by Iris Smyles
“No,” he said. “Do you?”
I shook my head.
He looked at me and blinked. I wanted to ask him what he was thinking but you can’t ask that and expect a real answer, so I just stared at him for a moment and twirled my hair and wondered.
“Have you ever counted your freckles?” I asked.
“Should I?” he said, blushing, his freckles blending together across the bridge of his nose.
“I would think that’s something one might want to know about oneself, Captain.” Then, all of a sudden, I felt exhausted, one of the few times. “Captain?” I began.
“Yes, Iris.”
“I’m so bored of myself.” I looked down and held my breath, hoping to shape it into something meaningful before letting it go again. “Do you ever feel that way?”
“Yes.”
“Are you starting to hate me?” I asked, feeling so sick of myself, feeling even more sick of myself for having asked him that, feeling sure that he must be sick of me too, of my trying to be cute all the time, of my never stopping. But how can you get away from yourself is the thing? How not to keep getting worse?
“No,” he said. “I like you.”
I cringed. I wanted to sink into the ground. He had to be lying, or else he wasn’t lying, and then what? He was just wrong and he’d eventually figure that out, maybe any second now.
“And you’re going to be rich,” he added. “Once we get your eBay store going, you’ll be able to support me.” He paused. “Iris?” he said, imitating the way I bat my eyelashes, giving more energy to his impression of me than to what he gave to being himself.
“Yes, Captain,” I said, lethargically.
“Do you want me to hate you?”
I looked up from the table of martinis and found his eyes right on mine, looking at me, I swear, as if I were the open sea.
I changed the subject by thanking him again for all the help with the photos. He said he would work on them overnight and give them back to me all spruced up, sans bruises, in the next few days. And then he’d help me create a store on eBay and maybe a website to go with it.
We tried to think if we knew anyone with a nicer ass than mine to model the underwear, before concocting a scheme to put an ad for models on Craigslist.
“Those pictures we took in the underwear won’t do. It doesn’t look right around the ankles either,” I said. “I guess I’m getting older. My behind used to be much different, you know. Anyway, you should see my feet.”
“I have,” he said. “They’re amazing—”
“They’re amazing,” I said.
I picked up my backgammon board to put it on the floor, and all the pieces inside made a loud crashing noise. “When I dance,” I said, “I make that same noise. I’m like a maraca.” I raised my eyebrows.
The table was covered with a paper tablecloth, and I used one of the crayons the restaurant put out to begin composing a want ad for models.
“Are you ready to enter the glamorous world of high-fashion modeling?” I read aloud, as I wrote.
The Captain crossed my words out with his crayon and added some new words, which I crossed out, too, before adding some others, until we had a whole mess of scribbled lines surrounding the few on which we finally agreed: “Model wanted. No pay.”
“Do you think it will work?” I said, leaning on my hand and looking up into his eyes. I began twirling my hair like I always do when I’m trying to work something out in my head, but then let it go in order to twirl his. I was trying to twirl the uneven section I’d cut above his ear last Thursday, but the hair wasn’t long enough, so I just made circles with my finger beside his temple as if he were crazy.
The Captain didn’t answer but had that faraway look again, as if he were calculating weather conditions up ahead. Then, catching sight of something in the distance, he signaled to the waiter for another round.
CHAPTER 3
AUTUMN IN NEW YORK
How far away the stars seem, and how far
Is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “EPHEMERA”
THE CAROUSEL IN Bryant Park will soon stop spinning.
A poster at Lincoln Center says La Traviata is coming in November. Outside the Met, flags have been unfurled to announce two new exhibits: Kirchner’s Berlin Street Scenes, Van Gogh’s “Night.” Things to do in cooler temperatures.
It’s Sunday. Sheep Meadow is locked, and your wiffle bat has begun its seasonal drift toward the back of your closet. Instead of going out, you prepare hot drinks at home. Amid the sprawl of the Times and scattered sesame seeds from the morning’s bagels, you practice laziness, your pet art. The window is open and drifts of sweet cold float in, inspiring your girlfriend to borrow your extra-large sweater. She wears it rolled at the sleeves, then sits Indian style on the hardwood floor and puzzles over 3-Down. You look over her shoulder and offer a guess: “Possibly.”
