Iris Has Free Time (9 page)

“Martin, can you tie me up now?” I asked, stopping on the sidewalk.

“I’ll do it when we get there.”

“It’ll be too late then. I want to be in costume when we walk in or the effect will be lost.”

“I’ll do it in the lobby.”

We got into an elevator filled with vampires, sexy witches, pimps, and white trash. When we got out, Martin kept going.

“Wait, you said you’d tie me up!”

He sighed. “Is this really necessary?”

“Yes!” I said. “It’s our whole costume!”

Zach and Michelle stood by.

“You guys go ahead,” Martin said. “
I’m
not allowed.”

They went in, and Martin and I got to work. I had already figured out how best to secure the tracks and tried explaining to Martin, but he got mad and said he knew what he was doing and that I should just “keep quiet for a change.”

“You keep quiet,” I whispered, as he circled the rope around my arms and torso, weaving it through the tracks until I couldn’t move my upper arms. “Circle it more times,” I said, when he stopped after only two loops. “You have to do it more times or it won’t look good.”

He circled it a few more times and then, walking on ahead without me, said, “I don’t know how you’re going to move around, but you got what you wanted. Happy?”

Since I was now attached to the tracks and the hallway was so narrow, I couldn’t walk straight but had to walk sort of sideways, like Gloria Swanson entering stage left. “This is part of the fun,” I said, flanking in behind him.

Past the front door was another long, even narrower hallway that led into a large loft-like living room packed with costumed guests. Martin and I stood at the edge with Zach and Michelle. I smiled excitedly and, maneuvering just the bottom of my right arm, handed Zach my disposable camera.

“Would you take a picture of us? Martin, could you please wear your hat?” He’d taken it off again. “At least for the picture?”

Martin put his hat back on and stood beside me. I leaned over for a second to brush a hair from my face, which caused my tracks to bump Martin in the back. He flashed me a mean look.

“What?” I asked.

“Your stupid tracks hit me. Can you try to be a little more aware of yourself, please!” he yelled, shaking my tracks angrily, and in so doing shaking me.

“Guys,” said Zach, a few feet in front of us, holding up the camera. “You ready?”

My eyes filled with tears. I tried to smile but found my mouth muscles doing all sorts of weird things. “No, umm, I have to go to the bathroom,” I said and flanked off down the long narrow hallway, trying not to cry until I made it outside.

I just needed a moment alone to collect myself, but the hallway was filled with pimps and white trash—investment bankers in costume—coming off the elevator, so I climbed the staircase half a flight to get some privacy. Standing on the next landing, my arms tied down to my sides, tracks on my back, I let my tears flow.

After a minute, a sexy witch spotted my feet and ducked her head up the stairs. She smiled, then frowned. “Are you okay?” My costume was a success; I looked like I was in trouble. Her boyfriend, wearing a tuxedo and an Afro wig, poked his head in next to hers and looked up at me with concern. I tried to smile back. “Fine,” I said. “Great,” I sniffled, as if I had no idea why they’d even asked.

After my face air-dried—I couldn’t reach my eyes to wipe the tears away—I went downstairs and flanked back into the party, to the edge of the large room where our group had stood moments earlier. Martin was nowhere to be seen. A few different guys came up to me while I waited, each of them telling me how much they liked my costume before asking if I needed rescuing. I said no, told them I had a boyfriend somewhere inside, but thanks anyway. Then, after a few minutes, The Villain returned.

“There you are!” Martin said. “Look, I’m going to get a drink, you want anything?”

“A screwdriver would be nice,” I said quietly.

He looked me up and down and then back at the crowd. “Well, obviously you can’t come inside with your tracks on,” he said.

“Yes, I can.”

“So I’ll come back in a few minutes.” He rubbed the skin above his upper lip, pulling at the remaining glue so that it looked like he was twirling an imaginary mustache; he’d already removed the real one. “It was falling off anyway,” he volunteered. “It’s too hot in here,” he sighed. He took off his hat and jacket and studied me. “You might as well make yourself useful,” he said. And then, as if I were a coat rack, he hung his jacket and hat on my tracks and disappeared into the crowd.

