Iris Has Free Time

by Iris Smyles

  —Ms. Smyles

  I go to www.Sceenz.com to see what people are doing at the intersection next to my apartment. There is a camera hidden above the building housing the Christopher Street Smoke Shop, which casts a live feed to this website, Sceenz. Sometimes I look in to see what I’m missing while at work.

  People are crossing the street again. What else would they be doing? I watch as a cluster of tourists waits for the WALK sign. The DON’T WALK sign begins flashing and they wait. I wait. The light changes. Now they’re walking.

  I send another email, this time to all my contacts:

  Subject: Who wants to know what I’m wearing?

  Three pairs of underwear because I LIKE panty lines and don’t want to give the wrong impression, like I’m not wearing any underwear. One brassiere (white). An oxford shirt (blue), a cable-knit crewneck sweater (gray), a corduroy skirt (brown), high-heeled penny loafers (also brown), a Band-Aid on my bloodied knee (was driven off the road on my bike the other day by a school bus), and tights (black). Otherwise, I’m completely naked. Wait, I’m putting on my jacket (brown, tweed). I’m procrastinating.... Who thinks I should renew my internet porn subscription?

  —Iris

  I get an idea for a fiction blog called, Hellen Gimbel, Editorial Assistant! It will chronicle the adventures of Hellen Gimbel, woman-about-town /editorial assistant/plant lover/detective. I will update it daily until I have amassed a whole novel. I quickly register the domain name, choose from a few ready-made blog templates, and am ready to go!

  I can think of nothing to write.

  I decide to add an FAQ section to Iris Has Free Time instead.

  FAQ

  RE: THE BIG BANG

  QUESTION: If the universe is expanding, are we—my boyfriend and I—doomed to grow apart?

  ANSWER: Cooling is inevitable on a scale both cosmic and personal. But so is death. My advice? Try not to think about it. My advice? Go get your hair done.

  RE: COSMETOLOGY

  QUESTION: Why do I always feel sad after having my hair cut no matter how well it comes out?

  ANSWER: Human hair grows from the root, making that last inch of hair at the very end the oldest. If you have long, shoulder-length hair say, you will be losing a ten or fifteen-year-old piece of yourself. Naturally, this will feel traumatic.

  In today’s busy, modern world, however, a haircut is a loss for which we occasion no ceremony. If it’s really getting you down, though, on your next visit to the salon bring a decorative urn in which to gather up the clippings. Then, you can either place the urn on your mantle at home, or say your goodbyes while spreading its contents over your favorite body of water.

  RE: HISTORICAL ERRORS

  QUESTION: What is the difference between a mistake and an error?

  ANSWER: A mistake you make once. It’s an accident, like a typo. An error you make repeatedly. It’s a misjudgment, like youth. Hence the popular expression, “Oh my god! You’re [getting married/moving/enrolling in graduate school/dying your hair back to its natural color]. It’s ‘the end of an error’!”

  RE: CROWDS

  QUESTION: Why am I lonely at parties?

  ANSWER: Because everyone in the room is eventually going to die and what the party is really celebrating is the accidental fact that none of you are dead yet. Because the universe is expanding and you and your boyfriend have grown apart. Because your hair is short. Because from the distance of a few feet, all conversations sound the same.

  Because the din of oblivion is the sound of silverware on crystal, of toasts made to dinner party hosts, of pleas for coat-check girls to distinguish among identical umbrellas, of inquiries with cater waiters regarding a mix-up with your specially requested vegetarian plate. And because nobody really talks about anything interesting. Because there is usually no one very handsome to talk to anyway. Because the food is frequently not very good. And even if it were, did you attend the party for the food?

  RE: LINGUISTICS:

  QUESTION: Why can’t you make the word red into an adverb? Like, “He stared redly?”

  ANSWER: But of coursely, you can. You can make anything into an adverb by just adding “ly.” Start nowly!

  RE: SPONTANEOUS HUMAN COMBUSTION

  QUESTION: Is it possible?

