The Folded Clock

by Heidi Julavits

  We walked around the Boston Marriage cottage and peered into the windows. We sat on its deck and enjoyed the view. We guessed at the problems given its age and location. A complicated septic situation. Rot, infestation, unbearable neighbors. These seemed minor disincentives given the price, which we’d heard was reasonable. We guessed at the future problems that might mar this cottage were my friends to buy it. Men who never wanted to come and weren’t handy. Close-quartered children who quarreled when the fog parked in the harbor for days. My friends—both are women, best friends since girlhood—began scheming to buy this cottage together. They both had husbands. But they had yet to replace one another. Who ever replaces their friends with a lover? These two women took nearly all of their vacations together. Their individual families coexisted as a larger, extended family, headed by two matriarchs. We finished our drinks on the porch. My two friends reasoned that they were the cottage’s heirs apparent. “We basically have a Boston Marriage,” they said.

  Today I tried again to read the Goncourts. I know I said I’d definitively given up on them, but this is the beauty or the lameness of me—there’s no shortage of second chances. Every petty, embittered person should want to date me. Every petty, embittered person should write a book I hate because I’ll keep trying to read it.

  It has been a few months since I gave up on the Goncourts; today I thought about them, Maybe they’d changed. Or maybe I’d changed. I reread books to measure my degree of difference from myself. During my twenties and thirties the book I reread most often was a biography by Jean Stein, edited with George Plimpton, called Edie: An American Biography. Edie Sedgwick, often described as “one of Warhol’s factory girls” (this is my description—a shocking number of people do not know who Edie Sedgwick is), lived a fast, sad life, dead at twenty-eight of a drug overdose. Despite my PhD-level familiarity with all extant images of Edie Sedgwick, the images that appear in my head when I think of her are two: (1) with a peroxided pixie cut, doing a ballet move atop a coffee table in black tights; (2) head cocked like a cute dog, hair long and brown, looking up at the camera, wearing a flowered, normal dress. Between those two images exists the identity spectrum she traveled during her life, though this does not take into account certain images further out on the spectrum, for example, stills of her topless and drugged out at the bottom of an empty swimming pool (from the film Ciao! Manhattan), or shots of her immediately following the Chelsea Hotel fire, her burned hands wrapped in dirty gauze, looking like a boxer wearing too much eye makeup and also, though not by human forces beyond herself, defeated.

  I first read Edie in college. My roommate found a copy in a dingy, low-rent part of Vermont, a part that hugs the railway lines and the river, a part where it is always, psychically speaking, mud season. Among the old towels and the kitchen tin she found this book. It was out of print. So far as we knew, there was only one remaining copy in the world. My roommates and I all read it. We all wanted to move to New York and be lauded and exploited by an artist and wear black tights and little else. Ambitious though we were, this one time we dreamed about becoming famous for having produced or accomplished nothing.

  Also, Edie and I shared a birthday. This coincidence was the equivalent, in my mind, of a knighting; clearly, I was destined to be Edie’s successor. This also meant Edie, like me, shared a birthday with Hitler. Somewhere within our essences, the ones determined by constellations, we might harbor a dormant evil. A mutation of circumstance could set it off. Could we safely endure for a lifetime without waking it?

  Edie maybe didn’t think so. I felt it was important to study her and to learn, perhaps, how to better cope with our cosmic birthday inheritance. But really what I studied was how I might fulfill a fantasy I never knew I had until I read Edie: I wanted people to want to photograph me because I represented energy. Cultural energy. I wanted to possess and transmit cultural energy that, ideally, wouldn’t produce another national socialist movement. I guess, thinking more broadly, Edie didn’t produce or accomplish much, but she did exude. Why get hung up on production and material accomplishment? Let’s look at what Hitler produced and accomplished, and let’s wish he had slightly less of a production and accomplishment fetish. Who cares about a bunch of books. Edie left spooky and beautiful images of herself. That is more than I’ve managed to do.

  Later, when the Internet happened, I bought my own copy of Edie. It remained my practice to regularly read it because every time I did my reaction was different. I could use it as a barometer of who I no longer was. Early twenties: I want to be Edie. I want to be a drug addict. I want to end up at the bottom of a swimming pool with a male model cooking my dirty underpants in a cauldron. Midtwenties: These earlier goals start to seem somewhat less like “goals.” Late twenties: Edie and also Warhol are starting to bug me. I covet only Edie’s body and her earrings. Thirty: I decide that all of Edie’s problems are because she comes from old money, and I’ve been developing theories about money and how money, especially old money, can be bad for children, even though all I ever wanted as a child was to come from old money. Early thirties: I feel guilty for thinking so harshly of Edie. I see her as pitiable, a product of bad parenting, because a seriously crazy bunch of humans raised that girl. Her father was vain and also possibly/probably/definitely molested her. He was an obsessive tanner. His nickname was Duke. The children called him Fuzzy. One of her brothers killed himself; another died in a motorcycle accident.

  Midthirties: I start to get interested less in Edie the life than I am in the structure of Edie the book—the many gossipy voices all talking about Edie (the book is an “oral history,” i.e., a bunch of interviews edited into what appears to be a continuous conversation among many people). I think to myself, Someday I am going to steal this structure.

