by Iris Smyles
It was around this time that a grisly habit took possession of me. In the same way I began studying The New York Times wedding announcements after breaking up with Martin, with every book I came across, I began subtracting the author’s birthday from the year of his or her first publication in order to see how much time I had left, how much time I had lost.
Too late to be the next Carson McCullers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Malcolm Lowry. Too late to be a phenom, but there’s still time to be Céline or Henry Miller or, if I get lazy and alcohol takes precedence, there is always Bukowski. . . . Over the next years, I continued to tick authors from my list, until Frank McCourt became a key palliative in my anxiety attacks.
Plenty of time, I told myself. Frank McCourt published his first book in his sixties, after he retired! Of course, in your sixties no one’s asking what you do anymore, because they assume you’ve already done it. And sixty years is an awful long time to hide out in your fake life, waiting for the real one to begin. And then, of course, I will have missed out on the opportunity to be beautiful and successful and have men want to use me for my status and power, to feel happy and secure in the fact that “the real me” plays no part in their love. I’d be too old to enjoy my success, but . . . and then I’d steer myself toward some easier thought, some vague plan like, well, I guess I’ll just have to hurry.
Nearing twenty-five and about to start over both professionally and personally, I decided to stop telling people I wanted to be a writer and began saying instead, “I’m going to be a professor.” But as I said it, I whispered this to myself: What a long road it is to earn a PhD, Iris. How many more cushiony years in which to protect your dreams from the harsh light of reality. How many years for you to continue safely to want, without having to do. You could still become . . . had years to become.... My goal, if I’d really been honest with myself, was a life of endless preparation.
2
Because I had only very recently broken up with Martin, I had few friends of my own to invite to my birthday party, so Jacob invited his friends and asked them to invite theirs. “I want to have a wild party!” I told Jacob, feeling myself so old. I must stop dressing so maturely, I decided. And getting ready for the party, I put on a slinky black mini-dress as if dressing were an act of protest, as if my body were a banner raised against time.
Martin called early in the day to wish me a happy birthday, instructing me that I start to get used to it. “Twenty-five is the last good birthday. After twenty-five, instead of growing up, you grow old.” I told him he was a downer. I told him I was just grateful to have survived another year without an air conditioner falling on me and insisted that all birthdays were good ones. I lied and told him I was happy. And then I promised myself that this year I would get one year younger, that I would be young again before it was too late.
I invited a few people that I’d reconnected with on Friendster, the new social network that Jacob and I had begun obsessing over—we revised our profiles multiple times a day, endlessly rewriting our “about me” sections as if it were our descriptions and not our lives that needed the work. I invited Reggie, who had friendstered me months earlier, after we’d run into each other online outside the Halloween store. Reggie responded, saying Felix was in town; would I mind if he brought him along?
“I wouldn’t mind,” I answered prissily, “so long as he behaves.” Having spent the last three years trying to be a grown-up—I’d gone to cocktail parties on the Upper East Side, organized parent-teacher meetings, rode the subway during rush hour, and graduated from night school—I didn’t want to lose what I’d worked so hard to attain. If I wanted to be young again, it was not to escape adulthood, but to use this second youth to better prepare for it. “Youth is wasted on the young,” Shaw wrote, and I didn’t want to waste mine twice. “Just make sure he doesn’t break anything,” I wrote back warily.
Jacob came. Reggie came. Felix came. Some old friends from college came. A lot of people I didn’t know came—Jacob and I, worried no one would show, had dispatched a small crew to invite people they met in the bars and streets surrounding my apartment—and then some people they knew came.
Felix danced and played DJ. Everyone drank. Everyone danced. Everyone drank more. We piled into the bathroom and smoked a joint. We all stood on the furniture at once. We decided to put on a talent show and appointed judges. A girl no one knew drummed the bellies of three men, one of them Jacob, who, lying down, had a flower tucked behind his ear. A couple danced to “Disco Mickey Mouse.” And a guy ate crackers very fast. And then, at midnight, Felix handed me his phone. “It’s May. She wants to wish you happy birthday.”
