Iris Has Free Time (15 page)

“No one’s ever written a story about me before,” he said. “What’s it about?”

“I’m not sure. That’s all I have so far.” I looked at the lines for a while, added a comma, then deleted a comma, and then saved the document and filed it away in a folder with five or six other stories I’d started and abandoned. “I’m going to call it, “The Bored and Feckless,” I said. “It’s an homage to Fitzgerald’s
The Beautiful and Damned
.”

He shrugged, “I don’t know it,” and I continued thinking carefully about my story while setting up the backgammon board.

We played a few rounds and then went to the liquor store to buy a new jug of wine, this really cheap Chablis, which tastes pretty horrible but is not so bad if you drink it with a lot of ice. Then we started playing backgammon again and before we knew it, it was dark and time to go out. I tried on a few different outfits and asked him what he thought of each.

He played with his cigarettes, shrugged and said, “I don’t know.”

Then we went to Lex’s ’80s party because it was Thursday again, which was weird because it was Thursday only the night before.

You ever notice how most of your childhood memories seem all to have occurred at around the same time? Like in every story you tell about your childhood, when asked to recall how old you were, you find you were almost always ten years old? I feel that way about my twenties, like for the whole of it so far, it’s almost always been Thursday night.

When we got back to my place at the end of
that
Thursday, I offered to give The Captain a haircut. He’d been saying earlier that he needed one, and so I said that I ought to be the one to do it. At first he wouldn’t let me—“Absolutely not!” he said. But eventually—it took a half hour to convince him I knew what I was doing even though I didn’t—I wore him down.

I was straddling him on the couch, clipping at one side just above his ear with a pair of large kitchen shears, when I started laughing and he made me stop.

“Alright, that’s enough.”

“I’m laughing because it looks so good!” I said, laying the clippings carefully on the bookcase next to us.

Then the Captain said he was hungry, so I hopped off and went to the kitchen and made him a snack that he refused to eat.

“Grilled Cheese with light bulb,” I said, setting the plate down on my coffee table.

Then we decided to practice our kissing awhile. We wouldn’t really be kissing, I explained. We would be “kissing in quotes. Like when actors have love scenes in movies,” I said. “It doesn’t count as second base when they go to second base on film, because they’re just acting,” I told him authoritatively. I wanted to experiment with some new techniques, I said, like I’d been doing lately with my cooking.

So we started practicing. I had names for all my kisses. “The windmill!” I’d say, introducing each. And then he’d rate them. “The tractor!” “The warped mirror!” “This one’s called ‘the discarded pizza topping.’ You’ll see why!”

 

“Captain?” I said, looking at him over our second round of after-dinner martinis.

“Yes, Iris,” he said lethargically, pale as ever.

I didn’t actually have anything to say. I was just having one of those bottle-neck moments when you feel a lot or think a lot and want to express a lot, but don’t know what any of that lot is, so you just say whatever pops into your head first. “Do you know any good jokes?”

“No,” he said. “Do you?”

I shook my head.

He looked at me and blinked. I wanted to ask him what he was thinking but you can’t ask that and expect a real answer, so I just stared at him for a moment and twirled my hair and wondered.

“Have you ever counted your freckles?” I asked.

“Should I?” he said, blushing, his freckles blending together across the bridge of his nose.

“I would think that’s something one might want to know about oneself, Captain.” Then, all of a sudden, I felt exhausted, one of the few times. “Captain?” I began.

“Yes, Iris.”

“I’m so bored of myself.” I looked down and held my breath, hoping to shape it into something meaningful before letting it go again. “Do you ever feel that way?”

“Yes.”

“Are you starting to hate me?” I asked, feeling so sick of myself, feeling even more sick of myself for having asked him that, feeling sure that he must be sick of me too, of my trying to be cute all the time, of my never stopping. But how can you get away from yourself is the thing? How not to keep getting worse?

“No,” he said. “I like you.”

I cringed. I wanted to sink into the ground. He had to be lying, or else he wasn’t lying, and then what? He was just wrong and he’d eventually figure that out, maybe any second now.

