by Iris Smyles
He took the mustache with him into the bathroom and swatted me away. “I’ll do it.”
From the open door, I watched him apply a thin line of spirit gum above his upper lip before carefully pressing the mustache into place.
I smiled.
He scowled.
“You make a perfect villain,” I said.
“Because I’m so cruel to you, right? You’re just the innocent victim, I suppose.”
“Damsel,” I corrected him, twirling my hair.
He rolled his eyes.
Fred, Martin’s friend, was having a costume party downtown, so Martin’s other friend Zach, and Zach’s girlfriend, Michelle—both of whom lived on the Upper East Side—had decided to come over to smoke pot and have a drink before heading down all together. Zach and Michelle arrived as a wounded hockey player and a witch, respectively.
“Last-minute costumes,” Zach explained, heading directly to the kitchen.
“I would have loved to do something creative like you,” Michelle told me sweetly, as we waited for our drinks, “but I had no time and couldn’t think of anything anyway.” We sat on the couch where Martin was packing his bong. “I’m boring,” she said.
“No, you’re not. Witches are classic!” I said.
“Relax, Iris. She’s just trying to make you feel better because your costume’s so ridiculous.”
“I can’t believe you got him to dress up,” Zach broke in, handing us glasses. “Martin, what’s happening to you?”
“I’m whipped,” he said. “I’m her slave.”
“Woe is you,” I said.
“Zach already had the hockey jersey, and I just put some of my eye shadow around his eye to make a bruise,” Michelle said. “I used glittery shadow though, so he just sort of looks dressed up or something.” She shrugged, as if to give up.
“I think we should go,” Martin said. “Before Iris gets impatient. Halloween’s her religion, you know.”
Because my tracks, when attached, made me five feet wide, I wouldn’t be able to put them on until we got to the party, so I brought the rope with me and told Martin he could tie me up once we got there. A taxi stopped for us at Park and Eighty-second. I put the tracks in the trunk while everyone else got in.
The cab dropped us just north of Union Square and I was excited to see the streets filled with people in costume. On the walk over, we started talking to a couple our age that were dressed as contestants from TV’s Double Dare, the popular kids game show from the ’80s and ’90s. Their costume was pretty impressive, and I nudged Martin as if to say, you see how much fun this is, everyone is doing it, not just us. He said, “Ow,” as if I’d jabbed him in the ribs.
“Martin, can you tie me up now?” I asked, stopping on the sidewalk.
“I’ll do it when we get there.”
“It’ll be too late then. I want to be in costume when we walk in or the effect will be lost.”
“I’ll do it in the lobby.”
We got into an elevator filled with vampires, sexy witches, pimps, and white trash. When we got out, Martin kept going.
“Wait, you said you’d tie me up!”
He sighed. “Is this really necessary?”
“Yes!” I said. “It’s our whole costume!”
Zach and Michelle stood by.
“You guys go ahead,” Martin said. “I’m not allowed.”
They went in, and Martin and I got to work. I had already figured out how best to secure the tracks and tried explaining to Martin, but he got mad and said he knew what he was doing and that I should just “keep quiet for a change.”
“You keep quiet,” I whispered, as he circled the rope around my arms and torso, weaving it through the tracks until I couldn’t move my upper arms. “Circle it more times,” I said, when he stopped after only two loops. “You have to do it more times or it won’t look good.”
He circled it a few more times and then, walking on ahead without me, said, “I don’t know how you’re going to move around, but you got what you wanted. Happy?”
Since I was now attached to the tracks and the hallway was so narrow, I couldn’t walk straight but had to walk sort of sideways, like Gloria Swanson entering stage left. “This is part of the fun,” I said, flanking in behind him.
Past the front door was another long, even narrower hallway that led into a large loft-like living room packed with costumed guests. Martin and I stood at the edge with Zach and Michelle. I smiled excitedly and, maneuvering just the bottom of my right arm, handed Zach my disposable camera.