Go outside. A student film crew is set up in one corner of Washington Square Park. Three NYU sophomores are about to capture in 16 mm that ineffable feeling that is autumn in New York. If only they could stop arguing about that next shot. A young man with scanty sideburns fiddles with his camera while bickering with a purple-haired girl over where to hold the light reflector. A policeman settles everything when he asks them to produce a permit before forcing them to disband.
Later on, you bicycle across town on Tenth Street, a chilly breeze pushes your hair from your face, nibbles your earlobes, and teases you with winter. Will you stop home to retrieve another sweater before you meet your friends for billiards, for bowling, for basketball at the Hudson River courts? The wind swells and the leaves say, “Yes!”
Underground, at the Union Square subway station, notice the stylish couple causing a scene across the platform. She’s crying and he’s yelling, and they’ve nearly got it right, are almost ready to return to their acting class at the Lee Strasberg Institute a few blocks over where fall session has just gotten under way. The pretty girl wipes her tears, fixes her makeup, looks in a compact mirror, and ad-libs distress. You catch her eye, and she smiles back slyly. You don’t know it yet, but soon she will be famous.
In a park of concrete and metal on Fifty-seventh and Ninth, a young woman is on her lunch break. She’s shivering in open-toe shoes and a thin sleeveless blouse, and when the wind rises, she folds her arms across her chest. She might have put on something warmer this morning, but she is unwilling to relinquish the summer so soon; it’s only October. Beside her, another lady sweats inside a rust-colored sweater paired with tall leather boots, too thrilled by her new wardrobe to delay by one more hour her personal parade of the fall’s newest fashions. Sipping her hot coffee, she dabs the sweat from her brow and happily considers what she’ll wear tomorrow—it’s already October.
Crowds pour into the Angelika movie house on Houston, excited to see the latest shaky-camera take on the discontents of urban intellectuals at family gatherings on Connecticut estates. Someone’s sister is getting married—how bourgeois! Further west is a matinee of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and at Film Forum or Anthology Film Archives or somewhere else west or east of here, Woody Allen’s Manhattan is playing, has just played, or is about to play. Yes, it is autumn in New York. And there are so many wonderful things to do!
But I prefer the other things.
If you’d like to join me, we can film an homage to a New York classic on your camera phone. Break fast at The Container Store, starring ME! I’ll buy some vodka, and you’ll hold the phone while I stand in my crumpled evening gown outside the shop window on Sixth Avenue. Be sure to catch the light just so, as I look longingly at the lush display of filing cabinets and accordion folders. Between slugs from my flask, I’ll say wistfully, “The Container Store is where I go when I’m hungover. Nothing very bad could ever happen to you there.” You’ll remark about the store’s impact on Cold War foreign policy, and I’ll point out a handsome bureau inside which we might contain communism.
> Next we’ll visit the Sharper Image on Fifty-seventh Street to test-run the massage chairs. A store clerk will begin selling you hard and I will interrupt, eyelashes batting furiously, like butterflies bursting from cocoons, asking that he fetch me the foot massager. “Would you please?” I’ll say, still in Hepburn mode. We’ll stay as long as we want or until my flask runs dry and I start to shake while imagining bats clawing through the walls, like Don Birnam in Lost Weekend. I’ll cry out in terror, before you press power on the foot massager, tie my shoelaces for me, and suggest I take deep breaths. And then, grabbing my hand, you’ll whisk me gallantly off to the liquor store, where you’ll buy a fifth of vodka to pour into a cardboard container of orange juice.
You’ll put the straw between my trembling lips.
I’ll squeeze your hand and ask, “Tropicana with calcium?”
“I’d give you all the calcium in the world if I could,” you’ll say. And I’ll explain how too much calcium is actually bad for you. “It says right here on the label that this will suffice for a daily serving.” I’ll kiss you on both cheeks alternating thirty-four times, the way they do in Foreignia, where I spent a semester abroad. You’ll graciously wait for me to turn my eyes before you wipe away the alcoholic sting of my saliva. “Poor jellyfish,” you’ll think, regarding the blue veins that decorate my eyelids, while I look sheepishly at the ground.
