Читать книгу Iris Has Free Time - Iris Smyles - Страница 26

I first met The Bastard at a dorm party in college. He was drunk and people were saying things like, “Who’s that?” and “Oh, that’s Felix” and rolling their eyes while he fell down, broke things, and danced to the sounds of traffic coming through the window. Apparently he got that drunk at lots of dorm parties and was getting something of a reputation for it. People thought he got too drunk. Regardless, he was unquestionably having more fun than anyone else, and when he got tangled in the Christmas lights and began quoting Tron, I said as much.

Later that night, my roommate May and I smoked a joint with him in the bathroom, and when the joint was close to finished and we both declined a last drag for fear of burning our fingertips, Felix demonstrated how to smoke a roach into nothing but ash. It was almost magical the way he just let his fingers go, like a magician making a whole rabbit disappear.... He doesn’t remember any of it.

The first time we met that he does remember was a couple of years later. May and I were at Three of Cups for a birthday party. With red Christmas lights, crummy sofas, and skulls punctuating the liquor bottles behind the bar, Three of Cups was at that time very popular among the NYU crowd. Though Felix had graduated a year earlier, he had been scene-partners with the birthday boy, so he was there, too.

Relatively sober this time, Felix immediately took a shine to May and went ahead and introduced himself, as if for the first time. May is very pretty—she’s petite, wears her dark straight hair in a bob, has big blue eyes like fishbowls without fish, and looks like a film star from another time, beautiful in a way that women aren’t anymore. When she first got to school, she didn’t think so though. She thought she was fat and talked all the time about how she wasn’t fat but just healthy. I told her she looked like Mae West. She told me Mae West was fat.

May is from Alabama and has down pat that Southern Belle sweet-and-cruel-way-of-being that just accidentally tears men apart. The way it works is that she never seems to know she’s being cruel, which is what enables her to be sweet at the same time, which makes the boys she’s cruel to like her even more. She doesn’t like them though is the thing, so she’s unaware of her power.

For most of college May didn’t have a boyfriend. She dated now and then, nice looking boys a little soft in the arms with fine manners whom she’d accidentally destroy before finding their pleading remnants too disgusting to tolerate—they’d save flowers that fell from her hair and months later, commemorating the day of their meeting, present them to her inside jewelry boxes cupped repulsively in shivering hands. No wonder she was still a virgin. Or, she’d date guys with way too much game, handsome men who’d cast her off right away because now it was she who liked them too much, her hands that shivered repulsively, because she was not cruel at all, but looked at them too long with her terrible, pleading, fishbowl-without-fish eyes.

Felix, on the other hand, isn’t handsome at all. He is striking, maybe even ugly, but the kind of ugly that in the eye of certain beholders (May’s, it turns out) could be taken for beautiful. Extraordinary-looking is the best way to describe him. He has a giant nose, a sort of monument to noses, a parody of a nose really, right in the middle of his face, which is where a nose should be, I guess, and then all this wild curly brown hair—now there’s some gray in it—sprouting from his head like a set of disordered but brilliant ideas.

He was standing under his hair at the bar that night—much more composed than when we saw him at the party two years earlier— performing an elegant lean with a look of half-seriousness, as if in his mind he were telling a very cool joke and were taking his sweet time with it. May was ordering her second Amaretto sour, when Felix said, “Hi,” or something similar, and gave her a look like he was really about something, so says May.

Then, channeling Mae West, May looked him up and down and asked, “Is that Deadeye Dick in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?” He had a Kurt Vonnegut novel tucked into the front of his jeans where a pistol would have been if this were an action movie. After that, May began to lean too and they talked for a while about their shared love of Vonnegut. May didn’t know what came over her, she told me later, just that all of a sudden she found herself possessed of a wit and self-assurance she never imagined she had. She fell for him that night.

I liked them as a couple, I told her at home after, mostly because I could draw caricatures of them together pretty easily. I had just started to draw, mostly when I was stoned or in class, or both as it often happened, and I would practice by drawing people I knew. I found my ability to draw people increased with the amount of time I spent with them and so got to know which of their features were the most telling. I particularly enjoyed drawing May because I knew her so well and also because she sort of looked like a cartoon already, which made it easy.

Just like May, Felix looked completely unrealistic in person. I mean I was able to draw him perfectly on my first try, that very night, while they stood chatting at the bar. When May introduced me a few minutes after, I showed them the napkin on which I’d drawn their joint portrait. Felix, leaning in, his hair a third party; May, looking away, glamorous, aloof.

They agreed with me that it looked much more like them than they did, and I ordered my third whiskey while they continued to eye each other. Finding little else to do—I wasn’t attracted to anyone at the party myself—I decided to spend the night brokering their first date, negotiating the exchange of phone numbers so May could play it cool, as if his calling were a matter quite beyond her concern.

I was only returning the favor. I often asked May to field phone calls from my own boyfriends, arrange with them the particulars of my dates, or else provide them with small talk until I was ready to talk myself. “Hand me the phone once you’ve tired him out,” I’d sigh, lying in my bed as she chatted them up. Sometimes I wouldn’t bother talking to them at all. We’d call it a “science experiment,” and I’d just ask her to pretend she was me. “Like a placebo Iris.”

Hanging up the phone, she’d submit her report, describing to me in detail how the conversation went. “Fascinating,” I’d remark. And then, analyzing his response, I’d try to determine whether his feelings for me, “his symptoms,” as I called them, were real or psychosomatic. “Love is a disease,” I told May. “The question is whether it’s viral or bacterial.”

I’d roll a joint, we’d get high, and then I’d record the results of the “experiment” in a chemistry ledger I’d purchased from the college bookstore for just this purpose. I’d draw up elaborate tables and charts in the rigorous fashion of the lab reports I’d submitted in high school—I got very good marks in science incidentally—and then we’d discuss my findings over margaritas.

Seeing as May and I pretty much shared everything, I figured why not share this, too. I went on my dates alone, of course, but found the reporting of them after to be much more fun. Whether or not it worked out with each guy, after a while, hardly mattered. How paltry love and heartbreak began to seem in the face of so much cold hard science.

Thus I began setting up for the experiment of May and Felix. Donning my imaginary lab coat that night at the Three of Cups bar, I told Felix that he could pursue May provided he honor certain protocol. “I’m going to give you May’s phone number along with this brief list of rules. Be sure to identify yourself politely when you call, or I won’t put her on with you.”