Iris Has Free Time (7 page)

Felix has been here nearly a week. He’s on the couch right now trying to assemble four roaches into a pinner, while I’m at my computer with my feet up on my desk, ready to write but feeling overwhelmingly, unidentifiably sad. How can I write with Felix here? I type out an idea, something I decide I’ll have to get back to later because I can’t concentrate now what with Felix around. I close the document and update the “about me” section of my Friendster profile. I delete what I had before and type, “60% cotton, 40% acrylic.”
Save.

I don’t share all of my ideas with Felix. Sometimes I won’t say anything but just write it down and make a note to implement the idea later, after Felix leaves. For example, the idea I just had is to create adult coloring books. Why not color in some porn or some scenes of East Village squatters sharing needles? Or romantic restaurant dinners between two consenting French adulterers feeding their dogs at the table directly from their spoons? Or scenes of coworkers gossiping around the watercooler about the intern’s terrible behavior at the holiday party, or a panel of you getting high with your college roommate in your parents’ backyard before Thanksgiving dinner, or a scene of you introducing your boyfriend to your parents, him awkwardly shaking your father’s hand in the garage, or a scene of the two of you at a diner two years later, you crying into your ice cream after deciding it’s best to split up, another of you in bed that night, trying to hide your tears from the man you just had sex with, whom you only just met and don’t love, or another of you cyber-stalking your ex on Friendster—a light blue crayon could fill in the light reflected off your face as you stare at the picture you’ve been cropped out of, the one he’s now using as his profile photo. Color it pink, where it says “single.”

Oh, I come up with lots of ideas and I start to wish Felix would leave in order that I get to them. And then I start to worry that he might leave and that I might have to get to them, and then I just get quiet and overwhelmingly, unidentifiably sad.

Usually Felix can sense these moments and he’ll rush to tell me a joke so as to curb me away from asking him to leave. I’ll resist for a while and then, eventually, I’ll laugh. But it won’t feel good because it’s terrible to laugh when you’re not happy. It feels like hell, which I imagine as a great party where everyone appears to be having a wonderful time. So I’ll mope around, trying to keep my face solemn in line with my mood while Felix blows straws from his nose.

Then he’ll decide to cook if he hasn’t already. While Felix gets into it in the kitchenette, I deal with my hangover by staring at the wall and smoking cigarettes. I’ll drink a can of warm beer that I opened last night before falling asleep, or I’ll put my feet up next to the computer and check my email again. I’m on all of these mailing lists so I get all sorts of junk. It’s kind of annoying, but I don’t take myself off the lists because I enjoy all the notifications telling me I have six new messages. If I didn’t get the junk mail, I would rarely get any mail and that would just be too depressing. This way, when I go online I’m never disappointed, but have all this stuff to do. All these Words of the Day to learn. All these ads for penis enlargement pills to delete.

I learn the definition of
gallimaufry
—“a hodgepodge; jumble; confused medley.” I select five spam emails and move them to the trash. I press
Delete Trash
. Felix begins to sing the
Growing Pains
theme song. I join him in the kitchenette for harmonies. When we’re finished, I ask him what he thinks I should do about so and so, if he thinks he’s going to call me, or if I should call him first and then just pretend he called me, pretend to want to get off the phone already because I’m so busy, and then ask him to please stop calling all the time. Felix says, “Breakfast is served.”

I help him bring the plates into the living room, and we eat on top of the open backgammon board. Then Felix searches the ashtray for a roach. We get high, play a round of backgammon, and go for a walk. If Felix can’t find any weed in the ashtray though, then we’ll take his parents’ car—if he’s come directly from his mom’s place upstate, he’ll usually have her PT Cruiser with the seat warmers parked around the block—to his dealer’s apartment in Brooklyn, this guy named Forrest who also went to NYU.

