Iris Has Free Time

by Iris Smyles

Wishing to get a head start on her career, May graduated a semester early, so in January, instead of commuting downtown to classes with me, she found a waitressing position at a restaurant in our neighborhood. She was given an apron and immediately went out to buy some sensible shoes and a memo pad. A day later, she began waiting tables as if it were the most natural thing. Then, with the money she saved from her first few paychecks, she purchased a new couch for our apartment. A large blue sofa bed, so that when Felix came to visit, he’d have a place to sleep.

  I finished my internship at The New Yorker and my relationship with one of its editorial assistants that December. In January, while May worked, I focused on my studies, specifically on my thesis, “Melancholy and Mania in the Creative Tradition,” and watched as May rushed toward the ringing phone, as she locked herself in the bathroom to speak in hushed tones, as she borrowed my colored construction paper to prepare a valentine for Felix.

  On graduation day, Felix happened to be in town. And since he’d forgotten to return his cap and gown after his own graduation two years earlier, he decided to come with us and graduate a second time. The three of us exited the subway on Eighth Street and began walking toward Washington Square Park where commencement was being held. On a bench outside the school’s fitness center, we stopped and sat down. Felix, decked out in his wrinkled purple robe, rolled a joint—“Our last one as college students!” he announced.

  The park was blooming with purple gowns, hundreds of faces I’d never seen before. A stage had been erected in the center, above the fountain, far away. Felix cheered histrionically during the speeches. Some students nearby asked him to knock it off. “Hey, it’s my graduation, too!” he yelled back. After they introduced “the Class of 2000,” Felix stood up and clapped louder than everyone else. “Come on, Iris. Stand up!” Felix shouted. I stood up and screamed a little, too, not sure if something was beginning or ending, if it all added up to a loss or a gain.

  Afterwards, Felix had an audition and, kissing May goodbye, disappeared uptown. May and I walked over to Broadway to meet our parents. Though I had spent a lot of time with May’s family, and she with mine, this was the first time our families met each other. Conservatives, for the most part our fathers got on well, though my dad leaned toward libertarianism while May’s toward Christian republicanism. They dealt with their differences fairly easily, however, by ignoring them and moving on to a conversation about us, their bright and talented girls who’d both ordered the lobster.

  There is a photograph my father took that day of May and me. We are walking up ahead of everyone on our way to lunch. We are side by side, a stretch of sidewalk at our backs. We are walking purposefully, as if we know exactly where we are going, though it took us no less than a half hour to settle on a restaurant, no less than a half hour of our trying and failing to recall the exact location of that really nice place we’d gone to once together, the one with the beautiful garden.

  2

  I made arrangements to leave for Greece immediately following commencement. I didn’t have a job, but I wasn’t worried. I was confident about the future the way one is confident of the contents of a package before you open it, before you realize the coffee maker you ordered off the TV is missing a part, or the closet organizer that’s going to revolutionize the way you store your clothes needs first to be put together.

  At the same time, May got a lead role in a touring company. “I’m going to be Peter Pan!” she squealed, watching me pack. “We’ll be traveling around the country all summer and part of fall, so I guess we’ll get back around the same time,” she said. She climbed up to her bed and sat with her legs dangling over the edge. “Felix says he’ll visit me on the road.”

  I stayed in Greece for four months, longer than I ever had before, writing letters to May and to a handful of ex-boyfriends, using our correspondence as an opportunity to hone my prose style. I was particularly weak when it came to botanical descriptions and if I were going to be a writer, I considered, I’d most certainly need to learn the names of more trees.

  When I wasn’t writing letters describing the wind through the poplars, I worked on my novel about all the drunks I’d gotten to know in the hallway bars of my Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, about one in particular, the fictional Hank, a twenty-seven-year-old alcoholic looking for redemption in his glass. Twenty-seven seemed so far away, and I had to work hard to imagine what that might be like. Trying to imitate hard-earned wisdom, I wrote metaphors for each drink: “Whisky is an accomplice,” I scribbled in my notebook, before taking off on my bike to weave back and forth through the olive groves. I’d ride and dream about the characters in my book, squinting my eyes to see them, wondering what they might do next, in a way that I had not yet wondered about myself.

  1

  I returned to New York in October with four spiral notebooks containing my novel, ready to put my party girl days behind me and begin my new life as an author. It was late evening when I arrived and fit my key into the lock. May wasn’t home, but there were candles that had recently been lit and an overpowering smell of gas. I went into the kitchen, which was bright—the light bulb had been replaced—found the open nozzle on the stove and turned it off.

  I returned to the living room, which was a mess—piles of discarded clothes I didn’t recognize. It was a mess nearly identical to the one I’d left, except none of it was mine. The relatively new sofabed was opened and covered by a tangle of sheets. It took up most of the room and I had to turn sideways to get around it, to make my way to the window to let in some air.

  May arrived later on that night, with Felix in tow. They each gave me a hug. May handed me a beer and then, saying she hadn’t realized I was arriving today, apologized for the mess. “Sit down,” she said, motioning to the now closed sofabed.