Hungry? Let’s visit the Olive Garden upstairs of Times Square for a tête-à-tête amoureux featuring their “all you can eat bread sticks and salad,” as advertised on TV. After we’ve exhausted their supply, you’ll excuse yourself to the men’s room and on your way tell our waiter a lie about it being my birthday. It’s a lie because neither of us will ever get old. After he clears the empty basket from the sixth serving of breadsticks, three of which now decorate your jacket in place of a pocket square, he’ll reemerge from the kitchen with our free cake ablaze, and the wait-staff trailing after him singing their approach. With the cake before me and my eyes pressed shut, I’ll pause to draft my wish.
And after a deep breath, I’ll begin to blow, steady and full like the change of seasons, as if I were the autumn wind and the candles were old trees—I’ll wish we were Russian spies and had fancy gadgets like poison umbrellas, or cufflinks that are tiny cameras, or pens filled with disappearing ink with which we might sign our names to great love letters. I’ll wish the day would never end.
You’ll pick up the check. I’ll steal a dessert spoon, lace it through my hair like a flower. And we’ll run out screaming with laughter. We’ll laugh until we cry, and then you’ll brush a tear from my eye and say with sudden gravity, “You have something in your teeth. Right there. No, you still didn’t get it.”
Tired but unwilling to stop the fun just yet, we’ll take the subway all the way down to Manhattan’s bottom lip and go fishing off the stern of the Staten Island Ferry for shoes and discarded hearing aids and whatever other unexpected treasures attach to our hooks. You’ll hold my hair back when I lean over the railing, sick, and then catch the dessert spoon just before it falls overboard.
I’ll smoke a cigarette after that and attempt to spell my name in the air with it, the way I used to with sparklers in the backyards of Long Island every Fourth of July. After remarking on the fleeting nature of the seasons, of you and me, too, I’ll observe the lapping water below, cast a quick eye up at nothing and then look over at Manhattan where windows are starting to twinkle instead of stars. I’ll feel sick and start to wish I hadn’t drunk all that vodka. “What’s wrong?” you’ll ask, and I’ll say nothing, and then, smiling, I’ll say, “It’s fall.” I’ll suggest we stop at the liquor store as soon as we dock.
As the sun dips lower, we’ll disembark. Our mood darkening with the sky, our pace slowing, we’ll walk uptown arm in arm, our steps sounding a near minuet. I won’t tell you what I’m up to, but I’ll be stepping as hard as I can, trying to leave my footprint in the pavement beside the older impressions of curse words and pairs of initials enclosed in hasty hearts, until we arrive at the public library just a few blocks from my apartment.
In the back of a darkened reading room, we’ll canoodle as they show a free movie starring a young Matt Dillon—“Yes, The Flamingo Kid!”—using a loud projector with an even louder fan, the whole thing so much louder than any of the characters’ voices. A confused elderly lady will stand for a long time in front of it, complaining about the darkened figure obscuring the picture. Then, letting go of my hand, you’ll find her, offer your arm, and lead her to a seat where she will have, you tell her, “the perfect vista.”
Stepping behind you down the marble steps after, I’ll look up at the sky, almost black, and then out over the street, so bright. You’ll say, “It’s late already, we’re up to our chins in night.” I’ll say, “Should we go to Grand Central then, for a drink among the transients, give a toast to old-what’s-his-name and tell stories about something or other?” You’ll pause and look uptown toward the greatness of midtown, and then look downtown toward me, scaffolded again by whirling rings of cigarette smoke. Frightened of arriving at the end of the night, feeling my heart crash inside my chest like a dropped bag of metal parts, I’ll bite my lip nervously and wait for your answer.
