Iris Has Free Time (3 page)

By July, I was spending less time alone and more time with Lex, who’d also been left behind for the summer. The way people without family feel about the winter holidays, Lex told me, New Yorkers without summer homes feel about July and August. I commiserated, leaving out the fact that it had been my choice to stay, that I was as thrilled by our condition as he was unhappy, that I loved the terrible heat, and that I always feel lonely no matter who I’m with or what the season, and that I felt lucky to be lonely in New York City with him.

We’d meet up for brunch, for a movie, for a birthday party his friend was throwing on his roof. Lex would call and say, “I hate parties. Wanna come?” Or I’d hang out with him in the DJ booth at Lot 61 or Life or Veruka. And then, Thursday again. I’d say hello before setting up at the bar, dance by myself to Billy Idol’s “Dancing with Myself,” and then when I got tired, rest by sitting in the coin-operated toy car machine in the corner of the club.

There, practicing loneliness, I’d watch the crowd until Lex came to fetch me, pulling me up to dance with him until the song ended and the record cut off. Everyone looked around, waiting for Lex to set up the next one. Lex had to work, so I’d return to the bar alone to pick up guys, which is an art as much as bullfighting. This was my Hemingway moment:

They’d buy me good drinks, and with dignity we’d lean on the bar of this dirty, poorly lighted place, before a song came on, a song I could not resist, and I’d run to the dance floor to perform my high-kicks dance.

Certain songs were anthems that brought everyone to their feet. The beat would find you chatting, sipping a beer, worrying, and you’d rise up, as if called. There, dancing under the swirling multi-colored lights, the song lyrics echoing in your ears like a Greek chorus, it felt as if you were part of something, as if youth were a revolution, and your drinking, your dancing, your laughing, even your tears, were a sacred duty.

I’d get fantastically drunk and smoke cigarette after cigarette and talk and talk until I had no voice left, until the lights came on and it was 4:00 AM.

The staff would start to close up, and I’d help Lex gather his records into the trunk of his vintage Buick parked out front. With me in the passenger side, we’d speed off into the night, stopping at our favorite diner to get cheeseburgers, or at the deli to get cigarettes and a six-pack—“my fuel.” And then we’d go to Atlantic City, or if we were feeling responsible, one of the illegal card rooms right here in Manhattan. Lex knew all of them. Lex knew everything.

An empty catering hall with one table occupied: A fifty-five-year-old dealer whom everyone called “The Greek,” two DJ’s Lex knew from Gambler’s Anonymous, a truck driver, a soldier on leave, a public school teacher who said very little, Lex, and me. I’d look on quietly, drink my beer, smoke my cigarettes, and occasionally write things in my notebook—poems or snatches of prose for a novel I planned to write about desolation and how much fun it was.

Settled in with my grilled cheese sandwich and beer, I’d watch Lex gamble away the morning, study the faces of the other players, and flirt innocently with the older man who ran the room. He liked me and gave me menthol cigarettes when I ran out of my regular ones, and then took me aside to a table next to the big one in order to share his stash of hard candy. He pulled my chair out and asked me to tell him all about myself, but then didn’t pause for me to speak and began telling me all about myself instead: I was a nice girl, he said, and I shouldn’t be hanging around all night with a bum like Lex in a place like this.

“She likes it,” Lex yelled over, without looking up from his cards.

I smiled and shrugged and chose a pink candy from the dish.

After a while I’d return to Lex’s side where I’d dream about the wonderful novel that might contain us, the sordid romance of Lex and me in the underworld. Wasn’t I bored just to sit there? the others asked, not understanding how busy I was in my mind, polishing the night until it gleamed like a rare fiction. Bored? How could I be? I was the heroine of a great book.

I’d pass out at Lex’s place, and in the morning or the afternoon or early evening, depending on when we woke up, hungover and tired, we’d go for breakfast around the corner. We’d eat pancakes and eggs and then, tired still, would return to his apartment to escape the heat and watch TV.

In his living room filled with records, four vintage televisions sets, and his very own pinball machine, the air conditioner wheezed loudly as we sat on his stylish mod couch, ridiculing Ruthie of MTV’s
The Real World
.