This is almost everything that happened since I last saw May in New York:

I got
even more
serious with Martin; took a job teaching sixth grade in a public school in the South Bronx; moved to a new apartment at the mouth of the Midtown Tunnel; took a new job teaching at a private school on the Upper West Side; earned my teaching certificate; applied to graduate school; discovered Reggie on line behind me outside the Halloween store on Fourth Avenue—“I’m going to be ‘white trash,’” he said; broke up with Martin after nearly three years (Not right after Halloween, but pretty soon after. He was surprised; he loved me, he explained, and figured we were in it for the long haul, which was why he resented me so much); moved to a new apartment in the West Village; accepted the third invitation sent by Caroline to join Friendster; quit my teaching job; began a master’s program in Humanities after every other graduate school rejected me; tried to write another novel; updated my Friendster profile to include under Favorite Films all three Amy Fisher movies (
Casualties of Love: The Long Island Lolita Story
;
The Amy Fisher Story
; and
Amy Fisher: My Story
) and summarily accepted one hundred or so “friend requests” from former college and high school acquaintances I hadn’t seen or spoken to in years; read up on “lucid dreaming” and began first by just trying to hover low, still pretty close to the ground; cried when I told Martin I didn’t want to get back together though I definitely still loved him, that I’d really only come over to collect my Tupperware containers and my train tracks; took to crying sporadically on the subway when I thought about how much I missed him; and learned to live an otherwise quiet, fairly responsible life that included veggie burgers (to make sure I was getting at least one serving of vegetables daily) prepared on my George Foreman Grill (a Christmas present from my parents), the occasional jog along the Hudson river, and hanging framed reproductions of Bruegels and Manets, or whatever I could find on sale at The Salvation Army, up and down the walls of my new West Village one-bedroom apartment in an ongoing effort to make the place look more like how I felt, which was, increasingly, like having a party, before I decided to throw one in celebration of my twenty-fifth birthday.

I invited all my friends. But because I’d been living wholly within Martin’s world for the last three years, I had only a few. So I asked my old friend Jacob to throw the party with me, to invite his friends and then ask his friends to invite theirs. Reggie, who’d found me on Friendster after our run-in at the Halloween store, wrote back that he was definitely coming and also, would I mind if he brought Felix?

Finding me within the large crowd of strangers huddled noisily inside my small one-bedroom apartment, Felix handed me a beer and also his cell phone. On the other end was May, calling from the edge of oblivion—California. And so, just as I had brokered May and Felix’s first date a few years earlier, Felix brokered a reunion between me and May.

It was as if we were a movie being played in rewind. First there was May and me, then May and Felix and me, then May and Felix and Reggie and me, then May and Felix, then me and Martin, then me. Then Reggie and me, then Reggie and Felix and me, then Reggie and Felix and May and me. See what I mean?

When May came to New York for a week’s visit a few months later, the four of us all went out together. Now Reggie and I were dating while May and Felix were negotiating a friendship/romance. She explained this to me by confessing that though she and Felix had kissed the other night, it was more out of boredom than out of attraction. Did I understand?

It was like a rubber band snapped back. Or rather, like a ship returning from the furthest reaches of space. Proof that the universe is just like a game of Pac-Man—I read this recently in
Scientific American
. The universe is not infinite, some scientists suppose, but shaped like a donut giving off the appearance of infinity while actually just looping. So there we were—rounding the other side of the universe, returning through the act of departing—a chain of acquaintances made, broken, and reassembled in reverse. Pac-Man exiting on one side of the screen only to reappear on the other.

After May’s visit, we began emailing each other pretty often. We were both single again—she and Felix were over, while Reggie and I had re-started only to re-stop—so we had a lot to discuss. We’d write to each other about our dating adventures, exchange advice, and occasionally even implement a new “science experiment” via correspondence.

