Iris Has Free Time

by Iris Smyles

  That said, I don’t think he really wanted to. Though he’d pursued me in the beginning, I didn’t know how to hold the interest of a veteran playboy of his caliber. He’d had hundreds of “relationships,” while I’d had two. Playing aloof at first, I managed for a while to excite his curiosity—I’d stand near him at the bar and then talk to someone else. But then, once I got him close, I let down my guard, began looking at him too often and too long, and the whole dynamic between us quickly shifted. He knew he had me, which was not nearly as exciting as wanting me.

  3

  We had sex for the first time in a suite at the Sands Casino, then ordered cheeseburgers from room service and went down to the floor to gamble.

  After, things cooled down almost immediately. I was disappointed, but found a broken heart was not so hard to bear, provided you didn’t know it was broken until after it had been fixed. Lex let me down easy by skillfully not bothering to let me down at all. Instead, he simply began referring to the fact of our friendship, as if from the start there had been nothing more. Since nothing was changing, nothing need change, was the message—no need to stop sleeping together. And because he was older, because he knew everything, I figured he must know about this, too. Not wanting to appear foolish, I didn’t ask any questions but just rushed to adjust my perspective to his.

  And I was happy to be his friend finally. That I was the one he talked to about girls made me feel special. More special than if we’d been dating, because if we’d been dating, I’d be his adversary, not his confidante. When you’re dating, we agreed, during one of our marathon phone calls, you’re basically just strangers trying to trick each other, opponents trying to win. Dating, we decided, is more about what you don’t share than what you do. Lex and I, on the other hand, that summer, shared everything.

  Including our secret. Because Lex had a reputation for seducing young girls—a habit I teased him for, as if identifying the others proved I was not one of them—I made him promise not to tell anyone about us. “Wouldn’t it be fun to keep you and me a secret?” I whispered feverishly, after our first kiss. With nothing to gain from publicizing our relationship, Lex pulled me close, agreeing it would make for a terrific time.

  Because of all this then, because I really liked Lex and was afraid of anyone finding out, I made jokes about him, told my friend Caroline that his close-cut hair made his head look like it was made of felt, told her that I wanted to stick felt animals on it and felt continents, called him “felt-head.”

  And catching sight of him scowling at karaoke one night, annoyed as usual, this time because his song hadn’t come up yet, I tapped Caroline on the shoulder and pointed. “Look, the denim gargoyle!” And when I spied him flirting with yet another young girl at the bar, I’d say, look how old and sad Lex is, how pathetic his chasing girls half his age. I’d remark how he was getting older but not growing up, how ten years from now he’d be wearing the same Converse sneakers and Eddie Grant T-shirt and whispering the same words he was whispering just then to someone else.

  4

  That August, as I did every summer, I left for Greece to visit my family. Day after day, I’d lie on the beach, sweating under the sun with my eyes closed, my face covered by a straw hat, imagining what it might be like were Lex to visit. I’d pick him up from the airport in our old limping Mercedes, and after passing through the brush and pulling into our gravel driveway, presided over by clay replicas of Grecian statues, I’d introduce him to my parents.

  My father wouldn’t like him at first. He’d be put off by his tattoos and would hate him as a matter of course—clearly a disc jockey wasn’t good enough for his only daughter. But then, convinced by the strength of Lex’s love for me, my father’s disapproval would melt away and the two men would eventually shake hands and laugh. Looking out at the sea in front of our house, they’d go on talking wisely about life, about the future, about Lex’s with me, both of them agreeing solemnly that I ought to be treated with care.

  When I returned to New York a month later, Lex finally confessed his love. For that girl—he pointed her out. The girl he loved was seventeen, a soon-to-be senior in high school, and because of her age, because she had school the next morning, harder to get than I ever could be. Lex had mentioned his crush on her before I left, but I had assumed it was like his crush on so many others.

  It didn’t bother me when he’d spoken about them or her, because they were passing fancies, while I was the one that stuck. Because his feelings for me ran so much deeper, I had been promoted from crush to best friend. I understood: Lex was a lifelong playboy who could never love only one girl. But as he enumerated all the ways in which she was different from the rest, I realized I had understood nothing. He just didn’t love me.

