Iris Has Free Time. Iris Smyles

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.”

       2

      “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.

       3

      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