The Folded Clock

by Heidi Julavits

  Recently I met this friend and another friend at a cabin on the coast. The cabin was runty and constructed of press board and plastic and propped up by rusted propane tanks. The view was astonishing. We are scarcely ever together nowadays, the three of us; we are far-flung in more ways than just geography. When we do meet, confession is our shortcut to intimacy. We bypass the years and our widening differences by confessing. We confess and confess and confess. We confess about our bad behavior toward husbands, children, other friends, ourselves. We are each other’s priests.

  On this night, I had my usual confessions to make; I waited for my turn. Though the confessions on offer (I thought) were good ones, my friend with the guru seemed distracted. When I finished, she wanted to know with whom I’d shared one particular confession. She wanted to know if I’d shared it with another woman I see more frequently than I see her.

  I had.

  The next morning I woke up to ocean and a painful amount of sun. My friend emerged from the small back bedroom; she announced that she’d spent the past two hours asking herself the questions she’d learned from the guru. She’d gone to bed upset last night by what she saw as my betrayal (she understandably felt betrayed that I would share news with this other woman before I shared it with her); now, however, she was perfectly fine.

  We ate breakfast. My friend was calm but also unsettlingly distant. I wondered if she’d experienced a moment of acceptance in that bedroom; what she’d accepted had something to do with my inability to stop disappointing her. She was finally resigned to this fact, and her resignation required she stop investing any hope in me whatsoever.

  Formerly I’d loved her guru. Now I was not so in love with her. I was emotionally quite dependent on the dysfunction my friend and I had co-developed over the past twenty-five years. I depended on my friend to get mad at me for doing mostly totally reasonable things that I then got mad at her for being mad about. I started to worry: our durable friend romance, the one that survived, and even thrived upon, our regular breakups, was finished. Her guru had killed it. Gurus, I’d always thought, were so airy and ephemeral—they encouraged your thoughts to drift around wearing the mind equivalent of an Indian gauze dress with a tinkling bell hem—but my friend’s guru, it seemed, was the most practical of taskmasters. She dressed people’s minds in an off-the-rack skirt suit and sent them to an office job where they laid people off.

  I tried to remain circumspect in the face of my friend’s resignation; maybe it was for the best. How much longer could we act like schoolgirls with crushes on one another? We were forty-four years old.

  After breakfast we all three sat on the rocks. We arranged ourselves at distances from one another so great that we nearly needed to shout to be heard above the gulls. We were literally speaking over a small crevasse. My two friends assumed one plane, like jurors; I faced them with my back to the sun. They began to worry aloud about me. Their worry amounted to a personality critique, but whatever. They cared enough to care. After my close run-in with total guru annihilation, I thankfully accepted their concern.

  Whenever I am not with them, they said, I am Not Me; I become a person they are certain, because they know me so well, I am not.

  There is a complicated truth to these claims. Historically, when I am in a shallow tizzy, or just really depressed, I do tend to pull away from these two friends. Historically, the explanation for my disappearance has been: they know me too well. When I’m not interested in (or capable of) being who, at my core, I am, I steer way clear of the two people who hold me to this unappealing standard.

  However—and maybe it was because the guru had messed with things, and so now our narrative seemed open to restructuring—a part of me wanted to disagree with this long-running interpretation. A part of me wanted to point out that this Not Me facet they strongly disliked—this “other” buzzy and irreverent me—was, if we were to deal in pure percentages, the person I predominantly am. I liked people, lots and lots and lots of them. I wanted people around me much of the time, and I wanted for the most part to never directly speak about serious matters. If a serious matter arose, I wanted to dispatch it in an unserious manner (which manner, in my opinion, would nonetheless result in its very seriously being dealt with). What they were saying, in short, I wanted to point out to them, was this: we are worried about you because we don’t like who you are.

