Iris Has Free Time (24 page)

Martin ignored me.

“Queasiness,” I said aloud, half to myself, thinking of alternate translations and finding the word funny. “Life makes him queasy,” I went on mumbling. “Simone De Beauvoir was his main quease.”

Martin shot me a dirty look. He was reading Céline’s
Journey to the End of the Night
, one of my favorites; I’d given it to him at the start of our trip. A mistake I’m always making with men. I give them great works of literature about callous, self-centered misogynists. In my freshman year of college, I gave
Tropic of Cance
r to Donald, a boy from New Jersey with whom I’d accidentally fallen in love, the one I’d later see inside the
Maxim
Man costume. Having read it the summer before college, I was struck by the novelty of its plotless narrative and immediately took to the idea that I, too, might one day live plotlessly.

Donald of the gold chain and white tank tops that came in packs of three became, for a few years, my destiny. My crush on him, like almost everything that’s deeply important to me, had started out as a joke. Wouldn’t it be funny, I thought, eyeing him in the dining hall one afternoon, if I liked
that
guy? Wouldn’t it just be hilarious? Martin had an expression for this phenomenon.

“Joke, joke . . . normal,” Martin told me, describing how he’d come to love beef jerky. He repeated this aphorism all the time. At a house party thrown by a friend of a friend of a friend, pointing toward a hipster wearing a trucker hat, Martin offered this assessment: “One minute you’re wearing a trucker hat as a joke, because trucker hats are so
un
cool. Then the next thing you know you’ve forgotten all about the joke and can’t leave home without your hat. And there you are, a guy who wears trucker hats.” He shook his head pityingly. “Joke, joke . . . normal.”

“That’s so true!” I said. “Perhaps the whole world started out as just a joke.” I poured some of his drink into my own plastic cup. “And on the seventh day, God laughed.”

“You need to calm down now,” Martin answered.

Back in college, in the dining hall, I pointed Donald out to all my friends and made joke after joke about how I was falling in love. I’m not sure when it stopped being funny and began feeling real, I just remember one minute laughing and the next lying alone on my dorm bed, listening to music in the dark, waiting. He’d said he’d come by my room but never showed.

Hopelessly infatuated by Valentine’s Day, I’d left the book,
Tropic of Cancer
, in front of his room, with a flower as a bookmark—I still cringe thinking about it—an iris of all things. What was I thinking? That he’d read, “Paris is a whore,” bring the iris to his nose and fall in love with me?

The train rumbled along. We might have made better time by getting out and walking alongside it. For a few minutes, I considered doing just that but then decided the weight of our bags would slow us down. The train shook from side to side, exacerbating my already formidable nausea—physical not existential. Too hungover to focus on the page, after a short interval we both gave up. One at a time, we closed our books and sat quietly, gazing out the window, at the view—a sliver of sky above a bank of close-set trees and parched no-name bushes. There was nothing at all to look at, so we stared.

We grew older. Just slightly. But age is cumulative and every second counts. How else do you pass a year or ten if not one second at a time? I wasn’t wearing a watch but I knew that Martin and I had gotten older by at least an hour, and so, arriving at this newfound maturity, we looked around. Seeing as we were the only ones left in the dining car, we brought out our pack of cards and split the deck. What one isn’t allowed as a child, one often is permitted as an adult. Perhaps time enough had passed to allow us an adult round of Spit?

“I don’t want to brag,” Martin began bragging, “but I was the reigning Spit champion in my fourth-grade class.”

“We’ll see about that,” I said, and we began seeing about it.

Martin dealt. We played three or four hands in a fast silence. Then the door to the next car opened, and in came the conductor. Without any new lines on his face, as if a whole hour had not also passed in his life, he stormed toward us, waving his hands. “No play!” he yelled wildly. “No Play! No Play!”

“Why won’t he let us play?” Martin wailed, sulkily returning the deck to his bag.

“Because he wants to make the trip as long and as miserable as possible, and he’s worried that a card game might reduce our suffering. He’s punishing us.”

“This is the train ride from hell,” Martin grumbled.

