Iris Has Free Time

by Iris Smyles

  Even the glass table exploded. One night, after taking her nightly sleeping pills—May’s father, a doctor, mailed them to her regularly—May stood on one of the rolling chairs to close the top window shutter, slipped, and crashed through the table behind her. I wasn’t home at the time, but staying the night at my “idiot boyfriend’s.” At 1:00 AM, the phone rang.

  “I’m sorry, Iris. I broke the table,” May said groggily.

  We rushed over and found a pile of broken glass where the table had been and May, resting in her silk nightgown, on the island nearby. She was bleeding from a small cut on her leg. Miraculously, she’d only a scratch. “I was so worried about you—” I said. “I was so worried,” she interrupted, not hearing me through her haze, “that you’d be mad about the table. I know how much you loved it.” My boyfriend and I began to clean up. “I made such a mess,” she said, as she climbed up to her bed.

  The next day, using the legs from the broken table, I made a new table using a large magnetic backgammon board I’d brought back from Greece. May was amazed at my engineering, which involved opening the board which folded in the middle and laying it perpendicular to the parallel lines of the two sets of table legs. “Voila!” I said, “a new table/ gaming center!”

  We began playing a lot of backgammon after that, and then, growing bored, invented a new game based simply on the set’s magnetic properties—if you faced the pieces one direction, they’d stick together, while placing them in opposition caused them to fly apart. Laughing, we’d chase each other all over the board, the winner declared after she’d driven all her opponent’s pieces out. We called the game “War.”

  Your first apartment—a milestone in your journey toward adulthood. We called ours “the clubhouse.” Sharing a bedroom, we installed two loft beds, one of seven feet and the other, “the castle,” rising a majestic ten feet off the ground—a nice auxiliary for the weighty questions that plagued us in those days. “Should we get high or really high?” I’d ask May, before rolling a joint and alighting with her to one of our beds.

  “The castle” had to be specially made. “We don’t build ’em higher than seven feet,” the man at the loft store told me. I drew a picture of what I wanted. “But you won’t have enough room above you!” he insisted. “Let me worry about that,” I said. To stabilize it, the structure had to be attached to the wall, and a safety partition added to the side to keep me from rolling over and falling to my death. “It’s magnificent,” I said when it was finished. I then set about covering it with white Christmas lights, which I attached to The Clapper, so that every morning it glowed with May’s applause.

  Turning the radio on, we’d climb up to May’s bed and sit with our legs dangling over the edge and look through the airshaft at our neighbors looking back. I passed May the joint. “Sitting on the edge of my bed . . .” May sang when “Dock of the Bay” came on, “watchin’ the time roll ahead. Watchin’ our neighbors walk in, and then we watch them walk away again. We’re just sittin’ on the top of my bed, wastin’ time. . . .” I’d whistle, exhale a long plume, and then hatch an idea for our next home improvement project—“a lifeguard chair next to the window! We keep the top shudders open so we can look out on the street, and the bottom shutters closed to maintain our privacy!”

  Today, when people see photographs of us from that time, thinking we were perhaps ten or twelve years old, they are shocked when I tell them we were nearing twenty-one, for even our expressions during that period had become vaguely childlike.

  For decoration, I covered the inside of our apartment door with my steadily growing collection of black-and-white postcards, among which I hid two black-and-white photos of May and me. May: looking glamorous at a masquerade ball we’d thrown at our Soho dorm for my last birthday. Me: in a vintage swimsuit, half submerged in the kiddie pool we’d installed in our dorm-room for the “pool party” we’d thrown before that—we’d moved all our furniture, including our beds, into the hall.

  In the corner, where the glass table had been, we placed a mini-trampoline we’d rescued from a dumpster. We were always on the lookout for great new pieces, so when we spotted a twelve-foot-long cardboard candy cane lying on the curb among the trash, we immediately knew we needed it. Spilling out from a loft party in Soho at 4:00 AM, I saw it first. Our only thought was of how to transport it; the thing was so large, so unwieldy. We ended up holding it against the outside of a cab, our arms looped around it through the open windows.

