Iris Has Free Time (17 page)

Janice is still angry at me for losing a batch of manuscripts last week, so I agree to go to Staples even though we don’t need Post-its and all the “work” she supposedly ends up doing herself, she creates out of boredom. Like now. Because Jacob hasn’t called her, she’s decided to make mailing labels—“And get more labels,” she adds. “We’re nearly out.” I don’t mention the fact that we have not yet mailed anything to anyone. I just say, “Okay.”

About last Friday: Janice invited me to meet her at a bar in my neighborhood, and when I showed up, she ambushed me with a pile of submissions to the magazine we’re starting, “official documents” she wanted me to take home. If anyone has a right to be angry, it’s me. Who brings important stuff to a bar on a Friday night?

She was having drinks with a few girlfriends from her Teach for America days. When I got there they were talking about their rewarding but difficult work and drinking very slowly. I ordered a shot and texted the guy I’d planned to meet up with later—a novelist/memoirist in his early forties who’s written extensively about his battles with alcoholism. For our first official date, he suggested we meet for drinks. “Just come now,” I texted.

Janice and I had both met him the previous weekend, first at the Brooklyn Book Festival and then again at the Corduroy Appreciation Club Meeting where I made him promise to contribute something to our magazine. “Even if it’s just a urine sample,” Janice added.

He and I immediately hit it off. He’d recently fallen off the wagon, so we ended up having a swell time smoking pot in a lavatory (he was doing cocaine, too, but I declined) and getting sloshed at three different bars (I on the whiskeys that he bought for me, and he on the fruity cocktails that I bought for him), followed by forties on an LES stoop—and then an even more swell time over the phone the next day trying to piece together what exactly had happened the night before. It was a great place to start things, and I was already fantasizing about the long romantic days of wine and roses we might share before his next bout of recovery.

We weren’t supposed to get together for another hour but I told him, “Just come now” because the conversation among the girls had moved to Hurricane Katrina and whether or not they all shouldn’t just quit their teaching jobs and move to Louisiana to help with the relief effort. It was a tough decision and for a moment they fiddled with their Live Strong bracelets in silence. Who needed them more, their poor students or those poor hurricane victims?

As he and I were leaving, Janice kept saying about the batch of manuscripts she’d brought, “Don’t forget the bag, don’t forget the bag,” like she knew I was going to forget the bag. So I left with the guy and with or without the bag, I forget, and we went to a bunch of bars and did what we did, and then she called me in the morning all curious to see how it went with the guy and also the bag. “What bag?” I asked, still in bed and in the middle of my ritual early-morning reproach. The guy had already gone.

Janice sighed. “You’re kidding right?” “I’m sorry,” I said. She was silent. “Are we still on for the meeting later?” she asked. “Of course,” I said, trying to pretend I knew all about the meeting. “Just tell me where and when.” “It’s at your place,” she answered.

“It’s not fair that you get to come up with all the ideas while I’m stuck doing all the work,” she told me in my apartment. It was an “executive meeting,” which meant the two of us sitting on the floor looking at manuscripts, complaining about men, and waiting for her pot dealer to call us back. “Well, no one’s stopping you from coming up with an idea,” I said. “When I do, you shoot it down!” “Because all your ideas are bad. Do you want me to say yes and put out a shitty magazine, just so you can feel good?” “No, but it’s the way you do it. It makes it hard for me to be creative. We should collaborate more. Anyway, I don’t have time to come up with good ideas because I’m too busy doing all the work while you’re having fun brainstorming.” “Okay, so do you want me to come up with fewer ideas, or just not tell you about them?” “Just shoulder some of the work!” “I do!” “No, you don’t!” “Fine. I’m sorry. Tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.”

She looked down at the agenda she brought over and then reached into the bag of new supplies she got from Staples. She placed a gold star next to one item. “Here,” she said. “We need to alphabetize our mailing list. It’s a total mess.” She handed me the agenda. I handed her a beer. Then she told me what a jerk my friend Jacob is, how he called her up last night, “at like two in the morning,” and came over and how she had sex with him. “You showed him!” I said and chugged my beer.

 

10:01 AM

I take out the stack of quizzes I gave last week, which I’ve yet to grade.

“The daily quizzes should be easy,” I told my students at the beginning of the semester. They will consist of one or two straightforward questions that serve only to verify that you’ve done the reading. It’s nothing to worry about,” I said, brushing off their concern, “provided you’ve done the reading.”

I look at the one on top.

I draw an X next to the answer and then put the whole pile in a drawer.

 

10:02 AM

I go online. I email a guy I’ve been leading on for just over two months; I don’t feel guilty because he seems to enjoy it. We met at a reading in January when I was at my most irresistible due to the fact that I was crying all the time. I was haunting the drinks table when this well-scrubbed Asian guy in an oversized hockey jersey asked me my name. He told me his and then claimed, very quickly, that he wasn’t on speed but worked in finance. He’s since asked me out ten or fifteen times, both personally for drinks and via mass emails for cocktail-hour events, which are addressed back to himself with my address bcc’d, though I suspect I am the only one he’s inviting. I think it’s a trick where I’m supposed to think I’m showing up to a party, but find upon my arrival that it’s just him and me. This actually makes me like him more. Still, invariably, I tell him I’m busy. Usually he’ll email and then I’ll email back. But the other day he called, so I’m emailing him back. I write:

10:16 AM

I receive a mass email Janice has just sent to all of our literary magazine contributors asking them to send a two- or three-line bio for our author’s page. “Like this:” she writes, and then proceeds to write a fake bio for Jacob, whose poem we are publishing. “Jacob is a self-absorbed jerk who eats his own shit and doesn’t respect women.”

I try to calm down.

I write an email back to her about what an idiot she is and then press
Delete
. I decide to call her instead. The phone rings and when she answers, “What’s up?” I tell her calmly that her email was very “unprofessional.” “What are you talking about?” she mumbles, the way she always does when she’s lying. I read the email aloud to her. She says, “I didn’t write that.” I say, “I’m looking at it right now.” She says, “Come on, it was a joke.” She laughs.

“It’s not funny. You’ve insulted one of our contributors for all the rest to see. They don’t know us, Janice, and think, unless we give them adequate reason not to, that we are running a serious magazine. And besides, what you wrote is gross.” “I thought it was funny,” she says. “It’s not funny, it’s retarded.” “Don’t say retarded, my cousin’s retarded.” “Fine. It’s stupid and not funny.” “Don’t tell me what’s funny!” she says.

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?”