by Iris Smyles
I skim through each portfolio and record the grades exactly as they’ve written them. Then I stare at the door for a while. It’s beige.
4:05 PM
One of the adjuncts who shares my office arrives with a student trailing her. I offer to step out for a half hour so she might use the space for a meeting, and then I go sit in the back stairwell. It’s rarely accessed, so I can count on a few minutes of solitude. I decide to pass the time by finally listening to my fourteen voicemail messages. One message is from B, a guy I’ve been seeing, and it makes me smile. I’ve already heard the message. He left it yesterday, but I haven’t called him back yet, because once I call him back, then it will be his turn to call me back, and I just want to feel good for a while, like I’m not waiting for someone to call me back all the time. But then, I don’t want him to think I don’t like him either. I debate what to do. I decide to text him later on tonight. I type into my phone, “shit fuck rat cock,” just to see how it looks and then erase it. Then I type, “I’m thinking about you right now. Can you tell?” I press Send and immediately revert to feeling unloved. I distract myself by erasing all the messages from Janice.
When I return to my office twenty minutes later, the other adjunct is alone and packing up to leave. She says she has to rush downtown for a doctor’s appointment, but that students will be dropping by all afternoon to leave their final projects—will I be here to receive them? I say, “Yes, I will be here to receive them,” and she thanks me profusely. After she’s gone I close the door, and when I hear footsteps or knocking I try not to move or even press the keypad because it’s one of those old keypads and can be quite loud.
“I guess she’s not here,” one female voice says to another. “Should we just leave it?” No answer. Pause. Another knock on the door. Silence. The sound of footsteps receding.
I crack open one of the beers I’ve hidden in my desk and light up a cigarette. I use the antique ashtray, presumably the property of the tenured professor whose office I’ve been assigned to. She’s on sabbatical. Before she left, she posted a little sign over the bookshelf that reads, “Do not remove books!” and put clear tape over the bookshelves as a deterrent. Dexterously, as if I were playing a game of Jenga, I slip out a volume of Barthelme and start reading a story about porcupines invading a college campus but quickly find myself bored. I’m bored of reading. I’m bored of words. I’m bored of myself.
Barthelme used to teach here back in the ’70s. I try to imagine running into him in the hallway. I wonder if he’d like me. If he’d ask me out thinking I was one thing, and then leave me waiting by the phone when he found out I was another. Howard says he was a total jerk. That’s always happening. All the authors you love are total jerks. I’m about to replace the volume but then decide to put it on a different shelf. An hour later, I have all the books spread out on the floor and am rearranging them at random. There are three other adjuncts who share the office, so I know I won’t get caught.
I open the door to use the bathroom. Three dioramas of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater are piled up, blocking the door like a fort, and I have to step over and around them to get out. I take the long way, so as not to pass Howard’s office. Halfway down the hall, I spot the back of Albert locking his door. I turn and head the other way quickly.
After I wash my hands and water splatters my skirt, so that I actually feel more dirty than before I washed them, I start back and realize that in order to enter my grades into the online database, I’ll need to get my pin number from the English office. Everything is high-tech now, except we still have to go in person to get our pin and also a printout with the instructions for how to access the database. They refuse to email the information so that in streamlining the process, they’ve actually complicated it further. I steel up for the English office.
5:20 PM
The English office is haunted. Pale adjuncts loom in perpetuity, ever at the ready should a portal to the next world open up—“I can teach Fiction Writing if Howard’s gonna be on sabbatical. . . .” Because the department heads are always busy trying to out-maneuver their peers, the secretaries have inherited full run of the department; it is they who decide who will teach what and when, they to whom the ghosts voice their wretched appeals.
When I walk in three adjuncts lean lifelessly against the corner filing cabinet. I stand before the desk and wait for a break in the secretaries’ conversation. They ignore me and continue talking. I shift from foot to foot, holding my tongue politely, smiling like an idiot. Four minutes pass—they look behind me, at the papers on their desk, at each other.
