The Folded Clock

by Heidi Julavits

  Then I told them a story about a very stupid thing I did with my first husband. We’d just started dating; we’d been drinking gin. We decided to run home. Literally, to run. Through Tribeca and over the Brooklyn Bridge. This was not exercise; this was not “running” as in marathons. This was the kind of running people did in The Sound of Music, over fields and singing. We were a third of the way across the bridge—to the first stone arch—when my first husband bent down and opened a trapdoor in the middle of the wooden walkway.

  It sounded so implausible—a trapdoor? In the bridge? But indeed there was a trapdoor, and for some reason it wasn’t locked. It led to a rung staircase and then a spindly catwalk suspended under the bridge’s roadway. Beneath this catwalk was air and then water. There was nothing to catch us if we fell. The cars drove a few feet over our heads. It was so loud above us, so quiet below. We chased each other. Back and forth, back and forth. The catwalk was metal and responded jerkily to running; it was constructed of welded rungs with a few inches of space between each one. When we ran we could see the far-down water strobing under our feet. Then, as I was being chased, i.e., my first husband was chasing me, I felt a violent vibration behind me. I turned. My first husband had run headfirst into a low-lying girder. He’d been knocked out.

  I then told my daughter and her friend, because I’d forgotten this crucial detail, that although the catwalk had a thin metal railing for your hands, by your feet there was nothing; if you were lying on the catwalk, for example, and knocked unconscious, you might tilt right off into the river.

  My first husband was tilting.

  But I saved him. I saved him so he could go on to be married to me and then divorced from me.

  My first husband and I climbed back through the trapdoor. We ran the rest of the way across the bridge. We walked down some steps that led to a deserted underpass. Suddenly, a car pulled up. In this car was one of my first husband’s best friends and his girlfriend. (An ancillary point of interest: this girlfriend would grow up to host a reality TV show that my current husband and daughter and I watch.) They gave us a ride to our apartment. That night, I lay in bed and could not sleep. I was traumatized by what might have been. I might have lost the love of my life to a tragic and stupid accident. He would have been the love of my life had I lost him. I did not, and he was not.

  After I told this story to my daughter and her friend, I became embarrassed, not least because they liked this story, and clearly held me in higher regard because of my stupidity and daring, which is of course why I told them the story in the first place. Even once my daughter no longer found me interesting, which would be soon, she couldn’t completely reject me; I’d run under bridges; I’d saved a man from death. To my face she’d scorn me, but to her friends she might proudly tell this story, because she’d heard it before she understood why I was telling it. It would be lodged in her brain before that brain could skeptically wonder, Why on earth is she telling me this inappropriate story?

  But what really made me pathetic was that I hadn’t told the whole story. In telling only the dramatic parts, I’d failed to tell the truth; i.e., I’d failed to shape from these events an educational story that little girls getting older and eventually leaving home need to hear. The truth about the skiing story is this: I skied across the Brooklyn Bridge because I was losing the thread. I felt disconnected from the person who once trekked alone through blizzards, the person who was from Maine and didn’t give a shit about parties and fame. The stone used to make the bridge’s arches was quarried in Maine, and taken from a hole in the ground that had since filled up with water and in which I’d once gone swimming. Both of these stories are about my first few years of what would become two decades in a city that didn’t immediately feel like home and still sometimes doesn’t. It so didn’t feel like home that I married a man I knew I should not because his mother lived in a house that, because of its windows and its molding and its old plaster smell, reminded me of Maine; New York so didn’t feel like home that I would often walk across the bridge to lean my forehead against the stone arches and touch the ground from which I’d come. If they could persist here, these stones, and retain their shape, then so could I.

  Today I was so relieved to get a migraine. For the past thirty-plus years I’ve gotten migraines regularly; they were part of the weather that happened within and without. I would get a migraine after a manic jag. I would get a migraine before a blizzard. Now I rarely get them. I don’t want to say that I miss being in pain, but I do miss the excuse to not give a shit about all the big and small things I often care too much about and that a migraine eradicates. When I have a migraine I do not grieve the shirt that was put in the dryer by accident and its texture forever ruined; I do not feel undermined by the passive-aggressive person at my workplace; I do not blame myself for failing to be in better touch with my grandmother. My body used to have the good sense to give itself a regular break from my mind. It is no longer so sensible.

  I welcomed a migraine today because it permitted me to forget that it is the end of summer and we are about to leave until basically next summer, and I feel guilty for abandoning my house. I turned out the lights and sat in the dim living room. I thought, This is what it’s like in this house for the other nine months of the year. Lightless and empty. I tried to put myself in the house’s position. I tried to feel what the house feels because this house is a people house. I worry, without people, what might become of it. When I was a teenager, my mother, who hated cats, agreed to buy a Maine coon cat because it was a people cat. It was a dog in cat form. I soon left for college, and then so did my brother, and my parents did not come home from work until late. A people cat without people proved a bad combination. Its personality changed. It opened the cupboards and pulled out the food. After months of daily solitude, it stationed itself at the top of the stairs one night and would not let my mother pass. It took angry swipes at her with a claw whenever she approached it. We realized our mistake. We are not people-cat people. We gave it to people who are.

