The Folded Clock

by Heidi Julavits

  The therapist did not call me. She never contacted me again.

  Nor did I ever contact her. I was happy to have been freed from this unsatisfactory arrangement without needing to do or say anything (therapist breakups are such a meta-trial). I’ve often wondered what happened to her. What if she didn’t have a stroke? What if she wasn’t sick or hospitalized, and thus unable to make phone calls? What if she just genuinely disliked me? I had been to other therapists, most of whom I’d gotten along with well enough. But our relationships were predicated on my “putting my best face forward.” When I was sad, I’d make jokes about my sadness. I’d been so totally hilarious when I’d talked to my pal therapist about my then-upcoming divorce. With this new therapist I’d let my ugliest self show. Either she’d had a stroke, or she’d died, or she’d simply decided: I cannot help that woman. I cannot bear to be around that woman.

  Today I visited a summer camp attended by a lot of wealthy New York City kids. I had not been around so many eleven-year-old girls since I was eleven. The campers were composed, and stylish, and, sure, in the Maine woods, where one of the main activities was “llama care,” their preternatural confidence and sense of entitlement struck me as pointless survival skills, but most of their lives weren’t happening in the Maine woods. I found myself harshly judging these children. They would get everything they wanted in life (real life), and would it even prove a challenge? Probably not as challenging as keeping the llamas’ fur from snarling. Probably not as challenging as sleeping in an incredibly spacious teepee. Achieving happiness, well, that was another matter, but isn’t it for everyone? In this elusive quest, the wealthy are not especially burdened, though perhaps they feel the failure more acutely. It is maybe harder not to get something if you’ve mostly always gotten everything.

  Certain recent encounters with very rich friends (people who were rich from birth) have confirmed: we are, on a basic psychological level, different people, and these differences can rankle me morally. My moral rankle, however, is complicated. It’s disingenuous. It’s a form of self-loathing. Because for many years, I wished more than anything that I had been born rich. My family was middle-class and rich by the standards of many, including my friends. (I attended a public school near the projects; my best friend lived in a near-derelict apartment building that, in keeping with the occasionally benevolent ironies of Maine real estate, had a beautiful view of the harbor.) But I knew my family could be much, much richer. As an eight-year-old my fantasy was concrete, modest, and thus not beyond the realm of possibility, except that it completely was. I wanted to live in an old mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. Very specifically Greenwich, a place I’d never been. I chose Greenwich because each Sunday I read the New York Times Magazine’s real estate section. I cut out pictures of mansions for sale in Greenwich and tacked them to my bulletin board. I knew, even as a kid, that a belief in one’s ceaseless entitlement could not be acquired later in life. Even if I managed to become rich, I would always be faking entitlement.

  Whatever. I was happy to fake it.

  Since my parents did not share my wealth fantasy, I eventually discovered boys to be the quicker route. In high school I dated a boy with money, or what counted as money in my town. He wore torn sweaters and drove an Audi and was adept at stealing radar detectors from the country club parking lot, a talent I understood as his form of artistic expression because he was rich. He didn’t need to steal anything. (I was not wrong about his creative gifts; he would grow up to become a successful defrauder of insurance companies.)

  After high school I fell in love with a rich boy from Virginia. (I didn’t fall in love with him because he was rich; he remains, other than my husband, the love of my life.) Through him I lived the rich life I’d dreamed my entire childhood of living, sort of. Richmond was no Greenwich. His family owned (I can still remember) two Audis, a Porsche, a Saab, and a BMW. They had a beach house, a hunting property, and a ski condo. That I loved him so much, and that his family was so warm and inclusive, meant that I fell into his world like a thirsty girl into a well. Every once in a while I’d poke my head out and wonder, What am I doing here? I couldn’t have a conversation with his female friends without faking an identity of assumed ease and privilege (and ease with privilege). These girls flew to London for the weekend to shop for debutante dresses. Their debutante parties were decorated by set designers from Cats. (They had debutante parties!) All of his friends went to Ivy League schools, even the self-admittedly dumb friends. Where I came from, being admitted to such schools was like winning the escape lottery, and many smart people I knew didn’t win, and ended up at the paper mill or a local community college. Every once in a while I’d call home exhausted and upset—upset by the amount of energy it took to fit in, upset that I cared to expend that energy in the first place. I think my parents were relieved by my periodic cracks. I imagine they otherwise thought they’d lost me to another planet, one to which theirs offered very infrequent shuttle runs.

  Still, I loved this boyfriend; I was convinced I would marry him. This belief resolved certain anxieties and illogicalities (despite my desire to be rich, I wanted to be a novelist). Of the many pressures I felt as I one-eye squinted toward adulthood, the pressure to support myself, or the question of how I would do so over the long term (and in the manner to which I was newly accustomed) was not one of them. It’s not as though I lost my drive. I made good grades because I always did. I overachieved because I always did. I got grants and pursued non-remunerative careers because that’s what interested me. But to know in the back of my mind that I would always have a very nice place to live, and money to eat in very nice restaurants and to buy very nice clothes and to go on very nice vacations, well, this was extraordinarily calming to me.