  ANSWER: Spontaneous Human Combustion was once believed to be an outcome of excessive drink. Today, “SHC,” as it is called in the scientific community, is a source of much contention, though I can’t see why. People blush, don’t they? Some more than others turn redly when embarrassed. Could SHC not then result from a deeply humiliating experience?

  The next time you spill a glass of red wine at a dinner party where you’ve already grown morose, and feel your skin begin to tingle with shame as everyone stares, give yourself a break. Stop beating yourself up. Put things in perspective by imagining the greater mess you might still make were you to burst suddenly into flames.

  RE: TIME

  QUESTION: The other day I was in the subway when suddenly, out of nowhere, I felt as if I were looking back in time, as if the present were already a faraway memory, and I felt an overwhelming desire to return to it, to get it all back even though I was still standing there, even though I’d not yet left. I got off at Fourteenth Street, but why did this happen?

  ANSWER: What you felt was an earthquake in your brain (brainquake), and so you briefly experienced time in a nonlinear fashion with past, present, and future occurring all at once. This happens more often as one gets older. Like a trick hip, your mind is now something you’ll just have to be careful with.

  Crossword puzzles may help, or try this: Imagine you are in a dark room with a single spotlight shining a path through it. Now imagine the same room, but with many spotlights turned on all at once and shining in every possible direction, illuminating the whole space so that instead of a single path, you see a vast room without any paths at all. You see space where you previously saw only direction. You see emptiness, which makes you sad, but also, you see possibility. This is most likely what happened to you on the subway. But don’t worry. Many people are subject to such flashes of brilliance. Quit your job and become an artist or don’t.

  Posted by Iris at 2:21 pm, 0 comments

  2:22 PM

  I decide to stop fooling around and get to work. But first I must use the bathroom. I lock my office door and start down the hall, grabbing a sheet of paper before I leave, just in case I run into Howard. I try always to carry some vague document with me so I can use the excuse that I am on my way to deliver it and therefore don’t have time to stop and sit in Howard’s office and have one of those long conversations where he just stares and doesn’t say anything.

  At the university, a walk down the hall can take all day if you’re not careful, or if you want it to take all day. Most of the professors keep their office doors open, so that when I or someone else walks by they can call out, “Hey!” and “Come in!” and offer me or whomever a bit from the blender they have installed in their office to make smoothies and life a bit more comfortable. These occasions are something I both hope for and dread. On one hand, I appreciate the break from the day’s dreary monotony, and on the other, once I’m sitting there talking with whomever, I find myself longing to be returned to the day’s dreary monotony.

  I pass Albert’s office and he spots me. Albert teaches a class called, “Reading Tootsie: American Phalofeminism After the War,” and seems to like me. In his mid-forties, he is younger than the rest of the professors and by university standards quite handsome. He obviously works out and wears very tight wool sweaters to show off his muscles, so that he often looks shrink-wrapped, or like a muscular sheep that got trapped in a clothes dryer. He has a motorcycle and long thick straight gray hair that he ties in a ponytail—a popular style among the female academics—and a very large head, as if he were a caricature of himself.

  He stands up from his desk and invites me in. I linger in the doorway and think. “Umm, okay, but just for a second.” I wave the piece
of paper in my hand to show my pressing business and step inside, feeling an immediate difference. Albert does not use the building’s fluorescent overhead lights but has lit the room with a variety of soft lamps from Pier 1 Imports. He invites me to sit on his plush leather couch, and I do. “A nice little oasis, you have here,” I say. Then I notice a pile of smooth stones on the rug beside a filing cabinet. I offer to help him clean up, but he says they’re supposed to be like that. “Feng shui,” he explains. I nod knowingly.

  He attends to the small bar arranged above one of his bookcases—a decanter of amber liquor surrounded by four highball glasses decorated with Mondrian paintings. He offers me whiskey. I accept. He pours out a few fingers full, hands me the glass, and sits back down behind his desk.

