Iris Has Free Time (20 page)

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.

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 said, “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.