Iris Has Free Time (34 page)

With my bare feet dangling over the shores of our couch, I was busy with my hobbies—drawing more Naked Woman cartoons, rendering crayon outlines of my face onto construction paper, or clipping the occasional article from the
Weekly World News:
“Alien Endorses Bush for Presidency—the same alien that endorsed Clinton in 1996!” I taped it to the wall next to the calendar where I wrote my itinerary for the month: “Prepare a list of demands and sell to bank robbers,” “Decide to change tomorrow,” “Decide to change tomorrow,” “Entry into martyrdom. . . .”

In anticipation of our delivery, sometimes I’d design a new pot-smoking device. Since my visit to Amsterdam three summers before (“field research” I’d called it, showing May photographs of the Dutchmen I’d kissed), I’d developed my own style of joint-rolling, which involved colored construction paper, numerous double-wide rolling papers and index cards. “I’m the Jeff Koons of marijuana paraphernalia!” I announced, holding up my latest creation. Atop exaggerated sculptural filters—bulbous cones and chimerical, animal-shaped hollows—I’d poke a small hole where I’d attach the joint. “I can’t wait for your retrospective,” May marveled.

Like this, lost in our respective delights, we’d wait for a bike messenger to buzz our door, and then, beer cans in hand, we’d receive him with flirtatious smiles and an offer to share a blunt with us, if we thought he was at all cute.

That same August, “drunk and delirious from the heat,” so I claimed, I tongue-kissed a few strangers and was renamed “Hurricane” at a local bar, while May met a Frenchman and began to doubt romantic love. It was during that August, after the Frenchman had disappeared, that May, still a virgin, announced her decision to have sex.

All our friends were aware of and had discussed often the fact of May’s virginity, so much so that her virginity began to seem less a function of time and more a permanent characteristic, like the shape of one’s nose or the landscape of lower Manhattan. Her decision to change it thus, seemed drastic. It was as if she’d announced the leveling of a historic building with a subsequent plan to put up a condo in its place. Our reactions, naturally, were mixed. We were all in favor of progress, sure, and yet, shouldn’t May be preserved as she was? Couldn’t we keep her virginal, declare her a landmark, and convert her into a library or something? Her decision shocked everyone, a feat that, up until then, had been
my
specialty.

In the waning blaze of August, we descended upon the Coliseum bookstore. Sweating, high, and ever studious, we bought
Hot Sex: How to Do It
;
Sex Tips for A Straight Girl from a Gay Man
;
The Good Girls Guide to Great Sex;
and the more romantic
How to Make Love to a Man,
which cited
The Best of Neil Diamond
as the ultimate sex soundtrack.

Drinking through the afternoons we read intently, copying notes for perplexing maneuvers on index cards, which we’d compare over lunch. May was a wizard in the kitchenette and sometimes (before we abandoned the room completely), I’d stand beside her, stoned, watching as she performed her magic on a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese. Red-eyed, nodding, “Miraculous!” I’d say, after she let me taste a bit.

Back on the couch with our bowls, May asked me about “the up and over” hand-job technique she’d read about earlier that morning, if I’d ever done it. “I
may
have done it once accidentally. But I’m not sure I could repeat it is the thing.” For dessert, we’d have Rice Krispies Treats laced with pot—expediently done so by simply placing a green sprig on top of an opened “Fun Size” package.

Pen in hand, I informed May of my goal to write a self-help book called,
How to Be the Worst Sex of His Life!
“It’s an unfilled niche in the marketplace. I’m reading to find out what
not
to do.” I had lots of goals back then—actress, cartoonist, novelist, gentleman farmer, reverse-stripper (I would begin naked and, one article at a time, get dressed. This would take a while as I like to layer—underwear to overcoat, then gloves, scarf, and hat—and then I’d walk off stage, out into the audience, out the front door and into the cold winter night!). Self-help author was but one more.

May’s goal was sex itself. “Do you want to fall in love and then have sex? Or fall in sex and then have love?” She wasn’t sure, she told me. It was more the fear of the buildup that had inspired her to build down. “Disarmament,” I interjected, “got it.” “I just don’t want to be a virgin anymore,” she answered.

