I would like to learn other means.
My friend teased me for being such a timid, neurotic freak. She did it good-humoredly. We got in the car. The tunnel doors opened. The roads remained roads and did not cede to air. Back in town, we made a sunny lunch of cheese and bread we’d stolen from the breakfast buffet, and drank vodka, and grew giddy. We’d survived! We ran through the town like lunatics. We’d survived! We hiked up a hillside and peed in a sheep barn. We ended up at a store that sold sweaters. We made the shopkeeper drink with us. We asked her lots of questions about herself. Who was she, no really, who? She was Danish, not Swiss. She ran a bed-and-breakfast with her (also Danish) husband. She said, after a time, “I like your scarf.” I was wearing a striped knit scarf. I told her that I’d bought it a few weeks ago in Berlin. I told her that I’d Googled the designer afterward to see what else she made, and everything was ugly, and this made me wonder if maybe I shouldn’t love my scarf as much as I did.
The woman asked to see the tag. “Ah,” she said. “I know that woman. She used to sleep with my husband when we lived in Copenhagen. It’s true, her stuff is shit.”
We wanted to ask—when did the designer sleep with her husband? While he was her husband? Before he was her husband? We left the shop in a whirl of questions. The day was not yet over—our outcomes, in theory, had yet to be decided. There could be an avalanche! My friend could get another stupid idea! But I suspected we were safe. We’d already had our unlikely coincidence, our moment of synchronicity or recursion. The machine had run its course. Our deaths would not be the likely outcome today.
Today I met for coffee a friend who, a few years ago, told me the most perplexing lie. She told me she was having an affair with a married man at work. (This part was true.) The only other details I gleaned from her confession—offhandedly mentioned—were these: The man lived in Connecticut. He had three children. She told me enough about him, in other words, that I could sleuthily Google her small company and discover his identity if I wanted to. Was I supposed to do this? I wasn’t sure. To be safe, I didn’t. I would respect, as she apparently wanted me to respect (since she hadn’t outright told me his name), both his and her privacy.
A week or so later, however, I decided oppositely. She’d felt bound by discretion but, at the same time, badly wanted me to know. Maybe she’d made a promise to the man, who was married and obviously trying to keep things under wraps, not to tell anyone, not a soul. She’d given me the search terms so that she could tell me without telling me. Obviously she expected me to Google her love affair. I did. The only man at her company who lived in Connecticut with three children was named Ryan. Ryan, I now knew without her needing to break her vow of secrecy, was the man in her office with whom she was sleeping.
A few months later, I was shopping with this same friend. (Obviously we are not such close friends that we see each other frequently.) I asked her how “things” were going. She said she was in love but miserable, and that the situation had become really complicated with Nick’s wife.
“Nick,” I said. “Who’s Nick?”
She seemed surprised that I shouldn’t know who Nick was.
“Nick’s the guy,” she said, leaving the rest unspoken. Nick’s the married guy I’m having the affair with.
We kept shopping but I was quietly confused. I’d Googled all of the men in her workplace. I knew enough about Nick, in other words, to have confidently excluded him as a suspect. Nick lived in Brooklyn and had two kids. And yet she’d told me that the man with whom she was sleeping lived in Connecticut with three kids. Ryan was her only coworker who lived in Connecticut with three kids. So she’d known that if I Googled her affair using the data points she’d provided, that I’d be steered toward the wrong man. Had she done this on purpose? Was this a test? If so, had I passed or had I failed? Years later, I still don’t know.
Today we are assessing the damage from the hurricane. We have brown water flowing from our faucets but we do have water. We have lights and heat and Internet. We no longer have half of what was once a whole tree outside our windows. To bemoan the partial loss of a tree when others have lost whole homes is ridiculous, but I am bemoaning its loss (I’ve told myself) as an object lesson to my children, who cannot understand loss on a grand scale and so must learn to comprehend it in smaller increments. They must learn about loss through a tree.
