by Iris Smyles
At a party a couple of weeks ago, Janice railed all night against a friend of mine who’d made the mistake of telling her, “Women aren’t funny.” It was an impromptu Zombie Roof Party, and I was leading everyone in the “Thriller” dance when she called me over and said, “James here doesn’t think women can be funny.” I shrugged. “That’s hilarious,” I said, seeing they expected me to say something.
They went on arguing about humor for the rest of the night and at no time, so far as I could tell, did either of them say anything remotely amusing. But then, I didn’t stay for the whole conversation. I went back over to the other side of the roof to apply zombie makeup to new guests who’d shown up without costumes. Janice pointed everyone my way when they came up unadorned. “Iris is going to put special-effects makeup on you,” Janice said. “She’s really good at it, because she’s so great at everything,” she sniggered.
And here’s another thing: Janice thinks that anything related to the act of shitting or the word “poop” is automatically sidesplitting. I tell her, “There is nothing inherently funny about shit, yours or anyone else’s, unless you’re five years old.” “Caca,” she responds, as if no further explanation is required. “I disagree,” I sigh. She peppers our website with references to excrement, and I chase after her with the delete key like the owner of a dog that’s not yet been housebroken.
When she suggested a farting noise accompany all visits to our homepage, I decided to try a new approach: “What if Harold Bloom looked at the site and saw that? He wouldn’t say, ‘How refreshing! Finally a literary magazine that addresses what I’m interested in.’ He’d think the editors were disturbed.”
“I don’t think we should censor ourselves to suit the tastes of one man,” she reprimanded me. “I’m just saying we shouldn’t post any material that would disgust those we admire.” “Well, I think that’s really elitist.” “It’s a literary magazine! Of course it’s elitist! We want to showcase the best and appeal to the best!” “Well, that’s not what I want.” “Okay, what do you want then?” “I want a really broad readership—I’m thinking soccer moms, doctors, frat boys, mimes, teachers, plumbers . . . everyone.” “And you propose to unify these diverse groups through short story, poetry, and crap.” “It’s what’s going to make our magazine special,” she said, resting her case. “Don’t say special. Your cousin’s retarded.”
10:30 AM
My phone rings. I don’t recognize the number, so I pick up, hopeful. “Hello?” It’s a customer service representative from the Wine of the Month Club asking me why I stopped my subscription last year and if I would like to restart it. I stopped my subscription because I can’t afford the Wine of the Month Club. The only reason I started it in the first place was the same reason I started the Tie of the Month Club—I was deeply hungover at my computer and temporarily insane. I canceled both memberships a few months after, though significant damage had already been done. My closet is filled with men’s ties that I’ve taken to wearing as belts and headdresses—I must use them for something!
I can’t tell him that though. So I tell him, “I quit drinking. I just started AA so I can’t really have wine around the house.”
“Oh,” he pauses. “I see,” he says uncomfortably. Then he stammers, “Well, are you sure you don’t want to try drinking for just one more month?”
“I’m an alcoholic,” I say. “It’s a disease. I’m trying to put my life back together!”
“Of course, of course,” he says and thanks me for my time.
I hang up the phone and feel terrible. I hope he’s not crying. I’ve decided that this is his first job out of college and it’s not going at all well. I’ve decided he went to Wesleyan and majored in archaeology and he doesn’t know what he’s doing with his life now that he’s graduated and ended up as a telemarketer. I want to call him back and console him, tell him it’s going to be okay even though it’s not, invite him out for a pitcher of margaritas—but I can’t. Instead, I open a drawer and remove a warm can of beer before swallowing as much as I can without gagging. Poor guy, I think. How guilty he must feel, trying to push wine on a recovering alcoholic. Then I become angry and tell myself every man is responsible for his own actions and his were really quite objectionable. I alternate between outrage, sympathy, and despair until the can is empty.