  “Aren’t you going to have any?” He says no, he can’t, and then looks at me as if sizing me up, but faster than there is actually time to, so that it’s more the suggestion of sizing me up. He says, “I have Hep C, so I’m not supposed to drink.” Making conversation, I say, “Gee, how’d you get that?” and he tells me you can get it from sex or sharing needles and then looks at me flirtatiously, like he’s dangerous and not like the other professors. “I read your blog,” he adds quickly. “It’s very interesting.”

  “I’m glad you like it,” I say, sipping my drink uncomfortably, wondering if I can catch anything from the glass.

  “You know, you look a bit like my decanter,” Albert says, motioning to the bottle’s Mondrian reproduction.

  “I get that a lot,” I shrug. “Albert,” I say, with formal enthusiasm, “I love what you’ve done with your office. This couch is just—”

  “—sumptuous.”

  “That’s the word. You know, you must have the nicest office on campus.”

  “Not as nice as the president’s,” he sniffs. “We’re friends, you know.”

  “Oh, is that why you were at the president’s dinner?”

  Colin Powell, an alumnus, had been the guest of honor, and Barbara Walters had introduced him. This to say, it was a very posh event at Chelsea Piers where I hardly belonged. I was there as the guest of one of the college’s new donors in whose name I had recently won a writing award. I submitted a novella about a young woman who loses her grip on reality as more and more people in her life stop using the subjunctive mood. The story ends in a psych ward, where she’s been admitted following an arrest—copyediting street signs in her nightgown, she is picked up for vandalism. There, a young nurse tries to give her some advice, prefacing it with the phrase, “If I was you,” which causes my protagonist to begin screaming, “Were! Were!” while futilely beating her fists into the wall until an orderly quiets her with an injection. For her, all hope is lost, the reader understands; the hospital will never release her now. The whole thing takes place in the 1960s, and the changes in men’s hat etiquette is used as a foil.

  I was very nervous the whole time I was there, as I was weighted with the twin goals of trying not to drink too much so as not to upset the donors who kept talking to me about my thanking them when I eventually win the Pulitzer, while trying still to get sufficiently bombed so that the night would not be a total bust.

  I excused myself to the bathroom numerous times. I wanted to cry, but I just stared at myself in the mirror and mouthed, “Who are you who are you who are you?” A new habit. I did not mean it metaphysically but practically. What I meant was: Who are you trying to fool, them in there, or you in here? “Figure out what you want and then go for it!” says every self-help book. I like to dip into self-help books when I’m at the bookstore. It’s a great way to fill the dull hours during which one is doing nothing to improve one’s life. So I told myself, “both,” and walked back to the table with renewed confidence.

  At the table they had these delicious chocolate desserts, which I decided to try not to eat as a fresh alternative to trying not to drink, when I spotted Albert across the room, his thick gray hair pulled back into his standard ponytail, his head too large for his body, his wacky proportions accentuated by his tiny suit: a capri suit, cropped at the wrists and ankles, and finished with a short tie. He looked like an auctioneer. I was surprised to see him because most of the professors from the English department had not been invited. I thought he saw me too, but then when I waved, he looked away.

  “The president likes me for some reason,” he goes on, watching me intently. “He’s a writer, you know. Like you.”

  “I’m not a writer,” I rush to correct him, too embarrassed to own up to my aspirations which, in the last eight years I’ve come no closer to achieving, around which I’ve settled into a kind of permanent orbit.

  “Sure you are!” he says.

  “I could just as well call myself a shitter,” I tell Albert. “I shit every day, too, and get paid the same amount for it.” I cringe almost immediately after the words leave my mouth. It reminds me of something Janice might say. What’s happening to me?

  Albert looks at me and composes his face into one of his two expressions: the Greek mask of happy (comedy) and the Greek mask of sad (tragedy). He does happy and nods. “Well, you’re already famous around here,” he says. “Everyone’s always talking about what a great writer you are.”

  “I doubt that’s what they’re talking about. Anyway, this place is hardly a reliable barometer for success. Half the staff is self-publishing and hoping their students will hook them up with their agents. Don’t tell anyone I said that!” I add quickly, realizing my mistake too late.

