Talking Can Be Treacherous

“I was hit in the head with a bat,” I told Glen on our first date. I’m an excellent conversationalist. “It was an accident when I was five. A neighbor was trying to teach me baseball. I have this small scar under my eye, see?”

“No, I can’t see it.”

“Here, look, it becomes more pronounced if I’ve been crying,” I explained.

“I hope I never see it, in that case,” he said, and surprised me with a charming smile.

That was about a month ago, when Glen and I were still getting to know each other and talking a lot, very carefully avoiding any lull in conversation as if silence were a dangerous moat surrounding the relationship castle.

Martin, my last serious boyfriend, complained in the end that I talked too much. I complained that he didn’t talk enough. He said it was because I didn’t give him a chance to speak. And I replied that I spoke all the time because he wasn’t speaking and someone had to, and anyway, “I make suggestive pauses, which are cues for you to enter the conversation,” I explained. Then I made a suggestive pause, hoping he would say something. He didn’t and shortly after that we broke up.

“I’m testing out my Roomba,” I told Glen an hour after we’d had our first kiss outside my front door. He’d called me as soon as he got home. “I can’t stop thinking about you. Did I wake you? Is it too late to call? What are you doing?” he asked, as soon as I picked up. And then “What’s a Roomba?”

“It’s a robot-vacuum. It vacuums all by itself. My parents gave it to me for Christmas. What are you doing?” I returned.

“Not much, just listening to music. Thinking about you. Wondering what you’re doing. Calling you to find out.”

“It’s really an amazing device,” I said sitting down with the phone, watching the Roomba spin around the room. “I’m going to decorate it with rhinestones. Then I’m going to name it. Do you have any pets?”

“Not since I was a kid. Do you?”

“Not in the traditional sense. I have a Fichus named Epstein and a stuffed animal, a golden Labrador, named Herbert. Also, a stapler with a lot of personality. It’s white and from the side looks like Moby Dick. I feed it staples when it gets hungry. But I haven’t given it a name.”

“I can’t wait to meet them,” Glen said yawning, “I used to have a pencil that looked like Captain Ahab.”

“Really?”

“No. It looked like Serge Gainsbourg.” He paused. “So what kind of music do you like?”

Brilliant people talk about ideas. Average people talk about things. And stupid people talk about other people. That’s the axiom. What kind of people talk about nonsense? Glen and I seemed to have a similar penchant for the inane, which made for very good conversation on our first few dates.

I wasn’t always so easy to talk to. I had to work at it. As a child, for a period of about seven years, I hardly spoke at all. I went to ballet school five days a week and never said a word the whole time I was there. My classmates and teachers all thought I was mute. When they’d ask me questions I’d just nod or make a face, as if I could do no more. Once you’ve gotten in the habit of not talking, it’s very difficult to start. After a year had gone by with my not speaking, how was I to break the ice? What would I have said first?

When you really start to think about it, what is there to say that’s so important anyway? Lots of things would cross my mind, but then why say one thing and not another. In fact, why say anything at all? I would think. Which is maybe why I talk so much as an adult. For fear that if I stop, I might not be able to start again.

If you date a lot you can’t help but develop a talking routine. The same questions come up over and over again, about childhood pets, about your family, your education, and it’s hard not to refine your answers after a while, having responded the same way so many times. “I had a pet peacock when I was twelve. He just came out of the woods one day and stayed. We named him Dan, Dapper Dan,” I told Glen, my new boyfriend on our second date.

“I had a rock,” he answered. “His name was Stony. Tony for short.”

For a while I was worried that something about me was inadvertently silencing men because all my ex-boyfriends had started out talkative and then clamed up after we’d been sleeping together for a while. But now I think they were just never very talkative, that they only talked in the beginning as a means of seduction, and once our relationship was settled there was nothing left to say.

“Martin!” I’d say to my ex two years into our relationship, after one of his long swampy silences. “Martin!” I’d repeat, thinking he hadn’t heard me the first time I’d asked what he thought of the low-pressure system moving into our area from the southeast. He’d scarcely reply, just stare off at the exposed brick of our favorite restaurant. “What are you thinking?” I finally prodded him. He said my question put too much pressure on him and that I had to give him time to think so that he might bring up a topic of his own interest. “OK,” I said sitting back silently, resigned to watching him chew while I waited.

The same way certain anecdotes are offered on first dates, I’ve noticed, others often come up toward the end. My telling of the chicken story, for example, occurs regularly, like some sort of break-up harbinger. “So I picked up the chicken and started waving it. “You see this chicken!” I said, “You see it...’” I'll be relating the situation animatedly before a sense of doom washes over me.

Last year, I told the chicken story to this guy Jason after we’d been seeing each for about a month. He capped my telling of the chicken story with, “I’m tired of the Iris show.”

“Pathetic!” my friend Janice said comforting me afterwards over the phone. “He’s obviously just jealous because his show isn’t as interesting yours!”