The tree is the reason we moved into this apartment; I have said many times, “Without this tree I do not want to live here.” I have spent nights worrying that something will happen to the tree; it will grow sick and die, a taxi will lose control and mortally wound it. The latter worry is not far-fetched. Our windows overlook a cursed T intersection. A girl was killed by a falling chunk of cornice at this intersection. A man in a helmet catapulted from his motorcycle and landed facedown in the intersection, many yards from the point of impact, and appeared to have dropped from the sky. A taxi lost control and rear-ended a FedEx truck and took out a pedestrian waiting to cross the intersection. The intersection is the site of many car accidents. While cleaning the kitchen or making the beds, I have often heard the sound of brakes and crunching metal. The tree protected our home from the chaos. It filled our windows with white, or green, or red, or a hatching of bare sticks like the fingers you put over your eyes during the scary parts of horror movies. We had to crane our necks to see the bodies.
But now half of the tree is gone. During the storm, a large part of it lay in the street like the man hurled from his motorcycle. I didn’t even realize it was our tree—I thought it was a weaker sapling, hauled wholesale from the roots. When I ascertained that it was ours, I wanted to go outside and investigate even though the hurricane was still raging. My husband observed, “If you die out there, your death will be so stupid.” I waited until the wind subsided a little. I ran out to see what remained of our tree. Not a lot.
This morning I prepared my daughter and son for the possible death of the tree. I tried to make them understand how long the tree had been there, and how old they would be before, if in fact we lost it, another tree could grow to be as large. How to make people who don’t understand time feel a loss that is best measured in time? It proved tricky. The only way to demonstrate the loss was to dramatize it. When the tree crew arrived to remove the half-tree from the street, I stood on the windowsill in my pajamas and watched. I acted sad because I was sad. Our tree would never be the same. It might even die. The damage wasn’t insignificant. I wanted to be the conduit of sadness—and of passing time and mortality—by interpreting the significance of the potential loss of the tree for my kids. I could tell this wasn’t happening. I could tell they were more interested in my reaction to the tree. I thought ahead to a point in time when this behavior might become symbolic of who I was or, depending on my life status, am. I do not think it unwise to view all children as future tattletales. Such a perspective forces you to better (and with greater care) behave, lest your conduct be chronicled later, and prove revealing in ways you did not intend. If and when my daughter told her own children about her memories of the big hurricane, maybe the only takeaway she’d recall would involve me. I was the object lesson. My mother was undone by the possible death of a tree.
Today I talked with a woman about ghosts. We were sitting in the shadow of a large building that is reputedly full of them. We wondered if people mistook for ghost sightings what was, in fact, a primal fear response to poorly arranged rooms. The appearance of a ghost was really just the cave brain responding with a potent visual alarm. The cave brain whipped up a ghost when a room lacked escape options, or when it featured too many unprotected entrances through which a saber-toothed tiger or a rapist might prowl in the dark.
I told this woman about a room in which I repeatedly, or so I believed, saw a ghost. The room’s bed, I conceded, was in the dumbest place. The door was to the right of my head; when I was lying in the bed, the door was actually, by a few inches, behind me. I’d awaken every night in a state of panic and look to the door
, where I saw a figure briefly coalesce from the darkness, then vanish. But I understand now (or think I understand) that I saw no ghost in that room; my brain was just keeping me alert to bad possibilities, tigers or rapists or whatever.
Then I told this woman my theory about rooms, and why some rooms immediately feel like home while others, no matter how long you live in them, never do. Maybe ghosts are to blame, or a lack of egresses, but possibly, too, there was, I had recently decided, the issue of light. Growing up, I slept in a room that faced west. From the age of four to the age of eighteen, I opened my eyes to the same message: something better was happening elsewhere. I had to seek out the sun (presuming there was one); otherwise I had to wait for it to come to me. All sorts of bogus long-term psychological effects could be generated from such regular conditioning. To awake to the west has, maybe, imprinted me with certain personality traits. I am always thinking: where I am is not as good as where I could be. I must, from the moment I open my eyes, be on the move.