  “You’re very beautiful,” he says, narrowing his eyes.

  “So are you.”

  A blonde T.A. with oversized dangling earrings pokes her head into the room and says, “Still at it?” Greek mask of happy. They exchange a few words, what seems like a continuation from a previous conversation. I put my glass back on the bar beside the bouquet of colored glass swizzle sticks.

  “Listen,” I say, turning to them. “I’m going to go. Have to get back to work.” I wave my sheet of paper like a hall pass. “Thanks for the drink, Albert.”

  He makes his Greek mask face at me—Greek-mask-sad that I’m leaving, followed by Greek-mask-happy that we’ve conversed. “Any time!” he says, still smiling. “Hey, Shell Levine, this is Iris Smyles. The two best writers on campus!” “Oh, come on,” she says, waving his comment away. “Seriously, you’re famous! Everyone’s always talking about what a great writer you are.” I interrupt to shake her hand and say, “Nice to meet you, Shell,” and then squeeze by her through the door.

  I float down the hall on barely a buzz and review my conversation with Albert. “Drinking is orbit,” I say to myself, and think again about how I should stop. And then I think about how I should really get back to work and try to calculate in my head how many quizzes I need to grade before I can take a break. Then I squeeze my waist to see if my love handles are still there, vaguely hoping they might disappear on their own without my having to do anything. I poke at my sides absentmindedly, as if checking the number on a lottery ticket I buy every day.

  3:31 PM

  I stop into the mailroom to see if I have any notifications in my mailbox. Next to the copy machine, I spot a pile of free copies of last month’s Associated Writing Programs magazine. I scan the names and titles listed on the front: an essay on memoir writing, an essay on small press publication, an essay called, “Poetry and Self.” The women writers, pictured in small boxes on the cover, have university hair—long, frizzy, gray, brushed straight and pulled back into a clip. They smile as if they were perfectly content to be featured in the magazine of losers who’ve found a way to make losing work.

  Their essays are always about “the craft” and the importance of “showing up for the work.” What they neglect to mention is that their showing up is only important to them. No one else cares if they don’t show up. The A WP bears an eerie similarity to self-help manuals. One of the features about memoir writing is called, “Writing to Save Your Life!” Because I love self-help manuals, I pick up a copy.


  I take the magazine back to my office. Settled in, I immediately turn to the back and circle a bunch of calls from literary magazines I decide to submit to but never will. I do this every month. They have names like Salamander and Natural Bridge. One wants stories about Southeastern women who’ve been battered. Another, Trout Magazine, wants only stories about trout fishing, specifically about trout and transcendence. I think about trying to write something about trout fishing. I think about trying to adapt a love story I’ve already written by adding a scene with a trout. “Write what you know,” goes the classic advice, but there are never any calls for stories about what I know. I feel hopeless. If only someone would take me fishing and then batter me.

  I get an idea for a surrealist story in which a woman wakes up as a chicken cutlet and is worried because how is she supposed to get to work on time and continue to support her parents and her brother’s violin lessons? I rush to write the idea down in my notebook. Then I think of another idea for a realist novel and jot down, “Story about a woman who is just like me but better. Everyone loves her. She drinks and never gets hangovers. She solves crimes and is impeccably dressed. She hasn’t gone to college or grad school or a second grad school and has never for even a moment thought about working as an adjunct in the Humanities department. Instead, she makes a lot of money stuffing envelopes at home—it turns out it’s not a scam!”

  I close my notebook and pick up the stack of final portfolios from Monday’s class. I’ve asked each student to do a self-evaluation, to collect all their work from the beginning of the semester to now, and then attach a cover sheet with a brief paragraph assessing their work, along with the grade they think they deserve. “The reason for this,” I told them, “is that I am not giving you a grade. You have already earned it. My role is simply to assess. There should be no surprise on your part, and no difference between the grade I think you should receive and what you think you should receive.” The real reason, of course, is to save myself the effort.