“Would you take a picture of us? Martin, could you please wear your hat?” He’d taken it off again. “At least for the picture?”
Martin put his hat back on and stood beside me. I leaned over for a second to brush a hair from my face, which caused my tracks to bump Martin in the back. He flashed me a mean look.
“What?” I asked.
“Your stupid tracks hit me. Can you try to be a little more aware of yourself, please!” he yelled, shaking my tracks angrily, and in so doing shaking me.
“Guys,” said Zach, a few feet in front of us, holding up the camera. “You ready?”
My eyes filled with tears. I tried to smile but found my mouth muscles doing all sorts of weird things. “No, umm, I have to go to the bathroom,” I said and flanked off down the long narrow hallway, trying not to cry until I made it outside.
I just needed a moment alone to collect myself, but the hallway was filled with pimps and white trash—investment bankers in costume—coming off the elevator, so I climbed the staircase half a flight to get some privacy. Standing on the next landing, my arms tied down to my sides, tracks on my back, I let my tears flow.
After a minute, a sexy witch spotted my feet and ducked her head up the stairs. She smiled, then frowned. “Are you okay?” My costume was a success; I looked like I was in trouble. Her boyfriend, wearing a tuxedo and an Afro wig, poked his head in next to hers and looked up at me with concern. I tried to smile back. “Fine,” I said. “Great,” I sniffled, as if I had no idea why they’d even asked.
After my face air-dried—I couldn’t reach my eyes to wipe the tears away—I went downstairs and flanked back into the party, to the edge of the large room where our group had stood moments earlier. Martin was nowhere to be seen. A few different guys came up to me while I waited, each of them telling me how much they liked my costume before asking if I needed rescuing. I said no, told them I had a boyfriend somewhere inside, but thanks anyway. Then, after a few minutes, The Villain returned.
“There you are!” Martin said. “Look, I’m going to get a drink, you want anything?”
“A screwdriver would be nice,” I said quietly.
He looked me up and down and then back at the crowd. “Well, obviously you can’t come inside with your tracks on,” he said.
“Yes, I can.”
“So I’ll come back in a few minutes.” He rubbed the skin above his upper lip, pulling at the remaining glue so that it looked like he was twirling an imaginary mustache; he’d already removed the real one. “It was falling off anyway,” he volunteered. “It’s too hot in here,” he sighed. He took off his hat and jacket and studied me. “You might as well make yourself useful,” he said. And then, as if I were a coat rack, he hung his jacket and hat on my tracks and disappeared into the crowd.
5
This is almost everything that happened since I last saw May in New York:
I got even more serious with Martin; took a job teaching sixth grade in a public school in the South Bronx; moved to a new apartment at the mouth of the Midtown Tunnel; took a new job teaching at a private school on the Upper West Side; earned my teaching certificate; applied to graduate school; discovered Reggie on line behind me outside the Halloween store on Fourth Avenue—“I’m going to be ‘white trash,’” he said; broke up with Martin after nearly three years (Not right after Halloween, but pretty soon after. He was surprised; he loved me, he explained, and figured we were in it for the long hau
l, which was why he resented me so much); moved to a new apartment in the West Village; accepted the third invitation sent by Caroline to join Friendster; quit my teaching job; began a master’s program in Humanities after every other graduate school rejected me; tried to write another novel; updated my Friendster profile to include under Favorite Films all three Amy Fisher movies (Casualties of Love: The Long Island Lolita Story; The Amy Fisher Story; and Amy Fisher: My Story) and summarily accepted one hundred or so “friend requests” from former college and high school acquaintances I hadn’t seen or spoken to in years; read up on “lucid dreaming” and began first by just trying to hover low, still pretty close to the ground; cried when I told Martin I didn’t want to get back together though I definitely still loved him, that I’d really only come over to collect my Tupperware containers and my train tracks; took to crying sporadically on the subway when I thought about how much I missed him; and learned to live an otherwise quiet, fairly responsible life that included veggie burgers (to make sure I was getting at least one serving of vegetables daily) prepared on my George Foreman Grill (a Christmas present from my parents), the occasional jog along the Hudson river, and hanging framed reproductions of Bruegels and Manets, or whatever I could find on sale at The Salvation Army, up and down the walls of my new West Village one-bedroom apartment in an ongoing effort to make the place look more like how I felt, which was, increasingly, like having a party, before I decided to throw one in celebration of my twenty-fifth birthday.
