pass through the living room, feeling their eyes on me as I took off my coat and inched uncomfortably toward the bedroom, before closing its flimsy “French” partition.
Turning on the fan, I’d climb the ten feet up to my bed to lie down, for it was the only semi-private place in our apartment. With two feet of space between me and the ceiling, what had once been a fun, creative use of space—“just think of all the top halves of apartments that go unused!” I’d told May two years earlier—now felt like a coffin.
1
In April, I was marking time at my hostessing job and planning the rise of my T-shirt empire, when my parents called to remind me that my lease was coming up for renewal.
They were surprised it hadn’t arrived in the mail already since the lease was set to expire in just a few days. I said I’d take a look, that “it’s probably around here somewhere,” underneath Felix’s dirty underwear, is what I thought but didn’t say.
My mom called to remind me about the lease again the next day, and so, the day after that, I finally got around to asking May if she’d seen the thing. She shrugged, said no, said she’d keep an eye out and tell me when it came. Then she went out. Since there was only one day left before our lease expired and since my parents were on my case, I dug through my desk until I found the landlord’s number. I figured it must have gotten lost in the mail and that I’d just ask him to resend it, if not go to his office and pick up a new copy myself.
“I have the signed lease right here,” he said when I got him on the phone. “Your roommate dropped it off ten minutes ago.” He chuckled awkwardly, the way a person does when nothing funny has happened. “Let me see. I’m looking at it right now. You would be Iris Smyles, the young lady whose name is crossed out?”
“Yes, I’m Iris. But I never received it. I mean that’s not legal, is it?”
He paused. “I’ll send out another lease today.” And then, with a combination of annoyance and pity, he sighed. “Talk to your roommate. Send it back when you’ve got it sorted out. I take it you’d like to renew?”
May arrived home a half hour later. I was on the couch, waiting for her when she walked in.
“I know what you did.”
Her eyes went wide. “I’m sorry,” she said immediately.
“If you’re sorry, than why’d you do it?” I asked, my mouth splitting into a painful smile.
“I didn’t want to. My parents told me to. I told them I didn’t want to, but I didn’t know what else to do. They want me to stay because it’s walking distance from the subway and close to all of my auditions.”
I stood up. “You think I want to live with you? I’m not moving because I don’t have a job. Because I can’t move. If you want to live with Felix, that’s great! Find a new place! You didn’t have to lie to me.”
“I’m sorry,” she repeated and, wiping her tears, she disappeared out the door.
I sat back down and felt sick. I was sitting in the same place an hour later when the phone rang. It was my mother. Well, my mom on one phone and my dad on another.
“May’s parents just called us, Iris.” My mother paused. “We need to talk to you,” my father finished.
I heard sniffling, my mother crying. My father went on softly, “May’s father just called,” he repeated. “He says you’ve been drinking a lot, that May can’t live with you anymore because of it. He said he became worried on his last visit when he saw you after May’s play. He says you’re an alcoholic, that you’re in trouble, and that we need to take you home.”
“May’s play was a year ago, Dad. Odd that he should wait until now to voice his concern. Odd that he should want to discuss this immediately after they were caught trying to steal the apartment?”
I told them what happened, explained that this was clearly another tactic to get me out.
My parents went silent. “Yeah,” my father said at last, “I knew something wasn’t right in his voice.”
I promised them that I was okay. I promised them that I was okay. I promised them that I was okay. And then I said it again.
“So you’re okay?” my mother asked weakly.
“I’m fine, Mom. Please don’t worry.”
“I can’t understand it,” my father mumbled. “She was like a sister to you. Is that lousy little apartment really worth so much?”
It was night when May walked in, drunk, her face stained with tears. She told me that she was sorry again.
“Your parents called,” I said, calmly.
“I told them not to.”
“Do you know how worried my parents are?”
“I told them not to,” she sniffled.
“Why are you crying?” I asked, smiling brightly.
“Because I feel terrible about what happened.”
“I suppose I should apologize to you then, since you’re feeling so down.”
She looked at the ground.
“Poor you,” I laughed. “Trapped in an apartment with a dangerous alcoholic. You must be so frightened. Maybe I should call your parents and tell them the real reason you want me out? Tell them their sweet Catholic daughter has been shacking up with her freeloading boyfriend, and when she’s not working at a tits-and-ass bar downtown, all she does is fuck, drink, and do drugs, and so my presence here really cramps her style. There’s a whole lot I could say about you, May. But I wouldn’t. I didn’t.”
