Iris Has Free Time (29 page)

To be honest, though, Glen never said he was falling in love with me, so it is sort of fiction. What Glen actually said was, “Iris, I think I’m falling off the bed.” He was all the way at the edge. Also, I never actually went to see
The X-Files
with him. I went alone, in the middle of a very hot day in Southwest Florida where I was visiting my parents for a week. The parking lot was huge and hot and empty, and I was alone in the multiplex and alone on the drive back to my parents’ condo. I just wanted to write about Glen’s weird genitals and saw the movie as an opportunity.

The piece was published under the title, “The Truth is Out There.” It wasn’t my title; my editor changed it. I had wanted to call it, “Iris’s Movie Corner,” as I was hoping to break into movie reviewing.

I watched the giant faces of Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston and considered the possibilities. But then the same questions arose that always do. What do I know about caring for an animal? And what about travel? If I go to Greece in the summer, would I leave the animal with The Bastard, or stow him in baggage and bring him with me? Both solutions seemed a bit cruel. And what if I were irresponsible and forgot to feed him for a few days and he felt hungry and it was my fault? What if he were unhappy? What if he stopped flying in his dreams?

 

I got the column a few months ago after reading an announcement for a competition to be the next sex columnist for
New York Press
, a free weekly newspaper I pick up regularly for the cartoons. It was the first time in my life that I’d read a want ad and didn’t feel immediately that I wasn’t up to the job. Instead I thought, I could do this! Most of the sex columns they’d been running had been first-person reports about the nightmare dates each writer had endured. My angle was that
I’d
be the nightmare date. The only question was which nightmare would I document? I had terrorized so many.

“An Open Letter to My Date of Last Friday” was accepted and ran, and they even paid me. I didn’t win. Nobody did. The competition was so popular that the newspaper decided to keep the column open. But then, a few weeks later, an editor from a new online magazine who’d read my piece contacted me about a job. And just like that, the purpose of all my failed relationships was revealed to me: I was to write about them. On my back and on the backs of all my ex-boyfriends, I would commence my writing career!

For some time before that, I’d been feeling like I was ruining my life, not to mention my health, and often, if I could sleep at all, I’d wake up terrified. Then, hungover and shaking one morning, at twenty-eight years old, I got this column, and it seemed like everything might finally click into place. It was nice to think, regardless of whether or not it was true, that all this ruining was actually in the service of something, that perhaps I had been on a path after all, that maybe I wasn’t getting more lost everyday but just pursuing my own special destiny, that this was me, following years of heroic suffering and wandering, ascending to Mount Olympus where I would remain for all eternity, happily writing my “sexploits.”

Suddenly, it looked as if it hadn’t all been for nothing. Instead of trying to bury the memory of every past affair, I could redeem them, like coupons for my future. Each shameful act, I discovered, was a paying article. By the way, I lied. I was twenty-nine when this happened, not twenty-eight.

When I turned twenty-nine then, I decided to begin lying about my age as a way of making the lie I was planning to tell when I turned thirty more believable—two years would be too much to shave off all at once, but if I shaved one now and then just kept it off on my next birthday, I might more easily blend. It wasn’t about vanity. I just felt I hadn’t earned my age. Though twenty-nine, I was still a child in most respects, still so dependent on my parents, still without any accomplishments beyond my quite excellent SAT scores (800 Math! 780 Verbal!). And now, not even finished with my quarter-life crisis, I was embarking on a midlife one.

Since my life was pretty boring when I got the column—I had cut down on drinking a few months earlier in an effort to get serious about writing before I turned thirty and with that had all but retired from my social life, rarely seeing friends and even more rarely dating—my first few pieces were about things that had happened to me before, which I wrote as if they were happening to me just then.

I decided to call my column “Second Base,” for the ambiguity appealed to me. Second Base meant “up the shirt,” but it also meant the island of Calypso in
The Odyssey
. Odysseus’s second stop where he is stalled for seven years on his journey home, just like I’ve been stalled for seven years since my graduation from college.

