The Folded Clock

by Heidi Julavits

  In the past I have suffered hand jealousy. Mine are stubby, with fingernails shaped like sideways rectangles. My left hand is visibly smaller than the right. I have one finger on which I can wear normal-sized rings, because the rest of my fingers I jammed playing basketball. I jammed them shorter and fatter. In the case of some rings, they do not make them big enough for my fingers.

  It was fortunate, I guess, that the one normal-sized finger I possess is the finger on which wedding rings are meant to go. When I was first married, I was much more interested in wedding-type wedding rings, and those rings tend to be small, especially if you’re broke, because you have to buy them used, and so they tend to date back to an age when people and fingers were tinier. My first husband and I bought my wedding ring at a pawnshop. People marveled at our brazenness. “Isn’t it bad luck to buy a secondhand wedding ring?” These people assumed the ring had been sold to the pawnshop following a divorce. My first husband preferred to think the woman who’d once owned the ring had died in a sky-diving accident. Years after our divorce, I still own the ring. I keep it in a small box with old business cards and postage stamps of outdated denominations. The box moves around my Maine home, sometimes in this room, sometimes in that. As with many things I don’t keep track of or care much about, I never lose it.

  Today I went to an art museum to see a show. I wanted to escape my head because my head is so stupid these days. I wanted to be inside someone else’s head. So I went to a show recommended by a young woman I work with. This young woman is dreamily and predatorially beautiful; she is nervously smart. She dresses to highlight her astonishing legs, and she looks at you as though she is planning to give your face a blow job. This sounds both more disgusting and less complimentary than I mean it to. I am transfixed by the way she looks at me. I find a coy boldness in her to admire. She’s giving your face a blow job while talking about Deleuze.

  I was interested in the artist this young woman recommended because the artist paints and does video and sculpts and knits. I figured this artist’s head was voracious and energetic and a generally good place for a blue person to spend the day. This did not turn out to be the case. Her installation was on the fourth of six very tall floors. The elevator failed and failed to come. Waiting for it stretched me to the breaking point. A drink would have done me, or a drink plus a controlled substance, or an uncontrolled substance plus a love affair, or all of these plus a leap from a high window. For some reason I thought an art show would reroute my defective circuitry. I thought an art show would keep me from more ridiculous alternatives.

  Once the elevator opened onto the fourth floor, I exited, I ran. I did a few laps, waiting for my jaggy attention to catch on a photo or a painting so that I could enter this other person’s head. I found no gateway. I slid over surfaces, uninteresting surfaces. The reviews I’d read made her work sound so intellectually sensual and object-driven, but where were the intellectually sensual objects? The reviews made her sound like a thoughtful hoarder, but where was the seductive clutter? I found the show so unfocused and completely disconnected and random. I had no idea who this woman was or what unified her curiosity or her drive. It might have been a group exhibition. I took the stairs to the third floor, where the exhibit continued, and where I turned her failure into my own. I am a jack-of-all-trades. I edit and teach and at times desire to be a clothing designer or an artist (one who doesn’t draw or paint or sew) and I write everything but poetry and I am a mother and a social maniac and a misanthrope and a burgeoning self-help guru and a girl who wants to look pretty and a girl who wants to look sexy and a girl who wants to look girly and a woman in her middle forties who wishes not to look like anything at all, who wishes sometimes to vanish. I thought of what a person said to me once about my short stories—“as a short story writer I just don’t know who you are.” I thought of how I’d screwed up somewhere, that in trying to be so many things and people I’d failed to be even one good thing or one good person. And how now I really, really needed a drink, or I really needed to fall in love with any old human, except that I felt so unattractive today.

  I left the museum and went to a clothing store. I thought I might buy a dress to make me feel better. I didn’t find that dress. I left the clothing store and went to a bookstore. I thought I might find a book to help me feel better, but I forgot that writers, after they publish books, can rarely enter bookstores and leave happier. Even if you are a writer who never reads her Amazon reviews, the bookstore is a reminder of how not beloved you are. If your books are on the front table, the pile is too tall; clearly nobody has bought any copies. If your books are not on the front table, so much the worse. You’re reminded how they might be on the front table if you ever made any sort of effort with booksellers, but you don’t, not even the one in your own neighborhood, the one you can practically see from your apartment. You are reminded of how you make a hard situation—surviving as a writer—much harder for yourself by refusing to help yourself, and why? Why do you refuse when you love to meet people, and are so chatty and personable, but usually only with non-bookstore-owning strangers? Why, when you shop at your local bookstore, even on those days when your book is on the front table, do you insist on anonymity?

