Out of all the factions, I was only interested in the Young Ms. I saw their posting in the local Mensa newsletter (L.A. Mentary) and decided to drop in on their weekly game night at a Hollywood coffeehouse. They were indeed smart and pleasant people. Sadly, they were also — as Douglas Adams would say — aggressively uninteresting.
The only exception was Ira.
If there was ever a Super-Duper High IQ Society that only the top minds from the Super High IQ Society could qualify for, Ira would be one of them. And I’m equally sure that within thirty minutes, the other two members would want to see him mauled by a bear. It’s not that he lacked social skills. He just ignored them. He was an asshole savant, with the mind of da Vinci and the temperament of da Vinci after spending six hours in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Worse, his foul disposition had a way of sneaking up on people, masked as it was by a deceptively jovial appearance. He was a large, shaggy-haired man, a cross between Jeff Daniels from Dumb & Dumber and comedy writer Bruce Vilanch. Simply put, he looked like a fun guy to be around. He did indeed have a robust sense of humor, but it usually left people in the wrong kind of tears. His tongue was a chainsaw. He was the evil clown.
Classic example: Ira at the pharmacy. Late one evening he picked up his prescription allergy medication, signed for it, and then paid by credit card. The cute young clerk was supposed to check his billing signature against the handwriting on the back of his card. Instead, she checked it against the name he’d just scribbled on the pharmacy slip. Most of us would smirk at the innocent mistake and assume she was simply at the end of a long and tiresome day. Not Ira. He glared at her like she’d just taken a dump on his shoe.
“I can’t believe you just…do you even realize what you did? You took a signature I made five seconds ago and compared it to a signature I made ten seconds ago. What in God’s name were you hoping to verify? That I’m the same person who signed both receipts? I am. I haven’t left your field of vision. Or maybe you’re concerned that, in the five seconds between signatures, I was possessed by some demonic entity that was out to defraud both MasterCard and Walgreens. In any case, I really have to wonder if you’re fit to hand out lifesaving remedies. Don’t they screen people here? What’s the qualification standard? As long as you don’t drool on your shirt, you’re in? Jesus. I hope you accidentally gave me Zoloft, because people like you depress the hell out of me.”
By that point, the clerk was sniffling, crying. Her burly manager had caught the tail end of the cutdown and was fixing to pound Ira into chutney. Wisely, he fled.
Poor Ira. Yeah yeah, what about the poor clerk? Look, she was young and pretty. She probably went home and cried to her boyfriend, who held her, stroked her hair, told her she was beautiful, and then screwed her raw. Ira had no such solace.
I can only assume it was a desire for human connection that had brought him to that Young M event in the first place. Still, it took just one game of Pictionary to clear out the room. The Mensans were too polite to tell him to take his art critiques and shove them up his alimentary. They simply found excuses to go home early, no doubt praying for his absence at the next gathering.
Unlike the others, I stayed behind and talked with Ira until 3 a.m. Once he realized he couldn’t push me away, he retracted his quills. The thing about Ira was that he loved people as an entity. He was a chaos mathematician, a brilliant one. By the time he was twenty, he had five published papers. When I met him, he was twenty-seven and widely considered to be the wünderprick of his field.
Soon after graduate school, he began working his way through each of the Big Six (now Big Four) accounting firms as a top-level market analyst. The drill was always the same. He went out of his way to earn the contempt of his bosses and peers, but because his work was so revolutionary, they labored to put up with him. Inevitably, the commoners would unite to gather their torches and run him out of the village. By the time I met him, he had already been chased out of Deloitte & Touche and Arthur Andersen and was repeating the process at Price Waterhouse. He lasted only five months there.
The real tragedy was that he got painfully depressed every time he was banished. After the Price Waterhouse fallout, in which a manager actually throttled him, he visited my apartment for the first time. I was stunned to come home and find him literally crying at my doorstep.
“I feel like I was born without something,” he told me. “Something everyone else has. I just can’t bullshit people. I can’t ask them how their weekend was when I really don’t care. I can’t tell them that I like their outfit when I really don’t notice. And when they do something to screw up a project, my project, I can’t just sit back and say, ‘Hey, good work.’ I wasn’t built that way, and they all hate me for it. When did it become such a handicap to be honest?”
Once he was began his next job at Ernst & Young, he swore to amend his ways. His resolve lasted about a week. But this time his boss came up a clever way to handle him. They insisted he telecommute. This worked out beautifully for Ira. It also led to him discovering his next true love: the Ishtar.
That’s where I went late this morning, right after dropping off Miranda at the Claremont. After the sex, which we had both agreed was terrible, we simply held each other and talked. That made up for everything. If I had known the postcoital communion would be so pleasant, I would have suggested we skip the coitus altogether and spoon. To most men, that probably sounds as lame as drinking nonalcoholic beer at a game of touch football. Untrue. It was that kind of intimacy I had missed more than sex. Her skin was smooth and warm. Her small fingers ran back and forth across my wrist. We spoke in tones so soft that the specters of Gracie and Jim took the hint and left. For all intents and purposes, it was the first time we’d ever truly been alone with each other.
“I think lifelong monogamy may be one of those myths that the human race is slowly catching on to,” she theorized, shortly before dawn. “I mean in these modern times, it’s presumptuous to assume that two people will continue evolving along the same path for the rest of their lives. You know what I’m saying?”
I held her from behind, nodding, enjoying.
“Conservatives keep freaking out about how more and more couples are getting divorced sooner. You know what I say? Good. That means more people are being honest with each other when it’s time to move on. I mean what’s the big deal? With one out of two couples getting divorced, there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Fifty percent of companies fail within the first five years, even in a good economy. The bottom line is that things change. People grow apart. Why deny it? So we can justify all the flatware we got at our wedding? That’s bullshit. Don’t you think?”
After a few seconds of silence, she laughed and checked my wrist for a pulse.
“I’m still here,” I said. “Just listening.”
“Am I even making sense?”
“Yeah. Definitely. Your statistics are off, though.”
“What, about the companies?”
“Well, that too. But I was mostly referring to the divorce rate. Everyone throws that figure around all the time, but it’s just a media myth.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know the folks who started it. They’re an independent research group in Boston. Twelve years ago, they were hired by a Christian organization to get some hard numbers they could use. They said, ‘We don’t care how you get them, just get them.’ So the researchers spent six months raiding the public records of a hundred and fifty counties, tallying the number of approved marriage licenses and divorce papers signed in 1987. They discovered exactly half as many divorces.”