  I said nothing. I chose not to seize the restructuring opportunity offered by the guru. Instead I listened; I nodded. The sun was hot on my back. I was struck by a guru-worthy koan to describe my current situation: To face away from the sun is not to hide from it. My friends and I have our friendship origin tales, just like the guru has hers. These are our paths to enlightenment, or maybe just our paths to this cabin, to this beach, to this day, to our girlhoods, to which we are fast losing the connection. I believe it is not wrong to protect these stories, even if such protection requires a little dishonesty in the form of silence. I did worry, however, that the crevasse over which we faced one another would eventually grow too wide. As yet, it had not. I was thankful for this. It was nearing noon now. My shoulders were starting to burn.

  Today I read a book while holding a fountain pen. I often have a pen in my hand when I read. I am trying to fool myself into thinking I am writing when I’m not. I read with a pen in my hand because it helps me think. If I underline a sentence, I temporarily own it. It’s mine. I have bought real estate in this book, laid down stakes, moved in. This does not mean I remember where I live. I turn the page. I lose my place.

  I used to be more of a habitual loser than I am now. In the past, I lost everything. Official, identity-reinforcing objects such as my wallet, these I lost regularly. Often my wallet was found before I knew it was lost. One night I received an e-mail from a woman who’d tracked me down online. She said, “I found your wallet on the street.” I thought: what is she talking about? I have my wallet right here. But I didn’t.

  I have also lost my passport. Once when I was twenty-four, and in Morocco, and traveling with my boyfriend and a woman whose terrible Arabic she made up for with outraged panache (she would ask a carpet merchant, when he told her the price of a carpet she wanted, “Am I a donkey?” and he would immediately halve the price), I discovered my passport missing during a sandstorm. We were in a Berber town on the edge of the Sahara Desert. We ransacked our hotel room as the sand hit the windows and sounded, apocalyptically, like rain. My passport was gone. This meant we could not go into the Sahara, as planned, in an old Mercedes driven by an old man we’d hired for the excursion, even though it was August, and eight trillion degrees, and when we told people our plans, they laughed at us, not because we were funny, but because we were stupid and going to die. This was their opinion and they were probably correct. The old Mercedes, the old man, our mettle—something or someone would have failed.

  But now we could not go into the Sahara because I had a flight home in five days that required a passport. I was starting a new job. It seemed a very bad idea to be a week or two late for my first day of work, so the missing passport needed to be dealt with. Unfortunately, the nearest passport office was a thousand miles away. We repurposed our driver. We told him we didn’t want to go to the desert—we wanted to head north through the Atlas Mountains to the nearest airport in Casablanca, so that I could fly to Rabat, so that I could get a passport, so that I could then take another taxi across the country to a Spanish principality, and get on a plane home that was so indirect I would have to first switch airports in London and spend the night on the terminal floor.

  So the driver took us north. In the High Atlas, we stopped to look at carpets, and we sat around drinking mint tea, and the woman asked, “Am I a donkey?,” and we left with four carpets. We descended the mountains and it got dark. We drove up another set of mountains and at around two a.m. the driver begged to rest, so we pulled to the side and spread out our new carpets and slept for an hour. Dawn happened. We returned to the cab and drove down the last mountain into Casablan
ca, and we boarded a very large white 747 headed for Paris and then America but stopping first in Rabat, and when we disembarked in Rabat, a city which to my memory looked and smelled like a wetly rotting dock pylon, we checked into a hotel room, and as the woman was looking for a sweater, because for the first time in weeks she was cold, she found my passport.

  We were dumbfounded. Who had put my passport in her suitcase? The taxi driver? The carpet merchant? Sometimes when you’re in a foreign country, it feels like everyone is in on a joke against you. My boyfriend accused the woman—they’d been fighting—of hiding it on purpose. But to what end? She appeared guilty, true, but only because she was guilty, albeit innocently, of harboring my passport. Who knew what had happened, but now we were stuck in this damp city, and we tried to believe that fate had intervened to make us change our plans. We might have perished in that hot desert. The sandstorm was a sign.