  On this day, in this mood, in this bookstore, anonymity was the only option. I did laps. I decided I should read a biography but I couldn’t find BIOGRAPHY, and human assistance was out of the question. I didn’t know how to ask a question without turning the exchange into something awkward over which I’d self-castigate for the next hour. I looked and I looked. There were people in every nook, hanging out and talking and working on computers. I looked at one person for quite a while before I recognized the young woman who gives blow jobs to faces, the woman who had suggested I see the art show I’d just seen.

  We said our surprised hellos. Adding to the tension, which possibly existed only for me, was the fact that the last e-mail exchange we’d had had been of a very personal nature, and I’d failed to follow up. I wrote to her, she wrote to me, I didn’t respond. We’d been writing to each other about our respective abortions. I knew of hers because she’d told me about it a few months back. I treated her abortion as an intellectual conceit because she was treating it as an intellectual conceit, and writing an intellectual essay about her choice to terminate a midterm pregnancy. Later I’d done some math; I realized that I’d had my abortion twenty-five years ago and that this woman was as old as the child I didn’t have. I don’t usually give my aborted child a body or a life; I don’t date it or pull it with me through time. I don’t really think about it at all. Which is why I was so shocked to contemplate that, had I not aborted this child, it would now be old enough to get its own abortion. Also, this girl’s mother had gotten pregnant very young, at about the age that I did. Unlike me, she didn’t have an abortion. She had this girl.

  So it was awkward in the bookstore because I’d yet to e-mail this woman back about her abortion, or my abortion, or why her mother didn’t get an abortion like I did, and why she was born and her baby was not, and my baby was not, and etc. Instead we made small talk about the Oscar nominations, the announcement of which I’d missed. I hadn’t seen any of the movies, anyway. Then, somehow eager to make this girl feel that I listened to her, and respected her opinion, even when I failed to write her back about a personal disclosure that I’d, technically, elicited, I said, “I just went to the art show you recommended.”

  “Oh!” she said. “Was I right or was I right? It was totally amazing, right?”

  At times like this, when the stakes are so low and still I cave, I wonder how I can consider myself an honest or a brave or even a good person.

  “It was,” I said. “That show was totally amazing.”

  Today I received an e-mail from a friend who might introduce me to some people he knows. He and I once spent a summer together in Morocco twenty years ago. I requested these introductions because I want to offer these people some work. I realized, however, that I was not just asking to be
introduced; I was asking to be recommended. He and I are both academics and so even innocent introductions have a whiff of putting one forth or putting one up (tenure language) about them. Character evaluations are required.

  My friend said he would introduce/recommend me to the people I wanted to meet. Then he related a story about Paul Bowles, the cultish American writer of The Sheltering Sky who lived most of his life in Tangier, and about whom this friend had been writing his dissertation the summer we lived in Morocco. Every weekend he’d take the train from Fez to Tangier to hang out with Bowles.

  He wrote, “Did I ever tell you the story of when I asked Paul Bowles to write a letter of introduction for me to William Burroughs?” I told him he had not. He described the encounter.

  ME: I mean, I think it would kind of, like, help if you could write a letter of introduction.

  PAUL B: Now?

  ME: No, like when you had time.

  Next day, after about two hours of chitchat.

  PAUL B: Oh, I wrote that letter to Bill Burroughs for you.

  ME: You did? (Thinking: OMG!! What will it say?)

  PAUL B: Yes, it’s over there on the table.

  I begin searching, on my hands and knees for about an hour. Under Bowles’s bed, among the detritus. Nothing. Never found it.

  I thought this was such a great story—I laughed about it quite a bit. Then I stopped laughing and wondered: did this mean he wasn’t going to make the introductions I’d requested? Such is the inconvenience of e-mail. I could not dig beneath his bed for proof of what he maybe had not written.

