by Iris Smyles
Philip used to call me by his ex-wife’s name when we argued. “Katherine!” he’d yell. “I mean Iris.” It bothered me, but I couldn’t get too angry, as I’d done the same thing a few times myself. Just as Philip associated anger with his ex-wife, I associated love with my then-ex-boyfriend Martin.
We were in bed the first time it happened. Philip was on top when I rather affectionately cried out, “Martin!” because, as I explained after, I’d felt a sudden rush of love, a feeling I associated with Martin, who was my boyfriend for three years before Philip. “But, Philip! Martin was the furthest thing from my mind!” I insisted, for hearing his name had surprised me, too.
“If anything, you should take it as a compliment,” I went on. “Had I called you ‘chicken fingers,’ ‘tilapia,’ or ‘suitcase without wheels,’ I’d understand your anger, because I don’t much care for those things. But I really liked Martin! Don’t you see? Which means I really like you, too.”
“Katherine—I mean Iris—I don’t want to hear it!”
After much discussion, his anger subsided, and we picked up where we left off. And then, what can I say? It happened again. “Oh, Martin,” I sighed, before I caught myself and froze. He pulled away and looked at me, his eyes molten.
“I’m kidding!” I lied. “God, you’re so serious all the time!”
He glared.
“Bad joke?” I asked, scrunching my face. “I remember what’s-his-name,” I said, forcing a laugh. “You know that joke?”
Philip left the room and I followed closely after, describing the symptoms of Wernicke’s aphasia.
4
Aphasia is a brain disorder primarily affecting speech. The afflicted will substitute words like “blaff” for “glass,” or “coutom” for “crouton.” Sometimes called “cocktail hour speech,” it’s not nonsensical exactly, because it can still be understood, the way readers can glean meaning from Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky.”
I’m not suggesting I have Wernicke’s, but I think it’s distinctly possible that I have Wernicke’s cousin. While Wernicke’s is caused by brain trauma, “Amatory Aphasia” results from a blow to the heart—a painful breakup or series of them—and presents as a trouble with naming romantic partners. It afflicts almost all single adults of a certain age. If you’ve dated around, you probably have it too.
That’s where “baby,” “sweetheart,” and “honey” come in. They’re pet names employed by the seasoned lover who’d never make a rookie mistake like mine, not again anyway. Had I cried out, “Baby,” the debacle with Philip might well have been avoided.
When I was young, calling someone “baby” seemed vulgarly callous, as I hadn’t yet grasped that a callus serves a purpose. Just like a person with a broken knee wears a cast, a person with a broken heart calls his new lover “baby.” It’s unfortunate but sometimes the heart mends imperfectly, requiring the injured to rely on a crutch. Saying “baby” is how the heart limps.
I could recall no name for the pain I felt when Philip left. And just as I’d become inadvertently poetic in my father’s garden, describing objects when their names eluded me, I went on to friends, trying to describe my terrible feelings for which no single word sufficed.
The word I was seeking was on the tip of my tongue, I felt, and so I kept talking, like that annoying guy hanging over the jukebox at your favorite bar who won’t stop hounding you about the lyrics to a song he can’t remember but which he has, nevertheless, stuck in his head. “You know that song about the girl who’s angry with the guy because he did something she didn’t like?” he goes on. “Damn! What’s it called? I’m not going to be able to stop thinking about it until I figure it out!”
If I could only name the feeling, I was sure I could let it go.
“Baby, you broke my heart,” the guy says between swallows of beer beside the jukebox. “B’dm, b’dm, d’dm. It goes something like that.”
5
Now I’m dating someone new. I’ve been seeing Sam for over a month and have in that time called him a variety of names: “Mr. Drummond,” “Bird Flu,” “Queequeg,” “Octopus Lips,” “Flounder Teeth,” “One Hundred Seventy-Five Pound Cake,” “Cold Cuts,” “Chief Custodian of My Loins,” as in “I hereby promote thee Sam to Chief Custodian of My Loins,” “Orange Julius,” “DDT,” “Tempur-Pedic Mattress,” “Wonderballs,” “Shostakovich,” and “Vitamin Supplement.” Pet names, alternatives to “baby” and “sweetheart.” Why not make my bandage words unique? Why not paint little drawings on each cast?
