by Iris Smyles
Later that night, as I was walking home, he spotted me from a bench facing the sea. He rose, came toward me, and opened his mouth to speak. Swallowing air a few times first, finally, he got out, “I love you. You love I?”
I reached into the shallow well of my limited Greek; the language of love had no words for “I like you as a friend.” So I kissed him on both cheeks, took his hands and looked into his eyes. “Bobocles,” I said, “Philadelphia, I’m sorry.”
The Sky! The Sky! The Sky!
—STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ, “The Azure”
Phatso
THE ACE OF SPADES SHOWS a naked woman on a desk with her legs opening upward, as if to embrace the sky. In her right hand, she holds a book—The Collected Poems of Mallarmé, I imagine, for the title is out of focus. With her left, she adjusts her reading glasses. All this to say, she’s “bookish.”
Years ago, growing bored of bottle caps and pencil erasers, I started collecting pornography. Since then I’ve amassed a book of 3D nudes, The Collected Tijuana Bibles, a few instruction manuals with illustrations—Total Sexual Fitness for Women! features exercises I can practice by myself—two fetish DVDs with lots of spanking but no sex at all, and five sets of dirty playing cards ranging in theme from “Ancient Greek Lovers” to the more contemporary “Poke-her,” from which I’ve pulled the ace.
It’s natural to identify with the characters in books and movies, and so I identify with the figures in porn. Because I’m not sure what “type” of woman I am, I end up identifying with all of them. As a child I related to Cinderella, for example, though clearly she and I had little in common. She was an underprivileged blonde left to tend the hearth; I was a suburban brunette accustomed to central heating. Still, knowing I wasn’t right for the part, I cast myself in the role anyway.
My new boyfriend Max says he’s into bookish women, but I think he just likes librarian-themed pornography. “You’re exactly my type,” he told me on our first date. I’d worn a sweater vest, dressing for the role. Having met him at a bookstore, I assumed he was bookish, too, and decided to play up that aspect of my character. I’d imagined a brilliant first date conversation in which we’d debate the finer points of Henry James’s later work and had even prepared an off-color joke about the master’s testicular injuries, which I planned to trot out over dessert to show my lighter side.
Alas, my prepping was in vain, as Max, it turned out, had wandered into the bookstore only to buy coffee and had little to no appetite for the books themselves. This was a disappointment. Though it did little to lessen my attraction to him, as I noticed he had a remarkably hairy chest. A veritable beast he was, judging from the wild tangle that sprang ferociously from the top of his V-neck. It thrilled me to imagine myself Boof to his Teen Wolf, while he busily imagined me teacher to his student. “Is that wool?” he whispered, touching my thick, scratchy vest with trembling hand. And then, a few dates later, we adopted two new roles: a young man and a young woman at the start of a great romance.
I didn’t mind being reduced to a “type.” That he managed to boil down my whole personality in order to meet the demands of his fetish was actually exciting; I belonged to a category and also to him. I’ve always enjoyed being objectified, if I’m being honest, to be called by pet diminutives like “baby” or “doll.” It can’t be so uncommon, this desire to become small, to be furnished with sensible handles by which one might more easily be held.
I told Max he was my type, too. Bringing the back of his furry hand to my cheek, I told him I loved his flaxen knuckle curls and began waxing bookish about his type’s recurrence in the novels of H. G. Wells. I described how I imagined him long before we met, naked, running through a forest shrouded in dense fog, pursued by trappers, nearly escaping. Then a tangle of nets! And another! Now a cage! Inside of which he was delivered to civilization, to a secret lab just outside of London, where an evil genius performed ungodly experiments on him, injecting him daily with a mysterious serum that would bestow upon beast humanoid characteristics, giving him some, but not all, of man’s higher brain functions. “And with the injection of this daily serum,” I went on breathlessly, “your body was transformed into the human shape that sits before me. Max!” I cried. “Your hands are a vestige of the savage beast within you, the beast which I adore!”
Max asked what “serum” meant and then, pulling his hand away, asked me to stop making fun of him. Reluctantly, I released his paw and took out my stopwatch to time his beard growth while we waited for appetizers.
