Iris Has Free Time

by Iris Smyles

  “I’m all natural,” he swore again. “I like yours though. That’s really cute. I’ve never seen anyone style theirs like that.”

  I shrugged. “Thanks.”

  “The pink scrunchy’s a nice touch.”

  “Well . . .” I blushed and, leaning over, gave him a kiss on the forehead.

  I was relieved by his approval. Preparing for our date, I’d switched the pony tail back and forth, trying it on the right side and then on the left side five or six times, unable to decide which way it looked best. I’m forever worrying about my pubic hair being out of fashion and so, getting intimate with a new man makes me feel doubly vulnerable. Is mine different than other girls’?

  Glen removed the scrunchy and began kissing me again. At last, we did it.

  I woke an hour later to the sound of Glen’s heavy breathing, to his arms draped over me, which I slunk out from under. I turned over and watched him in the dark, wondered what all this tenderness meant. I had wanted only sex from him, but now that I had gotten it another desire began to stir in me. The way the joints of the arthritic can predict a coming storm, I felt the dreadful swelling in my chest that always prefigures a monogamous relationship.

  Glen isn’t so bad, I thought, listening to him snore softly. He’s kind and well-intentioned if not exactly brilliant. And isn’t caring and tenderness ultimately all that matters? But can he be trusted?

  I peeled back the covers to investigate his private area again. I couldn’t shake the idea that he’d been lying to me. Though I had been with men before who had done some clipping in the area, none had ever shaved it completely. What had come over him? Also, the others had never denied it. They just liked to keep things neat, they said, and wasn’t everyone doing it these days?

  The look was especially weird on Glen though, as he had a considerable amount of hair everywhere else. Why only remove it there? Why not at least try to blend the edges? Surely, no one would do this on purpose? He must be telling the truth, I concluded. And yet, while I believed Glen’s assertion that he was not responsible, I also knew that nature could never produce so aberrant a feature. There was only one possible explanation.

  It was done by aliens under cover of night; the design above Glen’s balls was a communiqué from beyond. I stared at his flaccid penis again, so vulnerable in the field of shorn hair. The moon came through the window and shone on the design of shorter hairs as they lay like crop circles around his penis. What were they trying to tell us, I wondered, looking through the window and up into the night sky?

  I stayed up for hours puzzling over his penis, ready to catch the aliens in the act of marking him with their hieroglyphs. Then, at some point during my stakeout of Glen’s genitals I must have nodded off because the next thing I knew, light was pouring through the window and Glen’s face was floating over mine.

  “French toast!” he boomed, reading a takeout menu he’d glued to the wall, “Or not to be!” He’d already put his boxer shorts on and was squatting beside the mattress where I lay.

  I groaned and pulled him back into bed with me. He kissed me with my eyes and mouth still closed. I mumbled my reluctance to kiss back as I hadn’t yet brushed my teeth. “Don’t worry, neither have I,” he said, though his lips were cool and minty.

  Things started up again and before I knew it he was pulling off my underwear. “You are so cute,” he said, stopping at the site of my pubic hair, arranged neatly into two braids. I arrange it this way when I sleep, so it doesn’t get too tangled. “Do you know how sexy you are?”

  I gave him what had become my trademark frightened/sexy look. He took my hand and placed it over his boxer shorts. I pulled off his underwear and felt him again, smooth to the touch, like a frog’s belly, ready to be dissected of its secrets.

  He mirrored my gesture with his own hand and then, silently, one at a time, he began untying my braids. How we complimented each other, how he was hairless where I had hair, how we fit like a lock and key—was this what the aliens were trying to tell us?

  “I think I’m falling in love with you, Iris.”

  “No, you’re not,” I said skeptically. “You’re just saying that. I’m sure you say that to all the girls.”

  “There are no other girls,” Glen said, making eye contact.

  He kissed my neck, and I ran my fingers over the flat, stubble-like formation where the aliens had gotten to him—the proof—and wondered what mysteries the universe had in store for us. Beyond this morning in bed, after we went out for breakfast, after we kissed goodbye on the street, was it too far-fetched to think it might be love?

  “Oh, Glen,” I cried, “I want to believe!”

  The X-Files: I Want to Believe will be available on DVD and Blu-ray December 2, 2009.

  CHAPTER 8

  SCIENCE FICTION

  If we placed a living organism in a box . . . one could arrange that the organism, after any arbitrary lengthy flight, could be returned to its original spot in a scarcely altered condition, while corresponding organisms which had remained in their original positions had already long since given way to new generations. For the moving organism the lengthy time of the journey was a mere instant, provided the motion took place with approximately the speed of light.

  ALBERT EINSTEIN

  Seldom, very seldom does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken; but where, as in this case, though the conduct is mistaken, the feelings are not, it may not be very material.

  JANE AUSTEN, EMMA

  A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the course of the hour, one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges, and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts. It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation.