  Around this time I loaned my copy to a good friend. I kept the dust jacket because I didn’t want her to tear it. Ten years later, the dust jacket is all I possess. Acquaintances return books. Friends never do.

  Fortunately, at a public reading I gave around the time I last saw my copy of Edie, I mentioned during the Q&A that the book I most treasured was Edie. A woman in the audience e-mailed me the next day. She was a novelist; she’d been asked to write the screenplay to an Edie Sedgwick biopic. She offered to hook me up with the director in case I might want to write the screenplay in her stead. I didn’t want to write it, but I did want to meet the director. The director had known Edie in her worst days; he’d been criticized (by some) for taking advantage of her at her most pathetic and putting the sad spectacle on film. Also I was about to spend a month in L.A., where the director now lived. I contacted him. I told him I was very interested in his project. Hollywood, in my scant experience, is an industry consisting of projects—defined similarly to the way Mainers define projects. Passionate enthusiasm and commitment is expressed in the name of negligible material results. Twelve years after buying the lumber for his porch project, my neighbor still hasn’t built his porch. After a while the lack of a porch is not a daily reminder of what should be but of what might be. It’s a form of promise. What’s to hope for once the porch is built?

  We arranged to meet at the director’s house to talk about the screenplay. He lived in the suburban-seeming flatlands of L.A., his house hard to discern behind the bamboo forest overtaking the property. The roots were slowly upending his foundation like a tooth under a tooth. The floors, because of this slow incursion from below, pitched up and down, and walking through the house I felt like someone trying to reach an airplane bathroom during a turbulent flight. The director was a fanatical collector not just of movie posters and movie memorabilia but also of American bulldogs. One very old, incontinent bulldog had been urinating throughout the house (and presumably other bulldogs before him), and the whole place, windows darkened by the thick stalks of the jumbo bamboo, stank historically. The house extended like a tunnel to an even more lightless inner chamber where his videotapes were kept.

  The director was, I think it is fair to say, a
man who had not received all that life had, at one time, promised him. I can’t explain, even after knowing and meeting him, why. He was charming and generous and alarmingly smart. He possessed in his head an archive of American culture spanning decades. I suppose, yes, he was a little overwhelming when generously sharing his enthusiasms, and maybe, even in a process town, a bit too enamored of process. But he knew everyone who was anyone from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. He had proof of everyone.

  What I mean by proof. Among his many interests were Kung Fu films. In the ’80s he’d obtained the rights to a popular Chinese series and, with the help of a partner, reedited two episodes into a single film with an English-language sound track. This movie was very influential. Around the time when I met the director, he’d recently been contacted by a young and very famous auteur for permission to use a clip from his reedited Kung Fu movie. The director was thrilled. He’d wanted to meet the auteur for years. He told the auteur that he had footage of Uma Thurman’s mother breast-feeding Uma Thurman’s brother. His thinking: the auteur was obsessed with Uma Thurman. Imagine what an opportunity this presented! To see footage of the naked breasts that had nursed Uma Thurman! He told the auteur that he could see this footage if he came to his house. Then the director would sign the papers and give him the permission he wanted.

  This is, I think, give or take, what eventually happened.

  The director and I spent a lot of time together that month I lived in L.A., though we barely talked about the screenplay. Maybe he didn’t want to make the movie any more than I wanted to write the script for it. One day we hung out with a deranged actress he thought might be good for the part of Edie; she wore a Mexican sundress and talked for uninterrupted hours about herself, though not one detail of her life do I retain. Often the director told me stories about the talented people and the untalented people. And about those who’d made it and those who hadn’t. He was outraged on behalf of certain geniuses who had never gotten their due. He never once expressed bitterness on his own behalf, but I suspect the director believed, and I believed it too, that he’d been unfairly deprived of opportunity and greatness. Far stupider people had succeeded where he had not.

  At this time, I had not yet read the Goncourts. Only today did I read the following page from their journals because I am giving these brothers, these viperous, sulky brothers, a second chance:

  If I were really wealthy, I should have enjoyed making a collection of all the muck that celebrities with no talent have turned out. I should get the worst picture, the worst statue of this man and that, and pay their weight in gold. I should hand this collection over to the admiration of the middle classes, and after having enjoyed their stupid amazement at the tickets and the high prices of the objects, I should let myself go off into criticism composed of gall, science, and taste, until I foamed at the mouth.

  Were the director and I still in contact, I might send him this quote. We’re not. Promise has a shelf life. Without ever stating as much, we both knew he was never making this movie about Edie. But he was not as close to her life as I would get. A few weeks after meeting the director, my friend’s husband, also an Edie fanatic, suggested we drive a few hours north to Santa Barbara and visit the ranch where Edie grew up. We chose not to worry ourselves that the ranch had been donated, by the Duke Fuzzy Sedgwick estate, to the nearby university for agricultural experiments, and was surrounded by a fence. We parked on the roadside. We ignored the NO TRESPASSING signs. We pried ourselves through the gate. We hiked down to the house, we looked into all the windows, we saw the fireplace where the Sedgwick family photograph with Fuzzy reading a book to his many (not yet suicided or motorcycle-killed or overdosed) children, was taken. Then we got busted by the caretaker. He gave us hell. We apologized, and he offered to show us around. He didn’t understand what we were there to see, however. We were not there to see how nonnative grasses behave when planted in Southern California. We were not there to see how formerly extinct varieties behave when reintroduced to their homeland. We were there to understand why the native promise of this one woman, it had long ago been proven, did not survive.