The Overseer of Punishments took a seat in the booth across from ours and directed his gaze out the opposite window. He took a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, lit a new one with the old one and flung it out the window into the brush. I imagined bright orange flames exploding in our wake. Was this our penance for being bad tourists?

I took a deep breath to keep from throwing up. I thought of Camus’ suggestion to imagine Sisyphus enjoying his curse—his actually being happy to roll the same rock up the same hill for all eternity—and did my best to enjoy mine. Miserable, I started to laugh.

Martin caught my eye and smiled. Then, lifting his index finger from where his hand was resting on the table, he pointed at me—a familiar gesture. It meant, “You. You’re the one, and you know it and I know it.” If we were at a party and ended up on opposite sides of the room, he’d catch my eye and raise his finger just like this, so that only I’d see. Sometimes I’d blush and mouth, “What?” And he’d mouth, “You know.” Or else he wouldn’t say anything but just keep pointing silently, resolutely, and it felt like we were tied to each other by an invisible string, connected no matter how crowded the room got, no matter how far apart we grew—then he remembered he was still angry and stopped. After a moment, he shut his eyes.

We’d been dozing for some time when suddenly there was a great buzzing, like a muted chainsaw or a swarm of locusts, interrupted now and then by a loud thud. I blinked wearily and looked around. Surveying the car, my eyes fell upon a hideous insect. It was the size of a tennis ball and its body, furry and stout, was flanked by horrible wings. More beast than bug, outside the movies, I’d seen nothing like it. Silently, I rose up. The sound grew louder. It was coming toward me. I screamed.

Martin opened his eyes. “What the hell is that?”

“A dragon!” I squealed.

Quickly, Martin took my hand. We ran through the car.

“Duck!” he yelled, as it zoomed over our heads.

We zigzagged toward the other end. It zigzagged after us.

The Overseer stood up and motioned for us to be still. Obediently, we froze, our backs against the far wall, watching as the beast came at us once more. Then, throwing his arms over my head, Martin pulled me into him before the bug crashed into the wall behind us and fell heavily to the ground.

Disoriented, its buzz intermittent, it bounced weakly at our feet.

Calmly, the Overseer approached, reached down, grasped it firmly by one of its wings and, looking toward the half-open window, flung it out.

The car was quiet but for the chugging of the train. The Overseer looked at us—wild eyed, breathless—and let out a laugh. He returned to his seat, then turned to us and added, “
Ella Katse
.” He pointed to our booth. “Is okay,” he said. “Is okay now.”

Tentatively, Martin and I sat down.

“That was crazy! What
was
that?” he whispered frantically.

“A chimera!” I said excitedly, leaning across the table. “Did you see it up close? It had the body of a goat and the head of Pat Sajak!”

For the next three hours, we were besieged by Pat Sajak bugs. “They must be local to the area,” Martin said, as the Overseer calmly removed another that had landed, this time, on the table exactly between us.

The train chugged along in the hellish heat. The sky rained monsters. And as conditions around us worsened, things between us got a little better. United against the terrifying perils of the underworld, we were able to forget for a little while about our argument. And slowly, perhaps exactly at the speed of a train inching its way toward Patras, the previous night receded into the past.

“You know, the ancient Greeks believed the Chimera to be a harbinger, a sign that a storm was coming or a volcano was about to erupt. It foretold all kinds of natural disasters,” I said.

“Falling in love chief among them,” Martin answered. Then, reaching his hand across the table, he laughed. “You’re a catastrophe,” he said. My eyes filled with tears. “My catastrophe,” he added and squeezed my hand. Martin stood up and came round to my side of the table. He sat down beside me and found my hand again. I started to apologize, but he cut me off. “Let’s just forget it,” he said and fixed his gaze on our window, on the non-view we shared. We stayed that way for the next few hours. And like that, with a promise to forget, we began a relationship that would last three years.

Sometimes I wonder if we hadn’t gone to Europe that summer, would we have broken up sooner? Urinating on him in New York, for example, might easily have been a deal-breaker. He’d wake up in his apartment the next morning, find his pants hanging in the shower where he’d left them to dry, and think, “No, perhaps I won’t ask her for another date after all.”