  So I worry about this house being alone for most of the year because it is a people house. We bought this house because, after we’d seen it with a snobby real estate agent (who said of it, “it is not an important address”), we’d driven by it again to see if our good hunch held. We slowed as we drove past. Every window was lit; the then-owners were having a party. The house looked like the movie cliché of a house on Thanksgiving or something, aglow with human joy and coziness. Then we almost hit a large animal. I remember it as a stag, though I’ve never since seen a stag, nor do I really know what a stag is. A mythically large deer-type creature, that’s what I remember seeing. It appeared from the darkness on the north side of the house and leapt across the road. I took it as a sign. We should buy this house. (My husband remembers the stag as a moose. I didn’t learn until ten years later that he differently remembered this trenchant—to me—moment in our co-history. Of the two of us, I’m the only one who believes that the sudden appearance of a large animal means we should invest in real estate.)

  Despite my migraine, we went to our neighbor’s house for cocktails. Our neighbors serve me margaritas in challenging times. They made me margaritas twenty hours after I’d spent twenty-seven hours in labor. This evening I applied a vise to my temples with my two hands. Every once in a while I’d free a hand to take a drink. A second couple arrived and asked if they smelled like skunk, because their dog had been sprayed that morning. The husband had driven up to the general store at five a.m. to buy de-skunking supplies—baking soda, vinegar, other household items that our store reliably carries (it also reliably carries white bread, celery, rubber gloves, and tonic). The husband said he ran into a lobsterman who, when he learned of the skunking, said, “You know what you want there, you want some of that ladies’ douche.” The husband recounted this with a perfect Maine accent. I was in such pain, and I was fighting the end-of-summer sadness, but I said a small thank-you to the stag, or the moose, or the migraine, or whatever was res
ponsible for my sitting on a stool across the street from our people house, my head in my hands, so that I could be hearing that sentence.

  Today my friends and I gossiped hard. We gossiped athletically. It was as if we’d met for a run, but we hadn’t. We’d met in heavy coats and mittens to sit on a bench and talk. My friends and I, we are pixilated conversationalists. There are no lines of thought. Together we amass data points, and only later, while in bed and thinking back over the words I’d uttered and absorbed, does the day’s big picture come into focus, if even then. In truth I no longer crave the day’s big picture. More and more I crave the day’s quick tagline. A useful takeaway like, Buy cheap ’70s East German ceramics on eBay or Never assume you are the love of anyone’s life.

  My friends and I warmed up on real estate. Then we moved indoors and got out the knives and made the soup. We started talking about people. We talked about the man who left his wife for another woman, and had, out of pity, agreed to go on a last vacation with the wife (even though their marriage, in his opinion, because he was very much in love with the other woman, was over), and by accident while on this vacation he’d impregnated the wife while having “what is as close to platonic sex as you can possibly imagine,” and still he refuses to return home to the wife, now pregnant with his child, and their preexisting kids.

  We talked about the man whose wife left him for another man (also married at the time), and how the wife was impregnated by the new man, or so everyone thought, until a paternity test revealed that what she thought was her boyfriend’s child was actually her husband’s.

  We talked about the beautiful woman who was inexplicably marrying the man from Kansas City who wore cravats and resembled a turtle.

  We talked about the woman who reconnected with her med school boyfriend over Facebook, and who, out of guilt, included her husband in their online flirtation, and who arranged for them to meet and have a three-way in Paris—though in fact this was just an excuse for her and the med school boyfriend to have husband-sanctioned sex with each other—and when the husband figured this out, she “opened the door” for his betrayal and defection, and her husband has since fallen in love with the woman’s work colleague, and is probably going to leave her.

  The men showed up for dinner. The men were enthusiastic gossip participants but not so useful because they couldn’t remember specifics. They could only recall the haze of a scandal, and the haze is not what’s important. It’s the hard data that’s important; it’s the motivations and the causality. What makes what happen? What’s connected to what? It’s the equivalent of disassembling a car engine before putting it back together. Every plug and cable is important. So the men participated by saying stuff like, “What was it about that guy who had the secret second family?” and then the women would tell the story.

  This man, he’d been dumped by a rich woman who later found out she was pregnant with his son but refused to get back together with him, which was fine because the man had met another woman whom he married and with whom he had two children, but he never told his wife about his biological son with this ex-girlfriend. The ex-girlfriend—this was an important detail—was boundlessly wealthy and as such was never emotionally involved with anyone very deeply. On a whim, the rich ex-girlfriend decided she wanted this man back, and he returned to her, at which point his wife found out about his secret son, and she was so upset that she had him legally removed from the business they’d formed together, and so when the rich ex-girlfriend dumped the guy anew because she didn’t like his parenting style—the son was “feral” and told every adult who disciplined him, “My mother is going to fire you!” and the man tried to discipline his son and so was basically fired—he had no job, and no money, and no family, and now nobody knows where he is.

