Dating Tips for the Unemployed

by Iris Smyles

  The wine had just arrived when someone at the next table brought out a bouzouki and began to play. When Nicos asked if my friends back home played any instruments, I said yes, “but they tend not to bring them out in restaurants. You’d get thrown out, if you did that at a restaurant there.” Nicos looked confused. “Americans don’t like music?” I explained that in New York, if you want music, you finish dinner, go to a club where your friend’s band is playing, and pay.

  Nicos frowned, at first, I thought, at me, but then he motioned to the next table, where they’d stopped playing music and had begun arguing.

  “Some people,” he said after a full minute of silence, “drink too much and get angry instead of happy.”

  Infected by his gravitas, I nodded solemnly. This manner of exchange would become for us routine. Every once in a while he’d pause, as if on the verge of some serious pronouncement. Then, knitting his brow thoughtfully, he’d say, “Sometimes . . . at night . . . I feel tired” or “Should we . . . have an ice cream?”

  After each of these aphorisms, he’d look up pensively.

  I’d look up, too, responding with dual solemnity. “Yes,” I’d say. “I’d love some ice cream.”

  Nicos was still frowning when, without a word, he rose and headed for our neighbors.

  “What did you say?” I asked when he returned.

  “I told them to be happy. We have the moon and the stars,” he said, winking at me and then at the moon, which gazed back through the vine-covered pergola.

  A minute later he stood up again, disappeared inside the restaurant, and returned with a guitar he’d borrowed from the proprietor. Sitting back down, he began to play. The argument at the next table ceased, as Nicos began to sing.

  “Bravo!” they applauded after he finished “Stairway to Heaven,” their anger cured by Nicos’ musical prescription.

  “I think,” he said, holding my gaze with great intensity—I leaned in eagerly—“perhaps a sweet.” Then, turning toward the kitchen, he gave the nod for cantaloupe.

  He drove slowly around the mountain on the way down. Holding the handlebars with his left hand, he placed the right one over mine, which were linked around his waist. He was trying to warm me, he said, feeling me cold. At last, we arrived in our village.

  He parked his bike away from the bustle of cafés and suggested we sit for a while at the beach where, eventually, he kissed me.

  I began to see him every day. Every morning, I’d ride my bike to the bakery at the far end of town, passing his place on the way. Usually, he’d be sitting out front looking out to sea and, waving hello, would ask me to join him for a coffee. He was living that summer in a small apartment at the front of his parents’ rooms. Every summer prior, his parents had stayed there, but this year they’d decided to go on vacation. It was time, his parents had told him, that he work.

  While Nicos was technically a full-time student, he was also technically heading into his sixth year. His idea, he explained when I asked him why his studies were taking so long, was to stay in Germany for as long as possible, to extend his studies indefinitely in order to avoid conscription in the Greek army. There were rumors of the laws changing soon, he said, if he could only wait it out.

  In the evenings, after he’d finish pressing the sheets and preparing clean rooms for new guests, we’d drink the wine his father had made from the grapevines in the communal area out back, and then get on his motorcycle and follow a path to a deserted spot in the woods. Standing in the dark among horses, chickens, and the occasional goat, Nicos would light a joint. Passing it to me in the pitch-dark, he’d point out stars.

  “There, do you know that one?”

  “No,” I said. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” he laughed. “That’s why I asked you.”

  Realizing we both knew nothing of astronomy, we began to make up new myths.

  “That,” I explained, “is Orion’s used condom.”

  “What a dirty mind you have!” he noted, before pointing out the giant cock on the horse just next to us.

  The joint finished, we’d head back, and either sit at the beach, where we’d talk more nonsense, or else drink wine in his apartment, decorated with his mother’s needlepoint tapestries and the black-light posters he’d hung over them to better reflect his taste. One night we bought ice cream in town and then went back to his place to watch an old Rolling Stones concert on his small TV, the famous one with the Hells Angels that ended in murder. Another night, we listened to a mix tape he’d made of his favorite Greek folk songs. Mostly, though, we’d sit out front on the beach, where he’d play his guitar under the moonlight.

