by Iris Smyles
The lights had already gone down and I searched in the dark for the perfect middle seat. The room was large and cool, empty but for one person off to the side and near the back. I eased into the chair as if into a very still lake.
Going to the movies alone is one of my very favorite things to do. Where else in New York City can one enjoy so much space? Most apartments are tiny and cluttered, and on the street you’re always brushing by people. In shops there are crowds. Even at the library, someone inevitably answers a cell phone just next to you, or a homeless man decides to talk to himself at your reading table. At the gym girls stretch in pairs, talking about their jobs and their boyfriends and their words—“like like like”—whiz past you like machine gun fire. But if you go to the movies alone at the right time, for two hours—two whole hours—this huge dark room is yours.
I like to lose myself at the movies, to be completely swept up into the dream. If I’m with someone, though, this won’t happen. If I’m with someone, I’ll start to wonder what he thinks of the movie, if he is having a good time. Or else I’ll worry that he might talk at the wrong moment and break the mood, which breaks the mood. Movies are just not conducive to sharing. That’s what I’ve always thought anyway, though recently I’ve started to wonder if this kind of thinking isn’t symptomatic of a larger problem.
When my ex-boyfriend Philip visited me in Greece two years ago, for example, he commented regularly on the beauty of the sunsets. We’d be sitting on the beach, side by side, and he’d be looking out to sea and I’d be looking at him. I was glad the sunset was beautiful, for his sake, but I couldn’t pay any attention to it myself, not while he was there. It was one or the other. Philip or the sunset. By the end of his visit, I was actually eager for him to leave so I could finally enjoy the sunset, too.
I’m not sure why I couldn’t do what he did, what others seem to do with relative ease—to have my own thoughts alongside someone else’s. Instead, when I’m with a guy, everything but him goes right out of my head. We’ll walk somewhere and I’ll have no idea how we got there. The sun will go down and I’ll have no idea evening has begun. The whole sky, every star, every tree, every street, every room will fall away and I’ll see nothing but him, his face filling the world, a world from which I too have disappeared. One minute I’m there and then suddenly—eclipse. I end most of my relationships for this reason. Because after a while I become tired of living a life so reduced. But I’m the one that did it. No one blindfolded me or said I couldn’t look at the sunset, too.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, worrying that I can’t share things, like views or spaces or movies. Say I get married, will the whole world fall away forever? Will I fall away with it? Which brings me to what I like most about Glen, which is that I don’t actually like him very much. This makes it much easier for me to stand apart, for me to know where he ends and I begin.
The coming attractions started. More romantic comedies, more fabulous clothes, more scenes of female coworkers gathered around the watercooler to talk about love, more plots featuring hapless men who turn out to be the one, while the ones originally thought to be the one turn out to be hapless despite their great abs. I thought about Glen and wondered if the thirty-sixth or thirty-seventh one could still be the one. I thought about the phrase “the one” and wondered if it could be short for something. “The one that got away.” “The one I eventually settled for.” “The one that irritated me the least. . . .”
My parents took me to the movies every weekend when I was a kid. Mostly we saw grown-up films that I couldn’t follow or didn’t want to follow. Two hours to a child is like a summer to an adult; you might even be taller when you leave the theater. Bored, I’d turn in my chair to watch the light stream out from the projector, watching it spray out from a tiny point in the back. Staring into it, I imagined I was looking back in time, to the origin of all things, certainly the origin of all things on screen anyway. I’d watch the dust dancing above the audience in a long light beam expanding toward the screen. And I’d watch the faces of the other moviegoers behind me, wondering what they were watching, wondering what so engrossed them, wondering what they felt. Everyone was under the same spell. Everyone but me.
I felt fantastically alone then. Like the time traveler in movies who can stop time for everyone but himself, who can walk through a room where a party is being thrown and see the confetti stuck, suspended in midair, and see sound as if it were a physical, measurable thing—the laughter of party guests dangling half in and half out of their mouths—see someone just about to tap someone else on the shoulder, see potential, just before it is activated. The privileged time traveler who is able to appreciate the moment more keenly for his being outside of it, but who also, paradoxically, lives in exile as a result. As a kid, staring the wrong way in the movie theater, at the projector and at the faces of the audience lit up by the screen, I felt like that—an exile—like I was looking back in time while everyone else was looking forward, watching the moments pass and everyone around me pass with them. Everyone’s eyes were on the sunset, while I watched them watch.
The opening credits began and the lights dimmed further until the room was completely black. I was not expecting Marley and Me to be extraordinary. I was expecting it to be well-produced and easy to watch, with a few round laughs along the way. Because my expectations were so reasonable, it was unlikely that I would be disappointed, which is what I like most about big Hollywood movies and Glen.
Marley and Me was as delightful as I’d hoped. It’s about a columnist—like me!—who writes about his life; his wife, their dog Marley, their three kids and how their lives change. And, yes, as Glen said, the dog eventually dies. It was a very sweet story, and during many parts I cried.
But I cry easily at the movies, so that’s no way to rate the quality of a picture. I cry somewhat reliably, for example, during any scene involving flight; perhaps I was a low-flying bird in my past life. In my dreams, flying is my primary mode of transportation. It’s not a big deal when I fly, but just how I get around. For a few years after college, while I was teaching middle school and dating Martin, I stopped flying in my dreams all together which scared me; I was afraid something inside me had died. After I broke up with Martin and went back to school full time, I started flying again little by little, but then I started drinking a lot and stopped remembering my dreams, so I don’t know now whether or not I’m still flying.
Marley and Me had no flying in it, but it still moved me. Perhaps because Marley looks so much like my stuffed animal, Herbert, which made me think again about getting a dog and naming him George Foreman after my grill. I’ve never had a dog, only Dan, the peacock I had as a kid, and when I was very young, a guinea pig named Spud. Also, this one time I bonded with a box turtle that wandered into our backyard in Long Island. I had to let him go though.
They were free beings, my father told me, and “if you love something, you must set it free.” He was paraphrasing a line from my favorite Smurfs episode. “If you smurf something, let it smurf,” Papa-Smurf tells Handy, regarding his mermaid sweetheart who cannot stay with him on land. Handy built her a special bathtub but it wasn’t enough. I cried, but did as I was told, too, and set the turtle free among my mother’s bed of impatiens. Is this what men are thinking when they don’t call you after a one-night stand? Having “loved” you, must they now set you free? I brought out my pen and notebook and scribbled, “Possible idea for column. . . .”
Absorbed in the film once more, I began to draw “unfair comparisons” between myself and the columnist in the movie. I picked up the phrase “unfair comparisons” from my friend Jacob who’s been in therapy his whole life. “You’re not supposed to compare yourself to anyone else,” Jacob told me. “It’s unhealthy because you will always lose.” I’m not sure if he meant me specifically or “you” in general. Either way, I’m not supposed to do it, but that’s what I was doing.
In the movie, the main character’s column is full of cha
rming anecdotes about life with Marley. In one scene, his whole family gathers in the kitchen to reread his old clippings. Warm and happy together, they are delighted to find their shared memories evoked in print. Why can’t I write a column like that? I wondered. I tried to imagine my future husband rereading my columns. “Ha,” he’d say looking up, as I caught him in the kitchen, poring over a binder full of them.
“What you got there, hon’?” I’d say, laying an affectionate hand on his shoulder.
“I love this one about you blowing your obese ex-boyfriend and this one, too, about you vomiting in front of your rebound flame. Son, get in here!” he’d call into the family room, to our eldest playing Yahtzee with his little brother on the rug before the fireplace. Two small boys with matching bowl haircuts would gather round, eager to hear Dad share Mommy’s writing. “Letting my upchuck burst into full flower . . .” he’d read aloud, before beaming at me proudly with that same look Jennifer Aniston gives Owen Wilson in the movie. The one that says, “How’d I get so lucky to get a woman like you to be my wife?”
If I got a dog, I could write about him instead . . . I could give up sex writing . . . I could send my parents my articles....
When an essay of mine was recently published on Nerve, I felt so proud—my story was featured on the home page beneath a large photo and ads!—naturally, I sent my parents a link. When I spoke to my mother on the phone a few days later though, and asked excitedly if she received it, she said, “Yes. But don’t mention it to your father. I’m afraid it will upset him. It’s a little dirty; you know how conservative we are,” she said gently.
“It’s fiction!” I said quickly, burning with shame. “It’s only fiction, Mom!” It’s fiction, despite the fact that another “character” says my name within the piece, despite the fact that the other “character,” “Glen,” removes my underwear before exclaiming, “I think I’m falling in love with you, Iris.” I use this “fiction” excuse for everything. If I ever committed a crime, robbed a bank say, and were caught in the act, I’d probably scream out, “Don’t arrest me! It’s fiction!”
To be honest, though, Glen never said he was falling in love with me, so it is sort of fiction. What Glen actually said was, “Iris, I think I’m falling off the bed.” He was all the way at the edge. Also, I never actually went to see The X-Files with him. I went alone, in the middle of a very hot day in Southwest Florida where I was visiting my parents for a week. The parking lot was huge and hot and empty, and I was alone in the multiplex and alone on the drive back to my parents’ condo. I just wanted to write about Glen’s weird genitals and saw the movie as an opportunity.
The piece was published under the title, “The Truth is Out There.” It wasn’t my title; my editor changed it. I had wanted to call it, “Iris’s Movie Corner,” as I was hoping to break into movie reviewing.
I could get a dog . . . change my ways . . . write about my dog instead of my boy friends and repent for all that I’ve written so far....
I watched the giant faces of Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston and considered the possibilities. But then the same questions arose that always do. What do I know about caring for an animal? And what about travel? If I go to Greece in the summer, would I leave the animal with The Bastard, or stow him in baggage and bring him with me? Both solutions seemed a bit cruel. And what if I were irresponsible and forgot to feed him for a few days and he felt hungry and it was my fault? What if he were unhappy? What if he stopped flying in his dreams?
I got the column a few months ago after reading an announcement for a competition to be the next sex columnist for New York Press, a free weekly newspaper I pick up regularly for the cartoons. It was the first time in my life that I’d read a want ad and didn’t feel immediately that I wasn’t up to the job. Instead I thought, I could do this! Most of the sex columns they’d been running had been first-person reports about the nightmare dates each writer had endured. My angle was that I’d be the nightmare date. The only question was which nightmare would I document? I had terrorized so many.
“An Open Letter to My Date of Last Friday” was accepted and ran, and they even paid me. I didn’t win. Nobody did. The competition was so popular that the newspaper decided to keep the column open. But then, a few weeks later, an editor from a new online magazine who’d read my piece contacted me about a job. And just like that, the purpose of all my failed relationships was revealed to me: I was to write about them. On my back and on the backs of all my ex-boyfriends, I would commence my writing career!
For some time before that, I’d been feeling like I was ruining my life, not to mention my health, and often, if I could sleep at all, I’d wake up terrified. Then, hungover and shaking one morning, at twenty-eight years old, I got this column, and it seemed like everything might finally click into place. It was nice to think, regardless of whether or not it was true, that all this ruining was actually in the service of something, that perhaps I had been on a path after all, that maybe I wasn’t getting more lost everyday but just pursuing my own special destiny, that this was me, following years of heroic suffering and wandering, ascending to Mount Olympus where I would remain for all eternity, happily writing my “sexploits.”
Suddenly, it looked as if it hadn’t all been for nothing. Instead of trying to bury the memory of every past affair, I could redeem them, like coupons for my future. Each shameful act, I discovered, was a paying article. By the way, I lied. I was twenty-nine when this happened, not twenty-eight.
When I turned twenty-nine then, I decided to begin lying about my age as a way of making the lie I was planning to tell when I turned thirty more believable—two years would be too much to shave off all at once, but if I shaved one now and then just kept it off on my next birthday, I might more easily blend. It wasn’t about vanity. I just felt I hadn’t earned my age. Though twenty-nine, I was still a child in most respects, still so dependent on my parents, still without any accomplishments beyond my quite excellent SAT scores (800 Math! 780 Verbal!). And now, not even finished with my quarter-life crisis, I was embarking on a midlife one.
Since my life was pretty boring when I got the column—I had cut down on drinking a few months earlier in an effort to get serious about writing before I turned thirty and with that had all but retired from my social life, rarely seeing friends and even more rarely dating—my first few pieces were about things that had happened to me before, which I wrote as if they were happening to me just then.
I decided to call my column “Second Base,” for the ambiguity appealed to me. Second Base meant “up the shirt,” but it also meant the island of Calypso in The Odyssey. Odysseus’s second stop where he is stalled for seven years on his journey home, just like I’ve been stalled for seven years since my graduation from college.
There are some drawbacks to writing a sex column. Since starting the column, for example, I’ve developed a weird habit of relating sexual anecdotes in casual conversation with near strangers. Like the other day when I met my editor in person for the first time and he told me he sang in a Prince cover band and that they would be performing the entire Purple Rain album at an upcoming party—would I like to come? I said I might come, that I also love Prince, and that I actually lost my virginity while a record of Purple Rain, which I had borrowed from my local library in high school, was on the stereo. He said, “Oh,” and then I wondered why I was so indiscreet and eager to share.
Aside from worrying about what my parents think, I also worry that publishing these stories might make me unmarriageable—the worst possible fate for a Greek girl, and most especially for one so principally incompetent (“Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor. Which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.” —Jane Austen). This columnist gig might give men the wrong impression of me, might make them think I’m fast. And I’m not. Really. I’m not that kind of girl! I’m not at all callous when it comes to sex, nor flippant about whom I have it with. I want to fall in love and, to me, sex has everything to do wit
h that. It’s a very big deal. So big a deal, as a matter of fact, that I seem to be chained by it to Glen. So much for my notion of remaining distinct from him; I’m pretty much eclipsed.
And though I enjoyed the show Sex and the City, about a sex columnist like me, I was always mystified by how the four women could have sex with a man and after discard him so easily. My column is much less Sex and the City and much more Tess of the d’Urbervilles in that respect. Tess of the d’Urbervilles minus the rape and murder, but otherwise, nearly identical. Tess and the City would be the name of my TV show if I had one, and it would be subtitled The Adventures of a Pure Woman in Manhattan Faithfully Rendered. Because I’m just like Hardy’s Tess, a pure woman corrupted by society. Remember that, future husband, when you read my binder full of clippings!
Marley and Me ended and I stayed to watch the credits, figuring I’d be on the street again soon enough, floating among the honking horns and city lights, sharing the sidewalk with everyone else. Finally, the lights came up and I stood up to put on my coat. Looking around for the first time since I came in, I noticed the other man in the theater was still there. [Gungh, Gungh] He was looking right at me.
Who is this guy and why is he looking at me? Quickly, I looked toward the projector to see if there was anyone there to witness a crime should one be about to occur. We were all alone.
The man, middle-aged, was closer to the aisle than I was and I would have to pass him in order to exit the theater. Stalling, I remained in place, pretending to fiddle with the buttons of my coat, pretending to adjust my scarf. I tried to think of what I might use to defend myself were he to come at me, and gripped my keys in my pocket. He began walking toward me. I began to sweat.
Only a few feet away now, the man, perhaps in his fifties, stopped, smiled, and in an Italian accent said, “You know, I like it so much, the movie. I had a dog just like the Marley, and it remind me my own family.”