I stayed in Greece for all of August and flew home on the first of September. Waiting on line at customs back in New York, I checked my voicemail, having kept my phone off the whole time I was gone.
There was a message from May: “I’m engaged!”
3
At the beginning of
Speak, Memory,
Nabokov describes a friend’s anxiety over the thought, inspired by a home movie, of the world before he came into it. The film, shot just before he was born, shows an empty pram, bought in anticipation of his birth, which Nabokov’s friend likens to a coffin. It frames his non-existence, he explains. And he fears un-birth the way many more commonly fear death. Nabokov acknowledges the strange truth at the heart of his friend’s anxiety by describing every life as book-ended by an abyss, making before and after, birth and death, essentially the same occasion.
I thought about Nabokov while I searched my pockets for a tissue and the customs officer stamped my passport. I thought about my upcoming birthday, my thirtieth. I thought about Martin’s phone call on my twenty-fifth four and a half years earlier, about the bitter birthdays he told me to expect. I readdressed the question his warning implied: Is a birthday an occasion for celebration or mourning? I replaced the word birthday with “May’s wedding,” and found myself staring directly into Nabokov’s abyss.
2
The room began to spin, the whole world was spinning, and I realized with a start that it wasn’t just beginning, but that I was only now noticing.
“I have plenty of time, Mom.”
“The world will wait for us,” Leonidas said with a smile, after cutting the engine and handing me a drink.
“The rotation of the Earth,” I’d told The Captain, after falling down in front of the fountain in Atlantic City.
He gave me a hand to help me off the floor. “You were sitting still!” he said. “Who loses their balance when they’re sitting still?” he laughed.
“The world,” I explained, brushing myself off, “moved without me.”
Standing before the baggage carousel, I saw May climbing up onto one of our rolling chairs, reaching to close the top window shutter, the wheels slipping beneath her, her eyes going wide as she fell backward . . . crashed through the glass. The carousel turned and turned.
“Congratulations!” I exploded, as soon as she picked up. I’d called from the taxi on my way home from the airport. “Tell me everything!”
She told me how he proposed. She told me the wedding would be in the spring.
“That’s so great,” I gushed, before stammering to a halt. “So how does your fiancé feel about the sleeping arrangements? About our sharing a bedroom? Have you told him yet, or shall I?”
May laughed and said she’d almost forgotten. Then she gave me his phone number and said, “Pretend you’re me.”
1
In bed, back in my apartment, I lay awake for a long time.
I blink, straining to see, but the daubs of paint are giant, the branches great arms blocking my eyes. Inside the big picture, it is dark, it is night, I am in a clear plastic forest, the fog is dense, and I am lost. I turn onto my side, onto my back. I pick up where I left off:
Too late to be Hemingway . . . too late to be Capote . . . too late to be Salinger. But I could still be Isak Dinesen . . . I could still be Proust—Proust, the life-long dilettante, deciding one night out of nowhere, to leave the party early. Didn’t he also have a lot of catching up to do? What did Dante do when he found himself lost? He wrote about a time that must have been hell for him; he called it a comedy. And once he set it all down—his friends, his enemies, his heroes, his loves—he wrote himself out.
OVERTURE
FOR A LONG time I used to go to bed late. Sometimes I never went to bed at all but just drank until I passed out, my eyes closing so quickly that I had not even time to say to myself: I should take off my shoes. And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to the bathroom would wake me. I would make as if to put away the bottle which I imagined was still in my hands, and to turn out the light; “I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book.”
It’s 10:00 PM in New York. I’m in bed; I’m finally reading
Swann’s Way
. Every night I go to sleep early, rising at the hour I used to turn in. Yesterday, at 6:00 AM, I walked over to the Hudson River and saw a cluster of twenty-somethings, drunk, laughing, returning home at the end of their night. They didn’t see me though. It was as if I were looking through a two-way mirror; the light shines from one side and looking through you can see the past, but when you try to look from the other, into the future, all you see is yourself reflected in the present. Every morning, I wake early. The days race by and I chase them into the night—there’s barely enough time.
In my apartment on Tenth Street, the furnace burns at all hours. Before I go to bed, I open the windows to move the heat around; the blare of horns from the traffic below swirls up. I shut my eyes and for a few minutes, before I fall asleep, I think: I could be anywhere. Am I in bed on West Tenth Street or with Martin on the Upper East Side? Am I in Murray Hill in my apartment over the Midtown Tunnel or ten feet up off the ground in Hell’s Kitchen, with May and Felix in the next room, May in the next bed? What is my book about? A song from one of the cars stalled at a traffic light comes through the window, some laughter, the sound of two girls talking, searching for the address of a party. How does it begin? The furnace sputters and clangs all through the rooms, all through the building, and all at once, I am reminded of the old place:
My first apartment, its furniture, how it always rained in the bathroom, how the mice scratched in the walls at night, how the kitchen was a dark continent and our couch, an island bluff. How we sat together the last summer before graduation underlining our instruction manuals, snapping photos of each other in our Thursday costumes as if to catch our lives mid-blur. How our couch was an island like Manhattan, to which we’d both decamped separately at eighteen, and where we found each other, laughing, spinning the cap over a bottle of smoke, half believing that we would always be young, half afraid that we would never grow up. I think about our buckling couch, our youth, and the beach eroding on all sides. I think about the feel of its cushions, held up by so many lost things. Our couch—not an island at all, but just a raft—on top of which, for a few years, we floated.
1
The answer I am looking for is that he puts out his eyes with Jocasta’s dress pins. He puts out his eyes or he blinds himself is also acceptable.
2
Names of Women Jack and Larry Met at The Regal Beagle: Olga, Diane, Tanya, Shelly, Sheila, Audrey, Kate, Sally, Francesca, Linda, Agnes, Lauren, Lucy, Lydia, Betty, Beatrice, Marsha, Mandy, Sandy, Lucia, Allison, Henrietta, Shannon, Sharon, Beatrice, Claudine, Christine, Sherri, Simone, Cynthia, Susan, Madeline, Meghan, Felecia, Charlotte, Jennifer, Leigh, Samantha, Terry, Clarice, Dana, Carrie, Karen, Anna, Jane, Beth, Lulu.
Iris Has Free Time
Copyright © 2013 Iris Smyles
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smyles, Iris.
Iris has free time : a novel / Iris Smyles.
pages cm
eISBN : 978-1-593-76558-3
1. Smyles, Iris--Fiction. 2. Young women--New York (State)--New York--Fiction. 3. Self-realization in women--Fiction. 4. Bildungsromans. 5. Autobiographical fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.M95I75 2013
813’.6--dc23
2013000711
A different version of “Autumn in New York” appeared previously in
Splice Today
.
A different version of “Iris’s Movie Corner” appeared previously in
Nerve
.
Soft Skull Press
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