I don’t actually have a “type” myself, but have over the years cast a variety of men in the role of prince. To me, this is proof of my being open-minded. To my friends, it’s indicative of a vast collection of fetishes. My dating a man of forty-two when I was only eighteen was proof, they asserted, of an “avuncular fetish.” And my dating a carnie one summer on Coney Island made apparent, they said, my “toothless fetish.” And then, when in college a rash of boyfriends were overweight, I was dubbed “chubby-chaser.”
One ex was so fat, when he lay on top of me I feared being crushed, snapped in two, like a twig on the forest floor in Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. After our first night together, he pulled me close. “See how I mold so perfectly to your body? If I were thin, there would be all this space between us. I don’t want there to be any space between us.”
I was touched by his logic and could genuinely appreciate the way his flab curved into the small of my back. It was like being encased in bubble wrap. I felt very secure. Like a very delicate plate being transported overseas via superior postage.
I quickly came to enjoy the look of him, too. How he was planet-like, I’d think, as he exhaled rings of marijuana smoke that wreathed him like Saturn. And there I was next to him in the kitchen, barefoot and so tiny by comparison, his little moon. I began to think of physical attraction in a whole new way. He was a large physical mass with its own powerful gravitational pull, making it quite natural, quite inevitable really, that I should fall for or into him.
Phatso and I had fun all the time. No one had ever made me laugh the way that he did, and his were the most skillful penis puppet shows I’ve seen. And I’ve seen a lot. I don’t know if this is something most couples share, or if there is something unique to my “type” that inspires a man to give his penis a stage name, but nearly all of my boyfriends have erected such presentations. It would never do to ask if this is their first time reading for the part of Mame or if there were girlfriends before with whom they’d rehearsed. “But that,” as Rudyard Kipling would say, “is another story.”
Phatso had always wanted to be a filmmaker before he decided one winter—the one of our discontent—that he really wanted to act. Returning from his agent’s office one gray afternoon, he told me what his agent had just told him: As he looked presently, he’d be too difficult to cast. He’d need to either gain or lose weight to fit “a type.” Did he want to be a character actor or compete for leading man roles?
Fatter sounded good to me and I told him. “Roles are rolls,” I said, my hand drifting unconsciously toward his gut, where it stuck against his shirt, like an ecstatic ten-year-old pasted to the wall of a Gravitron ride. I gave him a squeeze, raised an eyebrow, and nodded toward the bedroom.
He didn’t see himself that way, he answered. He wanted to be a leading man and took off for the kitchen to continue the conversation over soda and Hot Pockets. He took off and, without noticing, released my hand back into space like a bottle of Coca-Cola Classic in that commercial from 1985. I caught up to him by the microwave, where he was already punching in numbers. After a moment, he turned around and looked at me with tears in his eyes. The timer beeped, like “Taps.”
Later that afternoon we rented Fatso with Dom DeLuise. We sat on the couch, and I stroked his hair and fed him Devil Dogs while he cried. He began his diet and exercise regimen the next day, and a month later he was muscular and thin. He took to eating soy, got his hair spiked at the salon and, I don’t know, it seeme
d as if his whole personality were disappearing with his chins. The man I loved had been pissed away in water weight.
After that I found someone fatter. Really fat. His body was a true extravagance. Breaking up is always hard, but perhaps he, with all his padding, might make for a softer rebound. My friends nicknamed Phatso’s sequel “Type 2,” short for “Type 2 Diabetes.” More romantically I nicknamed him “the Love Barge.” And whether by his side or taken up into the berth of his great arms, like a dinghy attached to a monstrous ocean vessel, when I was with him I felt so marvelously small.
It was at a bar where all my friends drank regularly, that he kissed me for the first time. We’d been flirting all night when, instead of flashing the bewitching smile I’d meant to, I accidentally threw up a shot of Jägermeister. (Later I found out he had a fetish for young alcoholics.) Mortified, I covered my mouth.