  At a certain point, however, wealth—not money but lots of money—started to represent, ironically, the inverse of possibility. It seemed oppressive; it changed people’s circuitry. One summer, my boyfriend and I accompanied his family on a trip to Spain. We ate every meal with his family. His parents and I talked more than was advantageous, if we wanted to remain fond of one another, about important matters. His father was conservative; he was also extremely perceptive, altruistic, and intelligent, which these days does not go without saying. He’d grown up with nothing; he was a self-made man. Still, it was wearing and occasionally enraging to tussle with him on political and social topics while I was staying in the villa he’d paid for, and eating the many fancy meals he paid for. I felt guilty that I experienced anything other than gratitude toward him.

  Two years later, my relationship with my boyfriend began to falter. I’d like to claim that this faltering had nothing to do with the fact that, once I hit my early twenties, I no longer fantasized about being rich. (I fantasized, at most, about being able to pay my bills. This seemed ambition enough where money was concerned.) Soon I would be dating a broke PhD student with a disregard for money so entrenched that he would spend a semester living rent-free in a tent pitched on the concrete floor of a friend’s garage. I learned to be a different person through him, and maybe I accomplished this on my own, but it doesn’t, even at a remove of a few decades, feel that way. I needed guidance. I was still at that point where a boyfriend was an opportunity to try out different identities, not just an opportunity to have sex and be loved. As my male friend in graduate school once said, “Men want a relationship, but women expect a world.” I don’t think, in other words, that my expectations were atypical, or that I was atypically using men as a means to better, or simply alter, because my goals had changed, my circumstances. According to this friend, I was behaving like every other woman he knew. I’ve never considered whether or not I provided the men I dated a new identity to try out. What would it have been? I was blonde and clever and fun, but I can’t imagine that I changed a man’s world as they often changed, or promised to change, mine.

  Today I went looking for Sanchez again. Again I could not find him. Sanchez is a legend in this town, at least among decorator
s and used furniture salesmen. Sanchez is a reupholsterer and an impossible man to locate. I’m looking for him because I have a couch that needs reupholstering, and reupholstering, I’m starting to suspect, is a dying art, like blacksmithing or coopering. Sanchez might be dead himself. His cell numbers, the four I’ve got, are all disconnected.

  I could just buy a new couch, but then again I can’t. This couch has history. It is an heirloom of sorts, proof of the people my husband and I once were. Once we were people who cared about, granted, possibly the wrong things. We cared about couches. We wanted to stake our claim as interesting individuals by owning a highly unique couch. Then we became enlightened, or resigned. The couch’s purpose shifted. It became defiled. Now it is used as a napkin by our children. For the past nine years, this piece of furniture has wiped mouths and hands and absorbed milk, all kinds of milk. This possibly makes the couch sound more disgusting than it really is, though in truth it is pretty disgusting. This possibly makes us sound like parents without boundaries, because who lets their children drink milk on a blue velvet couch which, when stained with milk, to be perfectly candid, looks as though people, and the assumption would be “we,” have had lots of sex on it? And now we expect our guests to sit on this couch, atop these stains, while eating olives and cheese?

  I know people often fail to find disgusting or shameful the revealing grime and sloth of their own lives. My friend with the apartment covered, quite impressively evenly, with a layer of dog fur, makes no excuses for her dog or for herself. My friend with the kitchen that stinks of compost from a filthy plastic bucket kept next to the stack of clean dishes. My friend with the long black hair (not her hair—whose hair is it?) cemented by dried toothpaste globs to the bathroom sink. These people are not apologetic. I am apologetic. They are not trying to cover up anything, as I am trying, quite literally, to cover up the daily evidence of our poor judgment, our pure exhaustion. That’s what this couch is. A sign of exhaustion. I would rather not be needed for two consecutive minutes than have a beautiful couch. I would rather search for coats I don’t need on eBay while milk is spilled than have a beautiful couch. I let the couch go because I felt confident that people like Sanchez existed in the world. Once I recovered my energy and my standards, I could enlist a Sanchez to reinstate my former self. No slip is permanent, right? But I can’t even leave him a message asking for his help. I can’t even hope that he’ll return my call.

  Today my friend is arriving from London to help me pack. I am in Italy, I have been in Italy for a month, working at an art colony, and together she and I are going to a different part of Italy (also to work). I am often anxious about traveling alone, so she has been requested to keep me company and prevent me, in theory, from being anxious. What I forget is that she often makes me anxious when I am with her. She has a hunger for adventure so extreme that my usual hunger for adventure becomes, due to reactionary prudence, squelched. If she suggests we do something, then I know it is my job to wonder, Why is this probably a very bad idea?

  The last trip my friend and I took together was to see and experience a building. I’d heard about this building for years; I’d even written a novel that took place in this building (that I’d never, save in my imagination, visited). While living in Germany—i.e., nearby, relatively—I decided it was time to finally see it. My friend agreed to accompany me.

