Iris Has Free Time by Iris Smyles Read Free Book Online

know that you know? “How’s publishing?” I stammered.
    He looked across the street, as if he’d already lost interest in the conversation, then back at me. He squinted. “You still writing your poems?”
    I shook my head, as if the notion were laughable. “I’m working on a novel now.”
    I carried my heavy load down into the subway steps and took the train to Grand Central, where I walked underground toward the cross-town shuttle.
    There, I came across a cluster of NYU graduates standing in cap and gown. They were laughing and posing for photos. Was it June again already? Their voices echoed through the tunnel. “Congratulations!” “Congratulations,” their parents sang. And I wanted to yell, “Don’t do it! Go back! You don’t know what it’s like!” Instead, I just watched them, and like a ghost haunting my old life, passed by unnoticed, the wheels of my suitcase whizzing in tow.
    I planned to try again the next weekend but never made it. The weather was iffy, I was getting a cold, my alarm didn’t go off . . . I can’t remember the reason. It was the same reason, I guess, that I never finished those art classes at SVA or the two writing courses I started taking at night in The New School’s continuing education program. Always, I planned to go back, but then something would happen, and then, after that, nothing would happen, which made it all the more difficult to explain, which made it that much more difficult to return.
    It was just like in college when, after seeing a lot of Woody Allen movies and reading a little of Freud, I decided to start seeing one of NYU’s staff psychologists. It was free as part of the university’s health services, so why not take advantage? Why not lie on a couch for a while and plumb the depths?
3
    A wood-lined room stocked with old books, a doctor in tweed with a beard and pipe, a leather chaise on which I lay face up, my eyes trained absently on the ceiling’s crown moldings as I describe in detail my most recent dream: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again, which is weird because I’ve never been to Manderlay. . . .”
    Instead I was shown into a small gray windowless cubicle where the “counselor” had me sit in a plastic and metal hard-backed chair directly across from her, leaving a space of just a few feet between our knees. She looked into my eyes and after a pause asked me why I’d sought “counseling.”
    Counseling? I’d come to be analyzed!
    I began scrambling for something, anything to tell her, scrolling through the highs and lows of my life thus far, when the whole of it, suddenly, struck me as so unimportant, so completely lacking in tragedy. Where was the pathos? The tortured soul that foretold genius in all the really good biographies?
    Compelled to tell her something, I finally told her I felt pressure to have sex with my forty-two-year-old boyfriend, some alcoholic from the dive bars in Hell’s Kitchen where I’d lately been spending a lot of time. (It was a lie. I’d been leading him on for the last month, but was perfectly happy to lead him on another month to boot.) “My roommate and I call him ‘Uncle Craig,’” I told the counselor, thinking this might shock her, before wishing I hadn’t said it, for it had shocked me more. “As a joke,” I added with a laugh, though the room seemed to suck the air right out of it. Her eyes remained steadily on mine.
    What would I have said if I had ventured the truth? That I’d never had any problems I could not manage on my own, that I enjoyed good health and was basically an optimist? That I’d taken a class called Madness and Genius and learned that neither Virginia Woolf nor Ernest Hemingway had been captain of their varsity swim team, president of their student body, debate team founder, ballet dancer, or member of the honor society? That I was afraid that everything good about me was just more proof that there would never be anything great? I hadn’t come to therapy for a