10:55 AM
I smooth my hair into a bun, pull a lint brush from my desk and run it over my sport jacket. I like to dress conservatively these days; one can conceal a lot more in professional attire, I find. I start down the hall, my modest brown pumps punctuating my stride like gentle commas separating items on the long list I’ve just posted to my blog2.
At The Leonard T. Gertz Room, named for its benefactor and decorated with his forbidding oil portrait, I make my way immediately toward the drinks. Because the English department is rife with political unrest—when not teaching, the senior faculty devote themselves to loftier pursuits, like getting their colleagues’ Distinguished Professorships revoked—parties are often scheduled in the middle of the day. If they weren’t, no one would show.
I’m uncorking a bottle of Yellow Tail—the standard fair, as it’s the cheapest—when Veronica, a teaching assistant with short black hair, a lip ring, and a large tattoo that says “VEGAN” (encircling her neck where a string of fake pearls decorates mine), appears beside me. I look up from the bottle and freeze as if caught.
“I didn’t eat breakfast,” she says, her eyes fixed ravenously on a tray of assorted cheeses.
“Me neither,” I say, motioning to the wine.
She spears a cube.
“Such a waste,” Veronica says, holding up a purple, cellophane-tipped toothpick. “Think of how many trees we could save if everyone brought their own forks.” She goes on about her new magazine, which she’s going to call Fork. “It’ll be like nothing else. We’re going to publish fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.”
“In the future,” I announce, “everyone will edit a magazine for fifteen minutes.”
“How’s yours going? Are you and Janice going to do a print issue?”
A thunderous burst of laughter breaks nearby—a professor from the speech department.
I refill my cup, casting an eye right and left like a thief. Though drinking in the English department is not uncommon, only those with tenure do so openly. Because I’m an adjunct, when I bring a six-pack into the building, I can’t throw the cans in my own trash, but must dismember the six-pack in the style of a mob killing and scatter the empties in bins throughout the building.
I move over to the fruit plate and run into Howard, sixty-eight years old, with flames of white hair. Howard has been the on/off Creative Writing Chair since the department’s inception in the mid-’70s. He has “ink for blood,” he likes to say, and regularly transfuses it into the pages of his once prominent literary magazine.
Filling close to one-third of every issue, his fiction catalogues the sexual fantasies of an aging writer/professor who, like Howard, has not published a book in almost twenty years. In his most recent story, which he modeled on The Inferno, Howard’s alter ego “Professor Moshe Blum” is a modern-day Dante who believes salvation lies in the penetration of Beatrice’s fiery vagina—Beatrice is a redhead undergraduate in Blum’s creative writing seminar.
I like Howard. He drinks too much, frequently devolves into tears, and has a form of Shakespearean Tourette’s that makes him explode into occasional soliloquy. Mostly I like him because he seems to like me.
“Again with the beret.”
“It’s my look!” he answers.
Howard wears berets. At the last party, a bit drunk off Yellow Tail, I plucked one from his head and, poking him in the chest, told him, “You can’t just go around wearing a beret, Howard!” “I’ll give you a beret,” he slurred, grabbing my finger. Later, when his back was turned, I snuck down to the mailroom and hid it in the English department microwave.
I ask him if he knows how to erase a Google memory queue. �
��Every time I type something beginning with f, ‘free porn’ pops up.” I tell him about an article on pornography I’ve just read in a new scholarly journal/lit-mag hybrid. “What kind of pornography do you like, Howard?”
“The Collected Musil,” he pronounces carefully.
An attractive brunette in her thirties joins us and says something that sounds like, “My book is made of porcupines and I find myself often shiny about this.” I’ve no idea what she’s talking about and after making a few requests for her to repeat herself, I nod as if in agreement. Howard remarks on her exotic accent and asks where she’s from. “School of Ed,” she answers.
Howard launches into a speech about his “ink for blood” before Jerry, another adjunct, interrupts. Jerry is upset because he suspects one of his students of having plagiarized. He rings his hands and asks us all what he should do.