6
I invited all my friends. But because I’d been living wholly within Martin’s world for the last three years, I had only a few. So I asked my old friend Jacob to throw the party with me, to invite his friends and then ask his friends to invite theirs. Reggie, who’d found me on Friendster after our run-in at the Halloween store, wrote back that he was definitely coming and also, would I mind if he brought Felix?
Finding me within the large crowd of strangers huddled noisily inside my small one-bedroom apartment, Felix handed me a beer and also his cell phone. On the other end was May, calling from the edge of oblivion—California. And so, just as I had brokered May and Felix’s first date a few years earlier, Felix brokered a reunion between me and May.
It was as if we were a movie being played in rewind. First there was May and me, then May and Felix and me, then May and Felix and Reggie and me, then May and Felix, then me and Martin, then me. Then Reggie and me, then Reggie and Felix and me, then Reggie and Felix and May and me. See what I mean?
When May came to New York for a week’s visit a few months later, the four of us all went out together. Now Reggie and I were dating while May and Felix were negotiating a friendship/romance. She explained this to me by confessing that though she and Felix had kissed the other night, it was more out of boredom than out of attraction. Did I understand?
It was like a rubber band snapped back. Or rather, like a ship returning from the furthest reaches of space. Proof that the universe is just like a game of Pac-Man—I read this recently in Scientific American. The universe is not infinite, some scientists suppose, but shaped like a donut giving off the appearance of infinity while actually just looping. So there we were—rounding the other side of the universe, returning through the act of departing—a chain of acquaintances made, broken, and reassembled in reverse. Pac-Man exiting on one side of the screen only to reappear on the other.
After May’s visit, we began emailing each other pretty often. We were both single again—she and Felix were over, while Reggie and I had re-started only to re-stop—so we had a lot to discuss. We’d write to each other about our dating adventures, exchange advice, and occasionally even implement a new “science experiment” via correspondence.
I’d send her an email that I planned to send to some guy, and she’d hypothesize his response, laying down a small wager with it: “Twenty bucks says he’ll call you Tuesday but not Monday, and if you don’t call him back within three hours, he’ll follow up with a text referencing the theme song to Knight Rider.” “You’re on!”
That Valentine’s Day it hardly mattered that I had no boyfriend. I wrote an email that included the address of a local flower shop along with the window of time during which I’d be home to receive presents, and cc’d it to a list of guys I’d recently dated or was still dating. May enjoyed this experiment particularly and called me in a peel of laughter.
“The bitch is crazy is about me!” she said in a man’s voice. “Hey, wait—” she trailed off, pretending to notice only then the long list of names hugging theirs in the cc.
I wasn’t trying to be cruel. It’s just, with all the waiting-by-the-phone stuff that happens when you’re twenty-five—the headgames, the guys never being honest, or their acting like you’re trying to do something awful to them just by caring—a girl’s got to take her power back. I got five valentines following that stunt, incidentally. An unexpected result that made us both a little sad.
“It’s horrible the way men will fall in love just because you won’t,” I wrote in my next email.
May agreed. “Even when you’re winning, hard-to-get is a lousy game.”
Around that same time, I began to see more of Felix and Reggie. Felix had decided to resettle in New York, which meant that for a while he would cruise the couches of the North East. And so, the three of us now became a gang.
It was just like in Sex and the City. Every Sunday, we’d meet for brunch to discuss our love lives, only, instead of four fabulous women in their thirties, it was four slovenly guys in their twenties; Felix, Reggie, Reggie’s two roommates, and me. “That chick I met on Friendster tossed my salad last night,” Felix told us.