  Loss, what I am trying to say, so long as you’re dealing with objects, can be spun as opportunity. Because I lost my passport we did not die in the Sahara. Because I lost a cashmere cardigan at a bus stop in Hyde Park, and decided that the University of Chicago student who probably found it would, instead of keeping it, decide to sell it on eBay to make some pocket money, I discovered eBay, and truly feel that eBay has measurably improved my mental quality of life more than doctors or drugs. Because I lost a necklace in a river I learned that the state of Vermont has a scuba diving club. All of this does and does not explain why my mother-in-law, at my marriage to her son, read “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop, the opening lines of which are

  The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

  so many things seem filled with the intent

  to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

  Nor does it explain how I lost my way today. I started writing because I was holding a fountain pen in my hand and a drip of blue ink landed on my sweater. Without thinking I stuck the sweater in my mouth. I sucked the ink like it was blood.

  Today I am working in the library of the German villa. I have my favorite spot. Next to me are books about Germany with titles like Deutschland, Wo Ist Du? and The German Question and Other German Questions. Usually there is an actual German in this library. The German is an architect. The German architect and I bonded a few weeks ago over a building we both liked and which I’d found in the nearby woods while on a bike ride. He said about the building, in his very kind way, “I am so happy you discovered it,” which I interpreted as, “What a remarkable person you are for having the same good taste as me. I am so pleased we found each other.”

  Soon afterward, the architect and I both began working in the library. All day long we spend together. His living space in the villa, I gather (from reports) is very nice and overlooks the lake. We’d commiserated over the fact that working alone, even in one’s lakefront suite, is not as appealing as grinding it out in the presence of others. We both needed someone with whom to share a glance when a man spent hours tuning the piano just outside the library doors, and then complained to a passing American, “This building is full of plaster, and plaster is the enemy of sound.” We both needed to be guilted into working longer hours, or maybe we saw it as a competition. Who would be the first to leave the library when the Berlin sun set at three-thirty p.m.? Who would be the first to crack a Berlin beer? Who would be the first to cave to the library’s chilly temperatures and start writing in gloves and a coat?

  Soon this competition we were or were not in became a crush. My husband jokingly accused me. I denied nothing. It was no big deal; it was just another of my workplace infatuations. Also this architect is the age of my dad.

  In the midst of what I understood as our mutual infatuation, I flew to Zurich to meet my London friend and see and experience the building/spa in the Swiss Alps. The architect was thrilled to learn I was going to visit this building that he’d already visited numerous times and about which he’d written many papers. (“I am so happy you discovered it.”)

  While in Switzerland at the building, I sent the architect an e-mail—my first-ever e-mail to him—wondering about our cold library (had it snowed inside?) and asking about a nearby restaurant he’d mentioned liking.

  When I returned to the villa, the architect sent me PowerPoint presentations about the building/spa and its architect (whom he considered “the world’s greatest living architect”). I sent him photos of a Swiss house built into the side of a mountain that, from a distance, looks like the site of a meteor crash. The next night—after firmly and energetically bonding over the world’s greatest living architect, thereby cementing our love via the creative genius of a third party—I ignored him. I couldn’t help myself. My teen mating instinct kicked in. (La tendresse Américaine on which I was raised deemed you must strongly discourage a man after you strongly encourage him as a way to more yet strongly encourage him.) We were at dinner with a group of people. I did not meet his eye. I very visibly engaged others in conversation. I took great pains to appear to be having quite a bit more fun while not talking to him than I ever did while talking to him.

  Our romance, such as it never existed, started to wane. Either he realized that he really liked me and could not bear to be ignored but also could not, in good conscience, follow through on his desires (we were both married), and so needed to “break off” this relationship we did not have. Or he realized I was a ridiculous person who likes to play games—card games, silly games of the heart, harmless, all of them, but therein lay the problem: I was a frivolous person who just happened to share his taste in buildings. Or maybe our infatuation was entirely one-sided. Even more ridiculously, perhaps I’ve fabricated this entire situation, and he’s simply confused but more likely uninterested by my middle-school bizarreness. Recently the architect sent an e-mail to a much older woman on whom I am certain he does not have a crush. He’d written to her about a Bauhaus building. She forwarded his note to me (she knows I am also a Bauhaus fan). I saw he’d written to her, of this building, “I am so happy you discovered it.”