Ruthie always got too drunk. The camera followed her as she crawled on her hands and knees through a crowded bar. We cracked up laughing at her expense, before I asked seriously, cringing as I recalled my own actions the night before, “Am I that bad when I drink, Lex?”

“Sometimes,” he said. “Not all the time, though,” he smiled.

We’d walk his dog, a melancholic ridgeback named Lola. We’d walk her around the block but never over to the river, though it was only five blocks away. “What’s there to do at the river?” Lex asked, when I suggested it. “As soon as you get there, all you do is start walking back!”

Walking to the river was not essential. What was essential was the invention and perpetuation of the good time. What was essential was yesterday—“In the ’80s, you could go to a party and meet anyone. Basquiat, Warhol . . . People were interesting then; creativity mattered!”

Lex would frown and complain, but even his bitterness was not without style. “I went to the video store and there were all these videos. Too many! I didn’t know what to get. What’s the point of all that selection? If I owned a video store, I’d only stock
Caddy Shack
. Every video in there would be
Caddy Shack.
This way you’d never be confused about what to rent again. . . .”

We’d run into his friends—B-movie actors, indie-directors, musicians and designers, or party promoters like him. In the middle of what for anybody else would be a workday, they’d stand on the corner, chatting about what to do next. No one ever had any place to be.

“We’re going to go buy more mint-flavored toothpicks,” Bernie and her boyfriend told Lex, but not me. They twirled the ones already in their mouths.

“We’re running out,” her boyfriend added, looking out across Sixth Avenue and blinking slowly.

“She wants to be a DJ now,” Lex began, after they left. “She called me up the other night, and she’s like, ‘Lex, I’m deejaying at Veruka tomorrow. Can I come over and borrow some records?’ I’m like, ‘Get your own fucking records!’ The whole thing of being a DJ is building up a record collection, and she just expects me to loan her mine? If a club wants my records, let them hire me! I’m gonna give them to her so she can play DJ and make money she doesn’t even need?” We walked a few more steps in silence. I’d learned to keep silent until his anger passed. Then he added, “It’s a joke that they’re dating. He’s just dating her because of who her father is.”

“Who’s her father?”

“Bax Stubbs.”

“Who’s that?”

“The guitarist of Xenophobe,” he snapped.

I shrugged. “I didn’t know he was married.”

“He’s not.”

“How chic. I’d love to have a little bastard myself some day. Name him Edwin . . . make him sleep in the stables . . . ask the servants, ‘Where’s that little bastard Edwin got to?’”

“When did everyone get to be so fucking fake?” Lex said, kicking at the ground.

Though Lex was thirty-six and I was twenty, in just a few years I would be too old for him. He’d had many “good friends” like me already, girls who eventually grew up and left him behind. Lex, always and forever, the boy behind the DJ booth.

Some people said he was living in the past, that he didn’t revive the’80s, but had never let it go. And sometimes, behind his back, I called him “the denim gargoyle.” He had lines on his face and thick skin from too much sun, too much partying and, finally, too much time. One of his tattoos, a thorn of roses circling his forearm, was fading to blue. In the mornings, before we’d head out for breakfast, I’d trace my fingers over it. I love you, Lex, I’d think, which is perhaps why I invented the cruel nickname.

“If I met you back then,” I said, looking up from a photo, “if we were the same age, I don’t think you’d like me.” It was a Saturday night, and we were at his apartment, looking through a box of old pictures taken in the early ’80s when he first moved to New York. In each, he looked so young and handsome, he and his friends so effortlessly cool. I dropped the stack onto the bed. “I think you’d be mean,” I said, going into the kitchen.

Lex and his friends dated models, fresh-faced movie stars, and the daughters of the rich and famous. Seeing him among them, I felt rough and embarrassed, as if my body were sewn from a cheaper material. I returned with a beer.

Lex was laughing and handed me another photo. One of his friends, the preppy one, had gotten the Lacoste alligator tattooed onto his chest. He pointed him out.

“That’s funny because I’ve been thinking about getting a one-legged alligator tattooed on mine,” I said frowning, “the insignia for the Lacoste knockoff on sale at JCPenney.”

“What about the Polo symbol without the mallet?” he ribbed back. “We could get matching ones. You get the mallet, and I’ll get the rest of him.”