“And you’re going to be rich,” he added. “Once we get your eBay store going, you’ll be able to support me.” He paused. “Iris?” he said, imitating the way I bat my eyelashes, giving more energy to his impression of me than to what he gave to being himself.

“Yes, Captain,” I said, lethargically.

“Do you want me to hate you?”

I looked up from the table of martinis and found his eyes right on mine, looking at me, I swear, as if I were the open sea.

I changed the subject by thanking him again for all the help with the photos. He said he would work on them overnight and give them back to me all spruced up, sans bruises, in the next few days. And then he’d help me create a store on eBay and maybe a website to go with it.

We tried to think if we knew anyone with a nicer ass than mine to model the underwear, before concocting a scheme to put an ad for models on Craigslist.

“Those pictures we took in the underwear won’t do. It doesn’t look right around the ankles either,” I said. “I guess I’m getting older. My behind used to be much different, you know. Anyway, you should see my feet.”

“I have,” he said. “They’re amazing—”

“They’re amazing,” I said.

I picked up my backgammon board to put it on the floor, and all the pieces inside made a loud crashing noise. “When I dance,” I said, “I make that same noise. I’m like a maraca.” I raised my eyebrows.

The table was covered with a paper tablecloth, and I used one of the crayons the restaurant put out to begin composing a want ad for models.

“Are you ready to enter the glamorous world of high-fashion modeling?” I read aloud, as I wrote.

The Captain crossed my words out with his crayon and added some new words, which I crossed out, too, before adding some others, until we had a whole mess of scribbled lines surrounding the few on which we finally agreed: “Model wanted. No pay.”

“Do you think it will work?” I said, leaning on my hand and looking up into his eyes. I began twirling my hair like I always do when I’m trying to work something out in my head, but then let it go in order to twirl his. I was trying to twirl the uneven section I’d cut above his ear last Thursday, but the hair wasn’t long enough, so I just made circles with my finger beside his temple as if he were crazy.

The Captain didn’t answer but had that faraway look again, as if he were calculating weather conditions up ahead. Then, catching sight of something in the distance, he signaled to the waiter for another round.

How far away the stars seem, and how far
Is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “EPHEMERA”

THE CAROUSEL IN Bryant Park will soon stop spinning.

A poster at Lincoln Center says
La Traviata
is coming in November. Outside the Met, flags have been unfurled to announce two new exhibits: Kirchner’s Berlin Street Scenes, Van Gogh’s “Night.” Things to do in cooler temperatures.

It’s Sunday. Sheep Meadow is locked, and your wiffle bat has begun its seasonal drift toward the back of your closet. Instead of going out, you prepare hot drinks at home. Amid the sprawl of the
Times
and scattered sesame seeds from the morning’s bagels, you practice laziness, your pet art. The window is open and drifts of sweet cold float in, inspiring your girlfriend to borrow your extra-large sweater. She wears it rolled at the sleeves, then sits Indian style on the hardwood floor and puzzles over 3-Down. You look over her shoulder and offer a guess: “Possibly.”

Go outside. A student film crew is set up in one corner of Washington Square Park. Three NYU sophomores are about to capture in 16 mm that ineffable feeling that is autumn in New York. If only they could stop arguing about that next shot. A young man with scanty sideburns fiddles with his camera while bickering with a purple-haired girl over where to hold the light reflector. A policeman settles everything when he asks them to produce a permit before forcing them to disband.

Later on, you bicycle across town on Tenth Street, a chilly breeze pushes your hair from your face, nibbles your earlobes, and teases you with winter. Will you stop home to retrieve another sweater before you meet your friends for billiards, for bowling, for basketball at the Hudson River courts? The wind swells and the leaves say, “Yes!”

Underground, at the Union Square subway station, notice the stylish couple causing a scene across the platform. She’s crying and he’s yelling, and they’ve nearly got it right, are almost ready to return to their acting class at the Lee Strasberg Institute a few blocks over where fall session has just gotten under way. The pretty girl wipes her tears, fixes her makeup, looks in a compact mirror, and ad-libs distress. You catch her eye, and she smiles back slyly. You don’t know it yet, but soon she will be famous.

