Droll Tales Read online

  Copyright © 2022 by Iris Smyles

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be sent to:

  Turtle Point Press, 208 Java Street, Fifth Floor, Brooklyn, New York 11222

  [email protected]

  The following stories were published previously in a different form: “Shelves” in The Baffler, “The Autobiography of Gertrude Stein” in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, “Philip and Penelope in a Variety of Tenses” in Hotel, “A Fortune of Cookies” in The New Yorker, “Aboard the Shehrazad” in The Capricious Critic, and “Exquisite Bachelor” in Splice Today.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Smyles, Iris, author.

  Title: Droll tales / Iris Smyles.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022003490 (print) | LCCN 2022003491 (ebook) | ISBN 9781933527611 (paperback) | ISBN 9781933527680 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Short stories. | Humorous fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.M95 D76 2022 (print) | LCC PS3619.M95 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20220202

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022003490

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022003491

  Cover design by Keenan Design

  Interior design by Misha Beletsky

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-933527-61-1

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-933527-68-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  To Arthur Smyles, my dad

  contents

  Glossary of Terms Not Found in this Book

  Author’s Note

  Medusa’s Garden

  Contemporary Grammar

  The Two Jacobs, with an Introduction by a Third

  My Ex-Boyfriend

  Shelves

  The Autobiography of Gertrude Stein

  Agnes Decides It’s Time

  Philip and Penelope in a Variety of Tenses

  A Fortune of Cookies

  Aboard the Shehrazad

  Exquisite Bachelor

  Veterans of Future Wars

  Ethay Azureway ybay Stéphane Mallarmé

  O Lost

  glossary of terms not found in this book

  Soufflettic: to move like a soufflé.

  Lord Creamy: a local noble.

  Scottsdale, Arizona: a village in Italy.

  Qui: three fifths of silence.

  Vanderpump Rules: a midevil irrigation system.

  Midevil: of or referring to the Meddle Ages.

  Upevil: a violent or sudden change or disruption.

  Frog Dance: a dance performed by frogs in which frogs imitate other frogs in a mocking manner.

  The Meddle Ages: a time in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire and before the Renaissance when everyone was getting involved in other people’s business.

  Wedding Ring: invented by J.R.R. Tolkien in his book The Lord of the Rings, it is one of three rings that make the wearer invisible to everyone but Sauron.

  Three-Cheese Ravioli: a slang term used to mean marriage counseling.

  Frozen Three-Cheese Ravioli: a postponed marriage counseling session when one or the other spouse can’t make it.

  Spoonerism: an ardent belief in spoons.

  Gravelax: a cold dish made from the bodies of exhumed salmon. Also, a diet pill marketed to the terminally ill whose goal is a narrower coffin.

  Upheaval: the northernmost territory of the Kingdom of Evil.

  Gargoyle: a female statue of Christian faith affixed to the side of a building.

  Cotton Balls: the testicles of an elderly king, sometimes harvested and used to remove eye makeup or disinfect cuts.

  Flying Dutchman: a man from the Netherlands arriving by plane (often encountered in an internet chat room).

  Deus Ex Machina: when one’s ex turns up at a party hosted by a mutual friend and one is not surprised but also still surprised.

  Error: a period of time.

  Mistake: a failure to take or a taking of the wrong thing. Also, (slang) a drag queen who behaves selfishly.

  Bette Middler: a precursor to Better Middlers.

  Middler: an early modern tool used for opening soda bottles and stuck windows.

  ’Pataphysics: the science of imaginary solutions. Also, exercise regimen incorporating Pilates, yoga, rope climb, and rabid squirrels: popular in the late aughts.

  Metaphysics: a branch of science in which you sign up for exercise classes and don’t go.

  Apostrophe: any event occurring after a rophe.

  Iota: singular nominative of ota.

  Ota: catch phrase popularized by Buckwheat in TV’s The Little Rascals.

  Myopic: possessive of opic.

  Opic: a motion picture about the life of a rock legend.

  Biopic: two motion pictures about the life of a rock legend, occurring twice monthly or twice weekly.

  Biweekly: to pass without strength an object or person.

  Feud: the substance of breakfast, lunch, or dinner, and sometimes snacks.

  Repast: a do-over.

  Disambiguation: the severing of two or more simultaneous marriage contracts.

  Rage: contraction of re and age, meaning to review the past with anger as a guiding principle.

  Coliseum: (slang) derived from the expression I-call-it-as-I-see-um, uttered frequently by Roman Emperors after sentencing a gladiator to death.

  Fact: (verb) contraction of fake and act meaning to act fakely. (noun) A false statement.

  Matter: someone who is more like Matt than Matt is.

  Sand: the sadness of conjunctions that were supposed to last forever, resulting in beaches.

  Meaning (derivation of mean): the unpleasant sentiment behind what is actually stated. See: The meaning of life. Life has no meaning. You mean everything to me. Why are you being so mean, I thought you loved me.

  For ever (née forever): A consequence of divorce.

  Eaternity: an idea in Greek mythology that the afterlife is a 24-hour diner located on the second floor of the Mid-Manhattan Mall.