  Four in the morning. May riding shotgun. Me in the back passenger seat. The cab driver yelling when I drop my end, again, onto the road. He stops the car short and I wake with a start before opening the back door to fetch my end. The driver lays into me. May rushes to my defense, telling him indignantly, “Stop yelling! Can’t you see she’s tired?”

  When we did finally get the thing home, it was much too large for our small apartment. It would fit neither upright nor sideways, and so we had to place it on a diagonal, a candy cane hypotenuse bisecting the living room, extending from top right corner to lower left. Accessing the bathroom from that day forward required an impromptu round of limbo—another game!

  Winter nights, lying aloft in our skyscraper beds, unable to sleep, we’d speculate about our futures. Blinking in the dark, I’d imagine a husband for May, describing various scenarios in which her husband, a concert pianist who’d grown unhappy and jealous of May’s tambourine playing (I’d given her a tambourine for her birthday), wished, midlife, to switch to the tuba. “The tuba won’t pay the bills!” May would protest. He’d be alcoholic and would hide his schnapps in the large horn, which May would find and drink herself, resulting in more terrible fights.

  Then she’d do the same for me: My husband would be a very wealthy businessman whom I’d despise and who would give me a gaggle of children who’d also irritate me. Regularly, I’d lock myself in the parlor where I’d remain all day drunk, playing with an electric train set and maniacally working a Hula-Hoop to keep svelte. I’d give explicit instructions to the servants to keep the children out of the west wing. My hair would grow wild, my nails long and curling.

  Sometimes we’d remark on the oddness of our being twenty years old and sharing a bedroom. “Do you think our husbands will mind the sleeping arrangements?” May asked, giggling through the dark, having just described a future in which, despite all the changes time would bring, the condition of our shared bedroom, with its twin loft beds soaring high into the night, would remain. I laughed. “They’ll just have to get used to it, I guess.”

  5

  Fall, winter, spring. And in summer we’d separate, leaving the apartment to boil without us. May would return to her family in Alabama and I’d visit mine in Greece where I’d update “the books.”

  “An influx of Germans,” I reported upon my return, summarizing my amorous adventures to May.

  For all the privileges of summer, however, we couldn’t wait to get back, to resume the duo, to resume our experiments. And so, in the August before our senior year, we returned two weeks early. May would use the time to go on auditions, she told her parents, while I, having already changed majors, told mine I’d need to prepare for my upcoming internship at The New Yorker.

  It was the summer of 1999 and the city was hot. The buildings themselves seemed almost to be melting. Every day brought reports of record highs. A weatherman fried an egg on the sidewalk. The mayor reminded us, “Drink water to prevent dehydration, check on neighbors, the elderly, and seek out the city’s air-conditioned cooling centers.” Surviving the heat became the first priority of every New Yorker. May and I had no air conditioner but had set up a circuit of fans to ameliorate the blaze, to blow the hot air into our loft beds and all around the apartment, across the trampoline, under the candy cane, over the island, and through to the next room—a trade wind you could follow on one of our rolling chairs.

  Submitting to the heat and its command to do as little as possible, we forsook our previous plans and spent the days lounging on ou
r island, sipping cold beer and waiting for our pot dealer to arrive. We’d turn up the radio—always oldies, always CBS FM—and May, growing impatient, would bounce on the mini-trampoline, a full-body alternative to waving a paper fan. I told her this would only make her hotter, but she persisted, up and down, singing along to her favorite song—“Big Girls Don’t Cry”—resting only to rehydrate during weather and traffic updates.

  With my bare feet dangling over the shores of our couch, I was busy with my hobbies—drawing more Naked Woman cartoons, rendering crayon outlines of my face onto construction paper, or clipping the occasional article from the Weekly World News: “Alien Endorses Bush for Presidency—the same alien that endorsed Clinton in 1996!” I taped it to the wall next to the calendar where I wrote my itinerary for the month: “Prepare a list of demands and sell to bank robbers,” “Decide to change tomorrow,” “Decide to change tomorrow,” “Entry into martyrdom. . . .”