Unsure of how to proceed or with whom, May continued to prepare for sex as if for nuclear attack. “Up and over!” I yelled now and then, calling a drill.

Then, as the summer cooled into fall, May met someone. Felix took her on a whirlwind date of free events in Central Park, made her laugh while she ate a hot dog, told her she was beautiful when she laughed with her mouth full, held her hand, and kissed her up against a very old tree, she told me happily, before he didn’t call again for a full week.

Lying aloft, unable to sleep on the third night of his silence, May began making fun of his ugly face, cursing his ridiculous hair, and related something stupid he’d said about rowboats. She’d laughed out of pity; it wasn’t funny at all. I agreed that she could do much better and told her so over and over again. “He’s a fool,” I repeated, until she fell asleep.

A few days later, arriving home from an adventure at the drugstore’s makeup aisle, our answering machine blinked with a message from Felix. I cheered and suggested we conduct “an experiment.” May didn’t laugh or agree, but just quietly found his number and took the phone with her into the bathroom.

After that, they began seeing each other pretty regularly. Then, one day in October, just as the weather was really beginning to change and the wind had begun to sing through the leaves the way it always does in early fall, I arrived home, slightly drunk after a long day of “work” at
The New Yorker,
and found May sitting by herself on the couch, her face serious. She’d been waiting for me, she said. She had something to tell me, she said, her face breaking into a horrible smile. “I did it, Iris!”

We went out that night—Felix had to return to L. A., she explained, so he’d gone to his parents’ place upstate to pack, which is why he wouldn’t be coming along. On our way to the bar, we stopped at the drugstore to buy a new disposable camera. “To capture my post-sex glow,” she said cheerfully.

At the bar, I told her I knew how she felt, thinking one moment that it meant nothing and the next, that it meant everything. She said that wasn’t it and looking over her shoulder at the camera, shot a sultry expression. All night she studied her reflection, in the mirror behind the bar, in the bathroom, in her makeup compact, in shop windows on our way home. “Do I look different?” she asked me.

When we got the pictures back the next day, she was disappointed. Instead of looking sexy, worldly, and knowing, she looked uncertain, as if all night she’d been asking the camera, “What now?” Following a brief perusal and handoff to me, she took all the photos and filed them under the couch. Then, taking her place on the cushions above, she asked if we shouldn’t call the dealer. I shrugged and got out the number.

With the approach of Halloween, May grew nervous and every day more distracted. During our costume-planning session, I’d had to ask repeatedly if she would be able to get hold of red swimming trunks by October 31st; we were going to be “Siamese Superheroes.” I was sitting on the floor, sewing two T-shirts together to make one with two neck holes. We’d share the cape. “May? Are you listening?” Felix was still in L. A. and not sure when he’d be back.

“He said he missed me,” she said later through the dark. He’d called that afternoon; she’d taken the phone into the bathroom again. “I mean, I don’t expect him not to see other girls or anything,” she said from her bed. I just wanted to do it, you know?”

“I know.”

“He probably thinks I’m in love with him or something.”

 

When Felix finally returned to New York a month later, she began seeing him as often as possible, wanting, I figured, to stay close to that part of herself she’d lost, what he had somehow gained. Or perhaps it was her heart, not her virginity she wanted back. Or perhaps I’m completely wrong, and she wasn’t trying to get it back at all. Perhaps she had given it.

That fall, I underwent a change myself, slowing down so much with men that I became nearly impossible, telling one as he leaned in for a kiss, that “a long calm must precede the storm.”

“I need time to sort my findings,” I told May, after returning early from a date one night. I’d always felt compelled to supply an explanation, especially now when I didn’t really have one. “I’m still organizing data,” I said, alighting onto the island where she was sipping a beer and watching TV.

Felix spent most of that winter in L. A., picking up small parts in films and extra work when he could get it, and now and then returning to New York for short visits. When he was in New York, he stayed with us, sharing May’s loft bed across the room from mine. In the morning, he’d roll a joint, which they’d smoke in the living room while reading
Backstage,
before taking off together to see about an open call.

