Dating Tips for the Unemployed Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Preface

  BOOK I

  Socratic Dialogues

  BOOKS II–XVI

  Dating Tips for the Unemployed and Unsuccessful

  Literature, Sex, Monopoly, Gin

  Monsters

  Enter the Wu-Tang

  Adventures with My Parents

  The Moon and the Stars

  Dispatches from My Apartment

  Hey, Houdini

  Dengue Fever

  The Great Lawn

  Philip Has a Small Penis Blog.com

  Philadelphia

  Phatso

  The Family Politic

  MENU

  BOOKS XVII–XXIV

  Talking

  The Friend Registry

  Lions and Wolves

  Donner, Party of Two

  My Real Estate Agent’s Beard

  Taxonomy of Exes

  Brillig

  Large Hadron Collider

  Acknowledgments

  Advertisement Credits

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2016 by Iris Smyles

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Smyles, Iris, author.

  Title: Dating tips for the unemployed / Iris Smyles.

  Description: Boston : Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016009605 (print) | LCCN 2016015866 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544703384 (softcover) | ISBN 9780544703681 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Smyles, Iris—Fiction. | Young women—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. | Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. | Self-realization in women—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Humorous. | FICTION / General. | GSAFD: Autobiographical fiction. | Humorous fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.M95 D38 2016 (print) | LCC PS3619.M95 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016009605

  v1.0616

  Cover design by Christopher Moisan

  Author photograph © Chris Stein Photography

  The following chapters were published previously in a different form: “Socratic Dialogues,” “Dating Tips for the Unemployed and Unsuccessful,” “Literature, Sex, Monopoly, Gin,” “Monsters,” “Adventures with My Parents,” “Dispatches from My Apartment,” “Dengue Fever,” “Phatso,” “The Family Politic,” and “Talking” in Splice Today; “The Great Lawn” in BOMB; “MENU” in Guernica; “The Friend Registry” in the New York Times; and “Large Hadron Collider” in the Atlantic.

  “Book 1: Athena Inspires the Prince,” from The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles, translation copyright © 1996 by Robert Fagles. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Excerpt from You Can’t Go Home Again, copyright © 1940 by Thomas Wolfe. Copyright renewed 1968 by Paul Gitlin, C.T.A., Administrator of the Estate of Thomas Wolfe. Reprinted with permission of McIntosh & Otis, Inc.

  THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. ALTHOUGH PORTIONS OF THIS NOVEL ARE INSPIRED BY REAL EVENTS, THE CHARACTERS ARE FICTITIOUS, COMPOSITES DRAWN FROM SEVERAL INDIVIDUALS AND FROM IMAGINATION. THE ADVERTISEMENTS IN THIS NOVEL ARE ALSO FICTITIOUS.

  To Russ Smith,

  for giving me my start

  +

  To Irene Skolnick,

  for helping me find my way

  Caveat Lector

  Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns

  driven time and again off course . . .

  Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of Zeus,

  start from where you will—sing for our time too.

  —HOMER, The Odyssey

  Dear Kermit,

  Wocka, Wocka, Wocka!

  But seriously . . .

  —FOZZIE BEAR, The Muppets Take Manhattan

  Originally a medical term, “nostalgia” was coined by the German scholar Johannes Hofer in a 1668 paper to describe a severe homesickness in soldiers, whose terrible longing in combination with battle wounds sometimes proved fatal. The word is a compound of the Greek words “nostos,” meaning homecoming (used by Homer to describe Odysseus’s return in The Odyssey), and “algos,” meaning pain.

  On the assumption that home is a place left behind, nostalgia is commonly understood as a yearning for the past. But for many a young person seeking their place in the world, home is an idea with stronger ties to the future, embodied by a person or place not yet seen, making nostalgia an equally apt diagnosis for the strange ache that often defines early adulthood.

  In his twenty-four books of The Odyssey, Homer relates the story of Odysseus, literature’s earliest nostalgic, on his long journey home. Spanning ten glorious, miserable, lusty, drunken, mistake-filled years in its hero’s life, The Odyssey is a catalog of ill-fated romances, parties, daydreams, grief, feats of daring, and experiences that very often lead to nothing but the next one. It’s a lot like those first, lost, adventuring years when you’re just starting out in the world.

  Older and much changed by his experience, Odysseus does eventually make it home. And though The Odyssey ends before he has a chance to look back, it would be a mistake to assume that he regretted any of it, that, recounting his tale in quieter times, Odysseus would wish he’d arrived any earlier. “The sea was tough,” I imagine him telling his son, “but strangely, sometimes, I miss its cold.”

  Homer, the great poet of nostalgia, began his odyssey in the middle. I begin mine likewise.

  BOOK I

  It takes a lot of nerve to have nothing at your age.