  Lemon Merengue: to move like a whipped desert.

  author’s note

  A woman begins to walk home—it’s only a block away—but before she can get there she must get halfway there. And before she can get halfway there, she must get halfway to the half mark (a quarter of the way there). Before walking a quarter of the way there, she must walk halfway to the quarter mark (one-eighth of the way); and before one-eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on, completing half of each resultant half before being able to complete the whole. If each half continues to be divided in half, the halves will become infinitely smaller, and she will get infinitely closer. Thus, traveling an infinite number of finite distances, her journey will take an infinite period of time to be completed. The woman will never arrive.

  medusa’s garden

  1 I grew up in the suburbs. It doesn’t matter which one. And studied ballet. I suppose there was a time before I studied ballet, but I don’t remember that. What I remember is how my mother, father, and two older brothers would come to my recitals and watch me twirl and turn and leap. Ballet slippers, then pointe shoes, and then a male partner to raise me even higher, above him, for a moment suspended, going nowhere.

  “Pull up! Reach!” our ballet master used to say. “I want you to defy gravity,” he’d call out over the music, “to leap, knowing you must come down, but to leap anyway! Refuse fate, my little cursed ones, that is the ballet, to make a great show of your refusal, while being broken on the back
of it.”

  When I was seventeen, I landed wrong and injured my ankle. I recovered but was never the same. You learn to dance through the pain though, and then the pain becomes its own pleasure, the joy and suffering inextricable. Blisters bursting in pink shoes, toes bleeding into each pirouette, beauty like a flower blooming on the heap of your destruction. Every ballerina is a collection of injuries, and we are proud of them. In the dressing room, we’d bandage our feet, showing off to one another our well-earned wounds.

  Albert says that’s what smoking is like. “Why do you smoke?” I asked him once, after I discovered him puffing secretly next to a payphone. I’d never seen him with a cigarette before. Furtive blue curls disappeared into the air above him, as he leaned against the booth in his abstracted way.

  “Because it will ruin me.”

  When I was eighteen, the company didn’t promote me. I auditioned for other companies after that, in San Antonio, in Nebraska, and then all over the world. For a year I traveled, auditioning for all the major and minor ballets. I’d never traveled before and found I liked flying even more than I liked leaping, which could only get you so high.

  After the start of my travels, when my partner was lifting me I felt still too close to the ground and thought dreamily of the stewardesses on the flight over to this or that audition, their effortless altitude, so much higher than I could ever pull up, so much higher than I could ever jump, so much higher than my partner could ever raise me. I thought dreamily of the women staying up there for hours, suspended in the sky, gracefully distributing nuts.

  Eventually I was offered a position in the Milwaukee Ballet chorus, but I turned it down. Over a payphone at the airport I told my parents, my brothers—they’d gathered round the speaker to hear my news—that I’d been rejected. They wouldn’t have understood if I told them the truth, that after all that training, all that traveling, I’d quit. Instead, I let them console me. After I hung up, I walked over to the airport check-in desk where I was due for my flight home and asked for an application.

  Passing the nuts, telling people to lower their tray tables, performing that gentle dance in which I point out the emergency exits and model application of the life jacket and oxygen mask. . . . What did I learn up there in that high artificial air? You always put the oxygen mask on yourself first, even before a small child or lover. What good are you to anyone else if you’re dead goes the logic.

  I did not have a small child or a lover, had never had anyone besides my parents and brothers with whom to concern myself; I’d flown to all my auditions alone. And I began to wonder if there would ever be in my life someone on whom I’d be tempted to put the oxygen mask first. When I think about love I think about that. About doing something unreasonable.

  I never knew what to do with myself after we landed. I’d go for long walks through the cities, munching on the nuts I’d pocketed from the airline. I’d visit museums, monuments, wander park lanes, and photograph the statues frozen in mid-gesture, while all around them the world blurred. A man sitting at the foot of one statue, turning over a map. A couple flirting before another, oblivious to the stone gaze set upon them. Friends playing Frisbee nearby, hitting a statue in the teeth.

  I photographed a granite woman nude to the waist, her dress about to fall, in Plaça de Catalunya. She looked like she was about to swim in the nearby fountain but never would. I photographed a granite man steps away in the same park, walking, blowing a flute. At the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, I photographed Michelangelo’s David. His stone curls, his deep-set brow, his gaze—just to the side—which I read is in the direction of Rome. And then lower, I photographed his penis, restful against his testicles. I wondered then about Goliath’s penis, Goliath’s testicles. There was no respective statue. In Lisbon, I photographed a marble man and two women sitting under a fountain. The water rained over them as they sat perfectly still: him looking at her, whose head was turned in shyness, and the other woman, looking at them both.

  I walked a lot, stopping now and then to take pictures, staring at statues the way you can’t at people, examining their faces and the thoughts they concealed, waiting for them to start—statues are always about to do something—whatever they were about to start. And when I got hungry, I’d stop into some tourist trap and lunch alone.

