Iris Has Free Time

by Iris Smyles

  My point is, things happen when you drink, not all of them good, but at least something is happening. And sure, there’s the downside— regularly losing my wallet and gloves, collecting bruises from renegade lampposts, suffering the occasional loss of dignity. But there’s an upshot, too—being brave and fabulous for the while I’m still standing, being hailed a woman of action before I fall down.

  The Greeks defined tragedy as the keen irony of a situation in which the good cannot be extricated from the bad. If you were Oedipus, for example, what would you have done differently? In the glorious despair-filled aftermath of a night out, I often ask myself this very question. Might things have turned out better if I hadn’t drunk so much? But then, who am I to question fate? Some people are just built for tragedy.

  I still don’t know why Caroline chose me, of all the people we met back then, to hang on to. She since claims it was my legwarmers and the way I sang The Rolling Stones that first night, just before I passed out—I’d charmed her. But who knows? Perhaps she was just vicariously enjoying my drunkenness the way I was vicariously enjoying her sobriety. Whatever the reason, we became pretty close pretty quick. And then she moved away.

  Six months ago her grandfather died. There was a big memorial service at the school, for which Caroline flew in. And then a week later, her grandmother decided to sell the duplex. It was too big for her to live there alone.

  A few weeks ago The Captain called me because, he said, he needed help cleaning out the liquor cabinet. They were showing the apartment the next day and there was a lot of work to do since, naturally, his grandmother wouldn’t be moving the bottles to her new place.

  “You did the right thing by calling me,” I told him solemnly. “I’ll be right over.”

  I’d been to the apartment before, visiting Caroline when she’d stayed there between apartments of her own. We’d sat by the window in her grandfather’s office, while Caroline Googled this fat comedian from SNL on whom I’d developed a crush. He was part of our circle and at the last karaoke party, Caroline told me, he had joked about wanting to fist her. She was disgusted and didn’t find him funny at all.

  “Why didn’t he say that to me?” I said jealously. “I would have said something witty like, ‘Hey, no, don’t fist me. That’s gross! Ahhhh,’” I trailed off miserably. It is my curse to lose any sense of humor I might have whenever I’m around someone I like.

  “A zinger,” she said. “Anyway, it wasn’t funny!”

  I lowered my head.

  “Not you. Him! He was trying to be funny, but it was just gross. He was completely wasted, too.”

  “He must have to drink so much to get drunk,” I said dreamily. “He’s huge!” I sighed, impressed by his alcoholism. “What commitment!”

  “He laughs at his own jokes and they’re not even funny. Look,” she said, typing a new search.

  I looked, as if into a crystal ball. The Internet was bewildering to me then. Even though I was finishing college and we were in the midst of the dot-com boom, I had managed to remain wholly ignorant of it all. I’d only just started emailing and did it but once a week, sending chatty notes to Emily, my former boss from The New Yorker. I’d stop at the NYU computer lab between classes and email her about my dating adventures, telling her how I’d run into Field—a handsome, preppie twenty-five-year-old with floppy hair who worked at The New Yorker—how I’d started “playing the Field.”

  We’d only gone on two dates actually: Both times he took me to dinner at the Afghan Kebab House and asked me if I wanted to have children. After dinner, both times, I took him to a local dive bar where I happened to know all the regulars. “Teeth,” one of the old drunks, decided to sit down and share a pitcher with us, both times—had it been only the one time it might have been charming, but I think the second time clinched it for Field and made him not call me for a third kebab. “Though I’m not toothless myself, I have a lot of toothless friends, so I think the general impression I gave was of toothlessness all the same,” I’d typed in an email to Emily. “By the way, I ran into Gibb at the Union Square Barnes & Noble the other day. Did he tell you? He told me about your new intern and I asked if Jed had started dating her, too. He said he didn’t know Jed and I broke up and I said, ‘I like to think of him as just part of the job.’ Anyway, how’s your love life? Any new developments since I left?”