  —ELAINE MAY, Ishtar

  Socratic Dialogues

  ON THE AIRPLANE, I sat next to a sixty-two-year-old Greek American woman named Kiki who got married at thirty-seven. She told me so within five minutes of my sitting down, before adding that it’s not too late for me either. By the time I got up ten hours later, I knew all there was to know about the struggles of Kiki’s son in AP Physics, his engineering degree from Cooper Union, the car accident four years ago that rendered Kiki unable to wear stilettos, how Kiki met her husband at church, how he scuba dives like her, about her father’s shipping company where she worked before marrying, and recent renovations Kiki oversaw to her house in Astoria. I told her my name when she asked upon landing. I said, “It was nice talking to you, too.”

  The drive from Athens airport to the bus station took an hour. I took a taxi and the young driver helped me with my bags. Tired from the last ten hours of talking, I pretended I couldn’t speak Greek, hoping this would exempt me from polite conversation. “Is okay. I speak English very good.” He told me the islands were very nice, have I been? That if I wasn’t married, I shouldn’t worry; this summer, here in Greece, I might meet the love of my life. “You are a kind girl, I can tell,” he said. “My business is peoples; I know.” After being riddled as to why Greece is better than America—“I love the quiet,” I answered—we arrived at the station, where he proceeded to overcharge me ten euro. And because I didn’t want to talk anymore, I gave it to him.

  My parents picked me up five hours later from a connecting bus station in Volos. Eager to make conversation, they said, “How was your trip?” I told them about the bathroom attendant at the bus stop, a little old lady with a tip jar on a folding chair outside the door, dispe
nsing wads of single-ply toilet paper from a lone roll. “No cologne.” I told them about the porcelain footprints inside the stall, the elegant hole in the ground over which I squatted. “It got me thinking; I should have my toilet removed back home. Go minimal, modern, make a statement.”

  “How long will you stay?” some friends of my parents asked over the roar of the boat’s engine the next day. A small party of us was motoring to the island of Skopelos.

  “I’m here for the month of August,” I yelled back.

  Tired from my trip, I was at first excited by the roar of the engine, anticipating a few hours’ lull in conversation.

  “She doesn’t talk much, your daughter!” our host yelled to my father.

  “What?”

  “She doesn’t talk much, your daughter?”

  “What?” my dad yelled back.

  Then they put the radio on, turning the volume high enough for it to be heard over the engine. Then they raised their voices so they could be heard over the radio. They talked about the view, about the sea and the sky. “It’s so relaxing,” they yelled in agreement.

  Back at the house, every room is filled with guests—aunts and uncles and cousins and friends. In the afternoon, after lunch, I slip off to my room for a nap. Drowsy from the midday heat, I shut my eyes and listen. Eventually the voices fall away. I dream of a long conversation, but when I wake, remember none of what was said.

  In the early evening, I step onto the front patio and find Dimitra, my cousin’s four-year-old daughter, dancing before an audience of our family. They clap and laugh as she wiggles from side to side. They call her “i micrí,” which means “the little one.” It’s what they used to call me. My mother stops clapping and says she doesn’t like my dress. “What’s wrong with it?” I ask, looking down.

  “It looks old.”

  With Dimitra, conversation is easy. When she stops dancing, she sits next to me and I ask, “What color is the sky?” She says, “Blue.” I ask, “What does the rooster say?” “Koo-koorikoo,” she sings. “And the dog?” “Ghav, ghav,” because Greek dogs bark in Greek. Then she, Mamoù (her stuffed monkey), and I sit for coffee. Mamoù drinks too much too fast and becomes sick. I tell him I understand; sometimes I drink too much coffee, too. The micrí reprimands him, and I jump to his defense. I say, “Give the monkey a break, i micrí! He’s had a long day.”

  In the kitchen my aunt flips on the radio, and the voices of a Greek talk show waft out. Dimitra jumps up and begins dancing to an argument about the Greek economy—Dimitra can dance to anything. Eager for some silence, I head down to the beach and stare out to sea. The wind is loud. The trees, too. The leaves rustle furiously as if urgently relating an opinion; everyone’s got something to say.

  I take my bike into town after and am stopped by a flock of sheep occupying the narrow path that leads to the village. I stand and wait for them to pass.

  When they see me, all the sheep behh; they disapprove of my outfit—I should have worn the green dress. “Sometimes, Iris, it’s like you don’t even want to get married,” the sheep say. Then the sheepdog emerges from the crowd, a big shot barking orders.

  An old mustachioed shepherd watches silently in the distance. Single? Eventually they pass and the road is clear again. The sheep clink off with their ears marked for slaughter.

  “You don’t have forever,” the last sheep tells me, before he turns away.

  I shrug. “Neither do you. You’re gonna die, you know,” I say. “And your jacket’s old-fashioned.”

  I spin through the olive groves and the wind fills my hair. How old am I?

  I pull my bike across the gravel path an hour later and find my parents on the porch with their feet up. I join them. Dimitra sits beside me and asks why my feet are so large.

  “To match my nose.”