  She’d quit the show, she said. It was a lousy production and she missed Felix. Somewhere in Indiana, at a Hooter’s restaurant where the whole cast had gone as a joke—she showed me the cool T-shirt she bought there—she’d begun crying and told the director right then she had to quit.

  She asked me about my trip, about this summer’s crop of boyfriends, about “the books.” Felix sat beside her, listening. I said that I’d had a fine time, that I’d tell her all about it later, but that I was tired now from traveling. I left my beer half-full on the coffee table and went into the next room.

  She thought I was coming back tomorrow, she repeated, apologizing again as I climbed up into my bed. That’s why it was so messy. She’d clean it all up tomorrow.

  May turned on the assortment of fans and closed the doors to the living room where she and Felix unfolded the sofa. For a while I lay awake, noticing the shorter loft bed of May’s empty and listening to the muffled voices coming from the next room.

  IV

  5

  My future plan, hatched on the plane ride home, was to take a night job. I imagined myself a librarian, serving the graveyard shift at the big building on Forty-second Street. In luxurious silence I’d wander the stacks, pausing occasionally to shelve something. I would be lonely, weary, but comforted by my great mission to complete my first novel.

  When I went to the library to apply, however, I was shocked to discover that there was no night shift. It was closed in the evenings just like every other library. I asked the librarian for an application anyway, and then, with a stack of forms that I barely looked at, I wandered around the building, realizing only then that I’d never actually been inside.

  There was something hateful about the place, I decided, as I skipped down the front steps after. Something awful about its solemnity, its large hollows, its people who went steadily about their work. The way no one had looked up when I came in, had acknowledged my arrival, the way no one had recognized me. Outside, the autumn air was brisk and cool, the large stone lions implacable in their gaze. I walked home.

  I spent the next days and weeks perusing the want ads of newspapers I’d never read before, while May and Felix smoked pot and blasted clas
sic rock—Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin tapes I’d brought back from Long Island but never listened to. Searching for songs on Napster, the two of them sat in front of my computer, Felix marveling at how fast a Van Halen track was downloading, especially compared to the Beatles song that had required three separate tries and forty-five minutes.

  Unable to find any office job for which I was qualified—When was I supposed to have learned PowerPoint and Excel?—I took a temporary job at Barnes & Noble in Union Square. It was the holiday season and they needed extra hands, they said at the information desk, after I’d ordered The Beautiful and Damned (there were no copies left) and, spur-of-the-moment, asked if they were hiring. It was the next best thing to a library, I figured.

  My primary responsibility was re-shelving the books customers left on the ground, in the bathroom, on the magazine rack, or in the café on the second floor. But I spent most of the time trying to read all the books I hadn’t in college, going from aisle to aisle in order to avoid the undercover store security guard, whose constant staring caused me to reread the same lines again and again so that I never got passed, “Stately, plump . . .”

  I ended up spending as much money as I made, buying the books I’d started at work, thinking I’d finish them at home, but then, once home, finding it even more difficult to concentrate. “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong hills,” I read, before May and Felix turned on the TV. “The Giants are ’bout to tear it up!” Felix howled.

  “For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say, ‘I am falling asleep.’ And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light. . . .” I read at 2:00 AM, before the locks began to click and May and Felix stumbled in.

  “Beer and bacon!” Felix sang, pushing his way through the bedroom below on his way to the kitchen. Marcel Proust had been a dilettante, I read in the book’s introduction. Then at thirty years old, after years of constant partying, he quit that life and took to bed where he wrote his masterpiece. Peels of laughter in the next room, Felix saying, “I’m comin’ to getcha!” I lay in bed ten feet in the air, trying to imagine a manuscript in loose pages all around me.

  Some evenings the store would host readings on the fourth floor, and I’d hope to be assigned there so I might watch. On a Sunday, George Plimpton read from Pet Peeves, his new book for pet lovers. I took out my notebook and wrote, “If I ever get a dog, name him ‘Peeve.’”

  No one came. It was a cold December evening and through the windows you could see Union Square, lit up with festive lights as shoppers teemed in and out of the outdoor holiday market. The room from where I looked out was almost empty. There was a small platform set up before the window and one hundred or so chairs, as if they were anticipating a large audience. Among the one hundred, eight or nine seats were occupied, four filled by the homeless who hung around the store all day, and another handful by those who’d sat down to read a magazine or book they didn’t plan to buy.

  The store manager made a brief introduction. A few people applauded, mostly staff. I stopped what I was doing—reading How to Write a Movie in 21 Days (I’d been assigned to Film and TV that afternoon) —and watched Mr. Plimpton, a white-haired man in his seventies, ascend to the podium, tripping on the second step.

  Adjusting the microphone, he made a joke about the turnout and then chuckled softly to himself. “The audience” did not respond. No one, it seemed, had any idea who he was, only that he was old and had written a very thin book marketed to pet enthusiasts. After a moment, those who’d turned to listen went on browsing. I was behind the information desk when a New School student, Dave, who’d been working there a full year, stood beside me and said, “That’s George Plimpton. He’s like a legend and now look at him.”

  I nodded. “What’s he a legend for?”

  Dave shrugged. “You know, writing or whatever.”