  ERWIN SCHRÖDINGER

  Too late, too late!

  THOMAS HARDY, TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES

  DRUNKS HAVE A funny relationship to time. Though alcohol accelerates your aging physically, it retards you psychologically. For the while you are drunk you are suspended, preserved in the moment of your first sip, so that when your bender is over, a week may have passed for everyone else, but for you it’s just the morning after a very long night. A number of benders becomes a few years. And before you know it, you wake up the same age you were when you started drinking, but with your body strangely ravaged by time, as if during the night, during some practical joke, you were quietly bundled and jettisoned into the future. You wake up nineteen, but it’s your twenty-ninth birthday. Alcoholics are time travelers. That’s why they’re always so confused. That’s why they sway and stumble like seamen when they leave a bar. That’s why their rhythms are slow and different from everyone else’s, and why they’re always laughing—they see life from a great ironic distance even while it’s happening. That’s why they’re so sad. Time travelers are notoriously lonely.

  It was a Thursday night and I was having dinner with Glen at a restaurant on the Lower East Side. We’d just finished eating and Glen was in the bathroom, doing whatever he does. I was waiting at the table, checking the TV guide on my phone to see what time Law & Order would be on and if I’d be lucky enough to catch two episodes in a row. I’ve been watching a lot of Law & Order lately. So much that the percussion sound [Gungh, Gungh] the show uses to denote scene changes has gotten stuck in my head. I was disappoint
ed to find that night’s episode was not only a repeat, but one I’d seen already. Twice. I could hardly watch it a third time. Could I? I looked up from my phone to see if Glen was coming. [Gungh, Gungh] There was no sign of him.

  Glen regularly disappears into the bathroom following dinner for ten, sometimes fifteen minutes. I don’t know what he does. I think he gels his hair or something because he usually comes back looking extra shiny, though when I ask him, he says, “What do you mean?” and stares at me vacantly.

  I began searching the upper channels to see what I could be watching if I ordered cable—a reoccurring fantasy. The upper channels: additional airings of Law & Order. I never used to watch much TV, but I’ve been staying home a lot the past few months in order to write, which means that I’ve been watching a lot of TV and thinking about how I should be writing and taking lots of naps in between television shows, exhausted from the stress and guilt of not having written anything for all those hours spent watching TV. I watch Law & Order because it’s almost always on, and also Masterpiece Theater on Sunday nights because my mom watches it and we discuss the show when she calls.

  Aside from flesh and blood, my mom and I have very little in common, so when she calls, after we discuss the weather, we’ve still plenty of time to fill. She’s of a more practical nature than I am and doesn’t read much, if at all, so we can’t talk about books. I gave her The Bridges of Madison County, trying to excite her interest in literature, but she couldn’t be bothered. I chose to give her The Bridges of Madison County because I’d seen the movie and had heard the book was really good, and also because it only cost a quarter at a library sale. The book is ubiquitous on sale racks; it’s the literary equivalent of Law & Order. To be fair I haven’t read it either, though I own three copies. At that price? I’d be losing money if I didn’t snap them up while I had the chance.

  My mom likes the show Survivor and The Amazing Race and sometimes talks to me about them, but I’m not a fan of those shows and have little to contribute. Watching Masterpiece Theater, which airs film adaptations of classic books, allows us to meet halfway. My mom loves period pieces because, like me, she’s old fashioned and the themes of purity, honor, love, and the making of a profitable marriage are always on her mind.

  Last week, they showed Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which I read in college. When I called her later in the week, after we swapped dew points and information regarding a cold front approaching from the Southwest, we debated over whether or not the story had any true villain, and whether or not Tess could really be considered pure.

  I insisted Tess was morally pure and the least corrupt of all the characters though the most put upon, too. I suggested Hardy’s aim was to point out moral hypocrisy in the supposedly devout and respectable and proposed that society had made her into a murderer, and Angel, her true love, recognized this in the end, which is why he didn’t give her up to the police after she brutally murdered her wealthy husband.

  “I guess that’s why it was so controversial,” my mother added, referring to the show’s introduction, in which the host remarked about the book’s reception in 1891, the scandal caused by its subtitle, A Pure Woman Faith fully Presented.

  Last month my mom called to remind me to watch the last episode in the Jane Austen Collection. I’m not much for Jane Austen personally, but she’s my mother’s favorite author-adapted-to-film, probably because all the novels end with a wedding and my mom is feeling wedding deficient. The last episode was not an adaptation of one of her novels but a biographical film about the authoress herself. It was called, Miss Austen Regrets, and was all about Jane Austen not marrying but pursuing a career as a writer instead.