  My mother complains that I’m antisocial, that I should make more of an effort to see my friends in town, to talk with them, or else “they might stop talking to you, too. You don’t want to become a hermit,” she warns. She says, “Why don’t you go out tonight?” the same way she used to say, “Must you go out every night?”

  The road to and from our house is less a road than a narrow dirt trail cut out from some trees, which leads to a clearing by the beach where our house rests. The “road” passes olive groves, orchards of plum, pear, and quince, and farms with chickens and roosters and their guards—more asshole dogs. After an evening at a café in town talking with friends, the sky is black and littered with stars like empty soda cans and the embers of discarded cigarettes.

  I drive back in a gold 1982 diesel Mercedes we call “the Tank,” which my parents shipped here ten years ago. It is the car with which I learned to drive, the car I took to and from high school in Long Island, the car in which I had sex with my first serious boyfriend. The Tank rolls slowly through the trees, pushing rogue branches out of the way with its nose. A few horses grazing near the “road” see headlights and approach. They, too, want to talk.

  I roll down the window. The one that looks like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman sticks her head in. She thinks I’m lonely. She asks, “You lookin’ for a good time?” She wants to be taken up to my penthouse. “I don’t have a penthouse,” I tell her. She wants to be saved. “I don’t have a penthouse, and even if I did, what do I want with some hooker horse?” I honk a few times to usher her out of the way, but she’s stubborn and thinks I’m honking compliments. I nudge my way past and see her in the rearview mirror, watching me leave. She’d look better with less makeup. Someone should tell her.

  My dad likes to listen to opera in the morning, but my mom never lets him because she thinks Turandot sounds like yelling, which makes her jealous; she prefers to be the one raising her voice. It’s not that she’s angry, but that everyone in my family alternates between two volumes—yell and scream. I’m the black sheep because I alternate between whimper and cry. As a result, no one understands me. They yell, “What?” I whimper, “I didn’t say anything.” They scream, “What?” I sniffle, “May I have an aspirin?” “Turn down that racket!” my mom yells at my dad, losing her patience with “Nessun Dorma.”

  Yesterday my dad insisted on hearing his songs and so, together, mischievously, we barred the door to the front terrace where normally my mother and aunt sit together to peel vegetables and gossip about the people they know—those who are not married and not getting any younger, those who are getting fat, those who’ve failed again to earn college degrees, and those who they suspect might be gossiping about them, too.

  My dad’s not antisocial like me, but every now and then he requires some peace and quiet. He achieves this by turning the volume up high, so high that the sound of his stereo drowns out all others. Like that, all dogs, all insects, all birds, all sea, and all wind, any and all conversations are swallowed by the rush of music.

  Yesterday my dad turned the volume up on Tosca, and we sat side by side with our feet up, looking out to sea. For a few minutes, we said nothing.

  The lonely voice of the jilted Maria Callas (divorced and then ditched—“a kind girl, such a shame”) whirled around us, drowning out the voices of the rest of the family, who, relegated to the back terrace, continued their conversations in convivial screams. From their Greek staccato and sotto voce sighs, I could almost make out their measure, their firm agreement, this time about me: now that I’ve completed my second master’s degree, what I really ought to do is find a man and get married. And quickly, too, before I gain any more weight, before I get too old, before people start to talk.

  BOOKS II–XVI

  If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.

  —QUENTIN CRISP, The Naked Civil Servant

  Dating Tips for the Unemployed and Unsuccessful

  YOU ARE UNEMPLOYED, at best very unsuccessful. Yet you go to parties. Parties where you meet people who ask, “So what do you do?”

  You live with your parents. You share a one-bedroom with three roommates. You consider ramen a food gro
up. You update your Facebook profile daily.

  Your job has no title. You work within a department. You’re an unpaid intern. You’re assistant to the intern.

  You stop people on the street and ask them if they like comedy, then push ticket packages to the “best comedy club in New York!” You stop them and say, “Excuse me, may I ask you a question about your hair?” You hand out free soap samples; nobody wants your soap samples.

  You don’t read the newspaper; it’s expensive and the news is never good. Instead, you pick up the free alternative weekly. You skip straight to the comics and read without laughing. You could do better, you think. That is, if you drew. You blame your parents for not recognizing and encouraging your artistic potential early on. You remember when you were ten, you’d sketched some pretty realistic-looking horses. You skip to your horoscope: “Inside you is an untapped power source, Pisces. Tomorrow, Libra, a great opportunity will present itself. Be prepared, Gemini, the rest of your life is about to begin. Leo, stop living in the past, the future is right in front of you!” You throw the paper away before you get home and forgive your parents for not buying you pastels—they did their best.

  You call your mom, and she asks you about the weather. You lie and say it’s colder than it is. You want to say something interesting. “We’ve a wintry mix today, Mom.” When she says, “You sound depressed,” you say you got a flu shot yesterday, just as she instructed, that it might have infected you. You feel so tired all the time lately. “Wear a hat,” she says.