  I am the only one working in the cold library today.

  Today I turned the wrong knob on my stove when I tried to boil water. The burner knobs on my two stoves are reversed. To fire up the front burner in New York, I turn the left knob. To fire up the front burner in Maine, I turn the right one. When I move from the apartment to the house (or the house to the apartment), I spend many days unthinkingly turning the wrong knob and igniting the wrong burner. Like a magician off her game, I throw fire where I didn’t mean to throw it. I have to remind myself: You are not where you just were. Things are different here. I get mad at myself because I hate to waste time, even if it’s only one one-hundredth of a second. I watched the Olympics this summer. One one-hundredth of a second is no joke. One one-hundredth of a second is the difference between gold and last place. I also hate to think about actions that shouldn’t require thinking. I need the mechanics of my life to be effortless. When appliances don’t work, I cannot be my best person. I actually become a bad person. I am not a patient mother when the machines, in addition to the people, require attention. I become like the real estate woman in Maine who showed me the Odd Fellows Hall the other day. The woman, nearing eighty, emerged from her car wielding a butter knife. (The hall has no keys.) She used the knife to jimmy the lock, but the lock wouldn’t spring, and she grew frustrated, and I saw in her what I see in myself when plain things that should work do not—that I have the capacity to turn, with the quickness of a lightning strike, unkind.

  But I am also reassured by my failure to turn the correct stove knob in New York. This meant that, though back, I was not yet fully back. Even though I’d already forgotten the calm of the past three months, my muscle memories had yet to be overridden. I am still in that place where real estate agents unlock empty houses with butter knives. My Maine neighbor, an occasional electrician, warned me when he changed our bathroom light from a pull chain to a light switch: “You’ll be reaching for that chain for weeks.” He was right. I was incap
able of remembering the chain was no longer there. A year later, I still grope in the dark at the dark.

  Today I fought with my husband. He is on a diet, not for vanity’s sake but because of a recent encounter with a scary illness. A person might think—given my own recent encounter with a scary illness—that I would unreservedly support his wellness pursuit. I do not. Until today I have acted supportive, but beneath my support a dark undertow lurked. I’d kept this undertow a secret from him. Instead I confessed my baffling hostility toward his diet to my female friends. All of them, I was surprised to learn, are or were once involved with men who’d experimented with diets for reasons of health. I discovered that the male diet is a potent relationship disharmonizer. “Threatened” is the word that arose most frequently when I spoke to women about their male dieting partners, as in “I am/was threatened by his diet.” The obvious interpretation of our reaction was this: we feared that our husbands desired to look slimmer and healthier because they’d met another woman and planned, once their transformation was complete, to leave us.

  But we weren’t scared of being left. Maybe we should have been, but we weren’t. We were resentful. The dieting man does not eat the same food as the rest of his family—the diets we were speaking about were not “eat more healthy foods” diets. These diets required extreme abstinence and often had a cultish whiff to them. The adherents of these diets made YouTube videos that were both compelling and disturbing. People lost so much weight that their skulls shrank.

  We tried to parse our feelings of endangerment. Was gender primarily to blame? By being on a diet, our husbands were (albeit for very different reasons) behaving like so many of our female friends, some of whom developed eating disorders and became incredibly boring. I was one of those women for a year. Luckily I was able to escape what is often, tragically, inescapable. When I emerged from my brief anorexia incarceration I thought: Well that was a very huge waste of my time. The monomaniacal dedication of brain activity required to maintain an eating disorder was an inexcusable squandering of one of my best brain years. Plus the obsession was inherently perverse. Even though I was fixated upon nothing but my body, my brain was somehow totally disengaged, save intellectually, from its singular concern. My body, despite the molecular-level attention paid to it, belonged to a faraway creature, a numb, gray sylph.