Iris Has Free Time (19 page)

1:19 PM

I stare directly at the fluorescent light fixture.

 

1:45 PM

I write an email.

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:

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.

 

RE: THE BIG BANG

RE: COSMETOLOGY

RE: HISTORICAL ERRORS

RE: CROWDS

RE: LINGUISTICS:

RE: SPONTANEOUS HUMAN COMBUSTION

RE: TIME

 

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?