And so I ran, like Cinderella at midnight, while he, obese prince, panted after me down the steps and into the men’s urinal where, letting my upchuck burst into full flower, I had just enough time to rinse my mouth out in the sink.
A moment later, Type 2 caught up to me. Wheezing at my back, he spun me around and took me in his arms. His hair! His eyes! The jack of hearts!—he kissed me.
This is the best thing to wear for today, you understand. Because I don’t like women in skirts and the best thing is to wear pantyhose or some pants under a short skirt, I think. Then you have the pants under the skirt and then you can pull the stockings up over the pants underneath the skirt. And you can always take off the skirt and use it as a cape. So I think this is the best costume for today.
—EDITH BOUVIER BEALE, Grey Gardens
The Family Politic
MY FAMILY IS DOWNSTAIRS YELLING. They’re not arguing, that’s just how they talk. It’s a Greek thing. That’s what we say, but the truth is when we visit Greece, people remark on how loud we are. We respond, “It’s an American thing.”
I’m in my old room at my parents’ house because I just got into a fight with my brother Teddy. He was going on about the Internet spelling the end of physical books. Lowering his voice to just a yell, he said, “In the future, no one’s going to want your precious little books, Iris. The book will be obsolete!” I told him he was wrong, that people will always want books. Then he said, “Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah,” and I lost it and ran upstairs.
So now I’m up here, digging out old swimming trophies and dance costumes from under my bed. I have a trophy from 1992 that says “Highest Achiever.” I dust it off and think about bringing it back to my apartment in Manhattan. Maybe I could turn it into a cigarette holder or something.
I try on a blue ballet costume and am excited to find it still fits. I look at myself in the mirror and think about Zelda Fitzgerald. She was about my age when she took up ballet. Taking stock of my reflection, I understand, for the first time, her insanity. I turn in my tutu and notice my thighs are thicker than they used to be. I’m an oversize child, a monster of wilted potential. I put on my pointe shoes and attempt a few poses in front of the mirror.
After a while, I change back into my regular clothes and head downstairs. Everyone is standing around the kitchen table, yelling at the top of their lungs, agreeing that Bush has betrayed the party. I hold up a hanger with the tutu on it and ask my mom, “What’s the best way to remove wrinkles from tulle?”
“What do you want with that old thing now? Throw it out.”
“No way!” I say. “I can’t believe you had it all scrunched up in a bag. I could use it for a Halloween costume, or my author photo—a web magazine is going to publish one of my stories this spring!”
“Oh, god!” she says, giving up. “Steam it, maybe. Hang it in the shower.”
I pull at the blue tulle, worry a loose sequin, then sit at the end of the table and listen. I don’t know how to talk to them. All they ever talk about is politics, which I’ve given up, having decided long ago that cultivating opinions about politics is against my better interests. I lean right economically, which, as a writer, would put me at odds with the artistic and academic communities in which I work.
I recognize my views are somewhat paradoxical. For example, idealistically speaking, I’m a “rugged individualist.” “The government is a necessary evil,” I like to say, “like boyfriends.” But practically speaking, were it not for my parents, I would need government handouts more than anyone. I’m prime welfare material. In fact, trying to assuage my father’s disappointment in the McCain candidacy last election, my mother told him, “On the bright side, if Obama is elected, the government will help us support Iris.”
It’s pretty well understood in my family that I can’t take care of myself, which is why “family values” are so important to me. It’s paramount that I marry so as to preserve my identity as a rugged individualist. If my parents ever cut me loose and I were forced to rely on the state for support, my whole ideology would crumble. “I don’t approve of social programs! FDR ruined this country with his pinko rescue plan! Let those in need pull up their socks!” I say, all while dreaming of the day that my parents’ burden (me) might be transferred to a rich husband, and I might continue to cultivate my pioneer spirit in safety.
My brother Teddy, a computer programmer, is exactly my opposite—he’s a great success. He is a programming savant and his skills are much in demand. If the movie The Terminator were to come true, I often think, Teddy would side with the machines. He’s the villain. Sometimes, when I’m home for the holidays, I pretend I’m a visitor from the future and that my assignment is to change the fate of mankind by changing my brother’s mind, by appealing to his heart before he destroys civilization as we know it. Teddy thinks I’m an idiot.