This sounds like an optimistic mind-set. It’s not. It’s neurotic. It’s crazy-making. Especially since I don’t particularly like the morning sun I feel so compelled to seek. Regardless, I only feel at home in places that face west. I currently live in an apartment that faces east. Despite my best attempts to comfortably inhabit this apartment, I have failed. I’ve faulted the gray paint I chose (“November Rain,” clearly formulated for seasonal depression junkies or, more damningly, per a decorating blog, “for the sage green set”), the window treatments (there are none), the fact that our books are kept in the guest room and so sometimes it looks like nobody interesting lives in our home. There’s sun upon waking, yes, but it feels like a reward I do not deserve and don’t want.
Probably it’s due to some combination of light and egresses and ghosts, but for sure I experience a panicked flight reaction when I enter certain interior spaces. I told the woman about a room to which I recalled suffering an immediate allergic reaction. I had just married my first husband. We’d blown all of our money on the wedding and had just a few hundred dollars left, and so we decided to spend it at an old inn in Camden, Maine, with cheap off-season rates. My first husband called these three days our “mini-moon.” The moment I entered our mini-moon room, however, I needed to leave it. For no apparent reason I felt on the verge of hysterics. Or maybe there was a reason. The room had been renovated so that, while legitimately Victorian, it now vibed faux-Victorian. I worried that this room would reify what I already felt—I did not belong in this marriage. I was faux to my core. If we stayed in this room, I thought, my first husband and I would be divorced by sundown. I made up a story about how I needed a bathtub and not a shower with massaging jets. The porter showed us a second room, one that still had its old clawfoot tub, and one that didn’t make me think, We are doomed. This room faced west.
Still, the west-facing room could not protect me from all bad omens, and Camden, in late October, plagued by rain, was full of them. My first husband and I read books each afternoon by the fire in the inn’s library, and drank tea. I was reading a biography of Edith Wharton. Wharton, I learned, married a man she did not love because she felt societal pressure to do so. (I didn’t feel societal pressure to marry my first husband, but I did feel pressure, most of it self-inflicted.) She had a fulfilling life despite her bad marriage, and, besides, she wrote many novels, which is what I hoped to do. Maybe, I reasoned with myself, I hadn’t made a terrible mistake. Maybe a bad marriage would prove good for my career, too.
Aside from wedding decompression, my one goal in Camden—a town with many used bookshops—was to locate an out-of-print memoir. Published in the 1940s by a woman who never wrote another book, this memoir detailed the story of a wife (the author) and her husband, who fled Manhattan to homestead in Maine. The husband came from a wealthy banker family; he had artist ambitions, as this variety of black sheep usually does. Their remote, falling-down house—on a point of land accessible only by boat—became, after the adrenaline high of their escape subsided, the site of their marriage’s unraveling. Only the seeds of the unraveling are present in the memoir. On the last page, they are still happily married. In the hermetic world of the book, their love persists. In reality, they grew miserable. I know because Maine is a tiny state and the couple’s decline into unhappiness remained gossip nearly sixty years later. The friend who’d told me about the book had met the husband, by then in his eighties and a widower, at a dinner party. She found him scary, she said, broody and embittered. So great was the couple’s marital misery in the remote house, in fact, it was rumored the husband had murdered the wife (she died under mysterious circumstances).
On the third rainy day of our mini-moon, I decided to search for this book in the local used bookstores. The first bookstore didn’t have a copy of the book on the shelves, but I figured I’d ask the salesperson if she knew of a copy lingering in one of the many unpacked boxes. When I told her the book’s title, her eyes—they were white-blue, the irises seemed to spiral toward the vanishing point of her pupils—got really wide. She didn’t have a copy, she said. But she knew the book very well and had read it many times herself, because the woman who’d written it was her aunt.
I couldn’t believe it. The woman, also stunned, nonetheless seemed so excited to talk to me about the book. Yet she didn’t say a word. She just stared at me expectantly, as though I were the person who might enlighten her about her own relative, and her eyes spiraled more quickly, and the whole situation grew surreal and uncomfortable, and without learning anything more about her aunt, I left.