“Excuse me?”
The head secretary looks at me surprised, as if she didn’t know I was there, as if I were unconscionably rude. I hang my head in shame. “One second,” she says, indignantly. She talks with the other secretary for another two minutes before finally turning to me. “Yes?” she says. “Now can I help you?”
I smile and stutter my request for my pin number. I make a big show of thanks after she gives it to me. Humiliated, I head back to my office, ready with the key before I arrive.
My phone rings. Janice. I don’t answer.
My phone beeps, alerting me that I have a voicemail.
5:36 PM
Just before I round the corner, Howard spots me as he’s coming out of the literary magazine office. “Gotcha!” he says. He says he must talk to me and without waiting for my reply, he turns and begins walking with the expectation that I follow. I don’t want to be rude, so I do. He walks briskly in short steps that make his hips seem like tight hinges needing to be oiled, like he is all business and has no time to oil them.
When I get to the door where he is fumbling with his keys, he pushes his briefcase toward me and says, “Hold this.” I take the case and say, “Don’t tell me what to do!” Then we both go inside.
There are piles of paper everywhere. He clears some paper off a chair directly across from his desk, orders me to sit, and then walks purposefully behind his desk and takes his own seat. This is an act; Howard has been without purpose for twenty years. He stares at me.
Finally, I break the silence. “Is there something you wanted to talk to me about, Howard? Or did you just want to stare at me for a few minutes?”
He stares for another few seconds, then says, “Why don’t you like to be looked at?” He leans back behind his desk and flexes an eyebrow, as if he’s said something wonderfully provocative. He pulls a caramel candy from his desk drawer and, without offering me one, unwraps it and stuffs it in his mouth as if he were at the movies, as if I am the movie.
I shrug. “I don’t mind being looked at. I just think it’s rude is all.”
He crushes the cellophane into a tiny ball without taking his eyes off me.
I say, “So, what’s new?” I look around the room as if something new might present itself.
“I haven’t seen you in a while,” he says.
“I’ve been keeping to myself. Working hard.”
Silence.
Silence.
“You look tired.”
“Thanks.”
“Are you alright?”
I tell him I’m broke. That I can’t afford to buy a new package of coffee filters until next week. He reaches into his desk drawer and gives me one coffee filter to take home. “It’s the wrong shape for my coffee maker,” I say, looking at it. “Worse comes to worst, though, I can use it when I run out of toilet paper, which will be soon. Thanks.”
“Have a sip of wine with me later,” he orders more than asks. His phrasing irritates me, the “sip of wine” part. It sounds cheap and a little gross, like he expects us to share the same glass. Howard is cheap. He makes me pay for my own drinks when I go out with him and sometimes even his. Seeing that he’s tenured and roughly forty years my senior, I think he should be the one buying. Instead, he acts like he’s this big shot writer whose favor I should court, ignoring the fact that he can’t publish outside of his own magazine. I told him once what I thought. I sai
d, “It’s not gentlemanly, Howard.” To which he explained that he was modern, and then complained that I was too old fashioned. He said, “Get with it, baby!”
I answer, “I can’t. Too much work.”
He mentions the possibility of public restrooms and their fully stocked toilet paper dispensers. “You could use the bathroom there,” he says, “and save a few squares at home.”
“You’re a temptress, Howard. But why buy the cow when I’m getting the milk for free?” I wave the single coffee filter he’s already given me.
“So why don’t you like to be stared at?” he asks, reviving his previous line.
I try to stare back but then give up from the awkwardness, realizing Howard actually likes it and could go on like this for hours. I stop to shuffle through some Xeroxes of a short story by Musil that are piled on top of a filing cabinet beside me. I explain, “Actually, I love to be looked at. Being looked at is wonderful! But it’s not right if someone insists that you know it while it’s happening.” I flash him a quick look out of the corner of my eyes to show him that I know. “I prefer to walk by and have no idea someone’s looking. I’m told I look very good walking by. But then, some people have no grace, do they Howard, and they insist that you follow them to their office and ask you to sit down and then they don’t say anything and just stare and eat caramels.”