Teddy spends most of his time staring into his computer and swears by the Drudge Report, which keeps him pretty well informed. He used to be Libertarian, but is getting into anarcho-capitalism now, and says that all social security is a form of corruption: “I was standing on line at McDonald’s yesterday, and the family in front of me paid with food stamps! Why am I paying for their chicken nuggets?” He reads everything online but my writing—which would be, I admit, a waste of his time. What would he learn from my column? How his prodigal sister spends his parents’ money, how she calls it “free time”? It angers him enough that I was born at all. He still hasn’t forgiven me for “invading the nest.”
“If we were birds, you’d have been pushed out,” he says sometimes, and I imagine myself quivering and featherless on the tile floor of our mother’s kitchen. I laugh because he’s joking, but feel bad, because it’s true. He calls the financial help my parents give me I-fare, “like welfare but for Iris.” He says, “Why should she be rewarded for her failure, and I get nothing for my success?” “Bureaucrats!” my brother calls my parents. The whole family believes in small government.
My other brother, Alistair, owns and manages a Dollar store, works seven days a week and very hard. He’s our own “Joe the Plumber.” He has the hots for Ann Coulter and is the most conservative one in the house, though recently we got him to move more center when we convinced him that there was in fact a moon landing. He’d been insisting for months that the photos were made with tiny astronaut figurines and a Styrofoam moon like the ones we made in elementary school when Pluto was still a planet. He pointed to astronaut ice cream as proof. “Like a grown man’s gonna eat that shit!”
My parents have cut McCain out of the campaign photo of Palin and McCain that they got after donating money. Now there’s just a picture of Sarah Palin propped up next to a picture of me in my tap shoes and sequins costume from a dance recital when I was ten. They say she energized the campaign. That’s why they’re all trying to destroy her still, even after the election. “It’s because she’s special,” my father says. I can relate. For years I’ve been trying to destroy myself for the same reason, I think, feeling hung-over, remembering some of the more idiotic things I said last night at a holiday party.
My family suspects me o
f being a closet Democrat. They think I’m a spy. It’s because I live in New York City, am an “artist,” and work occasionally in academia. Also, the magazine in which I was last published included poems by Amiri Baraka and a cover announcing an essay called “Why I Am a Socialist.”
Teddy smirks and asks, “So, who’d you vote for, Iris?” Everyone waits. Will she finally come out? I deal with this the way I deal with almost everything. I make a joke, usually one that no one but me seems to get. I say, “I didn’t vote. I couldn’t see my way clear to allow for a black man, a woman, or a senior citizen in the White House. I’m just too racist, chauvinist, and ageist for these progressive times!”
Neither Democrat nor Republican, my parents think. What we have is an idiot. No one says anything except for Teddy, who begins interrogating me, trying to catch me in a contradiction and expose my dirty, bleeding heart.
I cut him off and continue, “Further, as the leader of the Women’s Anti-Suffrage Party, I will not rest until a woman’s right to vote has been repealed!” I bang the table and stand up. “Of course, getting such legislation passed is tricky as my constituency refuses to speak until spoken to. Naturally we can’t vote for it ourselves. My only hope is to persuade the voting male toward my way of thinking. Which is why I date.”
My parents look horrified. I sit down and eat my baklava, happy to have weighed in during our political congress. “What time’s dinner, Mom?” I say loudly. “Do I have time to go upstairs and type up some pamphlets? I have this idea for a ‘good society’ that I might write about in my next column. Teddy, do you ever read my blog?”
Before dinner my dad fetches a bottle of Wild Turkey. He doesn’t drink much but has it around because he’s been using it to self-treat a toothache. My father hates doctors and believes everything can be cured with either peroxide or a T-shirt. The Wild Turkey is a new addition to his medicine chest; it’s to ameliorate the pain. “Wild Turkey for Turkey Day!” he announces festively, and we all have a few fingers’ full.