“No,” you’ll announce firmly. “We’ll go home instead!” And with a quick look both ways, you’ll tug at my hand and we’ll launch the wrong way down a one-way street before entering the all-night Food Emporium, whose doors open upon our arrival as if our presence on their threshold were the answer to a timeless riddle. Once inside, we’ll redeem coupons for Jell-O and soda crackers, buy Slime for fifty cents, our last purchase arriving in a tiny plastic globe and falling from the bottom of a coin-operated dispenser, like a wish.
One block over and three flights up, in the warmth of my one-bedroom apartment, while we wait for the Jell-O to congeal and the sun to rise, we’ll tell each other secrets: “I’ve never read Ulysses.” “I don’t want to kill mice, but just capture and rehabilitate them.” “I’m worried I’m losing my hair.” “I don’t care for Sting; I find The Police’s whole oeuvre repetitive, actually.” “I ran for president of my high school class and lost.” “I gave my cat a dog’s name.” “I think I’m losing my hair.” “I’m lonely.” “Are you?”
In the brilliant cool autumn morning, the light, terrible and bright, will streak through my apartment. And we will awake, stiff and uncomfortable where we passed out on the floor, covered in the crumbs of last night’s soda crackers, sheltered by the majestic fort we built with our own hands, what looks in the morning like just a pile of pillows. “Get up! Get up! It’s autumn in New York; there are wonderful things to do!” says the light as it hits you in the eyes, causing you to shrink back. “Start with an aspirin!”
Unhinging our knees and elbows, stretching the arms up and over, we’ll tie hasty knots to close the bags of clanging metal inside our chests. We’ll compose our faces and fasten our top shirt buttons. And then, still a bit drunk off the romance of yesterday, the romance waiting for us today and again tomorrow, and the jug of wine now empty in the corner, we’ll trot downstairs to lose ourselves once more in Manhattan’s surging throngs as we make our way to brunch, to White Castle, just opened up on Sixth—it’s time we sample their delicious sliders! Or else, if we’re too broke, if we spent almost all our money at the coin-operated wish machine last night, lose ourselves instead in the surging throngs on our way to the nearby Gristedes; it’s closer than White Castle and they also sell beer. We can just as well buy frozen sliders, which, transformed by the warm sixty-second embrace of my microwave, taste delicious.
“It’s autumn in New York,” you’ll say, regarding the sweet bite of cold air drifting in through the broken windows of my one-bedroom apartment, inspiring you to borrow my sweater that will be way too small. Then, sitting on the floor among the sprawl of pencil shavings and blank paper, devising questions for a crossword puzzle you’re writing yourself, you’ll catch my ankle as I pass barefoot on my way t
o the kitchenette and insist that you toast your can of Natural Light to mine. Motioning to 3-Down, you’ll read, “Are we making a mistake?” You’ll look at me expectantly before the microwave, in time with our hearts, begins to beep its finale, telling us, rhythmically, another sixty seconds has passed.
BOOK II
CHAPTER 4
DISPATCHES FROM MY OFFICE
He raised his brawny lumberman’s arms in the starlit night: “And then, the fundamental fact is that there’s no such thing as a grown-up person . . .”
ANDRÉ MALRAUX, ANTI-MEMOIRS
7:04 AM
I wait on line to buy a cup of coffee at the stand on the main floor of the Humanities building. I consider buying a scone even though I don’t like scones. Maybe I can learn to like scones. They’re everywhere and if I liked them, it would be a coup in terms of my lifestyle. I handle the shrink-wrapped scone and look at it from various angles until the lady asks me if I’m going to buy it. I say, “No, just the coffee,” and then count out exact change. Giving exact change is a coup.
I pull an extra bundle of napkins from the dispenser and place them on top of the coffee lid, which, as I make my way up the escalator, leaks until the napkins are soaked. In my office, I throw the wet napkins in the garbage, turn on the computer, and discover an email from a student asking what she missed in last week’s class. I begin to boil and write back, “The reward for being absent is not a private tutorial with the instructor.” I pause before hitting Send. I press Delete and decide to handle it later.
I close my email and Google “Hell.” I discover a site featuring a quiz that can determine to which level of Dante’s hell I’ll be banished when I die. I check my watch to see how much time I have and then spend ten minutes answering a series of questions with this result:
