Iris Has Free Time

by Iris Smyles

  Our plan was to fly to Rome, then make our way south to Brindisi, where we would board a ferry to Greece, visiting Corfu, then Santorini, and perhaps another island, before wending our way north to a village on the Aegean coast where my parents have their summer home.

  On our first day in Rome, we went for a walk and then sat for a while at the edge of a large piazza. Night was falling. I looked up to where the building tops meet the sky and watched the evening darken and the city lights come up. Young people filled the square—chatting, laughing, the boys flirting with the girls. I thought about my upcoming job as a teacher and wondered if I looked like one. Martin was a few steps away, practicing his Italian with the Roman teenagers he’d befriended after asking if any of them knew where he could buy weed.

  He followed one around the corner and returned moments later with a block of hash. “This is my girlfriend,” Martin said, introducing me. “Sofisticata,” his new friend said, kissing my hand. I was wearing a knee-length red summer dress, preoccupied as I’d become with dressing my age. I was twenty-two, a woman, and women didn’t wear miniskirts. We shared a joint, and then they invited us to the opening of a nightclub up the street.

  Outside the club, a sign in English read, “Blue Cheese.”

  Martin laughed. “In America, the same club would be called, ‘Fromage Bleu.’”

  One of the Italians regarded us curiously and then, smiling, ushered me in first. “The lady,” he said, as I passed.

  It was an open-air club and, because we’d arrived early, still relatively empty. Disco lights swirled against the white concrete walls and potted trees evenly spaced along the gravel floor. I was having a great time, sitting on the edge of an empty stage with my legs dangling off, feeling the wind blow through my hair and smiling at Martin as I danced with just my arms, raising them high above me, a beer in one hand, the other floating free and in time with the music....

  The next morning, Martin and I went to see the Coliseum. Silently, we climbed through the ruins before stopping at a nearby tourist trap, an outdoor café with the Coliseum in view. I collapsed into a seat and held my head in my hands. The sun was high and the air, still. I felt nauseous. My head was pounding.

  “You feel sick?” Martin asked.

  It was the first thing he’d said to me since our argument earlier that morning. I’d woken up alone and found him sleeping on the floor.

  “What are you doing over there?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  I shook my head, climbed out of bed and lay down next to him.

  His sophisticated girlfriend had gotten so drunk that nightclub security had asked her to leave. When she refused, they called the police. Martin apologized profusely, promised to take her home right away while she went on spitting, “Come on, you pigs! You hobby-bobbies! You flat-foots! Come and get me!” Her knee-length dress rode up sloppily around her thighs. The Italians had to hold her back. At the hotel, he helped her to bed, removing each of her shoes as she told him his cowardice disgusted her, and swore up and down that she’d rather die than share his bed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and began to cry again.

  Martin watched me silently, kicking lightly at the gravel floor. Near our table, a large soda machine hummed loudly. Martin stared off toward the top of the Coliseum, just visible behind the shack at the back of the café.

  “It must be 90 degrees,” he said after a while, mopping his brow with a waxy napkin. Then he turned to me. “Why are you crying, Iris?”

  I hiccupped and tried to catch my breath. “Because I love you and now I’ve ruined it. Everything is ruined!”

  He watched me for a few seconds and then looked around. “You can’t blame yourself,” he said softly, a hesitant smile breaking across his face. “It was ruined when we got here. Just look at it.” He motioned to the Coliseum. “Ruined!”

  “You know what I mean,” I said, looking down at the fresh scrape on my right knee—from falling down, I guessed. “I didn’t mean to drink so much. I don’t know what happens to me.”

  Martin came closer, lifted my chin and kissed my tears. “It’s not ruined,” he said slowly, circling me in his arms. “It’s going to take a lot more than that to ruin us.”

  3

  There were no sleeper cabins available on the overnight ferry from Brindisi to Corfu, so we purchased tickets for the deck and decided to stay up all night. The ship had three coach decks, one open to the air and two inside the ship’s belly with rows of chairs all facing the same direction. We claimed two seats in one of the indoor decks, and then I went to the bathroom to fix my hair and apply some lip-gloss while Martin went upstairs to buy a bottle of Johnny Walker.

  We met up top a few minutes later. Martin had heroically gotten hold of some plastic cups and poured us each two inches. I pointed to the early moon dangling above us like a paper lantern. Martin said it looked too perfect to be real. “Just a stage moon.” Then, in a gesture half-honeymoon/half-frat-party, we toasted our cups and began the night.

  Two inches later, we were sharing our whiskey with a young couple from Norway, and two inches after that, we all decided to find the social deck: an empty dance floor lit with spinning multi-colored lights and flanked by a long deserted bar. We took turns performing joke-moves for each other and then, after a few more drinks, a good song came on and without really deciding, we began dancing for real.

  We drank past dinner and met more people—a cluster of English college students, all male; two seventeen-year-old Dutch girls; and a Greek guy named Costas. We brought our cups together for another toast.

  At around two or three in the morning, Martin’s girlfriend began to fade. Seeing her eyes close, Martin led her downstairs and helped her to her seat. Not tired himself, he returned to the deck to take in the view, the paper moon, and some fresh air. When he returned, she was slumped and snoring at the end of the row. Quietly, he maneuvered past a few sleeping passengers before settling into the seat next to hers and accidentally knocking her elbow off the armrest; Iris stirred.

  “Then you muttered something, stood up, pulled your pants down, and sat on my lap.”

  “Why didn’t you stop me?”

  “I tried to. But you weren’t responding, and I couldn’t raise my voice for fear of making a scene. That’s when you started to pee. . . .”

  Most people become uncomfortable when I talk about blacking out. You’re not supposed to do that; it’s dangerous, frightening, a telltale sign that you’re out of control. All of this is true. And yet, as a method of last resort, is there really anything better? If we are powerless to change the past, I mean, isn’t the next best thing just to forget it?

  The body is a pretty good custodian of itself, I find, and blacking out is one of its more effective systems. It’s the brain’s gag reflex, jumping into action whenever a memory proves too noxious to keep. It’s my mind’s way of telling me, just like Tiresius tells Oedipus, “You don’t want to know.”

  The way turtles have protective shells, porcupines are covered in needles, and skunks emit a terrible smell, alcoholics forget. Sure, the needles of a porcupine prevent you from cuddling with it. Sure, there’s a downside—that Oedipus thing again, where the source of your strength is also the source of your weakness—but that’s just part of life’s great irony and not my fault. What can I do besides accept it and try to navigate as best I can among life’s strange paradoxes? Blackouts are just one of nature’s many peculiar blessings and should thus be counted. Sitting before Martin then—his pants still wet as he angrily related the events of the previous night—I struggled to assign this particular episode its proper number. Blackout blessing #144?

  “The splashing was pretty loud,” Martin continued, “and everyone started to wake up. Then the boat hit some swells and the puddle began to stream down the aisle, forming a kind of river, which this little old widow traced back to us. Standing on her seat to get out of its way, she screamed and then pointed. Everyone started yelling, babies were cry
ing, a priest spit at us, and then everyone began collecting their things and rushed to exit the cabin.” Martin sighed. “You peed for a very a long time.”

  “My God! What did you do?”

  “I smiled and tried to act natural.”

  4

  You know when you look back on your childhood, how it’s almost like watching a movie about someone else? How you know it was you that was kissed behind the church in Greece that summer when you were fourteen, but also, you know that it’s not you anymore? You look back and watch: There you are pressed up against the building. Only, instead of seeing what you actually saw out of your own eyes—which were closed—you see the whole scene objectively, as would a stranger happening by. You see the trees in the background, the leaves rustling against the sky, you see the way the light reflected off the brick, the geometry of your bodies, his hand on the small of your back. It’s as if your memory were a photograph someone else took, a postcard from the past arriving perfect, complete, in the mind of your future self.