We did eventually, due to our own growing misery, get divorced, my first husband and I. The end of our marriage came as no surprise to either of us, though he and I maintained different perspectives on the cause of death. He blames this and that marital moment of callous disrespect or unintended harm as the cause. I take the more deterministic view. Our divorce seemed at the time, and still seems to me, to have been fated from the outset, though I know this fate is unrelated to Edith Wharton, or to randomly meeting the niece of a woman who might have been murdered by her husband, or to the fact that we were supposed to spend our mini-moon in that first, terrible room.
Today we had dinner at the German villa in which we are living until December. (Technically, my family and I are not living in the villa; we are living in a small cottage by the gate. We do, however, eat meals at the villa.) This villa was built in the late 1800s and has a WWII-related story I’ve been told secondhand; roughly it involves the Jewish family who once owned the place and the gratitude they felt toward the avenging Americans, who, after the war, used it as a rec house for military personnel and filled it with Ping-Pong tables. When the Americans left, the family, in order to ensure a future of continued German American ideas exchange, donated the villa to an American ambassador who turned it into an academy (minus, sadly, the Ping-Pong tables). This story, or some slightly more accurate version, is how the villa came into my country’s possession; this is how I am being served a fancy dinner in it.
Most everyone living at this villa is an expert on foreign policy, on American and European intellectual history, on international economic issues, and on other topics I know nothing about. For months, my husband and I have worried that we’ll have nothing to say to the experts at the many meals we’re meant to share with them. Here is a good example of why we are worried. Last night my husband and I, in bed, Googled WW1 why did it happen.
At breakfast the other day, I chitchatted with an expert who was trying so hard to relate to me on my turf, such as he understood it; he said how much he appreciated having writers around because they added levity to the usually grave proceedings. But he also had such respect for writers! He brought up the fact that UNESCO had recently awarded Das Kapital a distinction, or maybe it was a prize. I asked if UNESCO only named nonfiction books as winners of this distinction or prize, and he replied, “Oh no, they’ve also named…” and he cited a very long title in German. I admitted that I had never heard of
this book. He repeated the title. I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know it.” And then he said, “It’s the incredibly famous Middle High German epic on which Wagner based The Ring series.” I said, “Oh, right, right!” The expert seemed a little crestfallen. He could forgive me for failing to be an expert in his area of expertise; he seemed slightly less willing to forgive me for failing to be an expert in my own.
(I have just looked up the UNESCO distinction/prize the expert mentioned. It’s an international program called the “Memory of the World,” the stated goal of which is as follows: “to safeguard the documentary heritage of humanity against collective amnesia, neglect, the ravages of time and climactic conditions, and willful and deliberate destruction.” What the Memory of the World program does not safeguard against is the failure of seemingly very educated and memory-loss-aware people to have read or even heard of these works to begin with. It does not safeguard the documentary heritage of humanity against people like me.)
By the night of the first dinner—today’s dinner—my anxiety about socializing with these experts was chart-breaking. I figured the best I could do was make jokes and then more jokes. Or I would—since I’d recently started taking longish swims in the Atlantic Ocean—talk about sharks. I would cite shark attack statistics for the lake we could see through the dining room windows (since before the beginning of time, no shark attacks on humans have been reported in this lake). Fortunately, I was seated near an architect (I could talk buildings) and the fourteen-year-old son of a Chinese foreign policy expert (I could talk Hunger Games). I was also seated near a man in a banker’s suit who was probably younger than me but who felt, categorically speaking, like a no-fun uncle. He introduced himself as the villa’s CFO; we talked grounds, we talked improvements and expensive plumbing disasters. I decided to introduce the topic of the automatic mowers. The villa’s property has a pair of automatic mowers—each is a three-wheeled robot the size and shape of a small ottoman. They are otherworldly to some—my son calls them “the zombie mowers”—and too human to others—my daughter and I have given them names and noted their different personalities. The mower who works the grass patch on the upper grounds we’ve named Schultz; Schultz is lazy and spends a great deal more time in his recharging hut than does the mower we named Greta, who tirelessly works a hilly, and much vaster, grass patch on the lower grounds. She is always mowing, even on weekends. She is dogged and uncomplaining, but my daughter and I have sensed her world-weariness. Greta long ago accepted her lot in life. Schultz, meanwhile, does the absolute minimum to get by.
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