  The image of Mr. Plimpton tripping as he made his way up to the podium stayed with me the whole thirty-block walk home. He seemed so embarrassed—he’d blushed—though hardly anyone had seen it happen.

  I was horrified to find out that no matter what job I took, the one at the bookstore, or the other I got a few months later as a restaurant hostess at a sports bar in Greenwich Village, I’d be required to work. “I just want to have the job, I don’t want to do the job,” I told May at home, trying to make light of it. In truth, I wouldn’t have minded doing any job, had I not been so bad at every one I tried.

  Wondering about the future now, I felt frightened. It didn’t seem to be up ahead of me anymore but suddenly at my back, as if my potential, all my time, was spent.

  I lay awake in bed every night, trying to ignore the muffled sounds coming from the next room. The clicking of channels. The light from the TV flickering through the slats of our “brand new French doors.” Carefree giggles broken by coughs, as May and Felix passed a joint back and forth.

  In my dreams, I saw myself standing alone in a clear plastic forest, surrounded by a dense fog. I’d raise my hand before my eyes but the fog was so thick, without beginning or end; I was trapped in a cloud that would not disperse. And I could not find my hand. I could not find myself.

  4

  While I floundered, May flourished. Felix had moved back to New York unofficially and was now staying with May—with us. They stopped bothering to refold the sofa-bed, and so it remained splayed out all day long, filling the living room and making it difficult for me to get to my desk. Finally, I said something.

  “Of course!” May said and began apologizing profusely.

  “I’m sorry to mention it, it’s just—”

  “No, it’s my fault!” she snapped, as if I were trying to take something from her.

  “Well, thank you. Also, I hate to be a pest, but it would help if you could tell Felix not to leave food on my desk. I kind of need some clear space to work.”

  “Absolutely.” She nodded vigorously and smiled. “Anything else?”

  Around this time, May began tending bar at The Village Idiot, a dive famous for its jukebox full of country music, a mounted boar’s head covered in the bras of past patrons, and its dancing. Dressed in half-tops and Daisy Dukes, the lady bartenders would climb on the bar to perform a two-step, pausing now and then to pour directly from the bottle into a customer’s open mouth. Drinks were cheap, making it a hotspot for bikers, truck drivers, and editorial assistants. I’d wound up there myself after a few New Yorker parties.

  “It’s so cool,” she told Felix and me, after her first shift. “They actually want us to drink on the job.” Though she disliked the half-tops, she liked the money and the days off it afforded, she told me—she and Felix could follow up on auditions, or else fill in as extras on the film shoots Felix often heard about. Plus, once or twice a week she was assigned a day shift, which, if less profitable, was more enjoyable because Felix could come in and stay the afternoon.

  While May served the regulars, Felix sat at the end of the bar. She’d rig the jukebox so he could play his classic rock selections for free and slip him free beers of whatever was on tap. Then, when her shift was over, they’d come home and reopen the sofa-bed I’d closed.

  3

  Morning. Felix in the living room, in his underwear, rolling a joint, before heading purposefully into the kitchenette to make breakfast. He had restored the light bulb and dug out the dishes. “It’s cheaper to eat in,” he told May.

  Putting some classic rock on the stereo and settling down to eat in front of the muted TV, they enjoy a leisurely breakfast while consulting Backstage for help in deciding what to do next. May doesn’t have work today, so they can “decide” for hours.

  Removing a half-eaten apple Felix has left on my desk, I ask, sheepishly, about their plans.

  “You wanna come to the park with us?” May answers c
haritably.

  “No, thank you. I was just wondering what your plans were, so I could try to plan mine around them; I thought I might do some work,” I say nervously, fingering the slim stack of notebooks I brought back from Greece.

  “Oh sure,” they answer together. “We’ll get out of your way.” Three or four hours later, they keep their promise.

  Alone at last, the sun disappearing, I sit, frozen in front of my computer, with one of my notebooks opened in my lap.

  Monday . . . Felix rolling a joint . . . Tuesday . . . Felix in the kitchen making breakfast . . . Wednesday . . . May and Felix on the couch next to me . . . Thursday . . . Bugs Bunny on the TV saying, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” . . . Friday . . . May laughing as Felix tickles her . . . I exhale a long plume of smoke and say I’m going out.

  I began going out as often as possible, avoiding the apartment as I’d avoided our dorm the first week of school, except now, because I was twenty-two, I went to bars. “Research,” I told myself, “for my novel.” I brought a little notebook with me to write down my ideas.

  And then, one day, too exhausted to stay away any longer and feeling I’d accumulated more than enough “source material,” I came home, pushed the door open—it was unlocked—and came upon May and Felix having sex on the couch. When I returned a half hour later, I announced my decision to move.

  That weekend I visited my parents in Long Island, who explained that moving was something one did after one found a job.

  “I can’t afford to make any changes until I find a job,” I told May and Felix when I returned, as if it were my decision, “so I’m going to stay after all.”

  2

  If May and I had been a duo in college, she, the virginal lab-assistant and I, the worldly scientist, who were we now? Who was she if she wasn’t hurrying after me, and who was I if I was no longer forging ahead? Moreover, who were we to each other?