  The moon, the stars, soft breezes rustling the trees, and making love in a rainstorm—these were Nicos’ favorite things. And he needed to be free to appreciate them. “I need to be free,” he’d say sadly, throwing pebbles into the surf, as he referred to the dreary work with which adulthood had saddled him. “I am a man! Not a machine!” he would say, and bring his fingers to a point in the middle of his chest, offering his pitiful heart by way of proof.

  Should he allow his heart to mark time in this life? Was it not wrong to treat it like a clock? Nicos would go on protesting that he wasn’t ready to grow up, that he was still a child, that he would always be. And I’d tell him, as if I knew better, as if I’d accepted it myself, that we all have to grow up eventually. In truth, however, I’d been making plans not to. I’d begun looking into graduate school.

  Our relationship progressed quickly. Soon he was even throwing the word “love” around. He’d bring it up in the abstract, wishing to discuss it philosophically, before asking me questions like, did I think I could love him? Sometimes, he said, he thought he could love me.

  Sex is a wonderful thing. It’s a wonderful, miraculous thing that two people should ever choose each other at the same time. What better way to describe it than “getting lucky”? Because it feels just like that, like getting double sixes in a game of Tavli, like being struck by lightning twice. Standing out in a field, your hands raised upward in the middle of a great storm, what the hell are the chances?

  We’d do it in his apartment with The Dark Side of the Moon emanating from his cassette player. And he would come, of course, but I wouldn’t. I didn’t mind really because it doesn’t always happen for me. At least, I have to be in love for it to happen. But then, after I have sex with a man, love isn’t a matter of if, but when. And so, eventually, I began to wonder: When? The thing is, after, Nicos wouldn’t do anything. He’d just roll to the side and say, “That was beautiful,” assuming that because it was over for him, it was also over for me. Finally, I decided to talk to him about it. Broaching the subject delicately, in the mysterious, veiled terms he seemed most comfortable with, “Nicos,” I said, in a voice philosophical, “I haven’t,” I continued before pausing pensively, “come yet.” He seemed not to hear me.

  Another time I tried posing it in the romantic/scientific manner he’d once applied to ruminations on the tide. “Some say an orgasm is like a wave washing over you. Is that what it’s like for you, Nicos? You know, there are many different causes for changes in the tide. The moon pulls on the sea, which I think you said is female . . .”

  “The moon is beautiful,” he said, still oblivious. “In Greek, the word for moon is To Fengári,” he continued. “Say it for me, please. You must learn Greek so you can move here and we can stay together forever.”

  “Yes, Nicos, I understand. You don’t want me to come to Greece. You want me to stay and not come,” I answered.

  One night, after dinner together in town, we returned to his apartment for the usual evening’s end. I had to use the bathroom and excused myself as soon as we arrived. I closed the bathroom door, ran the faucet to disguise my tinkling, and was about to lift my skirt when, there, against the clean white porcelain bowl, I saw a frozen shit cascade that ended at the bottom of the drain.

  My initial feeling was revulsion. But then, realizing that this was Nico
s’ handiwork, my revulsion was replaced by a very particular horror: I imagined him coming in after me, him seeing what I saw, him knowing what I knew about him. I imagined his shame, his humiliation, his pain. What could I do but shield him from it?

  Leaping into action, I seized upon the toilet scrubber.

  The work was difficult but not rewarding; it was caked on hard and thick, having been there perhaps all day.

  At last, I was finished. I flushed, washed my hands, and rushed out into the living room to kiss him and make our love.

  Nicos turned from the stereo where he’d been rewinding a Creedence Clearwater Revival cassette. He embraced me. And looking into his dark eyes—innocent of the pain from which he’d been rescued—I felt a special tenderness for him. I thought: Perhaps I could love him. We made our way to the bed, kissed passionately and undressed.

  We struggled for a while through a variety of positions before he finished and rolled to the side as always. Next to me, his breath slowing, he stared up at the ceiling where he’d hung a large tie-dyed tapestry.