I hate showing up to someone’s home empty-handed, so before we go I’ll take some stale cookies out of an Entenmann’s box and wrap them in aluminum foil and ribbon as if I baked them myself. Or, if I haven’t any cookies, I’ll make a card for him on my drawing table, with a little drawing of me naked holding out flowers and saying, “I love your shirt!” You’d be surprised how much Forrest appreciates it. He basically loves me, but only because I’m always leaving just as soon as I arrive. He always insists on kissing me on the cheek or hand just before I go, as if I were some delicate thing. I get into it, too, and bat my eyelashes and say, “Oh, Forrest!” Almost everybody loves to be addressed by their name, I find. It’s such a simple thing, and yet most people neglect to do it.

I love the drive over the bridge on the way there. There’s a great fullness that occurs when crossing city bridges, like you’re pressed right up against the surface of your life and can feel all its varying textures. For a few minutes everything comes into a strange focus and you just know it’s one of those moments that would be pivotal if a movie were made about you. One of those moments that would be featured in previews—you looking out the window, thinking about something or other.

Just as often, Felix won’t have any money to buy weed, and it’ll be too early to go over to a friend’s place to smoke theirs—if they’re not at work, they’re still sleeping or doing who knows what—so we’ll just go downstairs and hang out in his mom’s car for a change of atmosphere while we wait for someone to call us back.

We sit in his parked car, listen to music, fiddle with our individual seat heaters, and comment on the people walking by and their suitability for potential romantic encounters. Felix says the toothless bum on the corner outside the Tasti D-Lite is my type. I tell Felix I had thought so too, but it didn’t work out. Then we change parking spaces if alternate side of the street parking is in effect and go back upstairs to my dukedom and dance to “Macho Duck.”

I first met The Bastard at a dorm party in college. He was drunk and people were saying things like, “Who’s that?” and “Oh, that’s Felix” and rolling their eyes while he fell down, broke things, and danced to the sounds of traffic coming through the window. Apparently he got that drunk at lots of dorm parties and was getting something of a reputation for it. People thought he got too drunk. Regardless, he was unquestionably having more fun than anyone else, and when he got tangled in the Christmas lights and began quoting
Tron,
I said as much.

Later that night, my roommate May and I smoked a joint with him in the bathroom, and when the joint was close to finished and we both declined a last drag for fear of burning our fingertips, Felix demonstrated how to smoke a roach into nothing but ash. It was almost magical the way he just let his fingers go, like a magician making a whole rabbit disappear.... He doesn’t remember any of it.

The first time we met that he
does
remember was a couple of years later. May and I were at Three of Cups for a birthday party. With red Christmas lights, crummy sofas, and skulls punctuating the liquor bottles behind the bar, Three of Cups was at that time very popular among the NYU crowd. Though Felix had graduated a year earlier, he had been scene-partners with the birthday boy, so he was there, too.

Relatively sober this time, Felix immediately took a shine to May and went ahead and introduced himself, as if for the first time. May is very pretty—she’s petite, wears her dark straight hair in a bob, has big blue eyes like fishbowls without fish, and looks like a film star from another time, beautiful in a way that women aren’t anymore. When she first got to school, she didn’t think so though. She thought she was fat and talked all the time about how she wasn’t fat but just healthy. I told her she looked like Mae West. She told me Mae West was fat.

May is from Alabama and has down pat that Southern Belle sweet-and-cruel-way-of-being that just accidentally tears men apart. The way it works is that she never seems to know she’s being cruel, which is what enables her to be sweet at the same time, which makes the boys she’s cruel to like her even more. She doesn’t like them though is the thing, so she’s unaware of her power.

For most of college May didn’t have a boyfriend. She dated now and then, nice looking boys a little soft in the arms with fine manners whom she’d accidentally destroy before finding their pleading remnants too disgusting to tolerate—they’d save flowers that fell from her hair and months later, commemorating the day of their meeting, present them to her inside jewelry boxes cupped repulsively in shivering hands. No wonder she was still a virgin. Or, she’d date guys with way too much game, handsome men who’d cast her off right away because now it was she who liked them too much, her hands that shivered repulsively, because she was not cruel at all, but looked at them too long with her terrible, pleading, fishbowl-without-fish eyes.