  Another woman talked about her sister who left her husband for an “asshole” who was famous in the theatre and thus somewhat excused for being an asshole, and who she’d been with for three years when she found his diary detailing the many affairs he’d been having with other women during the same three years he’d been with her. Another man, we were told, kept his diary on his family’s home computer, where his wife read about the women he’d slept with in the darkroom she’d had built for him, because she was a successful surgeon. (At this point I tried to initiate the term “guy-ary,” defined as “a diary written by a husband detailing his extramarital affairs and kept in a place where a wife could easily find it.”)

  A man said, “We’re so horrible, talking about these people!” But he said it insincerely, and besides, we weren’t saying anything mean. Thomas Mann, in Buddenbrooks, wrote of a marriage that everyone in town found “queer”: “To get behind it even a little, to look beneath the scanty outward facts to the bottom of this relation, this seemed a difficult, but certainly a stimulating task.” We were involved in a stimulating task! But we were also speaking warnings. We were trying to figure out the rules to a game we weren’t playing yet (or were naive enough to think we weren’t playing yet) because we were still in love.

  We had no reason to feel confident. Sitting in our midst was a man whose wife had, a year earlier, slept with his best friend. His wife had believed he’d never leave her, no matter how she misbehaved, but her sleeping with his best friend was the last straw, and he’d left her, and now she was alone, and now he had a new girlfriend and was very happy.

  But we already knew his story; nobody needed to tell it again tonight. His presence was reminder enough. The day’s tagline was a simple one. One of three things would happen to us: we would stay married, or we would leave, or we would be left. We are in our forties, and this is what our futures have winnowed down to, these three possibilities. The stimulating task in which we were engaged would help us figure out how to deal with this clarified future. How, as one man put it, to “best maneuver through the situation.”

  I don’t maneuver. I distill. I distill from the many possible anxieties a primary one. I can imagine that point in time, if my husband and I stay together, and I believe we will, where our future will function like this: every night we’ll go to bed wondering who won’t be alive in the morning. When we kiss good night, it won’t be as we kiss now in our forties. I won’t be worrying whether or not I should be more passionate more regularly because if I’m not he might leave me for another woman. I’ll be kissing him wondering if we’ll never kiss again. I’ll be wondering if this is not good night but good-bye. I can imagine, too, that this anxiety is somewhat purifying, because it is so simple, so unavoidable. You believe you can prevent your husband or wife from leaving you for another person—this is one reason we gossip in our forties. But someday we will leave or be left, and it won’t be anyone’s fault or anyone’s choice. There is no available gossip to teach us how to avoid this fate.

  Today I met for lunch a famous German artist, the one who violates the homes of others with her personal possessions. She arrived in New York a few days ago to install a show in a church. She was violating the house of God now.

  I professed to her my adoration when, a month earlier, I’d interviewed her over Skype. She’d suggested, or maybe I’d suggested it: when she was next in town, we should have lunch.

  The artist agreed to meet me at Café Sabarsky. I arrived first. I was worried we’d lose our chance at a table, so I lied to the hostess and told her the artist was in the restroom. When I called the artist to check on her whereabouts, she was still many blocks away. I confessed to the hostess, “I was mistaken about the artist’s location. Would you like your table back?”

  Ten minutes later, the artist arrived. Though German she smelled of certain powerfully feminine moisturizers and shampoos I associate with the French. We sat. She wondered about the size of the small Wiener Schnitzel. “But will it be small enough?” she mused. I ordered a beer. We discussed female sexiness. I mentioned my ten-year-old daughter who was, in my opinion, very sexy. She’d been sexy since birth. One of the first things I remember noticing about her body, at thirty seconds of age,
were her sexy and muscular arms. (I equivocated to the artist: probably every woman thinks her baby is sexy.)

  Not long after I mentioned my daughter, the artist announced that she did not often befriend people with children. The artist does not have children. She said that if a person with a child uses the child as an excuse to explain why she cannot go out with the artist—to a restaurant or a movie—the artist stops calling the person. She waits twenty years until the person’s children are gone to call her again.

  After lunch we walked to the church to see the show the German artist was installing. It was hard to tell where the church stopped and the art began. People were praying and crying in the pews; others were scrambling to see the artist’s show, not yet open to the public. A Brazilian woman succeeded in pleading her case (she was flying home that night) and was admitted. The Brazilian and I wandered the church together while the artist asked our opinions about lighting. There was something so relaxed and easygoing about the artist. She seemed happy just having people around, even if she didn’t speak or interact with us much. Maybe she made friends this way, by fast-forwarding to the point where no one needed to perform, when not every second required that someone behave like a genius worth getting to know better.

  “Do you want to go to MoMA?” the artist asked me.