She said she was sorry for everything that happened, for everything she did. She said she’d wanted to call so many times. She said she missed me. We exchanged email addresses, promised to keep in touch, and then I hung up and blew out the candles someone had stuck into some cupcakes a friend had brought over, which everyone ate before I had a chance.
We danced more. We smoked a few more joints. More people came and went and I put on my roller-skates. We talked about the weather, the Super Bowl, irregular French verbs, fortune telling, igloos, the Donner Party, and our favorite discontinued snack cakes. I demonstrated a logic equation I’d learned from Martin, using the red and blue magic markers from my drawing table. We played a game.
And then at some point I must have hit my head on something, because when I woke up there was a big blue bruise near my hairline and a half-dressed Reggie lying beside me. I heard rustling in the next room, and then my bedroom door opened. There was Felix with one of my disposable cameras. “Cheese and crackers!” he said to both of us, before snapping a photo from which we shielded our faces. “Come on, breakfast is ready.”
1
She’d been living in L. A. for two years, she wrote in her first email. She and Felix had officially moved in together just before it all fell apart, she wrote in the next one. Now she was by herself, she said over the phone. She’d been doing a lot of commercials, had just landed a Diet Dr Pepper campaign, she told me over drinks; it was Halloween and she’d come for a visit.
We dressed as Cheech and Chong for a party I threw on Reggie’s roof. At another party the night before, May was Mona (the oversexed mother of Angela) while I was Angela (the uptight advertising exec) from TV’s Who’s the Boss? All night I kept calling out, “Tony!” as if I were quite exasperated, before The Bastard Felix, who’d been living on my couch before she arrived, appeared, mock-quizzical, holding a dishrag.
I visited her in L. A. the following winter. She picked me up from the airport and once on the road, popped open the glove compartment. Rice Krispies Treats laced with pot: “My pharmacy sells them. They’re just like ours,” she giggled, “except they actually bake the pot inside. I bought them in honor of your visit!”
It was her birthday and when we arrived back at her apartment, after she showed me to her couch, I presented her with a leather picnic basket that held two martini glasses, shakers, bottles, and olives. We took it to the beach with us that afternoon, toasted our glasses, and shivered in the sand.
I
4
In Greece this past summer, I saw very little of my friends. Mostly only in passing, in the late morning, as I rushed to the dock to meet Leonidas, my twenty-two-year-old boyfriend whom I met at a beach party at 4:00 AM, after everyone else had gone home. They waved to me and sometimes, reaching a hand into a stroller, helped their babies wave, too.
“Your turn,” my mother told me back at the house.
“I’ve got plenty of time,” I said, grabbing my towel. “American women marry later. Not one of my friends back home is married.” I zipped up my bag and skipped off to meet my new beau.
Leonidas had his own boat, or his father did. Having just graduated from college, he’d borrowed it for the summer, planning to tool around the islands while he figured out what he wanted to do. The boat wasn’t very big, but it had a small cabin underneath where he could sleep a
nd keep his fishing equipment and a cooler of ouzo and beer. Most mornings, I’d say goodbye to my parents and go out on the water with him. Feeling shaky and hungover from the previous night, I was always eager to see him, to share a small bottle of ouzo, to feel the wind and breathe the sea air.
The trick was not to drink too much, but just enough to take the edge off of last night. It was difficult to stop though, and what began as just one often turned into too many, turned into a long afternoon followed by another long night. Sometimes my parents would be asleep when I got home. Other times, they’d be up, waiting.
“It’s 6:00 AM!” my mother would yell, opening the door before I could turn the key. I’d dive past them to the stairs, grab the banister and try to steady myself, holding my breath so they wouldn’t smell the alcohol on it. “I’m twenty-nine years old. I’m a grown-up!” I’d say defiantly. “Exactly!” my father yelled.