  At last I took his hand. Trembling with love, I steered it toward me, but when it arrived at its final destination between my legs, Nicos recoiled and said, “No, not like that. I don’t like it like this. I am romantic.”

  “I’m romantic, too,” I said. “I’d prefer a happy ending.”

  “You make me feel as if you want me only for pleasure,” he said, and then turned away angrily, disgusted by my selfishness.

  I lay there for a while, wallowing in my selfishness, as I watched a small breeze ripple the tie-dye. Eventually I stood up, retrieved my clothing from the ironing board where he did the day’s pressing, and prepared for the long walk home alone, beneath the moonlight, with the trees rustling and the stars shining and the sea lapping, surrounded by all of Nicos’ favorite things.

  What boots it in these miffless times—

  —ELAINE DUNDY, The Dud Avocado

  Dispatches from My Apartment

  9:30 AM

  I seem to be getting worse.

  I examine closely the image of two large soupspoons facing away from each other. Grasping my own two spoons in my right hand, I begin again frantically, bouncing the pair madly off my bare thigh—I’m in my underwear—until I’m out of breath. Resting, I indulge in a favorite daydream:

  I’m at a swank dinner party and everyone’s bored stiff. Then the soup arrives and I start in with the percussion. Ten minutes pass with all eyes on me as I click the spoons on my back and knees and, why not, playfully against my head. When I’m done, everyone applauds. I wave them off, saying it’s no big deal. “Really, it’s not,” I demur, inviting everyone to ignore me, to please start on the lovely bisque provided by our elegant hostess, to whom I mouth “thank you” before blowing a kiss. Later, after quoting Shakespeare in Pig Latin (“Otay ebay, oray otnay otay ebay?”), I juggle the roast, a linen napkin, and a small candelabra. When I sit down, a successful husband-and-wife team compliment me on the elegance of my dress.

  I look down at my bare legs—the spoon blows have impressed a polka-dot pattern across my thighs. I give up practicing for the day and go to the kitchen. Holding the freezer open, I stare into it and let the cold pour over me. I remove the lid off a tub of ice cream and plunge one of my spoons into Breyers Neapolitan. I go for strawberry, the only flavor left, a mid-ocean ridge down the middle of the container. I think of plate tectonics and consider taking a nap. Then I look at my watch and decide against it as it’s not yet noon.

  10:40 AM

  I’m trying to change the bag in my vacuum cleaner but can’t figure out how to open it. I dreamed last night that I was discussing the problem with my friend Reggie, who, after, examined it with no better luck. He tried to vacuum with it as it was and then handed it back to me, remarking, “Yeah, no suction.”

  All of my recent nightmares have been similarly mundane. So much so that in waking life, I find myself often confused, thinking I’ve accomplished certain chores, about which I’ve only dreamed. Ten minutes ago, for example, upon noticing the still-full hamper, I threw up my hand. “Demon laundry! Why do you haunt me?” I cried, before pulling out a pair of pants to get dressed.

  It wasn’t always like this. I used to have dreams of far-flung fantasy. Often after closing my eyes, a masked lover would appear at my window. Bathed in moonlight—which is a lot like the light on my Timex when I press the side dial—he’d call on me in the smallest hours of evening and, from a part in the curtains, alight soundlessly, with a graceful tumble, into the interior of my apartment. Then, kneeling at the foot of my bed, dark cape slung sinister across his shoulders, he’d ask, would I mind darning his socks?—an obvious pretext for testing my marriageability. No! I’d say. No! And then I’d darn and he’d watch—his eyes, two flames, burning through me from behind his bandit mask.

  1:20 PM

  Someone saying he’s a cop knocks on my door and asks if I’ve seen or heard anything suspicious.

  I say through the door, “This seems a little suspicious.”

  My peephole is painted shut, so I continue the conversation through the closed door, warily. Apparently, yesterday, someone was robbed in the apartment just below mine.

  “See anything on the fire escape?”