“You think so?” I asked, sniffing back my tears. “I feel like my show has been canceled and taken off the air,” I cried.

“It may not be popular, but it’s a favorite with the critics,” she cooed supportively.

Glen calls me all the time just to talk, which I’m not used to. The phone rings and he says, “What’s up?” and then waits for my answer. My first impulse is to say, “Nothing. Nothing’s up,” but then I worry he’ll find me boring, so instead I struggle for something interesting to say. “Well, before you called I was thinking, you can’t undo popular mistakes in language and shouldn’t try,” I’ll say. “For example, there is no going back from ‘irregardless.’ The only way is forward. I’m going to try to popularize the word, ‘dis-irregardless.’ This way the two prefixes will just cancel each other out, bringing us closer to the original, correct ‘regardless.’”

“What’s wrong with ‘irregardless’?” he says.

I’m tired of the conversation already and don’t want to have to explain. So, I lie and say, “I’m in the middle of feeding my stapler. Can I call you back in a few minutes?” Then I text him instead of calling, and type that I am going to take a nap. That I’ll talk to him tomorrow. I type out an emoticon to suggest how my breasts look in profile.

Glen is starting to get on my nerves. It’s what he says when we talk. Like when he wondered aloud about how many bones make up the tongue bone. I told him there are no bones, that the tongue is a muscle, but he kept insisting that he could feel them. I tried to avoid an argument by just changing the subject. I asked him how his day had been, but instead of answering me, he began counting the bones. Finally I lost my patience and hung up on him. A minute later, I called back and apologized. I felt really bad. I told him thirty sounded about right. “Thirty bones, Glen,” I said dejectedly.

I dread our conversations lately. In the interest of preserving our relationship though, I’ve begun avoiding him. I won’t answer the phone when he calls. Or else, I try to call him when I know he will be unavailable or when I am about to get on a train so that I have to end the call quickly. I suggest movie dates over dinner dates so that we won’t have the chance to talk. I ask him take me in loud places, under elevated subway trains or near construction sites. And when, finally, we do get to talking, I mostly ignore him. I pretend I’m listening, and then just think about something else. What shall I name my Roomba? Clothilde? Mr. Fitzimmons? I should send out a Christmas card next year with a photo of me and my Roomba and my plant and my stuffed animal. I could write on the bottom, Happy Holidays from Iris, Epstein, Herbert, and whatever I decide to call the vacuum cleaner. Should I include the stapler? “What are you thinking about?” Glen will ask, interrupting my thoughts.

When Glen came over yesterday, I suggested that we write a script for our conversation, like a game. The idea was that we’d write a dialogue on paper for our date and then act it out, instead of just talking off the cuff like we normally do. A cute way to avoid fighting, I thought. Glen’s an actor and immediately thrilled to the idea. I’d wanted it to be a pre-sex scene dialogue, but Glen’s writing was such a turnoff. We disagreed for a while over the edits, before I finally acquiesced and fed him a line. No, it wasn’t good enough, he said, “Try it again. This time with more feeling!” All actors want to direct.

“I’m so happy to see you,” I repeated, looking up from the script.

“Cut! Cut! Say, it like you mean it!” he said at the edge of the bed.

“I’m so happy to see you, Glen!” I repeated louder, trying a different inflection in a futile attempt to make it believable.

I’m starting to think I might actually hate talking. There is a lot that I could say, I often think when Glen pauses, or when I look at my caller ID and see that it’s Janice calling, or if I’m at a party with a whole room full of people that are chatting enthusiastically. But there’s rarely much that I want to say.

Lately, I find myself often thinking about Dan. Peacocks don’t make very affectionate pets, and Dan was no exception. Dan would perch at the edge of our deck, stately, aloof, and mostly ignore me but for my mom’s leftovers I brought for his supper every day. Growing up, I never had close friends in whom I might confide, but every day for while I would go outside and sit with Dan. The two of us, separated by silence and a distance of at least six feet, would gaze out into the yard, a patch of grass bordered by a long and wide stretch of woods. Eventually, I started to tell him about my day, everything that happened, some things that never happened, what I was thinking about, what I sometimes missed.

And then one day Dan left. I’d had a party for my 12th birthday and all my schoolmates that I’d invited were yelling and carrying on in the backyard. Dan said nothing, he simply turned and walked back into the woods from which he’d emerged three months earlier. I never saw him again after that. For the rest of the summer, I wandered the woods, looking for some trace of him, but found nothing. “Dan!” I’d call, cupping my hands around my mouth. But there was no response. My father said Dan probably left because the loud noises of all the kids had agitated him, and then after that, maybe he just couldn’t find his way back. And now, I find myself thinking about him a lot. While other people talk to me, I think of conversations I used to have with Dan. I think, perhaps I should have listened more. “Iris, what are you thinking about?” Glen asked again last night during dinner. Dan! Dan! Was it something I said? “Nothing, Glen,” I finally answered, “Would you please pass the salt?