Then, because Felix and I were both unemployed—me because I’d just started grad school, and Felix because he’s Felix—we began hanging out more and more just the two of us, and as it turned out, we made an excellent team. When you’re in your twenties, and the battle of the sexes is raging, its casualty rate increasing every day, a platonic boy-girl alliance can be a great asset. With me by his side, women were much more amenable to his advances, and for my part, Felix was an excellent ally, too. While a girl alone might look desperate, and two together, way too intimidating, a girl with a guy who is not her boyfriend eases tensions. Together, we hit the bars, “befriend and conquer!” our new motto.
Having spent so much time in the trenches with Felix, it was only natural that eventually I began to confide in him, too, asking for relationship advice as if he were a surrogate May. “It’s funny,” I told him one day, “how in bringing you to my party, Reggie had been like a surrogate you when you brought Reggie; and when you put me on the phone with May, you were like a surrogate me putting me on the phone with a surrogate you; and then when May visited New York a while back and you guys sort of kissed, she’d been like a surrogate Reggie; and then Reggie, in dating me for a few weeks, was like a surrogate you; while I, in dating Reggie, the surrogate you, had become a surrogate May; which in turn made you, Felix, my bastard roommate, a surrogate me.”
How strange life is, I marveled, as we stood together in the kitchen, this ongoing exchange of one role for another. You’re a roommate, a friend, a girlfriend, a student, a teacher, a daughter, maybe even one day a mother, and on and on, I guess, depending on how long you live. But if you eventually become all these different people, what exactly is it that makes you still you? Do you change, or does the game just change all around you, you know what I mean?—I’m paraphrasing.
“Yeah, that’s why I used chocolate syrup to make the deviled eggs this time,” Felix replied. “You didn’t have any mayo. Go ’head and try one.”
III
1
“It makes no sense,” I said.
The Bastard and I were walking along Tenth Street. It was late fall or early winter depending on how you see things and the morning after another long night of terrible fun.
“Jess likes you, but you freak him out a little. He’s not looking for a serious relationship and can probably tel
l that it would be hard to keep things casual with you, which is why he’s backing off now.”
“But I don’t want a relationship either. I just got out of a three-year relationship. Another relationship is the last thing I want!”
We walked a bit in silence. Felix began whistling the Daft Punk song, “One More Time.” I hummed the choruses.
After a minute, he stopped, looked around, and nodded. “It’s officially a dry spell,” he announced.
“Nonsense! What about all those girls from Craigslist?”
That morning he’d posted an ad on Missed Connections describing a woman he’d not actually seen but only hoped to—his ideal girl—and then picked a random subway line and related an imaginary scenario in which he spotted her and felt an instant connection though regrettably he’d not said hello. “Did you feel it, too?” he wrote. He got the idea from Oprah, from an episode he watched recently with his mom about “the law of attraction.” “You’re supposed to ask the universe for what you want—blonde, brunette, Asian, etc.—and then just wait for her to come to you,” he explained before posting it.
“I think I miss May,” he sighed. “I just want to meet someone nice, you know?” We passed a girl in ripped jeans and motorcycle boots. “Hey, can I borrow your torso for twelve minutes?”
The girl ignored him.
“She’s clearly into you, Felix, but shy. When talking to a girl, try to avoid yes or no questions, like, ‘Can I borrow your torso?’ or ‘May I put my penis in your mouth?’ It leaves her with only two possible responses rather than opening the territory for conversation. What about that nice young lady you met last week on Friendster? The one who tossed your salad?”
“Cara?”
I shrugged.
“I’m not into her. She has weird gums.”
“That’s not nice, Felix.”
“She’s too skanky. I mean who does that on a first date? I can’t take her to dinner now even if I wanted to. She’s a savage!” He leaned into another girl passing on the right. “Ooh, I’d like to butternut your squash,” he said in a lewd voice. The girl giggled and kept walking.