  This building, in order to be seen and experienced, however, required great effort. My friend and I had to fly to Zurich. We had to rent a car and drive, in winter, on terrible Swiss mountain roads. Our arrival was adventure enough for me. I was happy to stay inside for the rest of our trip. We were there to see and experience a building; let’s stay inside the building! (The building is a spa, but “spa” does not accurately describe the building. It is more accurately described as an art installation filled with water.) But my friend had other ideas. She wanted to explore the area. She’d found a place where we could ride a sled for six miles down an alp. She’d found a beautiful reservoir she wanted to visit. She wanted to leave the building we’d traveled all this way to see and experience, even though, she agreed with me, we’d never been inside a building like this in our lives. A building built for people. Why are most buildings not built for people? We asked ourselves this question over and over as a means of restating our astonishment. Most buildings are machines. They perform services. They provide heat and dryness and other basic functions that help with survival. This building provided so much more than survival. This building was like a bed or a sweater or an orchestra. This building took into account what your body wanted to do, feel, see, hear. After not too much time in this building we felt as though we’d taken hallucinogenic drugs. We simply could not believe how much this building intuited and addressed (and maybe, too, inflamed) every desire we possessed. It became overwhelming. We needed a break from the building. We needed a break from being so deeply understood.

  Given that the six-mile sled run was closed (I tried not to seem excited by this news) we decided to drive to the reservoir. We asked a local man for directions. He warned that the roads, due to snow, were impassable. My friend pushed. Really? Were they really impassable? The man agreed to call the resident expert on road conditions. He would tell the expert the make of our car, and she, based on whatever fate algorithm she ran, would calculate our survival chances.

  The woman said: with our car, we might be fine.

  This did not sound like encouragement to me. To my friend, it sounded like encouragement. Because I am scared of appearing scared, I agreed with her interpretation. I would drive us to the reservoir.

  No one should listen to experts. The road was ice-shellacked, the road was steep, the road was barely the width of our car; to the right of the road loomed a cliff so steep we could see only air. As often happens in situations when reality becomes terrifyingly stark, I avoid panic by allowing metaphor to take over. It’s not I am headed up a steep and slippery mountain road and I cannot turn around but My life is a novel written by an author who might want me to entertainingly die. My friend and I were no longer people in a car; we were characters in a plot. As characters in a plot, there was no escaping the fact that our story would have an ending. An outcome. Arguably, each day, at its conclusion, produces an outcome (arguably so does each minute, each second, each microsecond). But even when you’re just a person (not a character, or a person who feels like a character) your day will end, and using the most basic (i.e., starkest) accounting model, one of two outcomes will befall you—you will be alive or you will be dead. Some days the luxury of other outcomes can obsess you—Will he respond to my e-mail? Will I get enough sleep so that I can teach tomorrow? Other days refuse to permit distractions from the most fundamental outcome options: alive or dead. On these starker days, you can begin to worry as characters in a book should worry. Your outcome, however it gets decided, might not be designed with your best interests in mind.

  Then we encountered the tunnel.

  It was not clear, at first, that the tunnel was a tunnel. The road simply disappeared into the side of a mountain. Preventing us from pursuing the road was a metal door.

  The road here also widened. At this single point in our journey, it was possible to turn around.

  “I guess we have to turn around,” I said.

  My friend thought otherwise. She’d read about this tunnel online. If we drove right up to it, she said, the door would open.

  This seemed impossible. It was not. The door creaked and groaned as it rolled open, slat by slat.

  We drove through. In the rearview mirror, I watched the door lower with the stuttering movements of a mechanism about to fail. The door resembled a jaw closing, and the tunnel, aptly, a digestive track. The stone undulated overhead, muscular and involuntary. Our outcome was being processed.

  We drove a few kilometers. If we’d lowered the car windows, we could have touched the walls as we threaded the space between them. Finally we reached the exit, sealed shut by a second door. We approached at idli
ng speed, hoping to God the thing would open. It did. We’d driven more deeply into the Alps but also more deeply into winter. The snow was abundant, the icicles thick and browned with age. We’d traveled through more than just solid matter to reach this place.

  Behind us, the door closed.

  We parked. We hiked, or tried to hike, but the roads were so slick we could only skid and fall. We eventually reached the reservoir. I tried to pretend I was enjoying myself. I wasn’t. My friend teased me about being such a worrywart, and I finally stopped feigning otherwise and admitted—I wanted to go back. I did not find it fun to wait for our outcome to be decided. I wanted to know our outcome, even though the variables were tilting us toward the less desirable of the basic two. Slippery roads. Mechanical doors that might or might not open. This situation reminded me not only of being in a novel but of writing one. It is equally no fun to be the author of scenarios where only a number of small outcomes are plausible. I knew the horror from both sides. In part this is why I’d told myself I was no longer, or not for the time being, writing novels. When writing novels I cannot seem to escape the trap of a plot. I imagine a fictional scenario and so quickly the march of consequence takes over. Things happen and so then other things must happen. I spend so much time working in the guts of this machine I feel less like a writer and more like the engineer of a high-performance vehicle. I am stuck perfecting the mechanics of happenings and coincidence. This is how plots take shape and achieve viability, at least when I’m wearing the hard hat—coincidence, recursion. In my defense, I am simply being mimetic. My life seems marked by a high degree of coincidence and recursion and synchronicity (as Durga the psychic confirmed). I know no other means to achieve plausibility.