  “Look! There are all these message boards about how bad a comedian he is,” Caroline went on.

  “Well, I think he’s funny. And anyway, it’s not about his talent. It’s about his body! If there were any justice, he’d win People’s sexiest-manalive contest. We should campaign for him. He’s romantic, too, you know. He bought me five dozen roses from that rose seller in the diner after karaoke last week. He just said, ‘how much for all of them?’”

  Caroline laughed, and I began singing the theme song to The Love Boat, replacing the title phrase with “The Love Barge.” “Do you think he likes me?” I asked her again, feeling simultaneously excited and miserable.

  Their grandparents’ apartment was in one of those fine old buildings with a manual wood and brass elevator and a man employed full time just to operate it. Thirty-five minutes after The Captain called requesting my help with the liquor, I was sitting on an embroidered, cushioned bench at the back of that little wooden box as the uniformed elevator man took me up.

  “Captain!” I said, kissing his check when he opened the door. He was wearing his captain’s hat again. I handed him my coat and, rolling up my sleeves, said, “Take me to the patient.”

  He led me to the full liquor cabinet next to the dining room.

  “This looks pretty serious,” I said. “I’ll have to get started right away. Glasses!” I commanded, like a doctor needing forceps.

  I fixed whiskeys for both of us, and he cued up some music on his computer. The apartment was bright, with windows on both sides, a vaulted ceiling in the living room, and a beautiful staircase with a carved wooden banister that led to a second-floor balcony that wrapped around and overlooked the living room. Large oil portraits of family members covered the walls; The Captain’s grandmother had painted them. One was an eleven-year-old Caroline in an Easter dress. We took our drinks into the library, which was extensive, and I happily browsed his grandparents’ collection, pointing out some of my favorites, “Cheever and Maxwell and Barthelme—my big loves.”

  “I never read,” The Captain said. “I just can’t get into it,” he told me, and I told him he probably just hadn’t found the right book yet, that reading is a lot like falling in love, that timing is everything. “The right book at the right time is paramount.” The Captain said he’d never been in love. I suggested Catch-22, and we drank some more.

  Then, for lack of anything better to do, I suggested we read aloud to each other. He chose some poems at random, some Ogden Nash verses, and we brought our drinks and cigarettes over to one of the windows. When it was my turn, I chose a short story of Raymond Carver’s called, “Nobody Said Anything.” We drank more.

  “Can you play the piano?” I asked, motioning toward the grand in the next room. He couldn’t, and I couldn’t, which I said made us perfectly suited to play together. I couldn’t believe he didn’t at least know “Heart and Soul,” so I taught him the notes and we practiced for a while, switching back and forth on the upper and lower registers. We drank more.

  Then we went upstairs to sit on the second-floor gallery. Our drinks in hand, we sat on the carpeted floor with our backs against the banister and faced the window that began a foot above our heads. The sky was an implacable white. We talked about his feelings about college. Like maybe he was missing out. How the applications were too long though. He quoted lines he liked from the Carver story I’d read—“George is an asshole,” he laughed. He told me about how he was tired all the time, how he’d just woken up when I arrived actually, how he’d gotten in the habit of staying awake all night and sleeping through most of the day. How his grandmother said it wasn’t good for
him. How the doorman called him a vampire. We drank more.

  I made fun of his captain’s hat. He shrugged and said he liked it. Then he told me that the sea was a difficult mistress and an ambivalent lover. That she might destroy you if you didn’t respect her. That she offered great gifts along with great peril. That an experienced seaman had to be vigilant and keen. He said he’d heard about it in a song. “It’s called, ‘Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl.’ I think you have it on Felix’s Cool Hits Volume IV,” he said.

  I swished and spun around the upper floor balcony and down the steps to refill our drinks—ice, scotch—and then I swished back. The Captain went to one bathroom, I went to another. He cued up some songs on his computer. “What’s the name of that song that goes, Shalalala?” I danced to show him what I meant. He made a few guesses, and we went upstairs again.