“I don’t want the mallet,” I said, flopping down on the bed. I stared at the ceiling, at Lex’s face as it came over mine, as he kissed me.

I would never be cool. And I wouldn’t have cared finally, if I knew that Lex didn’t. Still, I couldn’t blame him for being shallow; his life depended on it. Cool people, cool places, cool things. As a DJ and party promoter, being cool was how he made a living. And with no distinction between his personal and professional life, Lex, quite simply, couldn’t afford to date me.

That said, I don’t think he really wanted to. Though he’d pursued me in the beginning, I didn’t know how to hold the interest of a veteran playboy of his caliber. He’d had hundreds of “relationships,” while I’d had two. Playing aloof at first, I managed for a while to excite his curiosity—I’d stand near him at the bar and then talk to someone else. But then, once I got him close, I let down my guard, began looking at him too often and too long, and the whole dynamic between us quickly shifted. He knew he had me, which was not nearly as exciting as wanting me.

We had sex for the first time in a suite at the Sands Casino, then ordered cheeseburgers from room service and went down to the floor to gamble.

After, things cooled down almost immediately. I was disappointed, but found a broken heart was not so hard to bear, provided you didn’t know it was broken until after it had been fixed. Lex let me down easy by skillfully not bothering to let me down at all. Instead, he simply began referring to the fact of our friendship, as if from the start there had been nothing more. Since nothing was changing, nothing need change, was the message—no need to stop sleeping together. And because he was older, because he knew everything, I figured he must know about this, too. Not wanting to appear foolish, I didn’t ask any questions but just rushed to adjust my perspective to his.

And I was happy to be his friend finally. That I was the one he talked to about girls made me feel special. More special than if we’d been dating, because if we’d been dating, I’d be his adversary, not his confidante. When you’re dating, we agreed, during one of our marathon phone calls, you’re basically just strangers trying to trick each other, opponents trying to win. Dating, we decided, is more about what you don’t share than what you do. Lex and I, on the other hand, that summer, shared everything.

Including our secret. Because Lex had a reputation for seducing young girls—a habit I teased him for, as if identifying the others proved I was not one of them—I made him promise not to tell anyone about us. “Wouldn’t it be fun to keep you and me a secret?” I whispered feverishly, after our first kiss. With nothing to gain from publicizing our relationship, Lex pulled me close, agreeing it would make for a terrific time.

Because of all this then, because I really liked Lex and was afraid of anyone finding out, I made jokes about him, told my friend Caroline that his close-cut hair made his head look like it was made of felt, told her that I wanted to stick felt animals on it and felt continents, called him “felt-head.”

And catching sight of him scowling at karaoke one night, annoyed as usual, this time because his song hadn’t come up yet, I tapped Caroline on the shoulder and pointed. “Look, the denim gargoyle!” And when I spied him flirting with yet another young girl at the bar, I’d say, look how old and sad Lex is, how pathetic his chasing girls half his age. I’d remark how he was getting older but not growing up, how ten years from now he’d be wearing the same Converse sneakers and Eddie Grant T-shirt and whispering the same words he was whispering just then to someone else.

That August, as I did every summer, I left for Greece to visit my family. Day after day, I’d lie on the beach, sweating under the sun with my eyes closed, my face covered by a straw hat, imagining what it might be like were Lex to visit. I’d pick him up from the airport in our old limping Mercedes, and after passing through the brush and pulling into our gravel driveway, presided over by clay replicas of Grecian statues, I’d introduce him to my parents.

My father wouldn’t like him at first. He’d be put off by his tattoos and would hate him as a matter of course—clearly a disc jockey wasn’t good enough for his only daughter. But then, convinced by the strength of Lex’s love for me, my father’s disapproval would melt away and the two men would eventually shake hands and laugh. Looking out at the sea in front of our house, they’d go on talking wisely about life, about the future, about Lex’s with me, both of them agreeing solemnly that I ought to be treated with care.

When I returned to New York a month later, Lex finally confessed his love. For
that
girl—he pointed her out. The girl he loved was seventeen, a soon-to-be senior in high school, and because of her age, because she had school the next morning, harder to get than I ever could be. Lex had mentioned his crush on her before I left, but I had assumed it was like his crush on so many others.