In a park of concrete and metal on Fifty-seventh and Ninth, a young woman is on her lunch break. She’s shivering in open-toe shoes and a thin sleeveless blouse, and when the wind rises, she folds her arms across her chest. She might have put on something warmer this morning, but she is unwilling to relinquish the summer so soon; it’s only October. Beside her, another lady sweats inside a rust-colored sweater paired with tall leather boots, too thrilled by her new wardrobe to delay by one more hour her personal parade of the fall’s newest fashions. Sipping her hot coffee, she dabs the sweat from her brow and happily considers what she’ll wear tomorrow—it’s already October.

Crowds pour into the Angelika movie house on Houston, excited to see the latest shaky-camera take on the discontents of urban intellectuals at family gatherings on Connecticut estates. Someone’s sister is getting married—how bourgeois! Further west is a matinee of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, and at Film Forum or Anthology Film Archives or somewhere else west or east of here, Woody Allen’s
Manhattan
is playing, has just played, or is about to play. Yes, it is autumn in New York. And there are so many wonderful things to do!

But I prefer the other things.

If you’d like to join me, we can film an homage to a New York classic on your camera phone.
Break fast at The Container Store,
starring ME! I’ll buy some vodka, and you’ll hold the phone while I stand in my crumpled evening gown outside the shop window on Sixth Avenue. Be sure to catch the light just so, as I look longingly at the lush display of filing cabinets and accordion folders. Between slugs from my flask, I’ll say wistfully, “The Container Store is where I go when I’m hungover. Nothing very bad could ever happen to you there.” You’ll remark about the store’s impact on Cold War foreign policy, and I’ll point out a handsome bureau inside which we might contain communism.

Next we’ll visit the Sharper Image on Fifty-seventh Street to test-run the massage chairs. A store clerk will begin selling you hard and I will interrupt, eyelashes batting furiously, like butterflies bursting from cocoons, asking that he fetch me the foot massager. “Would you please?” I’ll say, still in Hepburn mode. We’ll stay as long as we want or until my flask runs dry and I start to shake while imagining bats clawing through the walls, like Don Birnam in
Lost Weekend.
I’ll cry out in terror, before you press power on the foot massager, tie my shoelaces for me, and suggest I take deep breaths. And then, grabbing my hand, you’ll whisk me gallantly off to the liquor store, where you’ll buy a fifth of vodka to pour into a cardboard container of orange juice.

You’ll put the straw between my trembling lips.

I’ll squeeze your hand and ask, “Tropicana with calcium?”

“I’d give you all the calcium in the world if I could,” you’ll say. And I’ll explain how too much calcium is actually bad for you. “It says right here on the label that this will suffice for a daily serving.” I’ll kiss you on both cheeks alternating thirty-four times, the way they do in Foreignia, where I spent a semester abroad. You’ll graciously wait for me to turn my eyes before you wipe away the alcoholic sting of my saliva. “Poor jellyfish,” you’ll think, regarding the blue veins that decorate my eyelids, while I look sheepishly at the ground.

Hungry? Let’s visit the Olive Garden upstairs of Times Square for a
tête-à-tête amoureux
featuring their “all you can eat bread sticks and salad,” as advertised on TV. After we’ve exhausted their supply, you’ll excuse yourself to the men’s room and on your way tell our waiter a lie about it being my birthday. It’s a lie because neither of us will ever get old. After he clears the empty basket from the sixth serving of breadsticks, three of which now decorate your jacket in place of a pocket square, he’ll reemerge from the kitchen with our free cake ablaze, and the wait-staff trailing after him singing their approach. With the cake before me and my eyes pressed shut, I’ll pause to draft my wish.

And after a deep breath, I’ll begin to blow, steady and full like the change of seasons, as if I were the autumn wind and the candles were old trees—I’ll wish we were Russian spies and had fancy gadgets like poison umbrellas, or cufflinks that are tiny cameras, or pens filled with disappearing ink with which we might sign our names to great love letters. I’ll wish the day would never end.

You’ll pick up the check. I’ll steal a dessert spoon, lace it through my hair like a flower. And we’ll run out screaming with laughter. We’ll laugh until we cry, and then you’ll brush a tear from my eye and say with sudden gravity, “You have something in your teeth. Right there. No, you still didn’t get it.”