“Count your blessings,” I answer. “I wish my students would plagiarize. It would certainly make for better reading. Unless a student actually hands me the book from which he’s copied with the page dog-eared and the exact words underlined, what do I care? I’m just happy to be able to give out an A.”
I plop down in an armchair and cross and uncross my legs impatiently. A woman across the room wonders aloud if she’s hearing cicadas. Howard stares. Our circle widens to include a female Melville scholar (the White Whale as feminist icon against which Ahab’s wood is impotent, etc.) and a gay black Gender Studies professor. I knock back what’s left of my Yellow Tail, feel myself becoming intolerably charming, and rise up. “Duty calls!” I say to Howard.
“‘Reflection is the business of man,’” Howard booms, “‘a sense of his state is his first duty: But who remembereth himself in joy? Is it not in mercy then that sorrow is allotted unto us?’”
I tap my watch. “Class in five.”
12:20 PM
“The book opens in a dark wood, with Dante confessing he’s lost his way. A poet in exile, Dante despairs. Then, seeing a light up ahead, a mountaintop offering sanctuary, he begins toward it only to encounter three beasts blocking his path. Dejected, he turns back and there meets the ghost of Virgil, his favorite writer. Virgil tells Dante of another path to the heavenly hilltop, but warns that before they can ascend, they must first pass through the place of eternal punishment, and then purgatory, a place of lesser punishment.
Traveling through nine torturous circles, Dante meets hell’s resident sinners—both strangers and those he once knew in life: former teachers, friends, enemies, politicians, and mythological heroes, all being punished by God. Inspired by their suffering, Dante begins an investigation into his own troubled soul, the subject of the book that will redeem him. As much fiction as it is memoir, The Comedia is an allegory of ‘quarter-life crisis’—what each of you will go through when you finish college, can’t find a job, and start seriously considering graduate school.”
A hand shoots up in the front row.
“Wasn’t Dante thirty-five in The Inferno?”
“Yes. But the people of the Middle Ages believed thirty-five to be the new twenty-five.” I look at my watch. “I’m afraid we’re out of time.”
I wave a book of CliffsNotes, which I’ve begun recommending officially on the syllabus. “Remember, there is no shame in supplementing your reading with a study guide. And one more thing: When referring to a book’s plot, it is customary to use the present tense. ‘Odysseus is trying to get home.’ ‘Dante is going through hell.’ Please remember that when writing your papers this weekend.”
12:55 PM
I drop another stack of quizzes on the desk and immediately shut the door lest a student actually stop in for “office hours.” I light a cigarette, turn on the computer, and check the stat counter on my website, www.PhilipHasASmallPenisBlog.com. There is a recurring visitor with an IP address from a west side office which I decide is Philip, whom I haven’t seen or spoken to in months. Back in December, he wrote, asking to see me, telling me he had a Christmas gift. I told him to mail it. He didn’t mail it, probably because he didn’t actually have one. I wasn’t surprised.
I go to Philip’s Flickr page and look at the album he’s labeled, “Breakfast.” In each photo I see my bare knees and feet sticking out from under his glass coffee table. My knees under his plate of egg whites. My feet and his feet under a plate of sausages. My hands and his knees under two bagels and lox, under two bowls of cereal....
Then I look at the photos from when he visited me in Greece over the summer, at the album he’s labeled, “My trip to Greece.” There are almost no pictures of us together. There are many photos of my parents’ house, however, with each room labeled. “Chez Smyles living room,” “Chez Smyles bedroom,” “Chez Smyles marble bath and chrome Kohler fixtures.” They look like real estate photos. There are quite a few views, too, which Philip has labeled, “Sunset over Pelion,” “Sunset over Volos. . . .”
Eventually, I come across a single photograph of us, standing on a mountainside, the sunset at our backs. It was taken right after another couple asked Philip to take their picture. After, the guy said, “Now you two,” and motioned for us to pose. Philip shrugged and handed him his camera, as if he were doing him another favor on top of the first. The photo is labeled, “Sunset over Kala Nera,” as if the sunset were the focus and the two of us had gotten in the way.