  As a result of my blackout, I felt as if a long time had passed since the events Martin was describing. The previous night was a distant memory, so distant in fact that I could recall none of it. So distant that when Martin filled me in when I woke up on the train the following morning, I was able to see the whole thing rather objectively, as if I were watching a movie. I was receiving the postcard when I should have only been sending it.

  There was Martin trying to “act natural” while his unconscious girlfriend sat on his lap, mistaking him for a toilet. And all around them, mayhem. Men and women yelling, children running away. I began to laugh. Like Oedipus, I couldn’t help but see the situation’s comedy.

  At the close of Oedipus Rex, Oedipus beholds the truth. Horrified, he blinds himself and sets out to wander the earth in self-imposed exile for the rest of his days. In the sequal, Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus is an old man, who, after years of suffering finally accepts the fate he’s run from all his life and with that, finds peace. He dies, a white light surrounds him, and his body is snatched away by the gods. But before that, just before, he looks back on all that’s happened and he laughs. “Comedy equals tragedy plus time,” he tells the audience.

  “You’re going to laugh about this some day,” I told Martin, exhibiting the calm, mirthful perspective one has of events relegated to the distant past. I smiled and invited him to join me in the future.

  “No, I won’t,” he said angrily and yanked me right back into the present. And with that, whatever humor I’d glimpsed disappeared. If anything could put out the flame of our love, I was sure pissing on it was it. I let out another jagged little laugh, not because I found anything funny anymore, but because I so desperately wanted to.

  “It’s not funny,” Martin snapped. “When we disembarked, one of the shipmates threatened me. ‘I remember your face. You no come again. I see you, I call police!’ You should have seen the way he looked at me.”

  “I see,” I whispered.

  “Do you?”

  “Martin, I’m sorry.”

  Martin took a breath and said he couldn’t possibly consider accepting my apology until his pants had dried. “As long as they are wet, I am still living the nightmare.”

  “You’re so dramatic!”

  “Yeah, I’m dramatic. That’s it.”

  “Yes. Yes you are,” I said, and turned to the window so as not to show my tears.

  II

  The dining car was just like the other cars, but with a few booths rather than regular seats, and a snack bar in the corner where you could buy a Fanta and potato chips or a prepackaged croissant filled with chocolate. It was the middle of August. All the windows had been opened in hope of a breeze, but since the train was moving so slowly, there was none. The air was hot and still, so still you felt compelled to move, to touch your hair or shift in your seat, if only to remind your soul that your body still lived, lest it get confused and try to climb out.

  Bored and uncomfortable, Martin asked if I wanted to play cards.

  I smiled, thinking his anger had passed.

  “For my sake, not yours,” he clarified with a scowl.

  We weren’t playing five minutes before the conductor appeared, waving his arms and yelling, “No Play! No Play!”

  “Why not?” Martin asked.

  “No play!” the conductor repeated, taking the cards from our hands and laying them on the table.

  “He must think we’re gambling.” I tried explaining that we were only passing the time, that there was no money involved, but it was hard because he spoke no English and I didn’t know the Greek word for gamble.

  “No Play!” he insisted, until we put the cards away.

  We took our books out and decided to read instead. I was reading Sartre’s Nausea because Martin said it was his favorite novel. Though I liked the detail of the self-taught man reading his way through the library alphabetically, I found the book surprisingly lackluster. I stopped reading to examine the cover again. “Does he ever actually throw up?” I asked Martin, “Or is he just queasy the entire time?”

  Martin ignored me.

  “Queasiness,” I said aloud, half to myself, thinking of alternate translations and finding the word funny. “Life makes him queasy,” I went on mumbling. “Simone De Beauvoir was his main quease.”