“I told them not to
call your parents. My father did it on his own!”
“You told them all that stuff about me! You did! It was your choice! You know what I told my parents about you?
She shook her head.
“Nothing,” I shouted, “I didn’t tell them anything, because you’re my friend!”
III
I don’t know how to be angry. This isn’t a virtue but a flaw in my character. I forgive people before they’ve even asked to be forgiven, before they even want to be.
What was I supposed to do? Never speak to her again? All of a sudden treat her differently than I had all five years prior? It seemed so much easier to let go of the events of the day, of the year, than to let go of the last five. I forgave May after only a few minutes, not because I’m magnanimous, but because I’m weak, because forgiving her seemed so much easier than staying angry, because we were still living together, because she was standing right there.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, staring at her feet.
I nodded uncomfortably. “I know,” I said, looking down at my own.
So then what? What do you do after all is forgiven? May and I, just as we had on the night she lost her virginity, decided to go out and celebrate.
We went to the same bar on Ninth Avenue, ordered a round and raised our glasses, toasting the renewal of our friendship. We laughed and carried on like we hadn’t in a long time. We took turns playing songs on the jukebox. “Dock of the Bay,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” And then May played, “Back Stabbers,” another oldie that aired frequently on CBS FM. When it came on, May said the song was about her, that she was the backstabber.
“No, you’re not,” I said, rushing to console her, before she could get out another apology.
“Yes, I am,” she said tearing up, and I think she hated me a little bit more right then.
A month later May found an apartment. She rented a van for the day and asked all our friends to help her move. On the street, she over-thanked me.
“It’s nothing,” I said, waving away her gratitude.
There wasn’t much. Most of the furniture that we’d bought together, May had fallen through or the mice had gnawed at, so aside from some clothing and books—she left the sex books—all that needed to be moved was the couch, the sofa-bed she’d bought on her own.
May and I didn’t bother trying to lift it ourselves. The guys—my “idiot ex-boyfriend,” Felix, Jacob, and Reggie—picked up the four corners while May and I guided them up the long narrow stairway. It took them a little over an hour to move, for it was much heavier and bulkier than a regular sofa, and to get it around each corner, they had to maneuver it up onto its narrow side. And then, when they had it up like that, the inside would start to unfold right in midair—the bed splayed open with a tangle of sheets still on it—and they’d have to stop and wait for May and me to stuff it back in before they could move it again.
A few weeks after that, May invited me over for dinner. We remarked on how weird it was that we weren’t roommates anymore, how I was her guest. She’d made a whole lemon chicken, a dish much more advanced than any that she’d made while we lived together. She said she was getting into cooking. Then she showed me the door on which she was starting a new collection of black-and-white postcards, like the one I had arranged on the doors of all our former homes—she had amassed only five so far, but was on the lookout, she said. Then she showed me around the rest of the apartment, which Felix, not officially living with her, had clearly decorated. There was a rack of comic books in the bathroom and two or three of his original paintings on the living room wall.
Back at Fifty-seventh Street, I wondered what to do with the second loft bed. And in the living room, in place of the couch, there was now a big empty stretch of floor. In a few months it would be filled with boxes of T-shirts from my fledgling business. And then, some time after that, I would meet Martin and begin to see less of May until I wouldn’t see her at all.
The last time was on a double date. Felix and May, and Martin and I, met up at a bar near her new apartment on the Upper West Side. It was, oddly, the day after September 11th, and also, the day after my first day of teaching. All the schools and offices were closed, while the restaurants and bars were overflowing as if it were a holiday.
I’d been at Martin’s earlier that morning, watching the news with some of his friends when, one at a time, we began to notice a strange odor. For a moment, we thought we were being gassed and looked at each other, wondering if this wasn’t the next part. Then we realized it was smoke from the rubble finally reaching us. That some of the great white cloud, what had been the two towers, was dispersing.
Terrified of the rising death count, terrified of what might happen next in the subways, on the streets, in the sky, I was also terrified of returning to my new job and the thirty-six students suddenly placed in my charge. Yesterday morning, standing before the class, futilely yelling for their attention, begging them to please sit down, sending one after the other to the principal, all I had wanted was to hide, and now, like a child hearing news of snow on the day of a big test, I was relieved.