“You’re very sexy when you get angry. You should use that in your writing.”
“I’m not angry,” I say, “I’m sexy. I’m very angry when I get sexy.”
I untie the silk scarf from around my neck and retie it as if I were performing a magic trick. It gets so cold in the building that I always have to wear a scarf to keep warm.
My phone rings. I leave it in my purse and make no move to answer. Its haunting whistle fills the room. I feel guilty for rearranging the professor’s books in my office.
Howard asks me if I’m nervous.
I tell him that I’m always nervous, except for when I’m asleep and even then I’m nervous, worried that my dreams don’t measure up. I stand. “Let’s have a drink now! Dig out one of those beers in the back of your filing cabinet, Howard. I know they’re there.”
“I can’t now,” he says, “Later.”
I shrug. “I can’t later.”
Then I tell him I have to get back to work. I motion to the sheet of paper in my hand as if it were a key aspect of the pressing business that’s calling me away.
“What’s that?” he asks, motioning to the paper.
I look at the sheet, turn it over and shrug. “It’s blank,” I say, and leave the paper on his desk. “But I still have to go.”
Instead of going back to my office, I go downstairs, past the security guards, past the double doors, outside, and across the street. At the crosswalk, I buy a cup of coffee from the lady I buy coffee from every time I go up to the school.
I say, “Hi, how are you?” the way I do every morning, as if I’ve never asked this before, as if I have suffered some sort of head trauma, rendering me incapable of progressing past this single line, as if I must repeat the same conversations and gestures over and over, every time, as if it were the first time. She responds, “Hi, how are you?” Neither of us gets an answer.
I take my coffee and walk a few paces to sit at the bus stop bench facing the college, at the hulking, relatively new Humanities building obscuring the much more beautiful neo-Gothic buildings of the old campus. The breeze tickles my arms; my jacket’s back in my office because I wasn’t planning on going outside. Still, it’s warmer than it is inside. Office buildings and classrooms, no matter what time of year, are always so cold. When my students ask me about the weather in hell, I tell them that Christian hell is hot, while Homeric hell is cool and damp, making it particularly uncomfortable for the arthritic. Then I paraphrase Milton—what I’ve gleaned from the CliffsNotes—and say that the mind is its own heaven or hell, cool or hot depending.
I hold my coffee, feel its warmth in my hands. I squint, and my eyes tear from the brightness of the sky. It’s an overcast day and the sky looks as it looked this morning—a dull white sheet—still somehow too bright. I look at my watch. 6:27 PM. I have accomplished nothing on my to-do list and soon it will be dark. The sun will set at 7:36 PM today. Yesterday it set at 7:35 PM. I checked the sunrise and sunset times online.
There are a few others at the bus stop with me. A middle-aged Hispanic woman standing by the curb, clutching a briefcase, looks in the direction of the bus; a young man in baggy pants and oversized headphones sits beside me, bobbing his head; and a young woman in tight jeans stands a few feet in front of the bench, her hip cocked, her face down, as she uses her thumbs to punch something into her cell phone.
The bus arrives and they all get on.
I sit for a few more minutes. And then I go back inside.
CHAPTER 5
CHINESE FINGER CUFFS
I delight in a moat.
HENRY JAMES, PORTRAIT OF A LADY
MY NEW ROOMMATE was standing in the doorway when I arrived. “I’m May,” she said brightly before hugging my mother, my father, and then me. She had already claimed her side of our dorm room, which she’d decorated with a poster indexing different species of butterflies, a couple more from the Broadway musicals she’d seen with her parents on previous trips to the city, and some charcoal drawings her older sister had made in a college art class. I’d brought few decorations myself. Just a string of fake flowers I’d purchased while shopping for a hamper with my mom at Bed Bath & Beyond and a pile of fake shit from my parents’ store.