  5

  In autumn I began dating someone, too. It was the start of my senior year at NYU, and I had taken an internship at The New Yorker where I met Jed, with whom I thought I was falling in love (again), and about whom I began, in detail, to tell Lex.

  Lex was much less receptive to discussions of my relationships than he had been about his. Indeed, the sophisticatedly comprehensive terms of our friendship, which had always included frank conversations about his intrigues, seemed to come apart on the occasion that I had my own. “I think I’m falling in love,” I told him, on the drive down to Atlantic City. Lex said Jed sounded like a loser, popped a cassette into the stereo, and turned up the volume.

  Since Lex dropped so much money in the casinos, he was regularly sent comps to all sorts of casino events. And since his girlfriend couldn’t go on account of her having school in the morning, Lex regularly took me with him. Together we saw Don Rickles, Tony Danza Live! and watched Bob Dylan from the comfort of our own private booth.

  We’d get a big suite, order milkshakes and grilled cheese sandwiches and French fries to eat in our room, before going downstairs to gamble before the show. “What do the Caribbeans know about poker?” I said supportively, after he lost a few hands. We moved on to the roulette table, his favorite, where he sometimes asked me to pick his numbers.

  I’d think hard about what numbers were important to me. “Sixteen,” I’d say, because I had been that age once, and according to the Sinatra song I’d sometimes sing at karaoke, “It was a very good year.” Or I’d calculate the difference of years between us: “Fifteen!” Or I’d choose the age at which I wanted to be married: “Thirty! No, twenty-eight . . . I’m not sure.” “Fourteen!”—how old I was for my first kiss. Or I’d think hard and choose a number based purely on a feeling. Why not? It was the same way I chose my boyfriends. I’d close my eyes tightly and ask myself, “Which number do I love?”

  After the show, Lex would continue gambling and I’d sit beside him happily, playing with his chips, ordering screwdrivers from the Caesar’s Palace waitresses clad in their short white gold-trimmed skirts. The drinks were free, but Lex would slip me chips to tip them. Smoking my cigarettes and cheering him on, I’d pray for him to win so the fun could continue, so I could be hailed as his good luck charm. On the other side of that prayer was the fear that he’d lose and, hating me by association, would scowl as he asked me to pay for our chicken tenders at the Burger King near the highway leading back to New York.

  It was on one of these trips to Atlantic City that I first met Justin, Shawn, and Richie. Lex and I were on the boardwalk on our way to the beach one Saturday morning when Richie and his model girlfriend flew past us on a rickshaw. They stopped after a few feet, having recognized Lex. They were going to see Stevie Wonder that night, Richie said.

  “Cool. We’re going to the Alfonso Ribeiro convention,” I interjected.

  “This is Iris,” Lex said. “She’s really into Silver Spoons.”

  I smiled and offered my hand.

  Later that night, they found us at the roulette table. Wearing anti-wack baggy pants and baseball caps pulled low in order to fend off the bright glare of wackness in others, they approached with their entourage of models in tow. They’d jus
t come from the Wonder show they said, frowning. “It was incredible.”

  “Hi,” I said, brightly.

  Justin began telling Lex about all the big names they’d met backstage and went on to show him the hundred-dollar bills he’d gotten each music legend to autograph. I stood on my tiptoes to see over their shoulders, to see the fan of ten or so hundreds he’d ruined with celebrity signatures.

  “But now you can’t use them.”

  Justin turned and ran his eyes over me quickly.

  “You should have gotten a Wite-Out pen,” I continued, “and asked them to sign some pennies.”

  No one but Lex said anything to me for the rest of the night.

  6

  If an internship is a way of getting one’s foot in the door, I used mine to wedge my whole body in before passing out drunk inside.

  Often, after discovering I’d locked myself out of my apartment, I went to the new Condé Nast building in Times Square, where The New Yorker’s offices had just moved, and where I’d been given my very own electronic key. I knew better than to waste another half hour knocking on my apartment door. My roommate May was inside, but in her deep, pill-induced sleep (her father, a doctor, mailed her a pharmaceutical care package every month), she never heard my knocks.