Wishing to get a head start on her career, May graduated a semester early, so in January, instead of commuting downtown to classes with me, she found a waitressing position at a restaurant in our neighborhood. She was given an apron and immediately went out to buy some sensible shoes and a memo pad. A day later, she began waiting tables as if it were the most natural thing. Then, with the money she saved from her first few paychecks, she purchased a new couch for our apartment. A large blue sofa bed, so that when Felix came to visit, he’d have a place to sleep.

I finished my internship at
The New Yorker
and my relationship with one of its editorial assistants that December. In January, while May worked, I focused on my studies, specifically on my thesis, “Melancholy and Mania in the Creative Tradition,” and watched as May rushed toward the ringing phone, as she locked herself in the bathroom to speak in hushed tones, as she borrowed my colored construction paper to prepare a valentine for Felix.

On graduation day, Felix happened to be in town. And since he’d forgotten to return his cap and gown after his own graduation two years earlier, he decided to come with us and graduate a second time. The three of us exited the subway on Eighth Street and began walking toward Washington Square Park where commencement was being held. On a bench outside the school’s fitness center, we stopped and sat down. Felix, decked out in his wrinkled purple robe, rolled a joint—“Our last one as college students!” he announced.

The park was blooming with purple gowns, hundreds of faces I’d never seen before. A stage had been erected in the center, above the fountain, far away. Felix cheered histrionically during the speeches. Some students nearby asked him to knock it off. “Hey, it’s my graduation, too!” he yelled back. After they introduced “the Class of 2000,” Felix stood up and clapped louder than everyone else. “Come on, Iris. Stand up!” Felix shouted. I stood up and screamed a little, too, not sure if something was beginning or ending, if it all added up to a loss or a gain.

Afterwards, Felix had an audition and, kissing May goodbye, disappeared uptown. May and I walked over to Broadway to meet our parents. Though I had spent a lot of time with May’s family, and she with mine, this was the first time our families met each other. Conservatives, for the most part our fathers got on well, though my dad leaned toward libertarianism while May’s toward Christian republicanism. They dealt with their differences fairly easily, however, by ignoring them and moving on to a conversation about us, their bright and talented girls who’d both ordered the lobster.

There is a photograph my father took that day of May and me. We are walking up ahead of everyone on our way to lunch. We are side by side, a stretch of sidewalk at our backs. We are walking purposefully, as if we know exactly where we are going, though it took us no less than a half hour to settle on a restaurant, no less than a half hour of our trying and failing to recall the exact location of that really nice place we’d gone to once together, the one with the beautiful garden.

I made arrangements to leave for Greece immediately following commencement. I didn’t have a job, but I wasn’t worried. I was confident about the future the way one is confident of the contents of a package before you open it, before you realize the coffee maker you ordered off the TV is missing a part, or the closet organizer that’s going to revolutionize the way you store your clothes needs first to be put together.

At the same time, May got a lead role in a touring company. “I’m going to be Peter Pan!” she squealed, watching me pack. “We’ll be traveling around the country all summer and part of fall, so I guess we’ll get back around the same time,” she said. She climbed up to her bed and sat with her legs dangling over the edge. “Felix says he’ll visit me on the road.”

I stayed in Greece for four months, longer than I ever had before, writing letters to May and to a handful of ex-boyfriends, using our correspondence as an opportunity to hone my prose style. I was particularly weak when it came to botanical descriptions and if I were going to be a writer, I considered, I’d most certainly need to learn the names of more trees.

When I wasn’t writing letters describing the wind through the poplars, I worked on my novel about all the drunks I’d gotten to know in the hallway bars of my Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, about one in particular, the fictional Hank, a twenty-seven-year-old alcoholic looking for redemption in his glass. Twenty-seven seemed so far away, and I had to work hard to imagine what that might be like. Trying to imitate hard-earned wisdom, I wrote metaphors for each drink: “Whisky is an accomplice,” I scribbled in my notebook, before taking off on my bike to weave back and forth through the olive groves. I’d ride and dream about the characters in my book, squinting my eyes to see them, wondering what they might do next, in a way that I had not yet wondered about myself.