Waking up somewhere in the middle of Greece though, in the middle of a month-long vacation with me passed out beside him, what choice did he have but to find a way to forgive me? Then again, if we’d stayed in New York, I might never have drunk that much whiskey to begin with, and so might never have pissed on him at all. If Oedipus hadn’t left home, if his birth mother hadn’t sent him away.... Was his fate inevitable? Was this relationship our destiny?

For the rest of our time in Greece, Martin and I visited a combination of sunny beaches and historical ruins. Our running joke was to feign surprise at finding everything ruined by the time we got there. “Ruined!” we said upon first sight of the Parthenon, before stepping in front of it to get a photo of us together: twenty-two and twenty-four, new statues with our arms around each other.

At the Parthenon we read how archaeologists and engineers were working to restore the ruins by installing new phantom pieces to fill the gaps left by lost parts. When they finished, tourists would be able to see the Parthenon as it once looked to Socrates and Plato and all those who walked through the roped-off structure we now circle. I told Martin about all my visits to the Parthenon as a kid, how my parents toted me around to see ruins all over Greece, how I hated it. “I don’t see why we had to come all this way to see a bunch of rocks,” I’d complained, kicking at the dirt.

Back in New York, I told Martin’s parents the same story over dinner, my cute anecdote about ruins striking me as “a bunch of rocks.” “I didn’t appreciate history then the way I do now, now that I’m grown,” I said, my voice suddenly childish. Asked about our trip, Martin and I talked about our sightseeing, about the oppressive heat on the steps of the Acropolis, about the bargain Martin had negotiated with an owner of a wonderful pension in Positano, about the argument Martin had won while trying to rent a moped on the island of Folegandros—his resorting to the demonstration of a logic puzzle as a way of proving why his American driver’s license should suffice for an international one—about a long afternoon on Santorini’s black pebbled beach, which had soothed Martin’s feet but hurt mine, so he carried me.

We skipped right over the more interesting story of my pissing on him and our being summarily banned from a fleet of Mediterranean ships, and reprised instead our favorite new joke. Passing around our glossy photos, Martin began, “Iris was so excited to see the Coliseum, but when we got there, it was ruined!” We savored this, recited it whenever possible, precisely because it wasn’t very funny. It struck us as the kind of humor that adults might exult in, and by aping adult behavior, we thought we might grow up ourselves—Joke, joke . . . normal.

That summer together in Europe was to be our last as kids.

September. 5:00 AM. The alarm clock sounds. I shower and dress in the dark, then walk seven blocks to catch the 6, before transferring to the 4, and heading uptown into the Bronx where I catch a bus and then another bus and then walk six blocks to Community School 4.

“Ms. Smyles! Ms. Smyles!” my students yell. “Raise your hand,” I respond, imitating the woman they think they are addressing. I’m an adult, I remind myself, standing before the room. I’m in charge of thirty-six children. If I am still a child, then what are they?

On the bus after school, my ears ring with my new name. I shut my eyes, hoping to sleep a little before night school. In a café, I prepare my homework, then walk over and up two flights to another classroom for a Teaching English course, followed by another hour and a half commute home, to eat, to sleep, to do it all again in the morning.

Some nights I go home, grab a quick change of clothes, and catch a bus up to Martin’s on the Upper East Side. With a briefcase full of lesson plans, I look out onto Madison Avenue, into the glittering store windows filled with party clothes I’ve no occasion to wear. Responsible young adults, Martin and I rarely “go out” anymore. We go to dinner.

I buy a Zagat guide. Martin subscribes online. We argue over which rating is more important. He insists “food” while I prefer “ambience” and consider food, provided it’s not terrible, incidental. We gain weight. I learn to cook. On a Saturday, we argue over my roast chicken. He complains I use too much lemon. I cry, feeling I’ve disappointed him.

Our first Halloween together falls on a weekday. Overwhelmed by my new job, I don’t notice the approaching holiday until it’s already upon us. A friend of his comes over dressed as a Brazilian soccer player.

“This party’s going to be great. You guys have to come!” he says, passing the bong back to Martin.