  The first time this happened, I tried crashing in the lobby of the nearby Holiday Inn. I had just begun to fall asleep when a security guard, rousing me, informed me I had to leave. I explained that I lived next door, that I’d locked myself out, but he gave me the boot anyway, confusing my winter jacket with its fashion-statement safety pins for the shabby coverings of a teenage-runaway-hooker.

  I went next into a nearby twenty-four-hour diner, where I slept upright with a chicken finger in my hand. The waiters said I could stay only so long as I was eating, which is why at 5:00 AM, having accidentally loosened my grip on the chicken finger—it fell to the floor; the waiters served me the bill—I was forced to make my way to 4 Times Square.

  Wandering into the cartoon lounge—where Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor, met with the magazine’s regular contributors every Tuesday—I slipped off my shoes, stretched out on the sofa, and settled in for a brief nap.

  Responsible to a fault, I first left a note on Jed’s desk (he was editorial assistant to the photo editor), requesting he wake me in time for work. And in case Jed came in late, I also left a note for Emily.

  Emily was the assistant to Bob Mankoff, and I was the assistant to Emily, who seemed to like me despite my poor work performance. I was no good as an assistant but made a wonderful office-friend, I decided. “I’m trying to make taffeta work-appropriate,” I told her, smoothing the ruffles on my dress—it was the morning after Lex’s Bar Mitzvah theme party. “I’m exhausted,” I confessed. “I was up all night doing the Horah.”

  Taking my cues from Charles Bukowski and various romantic comedies in which career girls discuss their love lives at the watercooler, I spent most of the workday nursing a hangover and regaling Emily of my adventures with the men in the office, specifically Jed before he became my boyfriend.

  I first met Jed in the copy room. He said, “Hi,” and I jumped nervously because I’d been busy copying my own cartoons for my Naked Woman zine instead of whatever it was I was supposed to be doing. I shook his hand and scuttled away. Then I ran into him again in the magazine’s archives while I was retrieving old cartoons to photocopy for my personal scrapbook. His hello startled me just as it had the first time, and I raced back to my cubicle. The next time he caught up with me was in the kitchen; I was wedged between the refrigerator and the coffee machine, trying inconspicuously to transfer the contents of a Colt 45 into a paper cup. He said, “Hi,” and I began to sweat profusely, terrified the jig was up, when he asked me out. I said okay just to get him off my back, finished pouring my “coffee,” and left to hand out the faxes.

  Later that day, Emily charged me with the difficult task of handwriting the addresses on a whole pile of outgoing mail. As I drank more “coffee,” my voice grew louder and my handwriting larger and loopier. After laughing at my description of Jed’s “proposal” in the kitchen earlier, she gently suggested that I write a little smaller.

  “Perhaps you could write the address on only the middle of the envelope,” she said sweetly, “rather than using all 8 x 11 inches.”

  “No problem!” I said, scrutinizing her envelope, the one she’d just addressed to serve as a model. It looked much different then my previous twenty-five, which, when I looked again, well resembled the crumpled bar napkins ruined with poems that always turned up in purse and pocket after a night out. “If that’s how you like it,” I said, as if it were a discrepancy in taste and not sanity.

  7

  Most students take on internships as a means of gaining professional experience while making a good impression on a prospective boss, hoping to leave with the promise of a future job, if not a recommendation for a comparable job elsewhere. During my brief time at The New Yorker, I was careful to aquire no new skills and stealthily avoided all of my superiors, behaving instead as if I were crashing a party.

  Though I’d worked really hard to get my internship at The New Yorker, I’m not sure what my purpose was once I actually got there. I had no interest in publishing, really. It just seemed like a cool place to hang out for a semester, an interesting alternative to another literature or philosophy class, maybe a new spot to meet guys.

  Though I thought often about the future—spinning fantasies, my favorite pastime—it was never something I planned. I would be a great writer, a famous actress, a cartoonist on the side.... I didn’t need to worry about how, because destiny would take care of that for me. “Fate is character,” the ancient Greeks said, and people were always remarking on what a character I was.