  We sat Indian style facing each other, and I told him I was worried, that I wanted so badly to write something really great. That my parents were getting older. That I can’t seem to finish anything. That I’m running out of time. I turned to rest my back against the banister and cried because the view from the window was so beautiful. The tops of the buildings across the street, the gilded cornices, the terrible sky! I told him how I felt about Mallarmé and Baudelaire. About his description of a man weeping at the foot of a statue in a public park. We drank some more.

  He agreed that the sky was beautiful. I noted how it had gone white as if it were concealing something, “as if it were saying, ‘This is not for you; turn your eyes upon something else!’” The clouds were so many that you couldn’t even tell they were clouds anymore. I apologized for my tears. “I guess it’s the booze,” I said.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked him.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked me.

  “I have class in an hour,” I said. I was drunk. I stood up and hugged him and said I had to go.

  A few weeks ago Caroline was in town visiting from Geneva—she’s moved again—when she decided to throw a birthday dinner for her grandmother. Caroline and The Captain invited five of their friends including Caroline’s new suitor, an Englishman living in New York whom she’s been chatting with online, who also likes The Smiths. I bought a fancy cake from a bakery near my house and felt very grown-up to be buying a cake and attending a dinner party.

  Caroline had cooked dinner, and we all sat around the large wooden dining room table and drank wine, except for Caroline who drank Coca-Cola. Their grandmother smiled and said very little except for how lovely the dinner and cake was. We were having a great time, all of us. Then I suggested The Captain and I play the piano for everyone. Their grandmother expressed surprise. She didn’t know The Captain could play.

  “I taught him,” I said proudly. “Let’s show them, Captain!”

  We went over to the piano and played our song. After, I scolded The Captain for not practicing more regularly. “You promised you’d practice!” I told him. The Englishman came over and took my place to play alongside The Captain, and then we all retired to the living room for brandy and Coca-Cola. Their grandmother fell asleep in an exquisitely carved chair, and Caroline’s Internet boyfriend brought out a pack of cards. In the kitchen, we began gambling peanut shells and drinking whiskey, before finally we wrapped that up, too, and took off downtown to go to Lex’s ’80s party, which always seems to be happening whenever we get together—Thursday, wouldn’t you know. Then it was 4:00 AM, and old times’ sake hit us again, so Caroline, The Captain, Lex, and I—the Englishman had disappeared—piled into Lex’s Buick and drove down to Atlantic City.

  Sometimes I wonder how it is that we can be so young and yet find so many occasions to dedicate to old times?

  We sipped our after-dinner martinis and The Captain said, “I love this song,” and then I asked The Captain if he was gay. He asked why I thought he was gay, and I explained my theory that “all men are gay and that the only reason they have sex with women is to make more men. It’s scientific! Also, you haven’t tried to have sex with me.”

  “I did try!” he said. “Last week, and you said no!”

  “I was sleeping.”

  “So how does that make me gay?” he countered.

  “Well, don’t get all bent out of shape about it,” I said. “I was just theorizing.”

  Last week we almost had sex. It was late—he’d come back to my place after Lex’s party—and we’d run out of beer. I began insisting that he go to the deli and get some, but he didn’t want to. Then I said we should have sex. Because it was normal for two people to do that if they were sleeping in the same bed, and anyway, didn’t he like me?

  He said he did like me, but that he didn’t have any condoms. I reminded him that the deli had condoms and also six-packs, and some bacon while you’re there—“I’m starving!” I gave him my keys to let himself back in, but by the time he returned I’d fallen asleep, and when he woke me up I told him the mood had passed. “Let’s just go to sleep, Captain,” I said.

  The next morning he complained of my sending him out to buy condoms and then being too tired. I complained that I shouldn’t have had to talk him into having sex with me in the first place, and then I pretended I was insulted until he apologized. After we made up, we went to breakfast and ate French toast and eggs Benedict. Then The Captain came back to my apartment and took a nap on my couch while I sat at my computer and tried to write a short story.