  I was walking down Las Ramblas on a layover in Barcelona one spring, going nowhere, which is my favorite place to go, and after a time, the restaurants that line the boulevard dwindled so that eventually it was just the open boulevard, a broad stone path crowded with tourists, shaded by tall leafy trees, flanked here and there by a statue, now one next to me, that blinked.

  A small crowd was gathered round a giant American penny with a copper man stuck still in its center. There was a hat a little ways in front of him and when a child approached and dropped in two euros, the statue blinked, came alive, and said to the crowd, “Heads or tails?”

  The child, startled, answered, “Tails.” And at this, the penny began to turn, flipping through the air a few times, before landing with the head of the coin facing us. The audience applauded and the copper man said, “Two out of three?”

  Someone else threw a coin into the hat. “Heads!” a woman yelled. And the penny spun again. More applause.

  I watched a while as the crowd grew and thinned and replaced itself with new onlookers. Mostly he remained still until activated by someone’s loose change. There must be some kind of rod through the middle of the coin, I figured, around which he rotated. Some of the living statues use rods, Albert told me later. There is a levitating guru in Piccadilly for example, with a rod hidden in his sleeve. He sits Indian style, three or four feet off the ground, holding a staff.

  Las Ramblas has lots of these performers, so too London’s Covent Garden, Florence, or any city where tourists converge. A green Statue of Liberty, a bronze Abraham Lincoln, Michelangelo’s David (his penis censored by loincloth), Nikia with wings, Garibaldi drawing his sword, a pewter no-name chimney sweep . . .

  Not all of the living statues are modeled on famous figures. Many, like the chimney sweep, are anonymous. Though the famous are often anonymous too. In public parks the world over, forgotten generals and poets loiter in perpetuity. And while there are many Lincolns and Napoleons standing still on Barcelona’s Las Ramblas, there are just as many “types.” A no-name bronze cowboy, for example. Is he a cowboy that no one remembers, or a people that everyone does?

  One no-name looks like he’s falling but never hits the ground. He’s suspended horizontally, a look of surprise stuck on his face. It’s done with some rods in his pants, Albert says, so that he’s suspended there, forever falling, the better to evoke a sense of the present, what happens between the things we remember happened: beginning to fall—having fallen.

  Most of the falling men wear top hats. Most of the no-names wear antiquated clothes to visually set themselves apart from the onlookers that pass. To set themselves apart from the present, which they’re imitating, they set their present in the past. If they wore baseball caps and jeans, I mean, if they looked like everyone else, no one would notice them paused in a moment, no less leave a tip.

  I sat down at a nearby café and watched the Living Penny over a Diet Coke. More couples and groups of friends and families approached him with questions. “The Sagrada Família next, or shopping in the Gothic Quarter?” a woman’s voice asked at a table near my own. “Let’s flip for it,” her companion answered cheerfully, before they paid their bill and walked over.

  At the end of the day I walked over, too, and threw my own coin into the now full hat. The statue blinked his unblinking eyes before turning them toward me. “Heads or tails?” the copper penny asked. I thought for a moment about everything I’d been thinking about. “Heads,” I said at last. And then the penny spun and spun and spun, until it landed facing me. And like that, it was decided.

  2 Once, I was Bernini’s Medusa.

  In most depictions, Medusa is rendered vanquished, a head severed
by Perseus. He holds her by her limp snakes and her jaw is slack. A glance at Medusa would turn you to stone it was said, so when Perseus sought her head he approached her using his shield as mirror, the way hairdressers ask you to hold one at the end of a cut, so you can see how they trimmed the back. “How’s that?” the hairdresser asks, showing you your limp snakes resting against your shoulders. Ironically or not ironically, Bernini sculpted his Medusa from stone. I have long curly hair and when I was little, waking up early for ballet practice, my father would say, “Brush your snakes!” before I’d collect them into a tight bun.

  For my Medusa, I set up an oblong box as a pedestal and around my neck layered silver necklaces, painting the whole pedestal silver too. And then above that, my snakes curled wild, mid slither, stuck still framing my stone face. Bernini’s is my favorite Medusa because of her eyebrows, because of her gaze cast just left, like she’s not looking at anyone but thinking of someone, looking at him in her imagination. She looks lonely and pained, not because she’s dead, for that would mean the end of pain, but because her face is frozen as it was before she died, as it was in life. It must be awful to have everyone turning from you, or else if they do return your glance, to have yours met only with stony expressions.

  I figured Medusa wouldn’t be that difficult to pull off since I could conceal most of my body in the pedestal and so had only to worry about the composition of my face, my not blinking. Within the first hour a few people stopped and put coins in my hat. I don’t know if it was a compliment or a criticism that they all felt so comfortable staring at me, not worried at all that they might become stones themselves. Was Medusa’s house filled with statuary, I wondered then? Standing still for so many hours, your mind goes to all sorts of places.

  Was it Medusa who invented the sculpture garden? Her yard must have been full of men who’d noticed her first in their periphery, who’d turned, about to say something, but then froze before they could utter a word. Like the way Dante froze when, overcome with nerves, he saw Beatrice in the street. Like the way poets describe love at first sight. Did Medusa love any of them back, I wonder? Was there one statue in her garden over whom she wept?