  In the meantime, I enjoyed drawing cartoons—what I did in class while everyone else took notes—so I figured the cartoon department would be a fun place to kill time. I did not try to get the attention of Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor who, had he liked me, might have offered me a job upon graduation, or at least offered to glance at my cartoons. Instead, I avoided him.

  Though he seemed a genial man, he was solid while I was all shadow. And when he entered the room, it was as if someone had cut in front of the light or removed the screen on which I had been casting my fabulous sillhouette. He’d come in, and my illusions would vanish, my useless hands curling into knots at my sides. Reduced to who I was, I was nothing like who I would be. I was not great, not noteworthy. I was just Iris, the shy intern, sneaking around the office in gold lamé.

  When not drinking or cavorting in nightclubs and at parties, my self-esteem—so prodigious, so grand—all but evaporated. Indeed, my daytime self—the one who’d made it home the night before, got dressed in the morning, and was not still drunk—stood in such stark contrast to my nightlife persona that one afternoon, going up the elevator at 4 Times Square, an employee from one of the women’s magazines could not stop staring. “Excuse me,” she said at last, “but do you know you have an evil twin running around Manhattan singing karaoke?”

  I blushed violently before I managed to get out, “Actually, that’s me. I’m my evil twin.”

  III

  1

  All of this is why, freshly graduated from college a year later, applying to The New Yorker was not even a consideration. What should I do? I asked myself, during my long walk following the disastrous job fair. I wanted to be a writer. Of that I was certain. But in the meantime, I needed a job.

  I did briefly consider becoming a movie star to support myself. I had met enough of them to know it couldn’t be that hard. And I still had the five hundred headshots I’d had printed in my sophomore year of college just before I dropped out of acting school. But ultimately, I decided against it. First, I liked my privacy too much to put it on sale the way an actor must. Projecting myself into a future filled with screaming fans and cold French fries (at restaurants, they’d drop by, insisting I pose for a “quick” photo); ca
r chases with paparazzi; secret affairs with my driver/bodyguard/ping-pong partner/masseur/amanuensis; I saw great sadness behind my sunglass-covered eyes, a great weariness of spirit that even my heavily insured smile could not mask. I saw bottle upon bottle of prescription painkillers mixed up in my purse. I saw endless afternoons of shoplifting and Pilates; it wasn’t a life I wanted.

  Plus, there were no roles I really wanted to play. What I had disliked most about acting, during my brief time studying it—aside from the other actors, the directors, the set designers, the composers, the playwrights, the stage-hands, the ushers, the box office salesmen, the audiences, the critics, and the drafty theaters themselves—was always having to play someone else. I didn’t want to be a chameleon, but a great personality photographed in black and white, my face framed by long thin fingers wilting gracefully around a cigarette, my hair hidden beneath a marvelous silk turban, my cruel lips—what are cruel lips? I’m always reading novels about characters who have them—on the verge of some pronouncement as quotable as inscrutable: “Where people go wrong is when they sell their soul to the devil; leasing is the thing. This way you’ll have a steady stream of income pouring in annually and can regularly renegotiate a competitive price based on market fluctuations.” To transform, yes. But into myself! Whoever that was.

  And then, after being turned away from an open call for extra work in a Russell Crowe film, I realized I was just too sensitive a creature to handle so much rejection—one. As a result, the other 499 headshots remain untouched in a tightly packed box on a high shelf all the way in the back of my closet. On the same shelf, incidentally, as my stock of unsold T-shirts.

  2

  To begin, I had a few hundred printed at a silk-screen lab downtown where a number of the workers said they absolutely loved my “Crapola” baby-T. “It’s a conversation starter,” one noted. Indeed, all my designs featured similarly charming inducements. “BRAINS” in big capital letters across the bust. “Second Base” on a form-fitting baseball jersey. “Somewhat Attractive” in a flaming script. And on a pair of black underwear—I dabbled in lingerie, too—“Bad Ass” in hot pink across the seat.