As Sam and I get closer, however, I find myself, much as before, on the verge of calling him the wrong thing. It’s strange to say, but an intimate moment in the life of an adult is often a congress of previous ones. With the ghosts of one’s past crowding around you in the present, a kiss is a haunted thing.
Like a song on the radio reminds you of your first slow dance; like the scent of damp grass brings back that high school pep rally; like the caress of an unseasonably warm day in winter reminds you of someone who broke your heart; like a storm of such triggers, setting off so many memories at once; like that, yesterday, with Sam inside me, all the men I’ve ever loved were all at once recalled, not because I was thinking of them, but just the opposite, because the whole of my history, everything I have ever known and since forgotten, was rising in me to mean him, Sam, whose name I could not remember.
The French call the orgasm “the little death.” Approaching the big death, the rumor goes, one’s whole life flashes before one’s eyes. It makes sense then that with my little one, all previous loves should flash before mine, so that instead of crying out, “Sam!” I nearly sang a summary of my love life so far: I love you, Joey, I mean Martin, I mean Nicos, I mean Philip, I mean Max, I mean Glen, I mean Billy, I mean Sam . . .
“’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.”
Today, after 50 years of its theoretical introduction, we have learned that the Higgs boson probably exists.
—CSABA BALAZS OF THE MONASH UNIVERSITY’S ARC CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR PARTICLE PHYSICS IN MELBOURNE
Large Hadron Collider
THE LAUNDROMAT IS A GREAT place to meet men, dating experts say. Also, sports bars. But what do you do when you have your own washer and dryer? When you quit drinking six years ago? What do you do when you want to meet someone who, like you, is not at that Super Bowl party, but home alone watching Science Channel, contemplating the certain collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda, and the romantic ramifications of quantum entanglement, what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.”
I was in my parents’ kitchen, reading one of my dad’s back issues of Scientific American, when my mother reminded me again of my hurtling headlong into a lonely void. “You don’t have forever” were her exact words. I was reading about the possibility that time doesn’t exist but is simply “emergent.” Still, I didn’t argue. I just nodded and turned the page, to an ad for a Bright Horizons educational cruise, this one with a physics theme.
“You’re too picky,” my mother went on, noting my age, “nearly forty!”
“Thirty-five,” I corrected her, and continued reading the trip itinerary. After a tour of CERN in Geneva, home of the Large Hadron Collider, participants would board the AmaDagio for a cruise down France’s Rhône River, enjoying twenty-two onboard lectures on the latest developments in physics and cosmology, punctuated by six tours of the port cities between Lyon and Arles. What kind of people take these trips? I wondered. Could this be my laundromat?
The day before my flight, I’m still packing. The brochure suggests casual attire, but I’m not about to meet my soulmate in a T-shirt, and visiting the largest particle accelerator in the world where, after a forty-year search, the elusive Higgs boson (AKA “the God particle”) was finally discovered, surely warrants a little dressing up. I settle on practical Hepburn-esque menswear
for day and gowns for evening—perfect for a transatlantic steamer setting sail in 1925.
An overnight flight later, and I’m standing amid a crowd of T-shirted septuagenarian couples, waiting to board a bus that will take us all to CERN. Struggling to remain optimistic—if I can’t have lived in 1925, at least I can rub elbows with those who came close—I keep my eyes peeled for a potential husband hidden within the group. I’m about to give up all romantic hope when a fantastically young man in his late fifties, an English astrophysicist, asks if he can sit next me. “Of course,” I say, before noticing his wedding ring, fat and gold, shaped like the Large Hadron Collider we’re about to see.
Three hundred thirty feet underground, a seventeen-mile ring straddles the Franco-Swiss border. Whizzing through it at speeds approaching that of light, particles smash into one another, causing mini “big bangs” and conditions like that of our universe 13.7 billion years ago. The Large Hadron Collider fills me with a sense of awe that follows me into the evening and is still with me the next day, as I stare out from the cold deck of the AmaDagio.