  “No,” I yell, straining a suspecting ear toward the muffled voice, thinking, What if he is the burglar, and this is his trick—to pose as a cop investigating the burglary he’s about to perpetrate! Perhaps the burgled guy living downstairs, if there is any burgled guy living downstairs, was robbed in just this fashion, and I am next! Terrified, I make sure the door is double locked, but continue speaking the whole time so as not to let on that I’m wise to him. My mind is racing. What if he tries to force his way in? He’ll see what I’ve been doing—nothing! Quickly, I run to the TV and turn off Soul Train.

  He keeps calling me “ma’am,” the way cops do on television. But his slick “officer” impression isn’t fooling me. I don’t need a peephole to see him for the common thief he is. I imagine him dressed in one of those slim, all-black outfits burglars wear in movies and Edward Gorey books. What a cliché! And yet, there is a certain sexiness to the ensemble: formfitting, sleek, hugging his sinewy muscles, showcasing his nimble maneuvers, as he slides through narrow hallways, pilfering jewels and negotiable bonds.

  In my reverie, I’ve neglected to answer his last question . . . the way they sneak around in the shadows, cat-like and mal-intentioned . . .

  Softening to this image, I decide to invite him in. Hurriedly, I clear some space on my couch, then give my cheeks a few pinches in lieu of rouge. Perhaps I’ll offer him coffee, reheat a few cups from the pot I brewed this morning.

  I’m about to open up when I hear him knock on the door down the hall and, quite caddishly, begin posing the very same questions he just posed to me to my neighbor! Fiend! I bring a hand to my heart only to find it freshly missing.

  3:48 PM

  This guy calls me twice, asking for Ilene. He recites my phone number back to me, asking if he’s dialed incorrectly. Ilene is the girl from the bar last night whose scribbled number on a napkin he is unable to make out. I begin to ask if he wants to talk about it, but he hangs up too quickly.

  I really liked the sound of his voice and think about calling him back, saying something sharp and disarming like “Is this Ilene?” before I confess charmingly that it’s just me again, the girl from before, and we share a good laugh over it. I imagine the whole conversation and decide I’ll say yes if he wants to take me out for pizza. But then I end up not calling, worried he might be cheap and ask me to pay for my own slice, or mock my choice of diet soda. Jerk. For a minute I thought he might have been the one. I wonder if I’ll ever love again.

  A UPS package!

  3:49 PM

  The package is for the tenant in the apartment downstairs. I decide I’ve earned a twenty-minute nap.

  5:37 PM

  I write a poem in French. It’s very difficult because I don’t spea
k French and have to use an English-to-French dictionary that I found a week ago at a sidewalk sale. The poem is an existential meditation on the chicken that crosses the road repeatedly but doesn’t know why.

  Le Poulet

  Le destin est une question.

  Avec deux pattes, il traverse la rue.

  Sa vie est une énigme.

  Il marche pour trouver une réponse.

  “Pourquoi le poulet traverse la rue?”

  Il marche pour échapper de son destin.

  7:35 PM

  I eat dinner and then record some fluctuations I’ve observed in the size and mood of my breasts. I’m something of an amateur alchemist when it comes to bust enlargement. I try out different formulas and report my findings in the daybook I’ve decorated with the catfish stickers I got from my parents’ store.

  In 1998, chest expansion occurred in direct proportion to Polly-O string cheese intake. Then, in the spring of 2001, rec-­ords suggest a correlation between waffle consumption and swelling. In the fall of 2002, I believed I’d uncovered growth-inducing properties in corn dogs and various carnival foods. And just now—following a brief examination in my bathroom mirror and reviewing the activities of the last two weeks—I detect a relationship between increased size and cigarettes, whiskey, coffee, chicken parmesan sandwiches from Chez Brigitte on Eleventh Street, fumes from certain varieties of paint thinner (I tried to thin my walls in hopes of enlarging my apartment last Sunday), and the occasional mint Milano.

  DAYBOOK, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2004

  Size: Enormous today! Possible side effect of daily spoon exercises?