The wind was blowing and the sky was clear, the mountains crisp along the coast as we motored past. Leonidas asked me what I was so worried about. It was noon. I had told my mother I’d be back for lunch and we were nowhere near home.
Earlier, Leonidas had passed unexpectedly in front of my parents’ house. He’d cut the motor and let down the ladder. My parents were on shore when I waved to them, before we sped away. We were only going over to the next village, he said. We’d be back within the hour.
But it was noon now, and we’d been gone two hours already and were still at least two hours from home.
“It’s summer,” Leonidas reminded me. “You have plenty of time.”
“Yes, but my parents will worry.”
“You’re not a child, Iris. You can do whatever you want.”
“I don’t like to make them worry,” I said, looking down at my drink.
He shrugged. “I like my time,” he said, leaning back against the boat as it rocked gently beneath us. We’d stopped in a cove for a quick swim. He put his arm around me, his young arm, and said, “What are you so scared of?”
My eyes filled with tears. He wiped one away and smiled. It was a beautiful day. “The sky is clear, the sea is clean, and we are together.” He toasted his plastic cup to mine. I took a sip of my ouzo and then another and then another, and with each my heartbeat seemed to slow, with each I smiled a little more. The hurrying thoughts, with every sip, drifted further away. I looked up at the clear blue sky where he’d pointed, and then down at the clean blue sea. Ignoring the horrible ticking in my chest, I jumped in.
I stayed in Greece for all of August and flew home on the first of September. Waiting on line at customs back in New York, I checked my voicemail, having kept my phone off the whole time I was gone.
There was a message from May: “I’m engaged!”
3
At the beginning of Speak, Memory, Nabokov describes a friend’s anxiety over the thought, inspired by a home movie, of the world before he came into it. The film, shot just before he was born, shows an empty pram, bought in anticipation of his birth, which Nabokov’s friend likens to a coffin. It frames his non-existence, he explains. And he fears un-birth the way many more commonly fear death. Nabokov acknowledges the strange truth at the heart of his friend’s anxiety by describing every life as book-ended by an abyss, making before and after, birth and death, essentially the same occasion.
I thought about Nabokov while I searched my pockets for a tissue and the customs officer stamped my passport. I thought about my upcoming birthday, my thirtieth. I thought about Martin’s phone call on my twenty-fifth four and a half years earlier, about the bitter birthdays he told me to expect. I readdressed the question his warning implied: Is a birthday an occasion for celebration or mourning? I replaced the word birthday with “May’s wedding,” and found myself staring directly into Nabokov’s abyss.
2
The room began to spin, the whole world was spinning, and I realized with a start that it wasn’t just beginning, but that I was only now noticing.
“I have plenty of time, Mom.”
“The world will wait for us,” Leonidas said with a smile, after cutting the engine and handing me a drink.
“The rotation of the Earth,” I’d told The Captain, after falling down in front of the fountain in Atlantic City.
He gave me a hand to help me off the floor. “You were sitting still!” he said. “Who loses their balance when they’re sitting still?” he laughed.
“The world,” I explained, brushing myself off, “moved without me.”
Standing before the baggage carousel, I saw May climbing up onto one of our rolling chairs, reaching to close the top window shutter, the wheels slipping beneath her, her eyes going wide as she fell backward . . . crashed through the glass. The carousel turned and turned.
“Congratulations!” I exploded, as soon as she picked up. I’d called from the taxi on my way home from the airport. “Tell me everything!”
She told me how he proposed. She told me the wedding would be in the spring.
“That’s so great,” I gushed, before stammering to a halt. “So how does your fiancé feel about the sleeping arrangements? About our sharing a bedroom? Have you told him yet, or shall I?”
May laughed and said she’d almost forgotten. Then she gave me his phone number and said, “Pretend you’re me.”
