Читать книгу Iris Has Free Time - Iris Smyles - Страница 27

“319!” Felix said, raising a hand to high-five us both. We were sitting on our couch—well, they were. I was bouncing a few feet away on our mini-trampoline. Felix high-fived May and then got up off the couch to high-five me and also pass the joint.

It was around 4:00 AM, and we’d just gotten back from karaoke where May had introduced her new boyfriend to our group. It was the first time May had brought a guy—usually she came alone, that is, with me—which made it that much worse when each of our friends, one at a time, said, “You do realize you’re dating a male version of Iris.” “My nose isn’t that big,” I protested drunkenly. May protested, too, though vaguely with a “No, he’s not.” The likeness became intolerable when The Bastard went on stage and sang “Just a Gigolo,” not knowing it was my signature song.

I hadn’t noticed the resemblance before that, but after everyone said it, I began to see it, too. It was, I suppose, a big reason why Felix and I got along so well and yet never felt even the remotest physical attraction—it was as if we were each other’s long-lost brother and sister. We both have big noses, wild curly hair, and a tendency to become the life of the party, or its death, depending on how heavily we’ve been drinking.

In fact, when I first saw Felix at that dorm party—the one he doesn’t remember—tripping over things and carrying on badly, I’d cringed with recognition. Comparatively sober for the moment, I’d felt as if I were watching myself on a different day. So much so that when the guy next to me passed a mean remark about Felix, without even knowing him, I’d rushed to his defense, not because I’m heroic, but because I was defending myself.

May and I, on the other hand, are nothing alike. Though we do share a tendency toward excess, the respective outcomes of our indulgences are quite different—while May might get too drunk and fall asleep, I might get too drunk and set something on fire. Further, while May is petite and shapely, I am tall and rangy. I’m more Laverne than Shirley, you might say, less pretty if more likely to sport a large embroidered I. I raise all this only to supply some possible reason why May, at that time, was regarded by all who knew us as “Iris’s sidekick.”

Certainly neither she nor I defined our relationship this way. Quite the contrary, we saw ourselves as partners, equal halves of a dynamic duo always in complete accord. Indeed, were we sold a motorcycle with a sidecar, there would have been no argument about who would sit where. She’d choose the motorcycle, happy to take charge at the wheel, while I’d choose the sidecar, preferring the role of passenger as if it were a limo.

My point is that though others may have defined her in relationship to me, she did not. So when she finally found a boyfriend, The Bastard moreover, I think she was excited to shed her old role. It was naturally upsetting to her then, to have this new relationship defined as just an echo of her relationship to me, as if being my sidekick were a fate she could not escape: May, a bizarro Oedipus, running from 319 and choosing Felix, only to discover that in choosing Felix, she’d in fact chosen her roommate once more.

“319!” Felix said again. “It’s fate!” he went on as I passed the joint back to him.

We’d been talking about NYU and the dorms, and had stumbled onto the uncanny fact that Felix had lived in the same Fifth Avenue dormitory that May and I shared two years prior when we’d been randomly assigned to each other as roommates. Not just the same fifteen-story building, but the same floor, and not just the same floor, but the same room—319. And which bed did Felix occupy? Mine.

“My eyes!” May cried, after some ash from the joint flew up into them. Blinking in pain, blind for the moment and leading with her arms, she ran to the bathroom screaming, in order to splash some water on her face.

How bizarre it was to reflect back four years, to recall the many conversations May and I had before falling asleep. How bizarre to think of Felix lying exactly where I’d lain two years before, to think that if you could dial back time on one side of that room, it would have been Felix and she that were randomly assigned to each other. It would have been Felix with whom she would have shared so many secrets.