Iris Has Free Time (28 page)

“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.

The lights had already gone down and I searched in the dark for the perfect middle seat. The room was large and cool, empty but for one person off to the side and near the back. I eased into the chair as if into a very still lake.

Going to the movies alone is one of my very favorite things to do. Where else in New York City can one enjoy so much space? Most apartments are tiny and cluttered, and on the street you’re always brushing by people. In shops there are crowds. Even at the library, someone inevitably answers a cell phone just next to you, or a homeless man decides to talk to himself at your reading table. At the gym girls stretch in pairs, talking about their jobs and their boyfriends and their words—“like like like”—whiz past you like machine gun fire. But if you go to the movies alone at the right time, for two hours—two whole hours—this huge dark room is yours.

I like to lose myself at the movies, to be completely swept up into the dream. If I’m with someone, though, this won’t happen. If I’m with someone, I’ll start to wonder what he thinks of the movie, if he is having a good time. Or else I’ll worry that he might talk at the wrong moment and break the mood, which breaks the mood. Movies are just not conducive to sharing. That’s what I’ve always thought anyway, though recently I’ve started to wonder if this kind of thinking isn’t symptomatic of a larger problem.

When my ex-boyfriend Philip visited me in Greece two years ago, for example, he commented regularly on the beauty of the sunsets. We’d be sitting on the beach, side by side, and he’d be looking out to sea and I’d be looking at him. I was glad the sunset was beautiful, for his sake, but I couldn’t pay any attention to it myself, not while he was there. It was one or the other. Philip or the sunset. By the end of his visit, I was actually eager for him to leave so I could finally enjoy the sunset, too.

I’m not sure why I couldn’t do what he did, what others seem to do with relative ease—to have my own thoughts alongside someone else’s. Instead, when I’m with a guy, everything but him goes right out of my head. We’ll walk somewhere and I’ll have no idea how we got there. The sun will go down and I’ll have no idea evening has begun. The whole sky, every star, every tree, every street, every room will fall away and I’ll see nothing but him, his face filling the world, a world from which I too have disappeared. One minute I’m there and then suddenly—eclipse. I end most of my relationships for this reason. Because after a while I become tired of living a life so reduced. But I’m the one that did it. No one blindfolded me or said I couldn’t look at the sunset, too.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, worrying that I can’t share things, like views or spaces or movies. Say I get married, will the whole world fall away forever? Will I fall away with it? Which brings me to what I like most about Glen, which is that I don’t actually like him very much. This makes it much easier for me to stand apart, for me to know where he ends and I begin.

The coming attractions started. More romantic comedies, more fabulous clothes, more scenes of female coworkers gathered around the watercooler to talk about love, more plots featuring hapless men who turn out to be the one, while the ones originally thought to be the one turn out to be hapless despite their great abs. I thought about Glen and wondered if the thirty-sixth or thirty-seventh one could still be the one. I thought about the phrase “the one” and wondered if it could be short for something. “The one that got away.” “The one I eventually settled for.” “The one that irritated me the least. . . .”

My parents took me to the movies every weekend when I was a kid. Mostly we saw grown-up films that I couldn’t follow or didn’t want to follow. Two hours to a child is like a summer to an adult; you might even be taller when you leave the theater. Bored, I’d turn in my chair to watch the light stream out from the projector, watching it spray out from a tiny point in the back. Staring into it, I imagined I was looking back in time, to the origin of all things, certainly the origin of all things on screen anyway. I’d watch the dust dancing above the audience in a long light beam expanding toward the screen. And I’d watch the faces of the other moviegoers behind me, wondering what they were watching, wondering what so engrossed them, wondering what they felt. Everyone was under the same spell. Everyone but me.

I felt fantastically alone then. Like the time traveler in movies who can stop time for everyone but himself, who can walk through a room where a party is being thrown and see the confetti stuck, suspended in midair, and see sound as if it were a physical, measurable thing—the laughter of party guests dangling half in and half out of their mouths—see someone just about to tap someone else on the shoulder, see potential, just before it is activated. The privileged time traveler who is able to appreciate the moment more keenly for his being outside of it, but who also, paradoxically, lives in exile as a result. As a kid, staring the wrong way in the movie theater, at the projector and at the faces of the audience lit up by the screen, I felt like that—an exile—like I was looking back in time while everyone else was looking forward, watching the moments pass and everyone around me pass with them. Everyone’s eyes were on the sunset, while I watched them watch.

