Читать книгу Iris Has Free Time - Iris Smyles - Страница 28

Felix and May were soon a couple. They spent the normal amount of time any couple might spend alone, but then, seeing as we all got along so well, they also spent time with me. And so, for a while, the three of us became something of a gang. Then when I had a date, the gang expanded to four. Then once when I didn’t have a date, Felix asked if he could bring his friend Reggie, who had just graduated from a college down South and who was in New York for a temporary consulting job. Then, after a while, Reggie and I started dating, too. Sort of.

Here’s a little lesson in Physics: While celestial bodies are governed by the laws of attraction, some other kinds of bodies—mine and Reggie’s, for example—are governed by the laws of boredom. Imagine for a moment a satellite orbiting Earth for no other reason than that it has nothing better to do. An orbit only aping paths defined by known physical laws but fundamentally free of any actual gravitational attraction. This was my relationship to Reggie, one of those attempted flirtations where you try to manufacture pull, but finally feel nothing and after a while just give up and turn on the TV.

More bored to Reggie than attracted to anyone else, every now and then we’d find ourselves alone—he was there, I was there, and for a little while, there we were—and kiss. But sharing a joint with May and Felix a little later, the kiss would be forgotten. That is until the next time Reggie and I found ourselves alone, thrust against each other once again, unable to resist the physical equations of the bored state.

And another little lesson, this time in Biology: After graduation, I left for Greece, where I remained for the next four months. By the time I returned to Manhattan in the fall, things between May and Felix had gotten serious. The symptoms of their relationship had progressed and like a chronic condition, Felix was flaring up daily; he’d practically moved in with us.

You know how Lyme disease makes you not want to do the things you used to want to do? May’s relationship with Felix was sort of like that. She rarely wanted to hang out with me anymore and after a while, I hardly ever even saw her without him by her side. May and Felix were, “like, best friends,” May told me privately, during one of the few lucid moments that very occasionally punctuated her fever. Outside of that, she’d completely stopped reporting on their relationship to me, but had actually begun reporting on ours to him.

She’d slip out to the corner deli to buy crackers or crazy straws for Felix—“he likes the ones shaped like flamingos”—and Felix would come up to me and say, “Maybe you should clean your hair out of the shower drain after you’re done, Iris. It’s not fair when May and I end up doing it.” I contemplated reminding him that May was my roommate, not he, and considering the fact that he was an unpaying tenant, it was actually quite fair that he not only clean the shower drain but also sweep and mop the living room. Instead I apologized. Though Felix was out of line, May had a point. But I had a point, too, which was this: Judging by the seriousness with which your illness is progressing, perhaps it’s time you two seek quarantine—I’m paraphrasing. “Maybe you guys should get your own place.”

May did eventually move out. And then I met Martin and came down with the fever, too. We got pretty serious and then, you know how it goes. How many close relationships can a single person juggle? In the beginning, May and I still saw each other; we went on a few double dates. But gradually, we saw each other less and less until eventually we did not see each other at all. It was the exact opposite of a big deal. It was more like the end of the world.

Just another word or two about Physics and the Second Law of Thermodynamics in particular: When I was a kid I thought often about what the end of the world would look like. I mean, the edge of the universe, how does that work? What exactly is the border between something and nothing? But now I see I was thinking about it all wrong, that there is no edge, no hard and fast end of the world, just like there is no end to certain friendships. People, like stars and planets and everything else, just drift apart.

May and I were like space. We didn’t end our friendship as much as let it go. Things got cold, the universe expanded between us, disorder replaced order, chaos and entropy and all that. Cosmic stuff. Until I didn’t even know her phone number anymore, until the next thing I knew about her was coming from Reggie’s mouth two years later after I ran into him downtown, on line outside The Halloween Store.

I looked up from my book—The Elegant Universe—and there he was cued up right behind me, the laws of boredom thrusting us together once again. He’d ended up settling permanently in New York and was renting an apartment in the East Village, he told me. And hadn’t I heard? May and Felix had gone out to L. A. about a year ago and were living together over there, trying to break into movies.

I told Reggie my idea about the end of the world, about expansion and cooling and increasingly entropic conditions resulting in a state of perpetual California—I’m paraphrasing.

“Yeah, L. A. sucks,” he replied, before craning his neck to see inside the costume shop window. “So what are you going to be for Halloween?”

“Oh, I have my costume already squared away. I’m just here to buy a mustache for Martin’s costume. Martin’s my boyfriend,” I explained.