After unpacking by simply dumping all my clothes onto the plastic dorm-issued mattress—there was no time to fold or hang, my parents said, they needed the suitcase and were double parked—I laced the string of flowers through my new metal headboard and then placed the pile of shit in the shadow, just under the corner of my bed as, partially obscured, the effect is more realistic. I moved it a few times—an inch to the left, an inch to the right—and then stood back as if it were a painting and I were checking to see if it had been hung correctly. May sat on her bed and watched.
I saw nothing strange in this, just as I’d seen nothing strange in bringing “my parents’ handcuffs” into second-grade show-and-tell. “They really work and come with a pair of their own keys, too,” I announced to the class, before offering to chain my friend Lydia to her desk—my teacher wouldn’t let me. “They sell them in their store . . .” I went on. In hindsight, I can see my teacher’s first thought was probably not of a party store where one might obtain a witch costume come Halloween, but of some other kind of shop, like those surrounding my current West Village apartment. In addition to being one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Manhattan, the West Village boasts a dominance of sex shops. I’ve only to step outside to find dildos in every shape and size, flavored lubricants, multi-colored condoms, and, yes, handcuffs.
Growing up, the handcuffs had been one of my favorite toys. Playing alone in the basement, singing softly to myself through vampire dentures, I’d handcuff myself and then un-handcuff myself repeatedly to the coffee table. Eventually, I’d grow bored and wander off into the storage room to “explore.” Digging through a box of old novelty items one time, I found a handful of colorful bamboo tubes. Turning them over curiously, I had no idea what they were; naturally, I thrust my fingers inside.
I was stuck.
I yanked and yanked. In a panic, I rushed upstairs, awkwardly working the doorknob with the heels of my hands, and found my mom.
“Pull yourself together,” she said, meaning literally to pull my hands together. English is my mother’s second language, so sometimes she mixes up words, says “pull” when she means “push,” etc.
I blinked. Losing her patience, she grabbed my hands and pushed my fingers toward each other, freeing me with very little ceremony, and sending me back into the basement to continue my games.
I staggered away, marveling at the finger cuffs and my newly freed hands. Only a minut
e ago, I’d been trapped, was figuring my dad would have to use the pliers he’d used to extract my baby teeth. And what if that didn’t work? I’d have to learn to eat, write, and play the piano with my feet, like that kid on TV. My whole horrible future had begun to unfold, when suddenly, it was over. Amazing, I thought, regarding the cuffs. A mind game. A trick. You have to push instead of pull, go toward to go away.
Though my parents closed the party store years ago, its remnants still suffuse our house. Sometimes on visits home, I’ll poke around my parents’ junk drawer, “exploring” like I used to as a kid, searching for lost treasure—among paper clips, I’ll find a finger puppet, a rubber pencil, a whoopee cushion, an unopened box of New Kids on the Block paper plates—and when I spot something particularly wonderful, I’ll ask my mom if I can take it home with me. The New Kids on the Block paper plate I’ve hung in my kitchen, the way my mom hangs real ceramic plates with hand-painted flowers in hers.
Every year, though, there is less treasure left. The house, for the most part, has been plundered. So I take great delight in stopping in novelty shops in Manhattan now and then. There is one party store, lonely among the sex shops, just a block from my apartment. Last fall I bought a jug o’ blood there and portions of Philip’s Halloween costume.
After we broke up, Philip posted a picture of himself in his Halloween costume on his Friendster page—with me cropped out. I had dressed as Virginia Clemm, Edgar Allen Poe’s real-life consumptive child-bride on whom he based his poem, “Annabel Lee.” Since Philip didn’t have a costume idea, I asked him to be Edgar Allen Poe. We had a big fight about it. He said no one would get it; Edgar Allen Poe was too remote a figure. So I said, fine, he could dress as whatever he wanted and asked him what he wanted. He went silent and began to mope around the costume shop, pensively picking up a package of hillbilly teeth before putting it down again. He handled a blue punk wig, then spent another ten minutes studying a package of clown makeup. At last we bought a plastic yellow bird.