  Today I was searching online for a place to stay in the Bavarian Alps. Ask me where the Bavarian Alps are located (beyond “in Europe”) and I could not tell you. A few months ago I might have claimed that “Bavarian” is just a snowier synonym for “German,” but I recently had the occasion to learn a little bit, not much, about German states. I’d Googled frankfurt what german state, because I was making an e-mail joke to my new agent about posing as my husband’s mistress while he was in Frankfurt. My agent is savvy about Europe and presumably also those ancient feudal European subdivisions about which most Americans know nothing. His suits suggest as much. He is a man whose suits say of him, “I know quite a lot about kingdoms.” I initially wrote that I was my husband’s Bavarian mistress, but then I wondered—why was I not his Tyrolian mistress? Or his Thuringian mistress? To claim to be his Bavarian mistress when really I was his Tyrolian or Thuringian mistress (in this joke formulation, at least) might reveal me to be the Old World-ignorant American I totally was and preferred to appear not to be. (Frankfurt, it turns out, is in the state of Hesse, and therefore I was my husband’s Hessian mistress. I have begun to fact-check my e-mail jokes, and my e-mails generally, even though I do not use capital letters or proper punctuation. “we write everything lowercase in order to save time,” said Herbert Bayer—herbert bayer—of the Bauhaus school. When I discovered this quote I felt so reassured. I’d always worried that I’d naturally defaulted to lowercase letters because I lacked courage or conviction or a healthy sense of self-worth. But in fact it was because I was so busy writing functional and unornamented sentences. I just needed to save time.)

  But the Bavarian Alps. Wherever they are, I want to go to them soon. I was trying to find an inexpensive lodge where I might stay; a travel article named a promising sounding place and included a link that led instead to a warning.

  PAGE NOT FOUND. This page is unavailable, it might have been deleted or worse: it could never have existed!

  I couldn’t tell if this warning was sincere or if it was meant to be cheeky. The hotel (to which this unfound page was attached) seemed capable of boutique cheekiness (there was an oversized service bell on the front desk), and, given, the hotel was French—somehow my “Bavarian” search term landed me at a French hotel—and the French are not typically cheeky, well, it would make sense if their cheekiness might unintentionally read, despite their best efforts to loosen up, as philosophical.

  Perhaps it was a matter of language. Ideas stated in French sound more dignified than they do in English. I translated. Page non trouvée. Cette page est indisponible, il aurait été supprimé ou pire: il n’aurait jamais existé!

  French did not clarify matters. The problem was not the language but the punctuation. The exclamation point drained all gravity from the sentiment. It rendered it bouncy and nonthreatening. It never could have existed! Wheeeeeee!!!! Once exclamation points were scary and loud; they made you jump. You were in trouble when the exclamation points came out. They were the nun-chucks of punctuation. They were a bark, a scold, a gallows sentence. Not any longer. The exclamation point is lighthearted, even whimsical. If someone responds with an exclamation point you can be sure that you failed to make a lasting impression on her. If your friend says, I love it! she means she was temporarily but forgettably energized by the photo you attached or the e-mail observations you so carefully fact-checked before sending. Your contribution to her in-box is the equivalent of a whippet hit. If she says, however, I love it, she means she has been soothed by your quotidian display of greatness into a state of contemplation. I wanted to soothingly contemplate the question of whether it was worse never to have existed than it was to be deleted; I love (as in love, no exclamation point) an existential reckoning moment with an auto response. But my only possible responses to this auto response (which I understood as a question—is it better to never have existed?) seemed to be Yes! or No! These were not convictions so much as they were hiccups in my attention span. No, I want another whippet, I mean what I meant is—sorry, yes! Please, I want another.

  Today I was walking to class when I heard a couple fighting on the sidewalk. The other pedestrians and I craned our necks to eyeball the participants, but cautiously, so we wouldn’t get busted. Looking is impolite. Space is tight in this city; loved ones have to take it to the streets, sometimes. They deserve a little privacy.

  The two fighting people quickly rumbled into view; they resolved themselves into one person fighting with herself. She wore a giant maroon sweatshirt advertising a mid-western college and a sagging pair of chinos. Despite her other-college varsity gear, her rant was about Columbia. “Fuck Columbia University! Fuck Columbia University!” It was her fight song. If only all cheerleaders suffered from psychotic breaks, I thought. They might help their teams to win more games.