  I worked a bit on the story and then got stuck and decided to update my blog instead:

  “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” So begins Nabokov’s, Speak, Memory. My own mornings begin similarly. The light streaks through my window; I come to. Immediately, my thoughts return to last night. I am like Nabokov peering into the dark recesses of time. Peering into my blackout, I invoke the muse—“Speak, Memory!” How did I get home last night? Was my karaoke performance received well? Did I leave my credit card at the bar, and if so, which bar? Shall I call the bar or the credit card company first?

  Posted by Iris at 1:47 pm, 0 comments

  When The Captain woke up, I told him he looked creepy when he slept, that his eyes stayed open a little, like a snake’s, and then I asked him if he wanted to hear what I was working on. I told him I was writing a short story about him. It took me a second to open the document. Then I read:

  The Captain was called The Captain because he wore a captain’s hat during a game of gin rummy at his grandmother’s house.

  “No one’s ever written a story about me before,” he said. “What’s it about?”

  “I’m not sure. That’s all I have so far.” I looked at the lines for a while, added a comma, then deleted a comma, and then saved the document and filed it away in a folder with five or six other stories I’d started and abandoned. “I’m going to call it, “The Bored and Feckless,” I said. “It’s an homage to Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned.”

  He shrugged, “I don’t know it,” and I continued thinking carefully about my story while setting up the backgammon board.

  We played a few rounds and then went to the liquor store to buy a new jug of wine, this really cheap Chablis, which tastes pretty horrible but is not so bad if you drink it with a lot of ice. Then we started playing backgammon again and before we knew it, it was dark and time to go out. I tried on a few different outfits and asked him what he thought of each.

  He played with his cigarettes, shrugged and said, “I don’t know.”

  Then we went to Lex’s ’80s party because it was Thursday again, which was weird because it was Thursday only the night before.

  You ever notice how most of your childhood memories seem all to have occurred at around the same time? Like in every story you tell about your childhood, when asked to recall how old you were, you find you were almost always ten years old? I feel that way about my twenties, like for the whole of it so far, it’s almost always been Thursday night.
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  When we got back to my place at the end of that Thursday, I offered to give The Captain a haircut. He’d been saying earlier that he needed one, and so I said that I ought to be the one to do it. At first he wouldn’t let me—“Absolutely not!” he said. But eventually—it took a half hour to convince him I knew what I was doing even though I didn’t—I wore him down.

  I was straddling him on the couch, clipping at one side just above his ear with a pair of large kitchen shears, when I started laughing and he made me stop.

  “Alright, that’s enough.”

  “I’m laughing because it looks so good!” I said, laying the clippings carefully on the bookcase next to us.

  Then the Captain said he was hungry, so I hopped off and went to the kitchen and made him a snack that he refused to eat.

  “Grilled Cheese with light bulb,” I said, setting the plate down on my coffee table.

  Then we decided to practice our kissing awhile. We wouldn’t really be kissing, I explained. We would be “kissing in quotes. Like when actors have love scenes in movies,” I said. “It doesn’t count as second base when they go to second base on film, because they’re just acting,” I told him authoritatively. I wanted to experiment with some new techniques, I said, like I’d been doing lately with my cooking.

  So we started practicing. I had names for all my kisses. “The windmill!” I’d say, introducing each. And then he’d rate them. “The tractor!” “The warped mirror!” “This one’s called ‘the discarded pizza topping.’ You’ll see why!”

  “Captain?” I said, looking at him over our second round of after-dinner martinis.

  “Yes, Iris,” he said lethargically, pale as ever.

  I didn’t actually have anything to say. I was just having one of those bottle-neck moments when you feel a lot or think a lot and want to express a lot, but don’t know what any of that lot is, so you just say whatever pops into your head first. “Do you know any good jokes?”