  Today I went to a barbeque wearing a hospital bracelet. I’d gone to the ER a few days earlier to get antibiotics for a case of strep throat. Normally strep throat does not require a visit to the emergency room, but we are in Maine, and we don’t live here full-time, and the doctors here aren’t accepting new patients, and my doctor in New York refused to phone in antibiotics without examining me, and so I had to go to the ER.

  I’d been to this ER eight years ago. All of my information dated back to that time—my old address, my old insurance, my old doctor in New York. My old doctor’s name was on the bracelet they taped around my wrist; on my discharge papers, it was suggested that I follow up with my old doctor once I returned home. Unfortunately, my old doctor was dead. He was killed riding his bike in Manhattan about six years ago. He was a beloved family physician of the sort that is not bred any longer, and thus his demise was newsworthy, inspiring many articles in the papers. In New York his tragedy had been well documented and long ago accepted. Not so here.

  The secretary requested I update my information when I settled my bill. Because of my dead doctor, I nearly didn’t. In Maine, computers function as keepers of nostalgically outmoded ideas and things, kind of like historical societies. But I needed to input my new insurance company information, so I updated everything, including the name of my old doctor. Next time I visited the ER, there would be no trace of him.

  I kept the ER bracelet on my wrist. Partially I wore it to make myself feel less terrible about erasing him. But I also wore it because of my failure ever to properly thank him for his doctoring while he was alive. He bent over backward to help me, not that I needed his help very much, but when I did, he gave it. I’d repeatedly said to my husband, “I need to write him a note to tell him how wonderful he is.” I never wrote a note. After he was killed, my husband made me feel better about the note I never wrote by saying, “I bet he received so many notes like that.” But what if other people assumed as I did, that all of his patients sent him notes, and thus they did not need to send him one? Maybe he’d never received a single note from anyone.

  So at the barbecue many people asked me about the hospital bracelet, including a woman who, after I told her the story of my dead doctor and my subsequent guilt and how I couldn’t, because it was the final connection I had to this man, cut the bracelet off yet, she said, “Wow, that was not what I was expecting to hear.” She declared that, due to this bracelet story, she would need to totally rethink who she’d thought I was. I didn’t ask how I’d formerly been categorized, or how I’d be re-categorized based on this updated information.

  Recently I read a piece by Julian Barnes about the painter Lucian Freud. Barnes writes,

  In one version of the philosophy of the self, we all operate at some point on a line between the twin poles of episodicism and narrativism. The distinction is existential not moral. Episodicists see and feel little connection between the different parts of their life, have a more fragmentary sense of life, and tend not to believe in the concept of free will. Narrativists feel and see constant connectivity, an enduring self, and acknowledge free will as the instrument which forges their self and their connectedness. Narrativists feel responsibility for their actions and guilt over their failures; episodicists think that one thing happens, and then another thing happens…. Narrativists tend to find episodicists selfish and irresponsible; while episodicists tend to find narrativists boring and bourgeois.

  These two approaches might typify our differences as people, this woman and I. She’s episodic, I’m narrative. I see connections everywhere. She’s a woman who has lived many fantastic yet disparate and self-canceling lives. She’s a rebooter, a category shape-shifter. I entered a track in my twenties and stayed on it and on it. She’s my occasional fantasy; I don’t know if I’m hers. But I suspect this is why our relationship is strained occasionally. We remind each other
of who we aren’t. I am herself betrayed. She is myself betrayed. I don’t know for a fact, but I can bet she’s told herself, or told her husband, that she’s relieved she’s not me. I have told my husband that I’m relieved I’m not her. I only sometimes mean it.

  Today I met a reclusive writer/editor who lives in our town. I’ve been hoping to meet him for years. The closest I’ve come to meeting him is seeing his name written on the DRY CLEANING READY list they tape to the cash register of the general store when the shirts come in.

  I finally met him not at the general store but at the boatyard. I was wearing a bathing suit and the writer/editor was fully clothed. It seemed inappropriate to be meeting this man in my bathing suit, primarily because this is not a dock where people are often seen wearing bathing suits, and secondarily because this man is ninety-seven years old. Plus my bathing suit is ridiculous on so many design levels; my left breast pops out when I shrug, or when I inhale, or when I put my hand on my hip. For swimming it is completely stupid, but it is a one-piece and thus more sensible than a bikini, and so it is the suit I wear when I swim to the Goodale buoy. Today this is what I intended.

  I tried to cover myself with my arms as I shook this man’s hand; I told him how excited I was to finally meet him. I asked how much time he spent in Maine (as opposed to New York, where he also lived); he said he’d been here most of the summer. He made reference to the fact that, after the recent passing of his wife, Maine seemed the pleasanter place to be.