  Watching it alone in my apartment that night, I knew my mother was seeing me as the Jane Austen figure, but in a happy way, as if I had a great destiny like Ms. Austen, as if it were because of my mission to write that I remain, to this day, single. When I spoke to her the following evening her tone confirmed this, and I was touched by her optimism, her choosing to ignore the fact that so far I have only approximated Austen’s failings without coming close to any of her successes. Like Austen, I am approaching thirty without a fiancé. Unlike Austen, I’ve not published a single novel.

  In the film, Jane gets drunk on a lawn with her young niece whom she is advising about whom to marry. A couple of hours later—film hours are like dog years—Jane Austen dies at forty-two. But single women died young in those days, at least according to the novels. If heartbreak didn’t kill you sooner, loneliness got you later.

  After perusing the TV guide with no luck, I decided to go to the movies and made a quick check of the local listings. Marley and Me was starting in ten minutes on Second Avenue. I had just enough time to get there if I rushed. That’s what I was thinking when Glen, shinier than ever, returned to the table looking befuddled. He’s been looking befuddled more and more lately. Or else I’ve been noticing it more and more.

  “I’m going to go see Marley and Me,” I announced as he sat down. I’d already told Glen I couldn’t sleep over; my column was due Monday morning and, still not knowing what I was going to write about, I felt I needed to wake up in my own bed.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s the new heartwarming comedy starring Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson that promises scene after scene of adorable canine high jinks,” I explained wearily. Lately I find myself speaking in movie blurbs. When Janice asked me about my relationship with Glen, I shrugged and told her it was a “non-stop thrill ride.” I think I might be depressed. Either that or I’m very happy. It’s hard to tell.

  “Oh, yeah,” Glen said. “The dog dies at the end.”

  I glared at him and made another mental note to break up with him later. “I just told you I was going to see it, so why would you tell me how it ends?” I said through my teeth. “I make a point of not reading reviews so as to avoid spoilers, and then you go ahead and in less than one second say, ‘By the way, everyone dies at the end.’ Thanks a lot, Glen!”

  “I lied. He doesn’t die.” Glen blushed and bit his fingernails.

  “It’s too late now. You already said it!” I said shrilly, and then felt immediately bad for yelling at him. My dad says I have a short fuse and that I have a tendency to get fixed. That I probably make it difficult for any man trying to date me, and that I should, “Try cutting people some slack, Iris.” “I do, Dad!” I told him last weekend, “You have no idea all the things I think but don’t say!”

  “Anyway, it looks stupid,” Glen continued.

  “You look stupid.”

  He paused. “I thought you were going home because you had work to do tomorrow.”

  “I do. I just think a movie will relax me and help me sleep better. Anyway, I don’t care if the movie is stupid. I just want to go to the movies.”

  “Can I come?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?”

  “You just said the movie was stupid! Now you want to come?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “You talk too much and make noises and I just want to be alone so I can relax.”

  “Fine, go without me,” he said petulantly. “I don’t want to go anyway.”

  On the street outside the restaurant, Glen kissed me goodnight and made me promise to call him later. I’m not sure why since we’d been silent through most of dinner.

  You know the death-march scene at the end of Empire of the Sun? The part when they pass a field decorated with a few mansions’ worth of luxury English furniture, and the woman who has become a kind of mother figure to Christian Bale’s character takes a seat on a plush divan and tells Christian Bale to go on without her before she dies from thirst and exhaustion right there in that beautiful chair? And at the same time that she’s dying, Bale’s character sees an atom bomb explode in the distance and mistakes it for her soul rising to heaven? Sometimes I feel like that when I’m with Glen. Like I’m on a death march and I want to say to him, “
No, Glen, go on without me. I’ll stay here among the exquisite armchairs and silver tea settings. . . .”

  But I didn’t say that then. I just looked at him and said, “Yes, I’ll call you when I get home.” You see, Dad? I do cut people slack!

  I got to the theater just in time and clomped in with my laptop bouncing on my side—I had been working at a coffee shop earlier that day. Ostensibly working. Mostly I checked my email, read Gawker, and deleted people from my Facebook account. I also made a to-do list of all the things I would need to do later that I wasn’t doing then. 1. Brainstorm column 2. Write column 3. Edit column 4. Wash face 5. Brush teeth 6. Shave legs—I like to throw in some basic tasks related to hygiene that are relatively easy to complete so that when I cross them off, I feel accomplished and emboldened to forge ahead with the rest of the list.

  The column should be easy enough to write, but I always make it unnecessarily complicated. I’m supposed to be a sex columnist and just write about my dates, but once I start writing, I find myself wanting to do more than just spill the beans about penis size; I find myself thinking of Horace and his notion of literature’s higher purpose, which is “to delight and instruct!” And so I end up waxing scientific, introducing rare brain disorders and new developments in quantum physics to bear upon my quest for love. Or else I wax lyrical, describing Glen’s penis as if it were Proust’s Madeleine about to unlock the floodgates of memory and with my first taste of it bring to mind my lost childhood among the garden paths of my parents’ backyard in suburban Long Island. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.