I look back at one of the pictures he took of my parents’ living room and pretend I’m Philip looking at it. Then I think about what I’d tell him if I saw him again. “You’re a bad thief. If you had any brains, you might have stolen much more and it is for this reason, above all others, that I despise you so. . . .”
A half hour passes this way, with me delivering a scathing speech to him in my head. I craft each line meticulously as if it were the Gettysburg Address. I insult him as an American flag waves thunderously at my back, and I revise my insults again and again until they are perfect, until they are glittering jewels inlaid into the handle of a musket, until they are multi-colored fireworks, bombs bursting in air, until I am a revolutionary insulting him for a cause. I choose each word carefully, with the kind of precision I’ve never been able to muster in my writing. And I destroy him. I destroy him. Then I remember the last time we had sex.
1:04 PM
My phone rings again. Janice. I don’t answer.
1:05 PM
I update my other blog, www.IrisHasFreeTime.com, and refresh the page thirty times in thirty minutes to see if any comments have been left. A comment finally shows up. It’s from a guy in Texas who calls himself “Chessman.” He’s my most faithful reader. Sometimes he writes more in his comments than I have in my actual post. He checks back even more than I update and complains that I need to update more often. His dedication to my blog is creepy and stalkerish, so says Caroline, who only very occasionally reads my blog herself.
On my last post, Caroline left a comment after his five, saying, “Hey, Iris, who’s the lunatic that keeps commenting on your blog?” But then, he seems to care more about what’s going on with me than any of my friends do and routinely tells me I should be writing for The New Yorker, that my writing is lyrical and funny and brilliant and beautiful, so I don’t think he’s so bad and frankly, I’m a little bit annoyed with Caroline for insulting my fan.
In his comment, he says he was in New York City last week. He visited the Marshall Chess Club downtown and imagined all the girls he saw walking in the village were me. I’m pretty sure most of the people I actually know don’t look for me in the faces of strangers. I know this because whenever I run into friends and acquaintances, they always look surprised, as if their view of the world hadn’t included me and now they must make room, as if I had shown up very late and unexpected to a dinner party, and they had to shuffle for an extra chair and place setting. They look almost annoyed, like there might not be enough dessert. But here is this stranger, my fan, thinking of me, wondering about me. For a while, I feel wonderful.
My friends don’t read anything I write.
Not even Reggie. Not even Reggie, whom I regularly pass out next to when I don’t feel like springing for a cab late at night. Not even Reggie who is basically in love with me. His irritating courtship strategy seems, literally, to wait until he is the last man on Earth, to wait until the zombie apocalypse eliminates all possible alternatives, causing me to one day turn to him and say, “Okay, Reggie. Now it’s your turn.” I find his patience both reassuring and disgusting. On the one hand, I don’t have to worry about dying alone. On the other, dying alone seems preferable.
You would think someone so in love might be a little more interested in me, might read my blog or something, seeing as I want to be a writer. But not Reggie. He’d rather just moon around and wonder why I’m not into him. What bothers me most is that he lies to me about it. I’ll stop him and say, “Look, Reggie, it’s okay. I know you don’t read my blog.” And he’ll say, “But I do, Iris. I’ve read them all!” And then he’ll start to chew on his tongue, a nervous tick. So I’ll say, “Okay, fine,” and proceed to ask him a simple question about my last post, just to get him to cut the crap and stop lying to me already. He’ll squirm through an answer the same way my students squirm through their daily quizzes.
ME: “Well, if you read it, then you should have no problem telling me what I did after I found out I accidentally killed my father and married my mother.”
REGGIE: “You were sad.”
1:19 PM
I stare directly at the fluorescent light fixture.
1:45 PM
I write an email.
Subject: Hubris and Lust
Hello, everyone!
Here is a link to the site I told you about in class today: “The Dante’s Inferno Hell Test.” OMG! I have been banished to the Second Level of Hell—it’s hot. Don’t forget, final paper proposals are due next week. See you in Hell if I don’t see you Monday!