Felix, on the other hand, isn’t handsome at all. He
is
striking, maybe even ugly, but the kind of ugly that in the eye of certain beholders (May’s, it turns out) could be taken for beautiful. Extraordinary-looking is the best way to describe him. He has a giant nose, a sort of monument to noses, a parody of a nose really, right in the middle of his face, which is where a nose should be, I guess, and then all this wild curly brown hair—now there’s some gray in it—sprouting from his head like a set of disordered but brilliant ideas.

He was standing under his hair at the bar that night—much more composed than when we saw him at the party two years earlier— performing an elegant lean with a look of half-seriousness, as if in his mind he were telling a very cool joke and were taking his sweet time with it. May was ordering her second Amaretto sour, when Felix said, “Hi,” or something similar, and gave her a look like he was really about something, so says May.

Then, channeling Mae West, May looked him up and down and asked, “Is that
Deadeye Dick
in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?” He had a Kurt Vonnegut novel tucked into the front of his jeans where a pistol would have been if this were an action movie. After that, May began to lean too and they talked for a while about their shared love of Vonnegut. May didn’t know what came over her, she told me later, just that all of a sudden she found herself possessed of a wit and self-assurance she never imagined she had. She fell for him that night.

I liked them as a couple, I told her at home after, mostly because I could draw caricatures of them together pretty easily. I had just started to draw, mostly when I was stoned or in class, or both as it often happened, and I would practice by drawing people I knew. I found my ability to draw people increased with the amount of time I spent with them and so got to know which of their features were the most telling. I particularly enjoyed drawing May because I knew her so well and also because she sort of looked like a cartoon already, which made it easy.

Just like May, Felix looked completely unrealistic in person. I mean I was able to draw him perfectly on my first try, that very night, while they stood chatting at the bar. When May introduced me a few minutes after, I showed them the napkin on which I’d drawn their joint portrait. Felix, leaning in, his hair a third party; May, looking away, glamorous, aloof.

They agreed with me that it looked much more like them than they did, and I ordered my third whiskey while they continued to eye each other. Finding little else to do—I wasn’t attracted to anyone at the party myself—I decided to spend the night brokering their first date, negotiating the exchange of phone numbers so May could play it cool, as if his calling were a matter quite beyond her concern.

I was only returning the favor. I often asked May to field phone calls from my own boyfriends, arrange with them the particulars of my dates, or else provide them with small talk until I was ready to talk myself. “Hand me the phone once you’ve tired him out,” I’d sigh, lying in my bed as she chatted them up. Sometimes I wouldn’t bother talking to them at all. We’d call it a “science experiment,” and I’d just ask her to pretend she was me. “Like a placebo Iris.”

Hanging up the phone, she’d submit her report, describing to me in detail how the conversation went. “Fascinating,” I’d remark. And then, analyzing his response, I’d try to determine whether his feelings for me, “his symptoms,” as I called them, were real or psychosomatic. “Love is a disease,” I told May. “The question is whether it’s viral or bacterial.”

I’d roll a joint, we’d get high, and then I’d record the results of the “experiment” in a chemistry ledger I’d purchased from the college bookstore for just this purpose. I’d draw up elaborate tables and charts in the rigorous fashion of the lab reports I’d submitted in high school—I got very good marks in science incidentally—and then we’d discuss my findings over margaritas.

Seeing as May and I pretty much shared everything, I figured why not share this, too. I went on my dates alone, of course, but found the reporting of them after to be much more fun. Whether or not it worked out with each guy, after a while, hardly mattered. How paltry love and heartbreak began to seem in the face of so much cold hard science.

Thus I began setting up for the experiment of May and Felix. Donning my imaginary lab coat that night at the Three of Cups bar, I told Felix that he could pursue May provided he honor certain protocol. “I’m going to give you May’s phone number along with this brief list of rules. Be sure to identify yourself politely when you call, or I
won’t
put her on with you.”

“319!” Felix said, raising a hand to high-five us both. We were sitting on our couch—well, they were. I was bouncing a few feet away on our mini-trampoline. Felix high-fived May and then got up off the couch to high-five me and also pass the joint.