  Martin shot me a dirty look. He was reading Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, one of my favorites; I’d given it to him at the start of our trip. A mistake I’m always making with men. I give them great works of literature about callous, self-centered misogynists. In my freshman year of college, I gave Tropic of Cancer to Donald, a boy from New Jersey with whom I’d accidentally fallen in love, the one I’d later see inside the Maxim Man costume. Having read it the summer before college, I was struck by the novelty of its plotless narrative and immediately took to the idea that I, too, might one day live plotlessly.

  Donald of the gold chain and white tank tops that came in packs of three became, for a few years, my destiny. My crush on him, like almost everything that’s deeply important to me, had started out as a joke. Wouldn’t it be funny, I thought, eyeing him in the dining hall one afternoon, if I liked that guy? Wouldn’t it just be hilarious? Martin had an expression for this phenomenon.

  “Joke, joke . . . normal,” Martin told me, describing how he’d come to love beef jerky. He repeated this aphorism all the time. At a house party thrown by a friend of a friend of a friend, pointing toward a hipster wearing a trucker hat, Martin offered this assessment: “One minute you’re wearing a trucker hat as a joke, because trucker hats are so uncool. Then the next thing you know you’ve forgotten all about the joke and can’t leave home without your hat. And there you are, a guy who wears trucker hats.” He shook his head pityingly. “Joke, joke . . . normal.”

  “That’s so true!” I said. “Perhaps the whole world started out as just a joke.” I poured some of his drink into my own plastic cup. “And on the seventh day, God laughed.”

  “You need to calm down now,” Martin answered.

  Back in college, in the dining hall, I pointed Donald out to all my friends and made joke after joke about how I was falling in love. I’m not sure when it stopped being funny and began feeling real, I just remember one minute laughing and the next lying alone on my dorm bed, listening to music in the dark, waiting. He’d said he’d come by my room but never showed.

  Hopelessly infatuated by Valentine’s Day, I’d left the book, Tropic of Cancer, in front of his room, with a flower as a bookmark—I still cringe thinking about it—an iris of all things. What was I thinking? That he’d read, “Paris is a whore,” bring the iris to his nose and fall in love with me?

  The train rumbled along. We might have made better time by getting out and walking alongside it. For a few minutes, I considered doing just that but then decided the weight of our bags would slow us down. The train shook from side to side, exacerbating my already formidable nausea—physical not existential. Too hungover to focus
on the page, after a short interval we both gave up. One at a time, we closed our books and sat quietly, gazing out the window, at the view—a sliver of sky above a bank of close-set trees and parched no-name bushes. There was nothing at all to look at, so we stared.

  We grew older. Just slightly. But age is cumulative and every second counts. How else do you pass a year or ten if not one second at a time? I wasn’t wearing a watch but I knew that Martin and I had gotten older by at least an hour, and so, arriving at this newfound maturity, we looked around. Seeing as we were the only ones left in the dining car, we brought out our pack of cards and split the deck. What one isn’t allowed as a child, one often is permitted as an adult. Perhaps time enough had passed to allow us an adult round of Spit?

  “I don’t want to brag,” Martin began bragging, “but I was the reigning Spit champion in my fourth-grade class.”

  “We’ll see about that,” I said, and we began seeing about it.

  Martin dealt. We played three or four hands in a fast silence. Then the door to the next car opened, and in came the conductor. Without any new lines on his face, as if a whole hour had not also passed in his life, he stormed toward us, waving his hands. “No play!” he yelled wildly. “No Play! No Play!”

  “Why won’t he let us play?” Martin wailed, sulkily returning the deck to his bag.

  “Because he wants to make the trip as long and as miserable as possible, and he’s worried that a card game might reduce our suffering. He’s punishing us.”

  “This is the train ride from hell,” Martin grumbled.

  The Overseer of Punishments took a seat in the booth across from ours and directed his gaze out the opposite window. He took a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, lit a new one with the old one and flung it out the window into the brush. I imagined bright orange flames exploding in our wake. Was this our penance for being bad tourists?