  In anticipation of our delivery, sometimes I’d design a new pot-smoking device. Since my visit to Amsterdam three summers before (“field research” I’d called it, showing May photographs of the Dutchmen I’d kissed), I’d developed my own style of joint-rolling, which involved colored construction paper, numerous double-wide rolling papers and index cards. “I’m the Jeff Koons of marijuana paraphernalia!” I announced, holding up my latest creation. Atop exaggerated sculptural filters—bulbous cones and chimerical, animal-shaped hollows—I’d poke a small hole where I’d attach the joint. “I can’t wait for your retrospective,” May marveled.

  Like this, lost in our respective delights, we’d wait for a bike messenger to buzz our door, and then, beer cans in hand, we’d receive him with flirtatious smiles and an offer to share a blunt with us, if we thought he was at all cute.

  That same August, “drunk and delirious from the heat,” so I claimed, I tongue-kissed a few strangers and was renamed “Hurricane” at a local bar, while May met a Frenchman and began to doubt romantic love. It was during that August, after the Frenchman had disappeared, that May, still a virgin, announced her decision to have sex.

  All our friends were aware of and had discussed often the fact of May’s virginity, so much so that her virginity began to seem less a function of time and more a permanent characteristic, like the shape of one’s nose or the landscape of lower Manhattan. Her decision to change it thus, seemed drastic. It was as if she’d announced the leveling of a historic building with a subsequent plan to put up a condo in its place. Our reactions, naturally, were mixed. We were all in favor of progress, sure, and yet, shouldn’t May be preserved as she was? Couldn’t we keep her virginal, declare her a landmark, and convert her into a library or something? Her decision shocked everyone, a feat that, up until then, had been my specialty.

  4

  In the waning blaze of August, we descended upon the Coliseum bookstore. Sweating, high, and ever studious, we bought Hot Sex: How to Do It; Sex Tips for A Straight Girl from a Gay Man; The Good Girls Guide to Great Sex; and the more romantic How to Make Love to a Man, which cited The Best of Neil Diamond as the ultimate sex soundtrack.

  Drinking through the afternoons we read intently, copying notes for perplexing maneuvers on index cards, which we’d compare over lunch. May was a wizard in the kitchenette and sometimes (before we abandoned the room completely), I’d stand beside her, stoned, watching as she performed her magic on a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese. Red-eyed, nodding, “Miraculous!” I’d say, after she let me taste a bit.

  Back on the couch with our bowls, May asked me about “the up and over” hand-job technique she’d read about earlier that morning, if I’d ever done it. “I may have done it once accidentally. But I’m not sure I could repeat it is the thing.” For dessert, we’d have Rice Krispies Treats laced with pot—expediently done so by simply placing a green sprig on top of an opened “Fun Size” package.

  Pen in hand, I informed May of my goal to write a self-help book called, How to Be the Worst Sex of His Life! “It’s an unfilled niche in the marketplace. I’m reading to find out what not to do.” I had lots of goals back then—actress, cartoonist, novelist, gentleman farmer, reverse-stripper (I would begin naked and, one article at a time, get dressed. This would take a while as I like to layer—underwear to overcoat, then gloves, scarf, and hat—and then I’d walk off stage, out into the audience, out the front door and into the cold winter night!). Self-help author was but one more.

  May’s goal was sex itself. “Do you want to fall in love and then have sex? Or fall in sex and then have love?” She wasn’t sure, she told me. It was more the fear of the buildup that had inspired her to build down. “Disarmament,” I interjected, “got it.” “I just don’t want to be a virgin anymore,” she answered.

  Unsure of how to proceed or with whom, May continued to prepare for sex as if for nuclear attack. “Up and over!” I yelled now and then, calling a drill.

  Then, as the summer cooled into fall, May met someone. Felix took her on a whirlwind date of free events in Central Park, made her laugh while she ate a hot dog, told her she was beautiful when she laughed with her mouth full, held her hand, and kissed her up against a very old tree, she told me happily, before he didn’t call again for a full week.

  Lying aloft, unable to sleep on the third night of his silence, May began making fun of his ugly face, cursing his ridiculous hair, and related something stupid he’d said about rowboats. She’d laughed out of pity; it wasn’t funny at all. I agreed that she could do much better and told her so over and over again. “He’s a fool,” I repeated, until she fell asleep.

  A few days later, arriving home from an adventure at the drugstore’s makeup aisle, our answering machine blinked with a message from Felix. I cheered and suggested we conduct “an experiment.” May didn’t laugh or agree, but just quietly found his number and took the phone with her into the bathroom.

  After that, they began seeing each other pretty regularly. Then, one day in October, just as the weather was really beginning to change and the wind had begun to sing through the leaves the way it always does in early fall, I arrived home, slightly drunk after a long day of “work” at The New Yorker, and found May sitting by herself on the couch, her face serious. She’d been waiting for me, she said. She had something to tell me, she said, her face breaking into a horrible smile. “I did it, Iris!”

  We went out that night—Felix had to return to L. A., she explained, so he’d gone to his parents’ place upstate to pack, which is why he wouldn’t be coming along. On our way to the bar, we stopped at the drugstore to buy a new disposable camera. “To capture my post-sex glow,” she said cheerfully.

  At the bar, I told her I knew how she felt, thinking one moment that it meant nothing and the next, that it meant everything. She said that wasn’t it and looking over her shoulder at the camera, shot a sultry expression. All night she studied her reflection, in the mirror behind the bar, in the bathroom, in her makeup compact, in shop windows on our way home. “Do I look different?” she asked me.

  When we got the pictures back the next day, she was disappointed. Instead of looking sexy, worldly, and knowing, she looked uncertain, as if all night she’d been asking the camera, “What now?” Following a brief perusal and handoff to me, she took all the photos and filed them under the couch. Then, taking her place on the cushions above, she asked if we shouldn’t call the dealer. I shrugged and got out the number.

  With the approach of Halloween, May grew nervous and every day more distracted. During our costume-planning session, I’d had to ask repeatedly if she would be able to get hold of red swimming trunks by October 31st; we were going to be “Siamese Superheroes.” I was sitting on the floor, sewing two T-shirts together to make one with two neck holes. We’d share the cape. “May? Are you listening?” Felix was still in L. A. and not sure when he’d be back.

  “He said he missed me,” she said later through the dark. He’d called that afternoon; she’d taken the phone into the bathroom again. “I mean, I don’t expect
him not to see other girls or anything,” she said from her bed. I just wanted to do it, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “He probably thinks I’m in love with him or something.”

  When Felix finally returned to New York a month later, she began seeing him as often as possible, wanting, I figured, to stay close to that part of herself she’d lost, what he had somehow gained. Or perhaps it was her heart, not her virginity she wanted back. Or perhaps I’m completely wrong, and she wasn’t trying to get it back at all. Perhaps she had given it.

  3

  That fall, I underwent a change myself, slowing down so much with men that I became nearly impossible, telling one as he leaned in for a kiss, that “a long calm must precede the storm.”

  “I need time to sort my findings,” I told May, after returning early from a date one night. I’d always felt compelled to supply an explanation, especially now when I didn’t really have one. “I’m still organizing data,” I said, alighting onto the island where she was sipping a beer and watching TV.

  Felix spent most of that winter in L. A., picking up small parts in films and extra work when he could get it, and now and then returning to New York for short visits. When he was in New York, he stayed with us, sharing May’s loft bed across the room from mine. In the morning, he’d roll a joint, which they’d smoke in the living room while reading Backstage, before taking off together to see about an open call.