When another teacher had come into my classroom, had taken me outside to explain that a plane had flown into the Twin Towers, I’d barely understood her. Curtis had just thrown his chair across the room. I had just split up a fight between Mario and Victor. Christian had told me to fuck off, and I was trying not to cry. I nodded dumbly. All I understood was that school was closing early.
Martin’s friend Fred, who had recently moved to the financial district, had spent the night. We watched the news until we couldn’t anymore, the same image of the towers falling again and again, small black figures falling from the windows. Then May called, told us to come out, to meet her and Felix somewhere in Times Square.
We played laser tag—I’d never played before—at a place called Playland or Mars, I don’t remember the name. Martin and I wandered through a dark maze filled with smoke and lit with red and blue lights . . . May and Felix sneaking up behind us . . . Martin and me hiding, running, dipping around corners, before shooting wildly . . . the whole room humming.
Then we went to a bar, and after that, stopped at a diner. We slid into a booth: Felix and May on one side, Martin and me on the other—two duos. Felix and May cracked jokes and laughed loudly. They had drunk more than we had, had been drinking since the morning. May looked at me across the table, her new hoop earrings catching the light. They reminded me of the black patent leather raincoat she’d purchased freshman year, just before winter break.
Preparing for her first visit home to Alabama, we’d gone shopping on Eighth Street to find “something chic and sophisticated,” an outfit that would impress all her hometown friends, an outfit that would let them know she’d changed; she was a New Yorker! “Wait ’til they see me in this!” she’d squealed, posing beside her suitcase in front of the dormitory door. I’d snapped a photo.
“Cool earrings,” I said. Then Felix pulled her face into his for a kiss.
I went back to Martin’s place after and as we got ready for bed, I told him I didn’t have a good time. Martin went into the kitchen and filled two glasses with water. He placed one by my side of the bed and then, putting the other down on his side, sat down and began unlacing his shoes.
What was supposed to happen? If things had gone as she’d hoped? Would she have watched as I packed my bags, as my parents waited outside, double-parked? Would she have held the door while I gave her my keys? And after, on her own finally, alone with the bugs and the mice and the leaks, a giant castle, empty, across from her bed, would she feel happy, would she feel she’d won?
“They’re kids,” I said, standing in my underwear. “Everything is a game to them.”
He shrugged. “She’s your friend.”
II
3
Three years later, two apartments later, I’d just moved to West Tenth Street and was planning a birthday party with my friend Jacob. I’d quit my job—I had never wanted to be a
teacher and didn’t know how I ended up one—writing to the headmaster during summer break that I’d been accepted to graduate school and would not be returning in the fall.
I was going to start over. While I studied and wrote papers, which now seemed so easy compared to the dismal work of showing up for students and answering to parents and bosses, I’d write my novel, a new novel that would pave the road to my real life, which still hadn’t started, my life as an author. More than a degree, graduate school would give me time.
My idea for the novel? Why, it would be about work, of course, and about not working, too. About young people who were unhappy with their jobs. Two of the characters would be named Jacob, after my friend, and they’d hate each other, thinking there could only be one. The other novel I’d drafted that first summer after college I now put aside, recognizing the complete falseness of my twenty-seven-year-old alcoholic protagonist, my pretending to be Damon Runyon and Henry Miller. My idea, this time, was to pretend to be myself.
I was quite disciplined in the beginning, writing every day, pausing only occasionally for the sake of my studies. But eventually, my schoolwork began to take precedence. It’s a difficult project, leading a whole fake life while maintaining the belief that another life, the one you are not actually living, is more real. It’s a difficult project being a writer who is not a writer.
When I was young, I wanted to be a famous actress, to own my own dirigible, to win the Nobel Prize for literature! My ambitions were great and I had plenty of time; the future was still far away. At a certain age, however, after you’ve been living in the future a while, continuing to say what you want to do is less laudable than laughable. To say you want to be a writer starts to feel embarrassing. Especially when you hold in your hand a book by an author who is younger than you are, younger than you were, younger, younger, younger, receding from you in age. For the adult, the question naturally follows: So, why aren’t you then?