1
In bed, back in my apartment, I lay awake for a long time.
I blink, straining to see, but the daubs of paint are giant, the branches great arms blocking my eyes. Inside the big picture, it is dark, it is night, I am in a clear plastic forest, the fog is dense, and I am lost. I turn onto my side, onto my back. I pick up where I left off:
Too late to be Hemingway . . . too late to be Capote . . . too late to be Salinger. But I could still be Isak Dinesen . . . I could still be Proust—Proust, the life-long dilettante, deciding one night out of nowhere, to leave the party early. Didn’t he also have a lot of catching up to do? What did Dante do when he found himself lost? He wrote about a time that must have been hell for him; he called it a comedy. And once he set it all down—his friends, his enemies, his heroes, his loves—he wrote himself out.
OVERTURE
FOR A LONG time I used to go to bed late. Sometimes I never went to bed at all but just drank until I passed out, my eyes closing so quickly that I had not even time to say to myself: I should take off my shoes. And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to the bathroom would wake me. I would make as if to put away the bottle which I imagined was still in my hands, and to turn out the light; “I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book.”
It’s 10:00 PM in New York. I’m in bed; I’m finally reading Swann’s Way. Every night I go to sleep early, rising at the hour I used to turn in. Yesterday, at 6:00 AM, I walked over to the Hudson River and saw a cluster of twenty-somethings, drunk, laughing, returning home at the end of their night. They didn’t see me though. It was as if I were looking through a two-way mirror; the light shines from one side and looking through you can see the past, but when you try to look from the other, into the future, all you see is yourself reflected in the present. Every morning, I wake early. The days race by and I chase them into the night—there’s barely enough time.
In my apartment on Tenth Street, the furnace burns at all hours. Before I go to bed, I open the windows to move the heat around; the blare of horns from the traffic below swirls up. I shut my eyes and for a few minutes, before I fall asleep, I think: I could be anywhere. Am I in bed on West Tenth Street or with Martin on the Upper East Side? Am I in Murray Hill in my apartment over the Midtown Tunnel or ten feet up off the ground in Hell’s Kitchen, with May and Felix in the next room, May in the next bed? What is my book about? A song from one of the cars stalled at a traffic light comes through the window, some laughter, the sound of two girls talking, searching for the address of a party. How does it begin?
The furnace sputters and clangs all through the rooms, all through the building, and all at once, I am reminded of the old place:
My first apartment, its furniture, how it always rained in the bathroom, how the mice scratched in the walls at night, how the kitchen was a dark continent and our couch, an island bluff. How we sat together the last summer before graduation underlining our instruction manuals, snapping photos of each other in our Thursday costumes as if to catch our lives mid-blur. How our couch was an island like Manhattan, to which we’d both decamped separately at eighteen, and where we found each other, laughing, spinning the cap over a bottle of smoke, half believing that we would always be young, half afraid that we would never grow up. I think about our buckling couch, our youth, and the beach eroding on all sides. I think about the feel of its cushions, held up by so many lost things. Our couch—not an island at all, but just a raft—on top of which, for a few years, we floated.
1
The answer I am looking for is that he puts out his eyes with Jocasta’s dress pins. He puts out his eyes or he blinds himself is also acceptable.
2
Names of Women Jack and Larry Met at The Regal Beagle: Olga, Diane, Tanya, Shelly, Sheila, Audrey, Kate, Sally, Francesca, Linda, Agnes, Lauren, Lucy, Lydia, Betty, Beatrice, Marsha, Mandy, Sandy, Lucia, Allison, Henrietta, Shannon, Sharon, Beatrice, Claudine, Christine, Sherri, Simone, Cynthia, Susan, Madeline, Meghan, Felecia, Charlotte, Jennifer, Leigh, Samantha, Terry, Clarice, Dana, Carrie, Karen, Anna, Jane, Beth, Lulu.
Iris Has Free Time