  I noticed a few people on the sidewalk, despite themselves, smiling. Columbia University is the gleaming beneficiary but also the occasional victim of its city circumstances. The students and faculty fight like everyone in New York fights for money and for space. Also the university was expanding into a new neighborhood, igniting local protests. Most of the pedestrians on that sidewalk had probably thought at one time, or were thinking right now, Fuck Columbia University!

  This woman was the voice of the people.

  I crossed Broadway. I was far enough away that I could now safely look at her. She was just another anonymous and lumpily dressed outraged person until she wasn’t. The body was foreign to me, and so was the voice, but I recognized the face. The face belonged to a student of mine from many years ago, a woman who’d come to my office and was so depressed that when she cried, her tears moved slowly down her face, her whole being enervated to the point where even gravity failed to have an effect on her.

  I stood on the street corner. I thought about chasing after her, but she was churning swiftly through the neighborhood—she was already almost a block away—so instead I entered a coffee shop. This is why I was on the street. I was going to a coffee shop, and I was buying a coffee, and then I was walking to class, and then I would teach, and then during office hours I would reassure the students who needed reassuring, and I would be tough on the students who could take it, and if someone cried in my office for reasons unrelated but maybe sort of related to the imperfect short story they’d written, I would tell them that fiction makes you cry, the fiction you read though more often it’s the shitty fiction you write t
hat makes you cry, and I would also be thinking, You poor person, you have no idea what awaits you. A life awaits you, like a serious fucking life. This is what I would want to say. And then I would go home to my serious fucking life, and it would be so ridiculously unserious; it would involve soup spills and dirty dishes and lengthy logic proofs meant to coerce tired, inarticulate people to bed, and I would think how lucky I was to have this unserious life, i.e., to be forced to do somewhat or even thoroughly banal things every day. Because what awaits you if you don’t? What kind of life awaits you then? A life where you don’t calmly think, as you’re scraping up the crystallized juice rings before showering before getting dressed before buying coffee before teaching class before reassuring people their hard lives would only get harder, Fuck this whole existence. You’re running down the street and you’re screaming at a university to which you no longer belong, you’re wearing a sweatshirt not even branded with the insignia of the university on which you blame your breakdown, the university to which you are no longer affiliated, because you are so deeply unaffiliated that you are barely even affiliated with your own face.

  Today I thought I might educate my husband about birth control pills. I said, “You probably don’t know how birth control pills work,” and he replied, “Actually, I do.” By “work” I didn’t mean that I understood how they keep a person from getting pregnant. I had no idea about that. By “work” I meant that every month a person can predict what day she’ll get her period. It turned out he knew this much about birth control pills; he knew even more than I did. And yet I had never, until recently, been on the pill during our time together. So this knowledge of his, it predated me, and to predate me meant he’d learned about the pill well over fifteen years ago. What else did he know that I did not know he knew? I thought about how, now that we know each other so well, we rarely talk about the time before we met. Every once in a while we still talk like there is more to discover about each other’s past. Often this happens on car rides. When it does, it’s so exciting, it makes me feel like we’re dating again, and presenting, for inspection to one another, our personal narratives that have been practiced on the lovers that preceded us. I especially want—even now, after hearing it all—to hear again about his ex-girlfriends. Every man I’ve been involved with, his past girlfriends have played a great part in my falling in love with him. I can’t explain it except to say that I have felt with these women a blood connection; these women have parted with a valued possession and now it has fallen to me. I am the beneficiary of a bequeathing. If I’d dated this man before they had, he would not be this man. And so I feel kinship, and gratitude. Also curiosity. I love to meet ex-girlfriends when such meetings are desired and appropriate, and even when they’re not. Once, when my husband and I were first dating, I spotted his ex-girlfriend on the train platform. I had already thoroughly interrogated him about her because she, in particular, fascinated me. I had scrutinized pictures of her, I had reclined on pillows she’d sewn, I had admired her artwork, still on his walls. She was a key part of our courtship. And here she was! Standing beside me, waiting for the train! I was still a secret; she had no idea about me. But I knew everything about her. I knew her so well that I was scared to stay in the same car with her for too long. For sure she would feel this strange woman knowing her. Yet I half wanted her to notice and wonder about me. I half wanted us to be forced to contend with one another. Right before exiting at the next stop, I half wanted to put a hand on her shoulder and say, one subway stranger to another, Thank you.