Iris Has Free Time (21 page)

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.

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 minute 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.

At my apartment, we painted it black and then attached it to his shoulder using high-powered magnets, which I sewed into his jacket—“The Raven.” I tied a white scarf around his neck and he shaved parts of his beard to match Poe’s. I wore an old-fashioned lace dress and painted on a pallid, deathly complexion. I blended dark circles under my eyes and made my lips slightly blue with just a trace of blood trickling from one corner. Philip set the timer on his camera and we took photographs together as Edgar Allan Poe and Virginia Clemm. We had to take a lot of them because in each one Philip was smiling. I kept having to tell him, “Stop smiling! I’m dying! Doesn’t that make you sad?”

We went uptown to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to see the original
Nosferatu
with the church organ playing in the background. Afterward, there was a procession of ghouls, and some puppeteers made these giant papier mâché skeletons dance. Every now and then, I’d reach into my purse and pull out my handkerchief, a lacy white cloth I’d doused with fake blood, and cough into it tragically.

On the subway after, a homeless man called across the car. “Excuse me, Miss, but I think you’re bleeding.” He pointed toward his mouth, to the spot where I’d painted a thin trickle of blood on mine. I smiled proudly and explained it was part of my costume. He laughed and examined both of us. “Let me guess,” he said, and began quoting lines from “The Raven.” “I love Poe,” he told Philip. And then he looked at me and recited, “My love and my life, my Annabel Lee in a kingdom by the sea.” I looked at Philip and smiled because here was one more reason for him to love me, because I was building such a strong case.

By the end of the night, Philip acknowledged that it had been a good costume. And by the time we got back to his place and were taking off our clothes to prepare for bed, he even began saying that his costume was better than mine. I was in the bathroom wiping off my pallid complexion and looked out to where he was sitting on the couch, picking lint off his black sport jacket. “But it can’t be,” I said. “It’s
our
costume. Mine
is
yours!” But he kept insisting his was better.

We went to bed after that. We had sex, and then he turned over on his side to face the wall. I lay awake awhile longer, staring at the dusty stuffed animals his ex had given him when they were sophomores in college—“It’s an inside joke,” he’d told me when I asked about them—still artfully arranged on his windowsill.

On his Friendster profile, he’s labeled his photo, the one with me cropped out, “Edgar Allen Poe.” It’s one of the many photos in which he was smiling because I was dying. In the bottom corner, the lacy shoulder of my costume is just visible. “Single,” it says under “Relationship Status.”