The opening credits began and the lights dimmed further until the room was completely black. I was not expecting
Marley and Me
to be extraordinary. I was expecting it to be well-produced and easy to watch, with a few round laughs along the way. Because my expectations were so reasonable, it was unlikely that I would be disappointed, which is what I like most about big Hollywood movies and Glen.

Marley and Me
was as delightful as I’d hoped. It’s about a columnist—like me!—who writes about his life; his wife, their dog Marley, their three kids and how their lives change. And, yes, as Glen said, the dog eventually dies. It was a very sweet story, and during many parts I cried.

But I cry easily at the movies, so that’s no way to rate the quality of a picture. I cry somewhat reliably, for example, during any scene involving flight; perhaps I was a low-flying bird in my past life. In my dreams, flying is my primary mode of transportation. It’s not a big deal when I fly, but just how I get around. For a few years after college, while I was teaching middle school and dating Martin, I stopped flying in my dreams all together which scared me; I was afraid something inside me had died. After I broke up with Martin and went back to school full time, I started flying again little by little, but then I started drinking a lot and stopped remembering my dreams, so I don’t know now whether or not I’m still flying.

Marley and Me
had no flying in it, but it still moved me. Perhaps because Marley looks so much like my stuffed animal, Herbert, which made me think again about getting a dog and naming him George Foreman after my grill. I’ve never had a dog, only Dan, the peacock I had as a kid, and when I was very young, a guinea pig named Spud. Also, this one time I bonded with a box turtle that wandered into our backyard in Long Island. I had to let him go though.

They were free beings, my father told me, and “if you love something, you must set it free.” He was paraphrasing a line from my favorite
Smurfs
episode. “If you smurf something, let it smurf,” Papa-Smurf tells Handy, regarding his mermaid sweetheart who cannot stay with him on land. Handy built her a special bathtub but it wasn’t enough. I cried, but did as I was told, too, and set the turtle free among my mother’s bed of impatiens. Is this what men are thinking when they don’t call you after a one-night stand? Having “loved” you, must they now set you free? I brought out my pen and notebook and scribbled, “Possible idea for column. . . .”

Absorbed in the film once more, I began to draw “unfair comparisons” between myself and the columnist in the movie. I picked up the phrase “unfair comparisons” from my friend Jacob who’s been in therapy his whole life. “You’re not supposed to compare yourself to anyone else,” Jacob told me. “It’s unhealthy because you will always lose.” I’m not sure if he meant me specifically or “you” in general. Either way, I’m not supposed to do it, but that’s what I was doing.

In the movie, the main character’s column is full of charming anecdotes about life with Marley. In one scene, his whole family gathers in the kitchen to reread his old clippings. Warm and happy together, they are delighted to find their shared memories evoked in print. Why can’t I write a column like that? I wondered. I tried to imagine my future husband rereading
my
columns. “Ha,” he’d say looking up, as I caught him in the kitchen, poring over a binder full of them.

“What you got there, hon’?” I’d say, laying an affectionate hand on his shoulder.

“I love this one about you blowing your obese ex-boyfriend and this one, too, about you vomiting in front of your rebound flame. Son, get in here!” he’d call into the family room, to our eldest playing Yahtzee with his little brother on the rug before the fireplace. Two small boys with matching bowl haircuts would gather round, eager to hear Dad share Mommy’s writing. “Letting my upchuck burst into full flower . . .” he’d read aloud, before beaming at me proudly with that same look Jennifer Aniston gives Owen Wilson in the movie. The one that says, “How’d I get so lucky to get a woman like you to be my wife?”

When an essay of mine was recently published on
Nerve
, I felt so proud—my story was featured on the home page beneath a large photo and ads!—naturally, I sent my parents a link. When I spoke to my mother on the phone a few days later though, and asked excitedly if she received it, she said, “Yes. But don’t mention it to your father. I’m afraid it will upset him. It’s a little dirty; you know how conservative we are,” she said gently.

“It’s fiction!” I said quickly, burning with shame. “It’s only fiction, Mom!” It’s fiction, despite the fact that another “character” says my name within the piece, despite the fact that the other “character,” “Glen,” removes my underwear before exclaiming, “I think I’m falling in love with you, Iris.” I use this “fiction” excuse for everything. If I ever committed a crime, robbed a bank say, and were caught in the act, I’d probably scream out, “Don’t arrest me! It’s fiction!”