There are some drawbacks to writing a sex column. Since starting the column, for example, I’ve developed a weird habit of relating sexual anecdotes in casual conversation with near strangers. Like the other day when I met my editor in person for the first time and he told me he sang in a Prince cover band and that they would be performing the entire
Purple Rain
album at an upcoming party—would I like to come? I said I might come, that I also love Prince, and that I actually lost my virginity while a record of
Purple Rain
, which I had borrowed from my local library in high school, was on the stereo. He said, “Oh,” and then I wondered why I was so indiscreet and eager to share.

Aside from worrying about what my parents think, I also worry that publishing these stories might make me unmarriageable—the worst possible fate for a Greek girl, and most especially for one so principally incompetent (“Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor. Which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.” —Jane Austen). This columnist gig might give men the wrong impression of me, might make them think I’m fast. And I’m not. Really. I’m not that kind of girl! I’m not at all callous when it comes to sex, nor flippant about whom I have it with. I want to fall in love and, to me, sex has everything to do with that. It’s a very big deal. So big a deal, as a matter of fact, that I seem to be chained by it to Glen. So much for my notion of remaining distinct from him; I’m pretty much eclipsed.

And though I enjoyed the show
Sex and the City
, about a sex columnist like me, I was always mystified by how the four women could have sex with a man and after discard him so easily. My column is much less
Sex and the City
and much more
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
in that respect.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
minus the rape and murder, but otherwise, nearly identical.
Tess and the City
would be the name of my TV show if I had one, and it would be subtitled
The Adventures of a Pure Woman in Manhattan Faithfully Rendered
. Because I’m just like Hardy’s Tess, a pure woman corrupted by society. Remember that, future husband, when you read my binder full of clippings!

 

Marley and Me
ended and I stayed to watch the credits, figuring I’d be on the street again soon enough, floating among the honking horns and city lights, sharing the sidewalk with everyone else. Finally, the lights came up and I stood up to put on my coat. Looking around for the first time since I came in, I noticed the other man in the theater was still there. [
Gungh, Gungh
] He was looking right at me.

Who is this guy and why is he looking at me?
Quickly, I looked toward the projector to see if there was anyone there to witness a crime should one be about to occur. We were all alone.

The man, middle-aged, was closer to the aisle than I was and I would have to pass him in order to exit the theater. Stalling, I remained in place, pretending to fiddle with the buttons of my coat, pretending to adjust my scarf. I tried to think of what I might use to defend myself were he to come at me, and gripped my keys in my pocket. He began walking toward me. I began to sweat.

Only a few feet away now, the man, perhaps in his fifties, stopped, smiled, and in an Italian accent said, “You know, I like it so much, the movie. I had a dog just like the Marley, and it remind me my own family.”

“Oh,” I said, frozen stiff.
Your family, sure, before you killed them. If there ever was such a family! Where are they now, huh? Why are you here at the movies alone on a Thursday night, you creep, you criminal, you rapist?

He smiled warmly and motioning to the screen, said, “It was very good. It made me cry.”

“Yes,” I said rigidly, smiling politely despite my fear, not wanting to appear rude. At last, he turned and left.

After the door closed behind him, I followed and exited the theater, too. I was eager to get home. The
Law & Order
percussion sounded in my ears again. I thought of my home address.

189 West Tenth Street

On the street, I thought about the man from the theater and felt bad. Perhaps he wasn’t trying to brutally rape and murder me, but just wanted to connect. Instead of reacting the way I had, I might have offered my own feelings about the movie: “I too could identify. I just got a Roomba—a robot vacuum cleaner—and he eats up all the dust just as Marley ate up all the furniture. What’s that? My Roomba’s name? I’m still deciding, but I’ve narrowed it down to Charles, Knuckles, or Saul. I had originally wanted to call him Oonchaka, but the name already belongs to an ex-boyfriend’s penis.” We might have shared a laugh had I not reacted so defensively. After all, wasn’t I also suspiciously alone at the movies on a Thursday night? Wasn’t I also a creep?

I arrived home and greeted my plant Epstein, my Roomba _________, and my stuffed animal Herbert. I was safe. Alone and safe. I studied my to-do list. I still had to wash my face, brush my teeth, and shave my legs, but I decided instead to write my column right then and there. I took out my computer and set it down on my desk.