I’d send her an email that I planned to send to some guy, and she’d hypothesize his response, laying down a small wager with it: “Twenty bucks says he’ll call you Tuesday but not Monday, and if you don’t call him back within three hours, he’ll follow up with a text referencing the theme song to
Knight Rider.
” “You’re on!”

That Valentine’s Day it hardly mattered that I had no boyfriend. I wrote an email that included the address of a local flower shop along with the window of time during which I’d be home to receive presents, and cc’d it to a list of guys I’d recently dated or was still dating. May enjoyed this experiment particularly and called me in a peel of laughter.

“The bitch is crazy is about me!” she said in a man’s voice. “Hey, wait—” she trailed off, pretending to notice only then the long list of names hugging theirs in the cc.

I wasn’t trying to be cruel. It’s just, with all the waiting-by-the-phone stuff that happens when you’re twenty-five—the headgames, the guys never being honest, or their acting like you’re trying to do something awful to them just by caring—a girl’s got to take her power back. I got five valentines following that stunt, incidentally. An unexpected result that made us both a little sad.

“It’s horrible the way men will fall in love just because you won’t,” I wrote in my next email.

May agreed. “Even when you’re winning, hard-to-get is a lousy game.”

 

Around that same time, I began to see more of Felix and Reggie. Felix had decided to resettle in New York, which meant that for a while he would cruise the couches of the North East. And so, the three of
us
now became a gang.

It was just like in
Sex and the City
. Every Sunday, we’d meet for brunch to discuss our love lives, only, instead of four fabulous women in their thirties, it was four slovenly guys in their twenties; Felix, Reggie, Reggie’s two roommates, and me. “That chick I met on Friendster tossed my salad last night,” Felix told us.

Then, because Felix and I were both unemployed—me because I’d just started grad school, and Felix because he’s Felix—we began hanging out more and more just the two of us, and as it turned out, we made an excellent team. When you’re in your twenties, and the battle of the sexes is raging, its casualty rate increasing every day, a platonic boy-girl alliance can be a great asset. With me by his side, women were much more amenable to his advances, and for my part, Felix was an excellent ally, too. While a girl alone might look desperate, and two together, way too intimidating, a girl with a guy who is not her boyfriend eases tensions. Together, we hit the bars, “befriend and conquer!” our new motto.

Having spent so much time in the trenches with Felix, it was only natural that eventually I began to confide in him, too, asking for relationship advice as if he were a surrogate May. “It’s funny,” I told him one day, “how in bringing you to my party, Reggie had been like a surrogate you when you brought Reggie; and when you put me on the phone with May, you were like a surrogate me putting me on the phone with a surrogate you; and then when May visited New York a while back and you guys sort of kissed, she’d been like a surrogate Reggie; and then Reggie, in dating me for a few weeks, was like a surrogate you; while I, in dating Reggie, the surrogate you, had become a surrogate May; which in turn made you, Felix, my bastard roommate, a surrogate me.”

How strange life is, I marveled, as we stood together in the kitchen, this ongoing exchange of one role for another. You’re a roommate, a friend, a girlfriend, a student, a teacher, a daughter, maybe even one day a mother, and on and on, I guess, depending on how long you live. But if you eventually become all these different people, what exactly is it that makes you still you? Do
you
change, or does the
game
just change all around you, you know what I mean?—I’m paraphrasing.

“Yeah, that’s why I used chocolate syrup to make the deviled eggs this time,” Felix replied. “You didn’t have any mayo. Go ’head and try one.”

“It makes no sense,” I said.

The Bastard and I were walking along Tenth Street. It was late fall or early winter depending on how you see things and the morning after another long night of terrible fun.

“Jess likes you, but you freak him out a little. He’s not looking for a serious relationship and can probably tell that it would be hard to keep things casual with you, which is why he’s backing off now.”

“But I don’t want a relationship either. I just got out of a three-year relationship. Another relationship is the
last
thing I want!”

We walked a bit in silence. Felix began whistling the Daft Punk song, “One More Time.” I hummed the choruses.

After a minute, he stopped, looked around, and nodded. “It’s officially a dry spell,” he announced.