Swathed in secondhand mink—like an Edward Gorey character surveying the grounds—I watch the French countryside drift by. It’s autumn and the trees along the Rhône are orange, and red, and then bare.
Below deck, I lunch with a couple from Greece who for many reasons remind me of my parents. “The bœuf bourguignon is delicious,” I say, smiling. “The meat is tender, but none of that matters if you don’t have a person to share it with,” Eleni replies, after she hears I’m traveling alone. I’m grateful when her husband George, a gynecological pathologist, changes the subject. He asks if I’ve gotten the HPV vaccine. “My doctor says I’m too old.” George nods gingerly before estimating my age, probable number of sexual partners, and the statistical likelihood that I already have the cancer-causing virus. Eleni beams and takes her husband’s hand. “George’s work has been honored all over the world.”
For dinner, I select a dramatic houndstooth gown paired with my favorite polar bear earrings. But I’m the only one in formal attire and blush when I enter the dining room. The waiters all look at me, I think, pityingly. Quickly, I take a seat beside the roguishly handsome Mr. Taggart, a retired history professor from Bath and science cruise veteran—this is his fifth. Mr. Taggart has spiky white hair, thick black eyebrows, and a back problem that makes him look sulky and rebellious.
Immediately, we hit it off—I have a similar pain in my hip from too many hours at my desk—and I begin fantasizing about becoming the wife of Bath, about accompanying him on his sixth and seventh and eighth science cruise. Trying to scope out his marital status, I compliment him on his unique style—a shirt with buttons—and ask if he has a stylist or if his wife and children dress him. Score: he is unattached. I probe further, asking after his other interests.
At this, he takes out his iPhone to show me photos of the clocks and barometers that he collects. He goes on talking to me about time and pressure when it hits me: I’m not being courted but visited by the Ghost of Science Cruise Future. With a start, I realize all his clocks are Grandfathers.
Like sands through Mr. Taggart’s hourglass, these are the days of our cruise: On Monday we sit for lectures on the subatomic world—“Electrons come in pairs.” On Tuesday, space—“We live in a time of cosmic collision, but eventually even galaxies have to settle down.” On Wednesday, we tour the Roman ruins of Vienne—“The Temple of Augustus and Livia. What a pair!” And on Thursday, we are treated to a romantic night walk through the medieval ghost town of Viviers. Two by two we disembark, like Noah’s animals, onto dry land. Mr. Taggart, gallantly, offers his arm.
The most unromantic view of marriage is that it’s insurance against the future. “You don’t want to end up alone!” my mother had told me in the kitchen. But here, on this ship, among the over-seventy set, I am with people who are pretty close to the end, and I am here alone. It dawns on me, I’m not sure on which day, that I’ve seen the end, and it’s not so bad.
We stay up late after our night walk through Viviers. The captain, the married astrophysicist, George and Eleni, a couple from China who are celebrating their fortieth anniversary, and Mr. Taggart and I sit together in the lounge talking about ideas the way we did when we were in school, when we were still young, when we had forever. We talk about the Big Bang, about what came before the beginning, about what came before that, and what came before that . . .
On the last night, when I enter the dining room the waiters applaud. They’ve enjoyed my outfits, one of them tells me. They’ve never seen anyone make such an effort. I smile and adjust my turban. So what if electrons come in pairs? The Higgs boson, that special thing that took almost forty years to find, goes it alone.
Acknowledgments
THANK YOU:
Mike Solomon
Chris Stein
Arthur Smyles
Popy Smyles
Frederic Tuten
Irene Skolnick
Lauren Wein
Pilar Garcia-Brown
Russ Smith
Ann Hulbert
Scott Stossel
Betsy Sussler
Honor Jones
Erin DeWitt
Taryn Roeder
Rachael DeShano
Ayesha Mirza
Christopher Moisan
Arthur T. Smyles
Alexander Smyles
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