The Folded Clock

by Heidi Julavits

  Today, however, I decided my failure has nothing to do with air pressure. I will never understand. But I wanted a good reason to abandon these Goncourts for good. I found one on page 18, which proves how little traction I ever got in their book. Which proves I did not give the Goncourts a fair shake before I concluded, definitively, that it was okay for me to give up on them. On page 18 the Goncourts write,

  Woman is an evil, stupid animal. She is incapable of dreaming, thinking, or loving. They can’t create any poetry or things of that nature except what they are educated to create. The female mind is inherently inferior to the masculine mind. Women are also overly self assured, which allows them to be extremely witty with nothing but a little vivacity and a touch of spontaneity. Man on the other hand is endowed with the modesty and timidity which woman lacks. Women are unbearable if they try to act educated and on the same intellectual level as men.

  To object to this kind of antique woman-hating, on principle, would make me too humorless to be endured. Who cares if the Goncourts hated women; so did everyone back then. So probably does everyone now; I suspect the Goncourtian attitude toward women, give or take many conscious degrees of vitriol, to be shared by a few of my friends’ husbands, all of whom I’m fond of, in my way. I enjoy a misogynist so long as they have a wicked sense of humor and know, on some level, that they’re pigs. This is why I enjoy Philip Roth but not Saul Bellow or James Salter. I recall a time in my midtwenties dating career when a suitor, typically around the third date, would give me a James Salter book. Salter articulated these suitors’ internal lives (or their fantasy of their internal lives) without their needing to. Inside, they saw themselves as earnestly arty fighter pilots with souls too deep for any girl to plumb. Salter was their intimacy shortcut. They could hand me a Salter book—supposedly a “gift”—and say without saying, This is me. I might someday say stuff like “Women fall in love when they get to know you. Men are just the opposite. When they finally know you they’re ready to leave.” I appreciated the overture; it prompted me to be expedient in breaking off with these men. Salter helped me see so clearly the unendurable life these men and I would have together, not ever laughing about totally unfunny things.

  Today I gossiped with a new friend about the illness of a woman we scarcely know. She and I are both living in a German villa along with a lot of academic policy experts and, in my case, my family. (We are here because my husband received a fellowship from the academy that occupies this villa; the academy awards people, for the length of a semester, money, housing, and food.) The sick woman—she is German—disappeared from the villa a few days after we arrived. This was over two months ago. No one knows what is wrong with her. We’ve asked around. Not even her close friends have a clue. Her story, we assumed, given the secrecy surrounding it, must be incredibly worth knowing. (My friend could offer this single detail about the sick woman: “Her husband was killed a few years ago in Antarctica.”)

  My friend, who is Italian, wondered if the refusal to discuss or acknowledge sickness was a specifically German trait. She herself had recently fallen ill; she said she couldn’t stop talking about her illness. She couldn’t stop calling people and telling them how sick she was, and how scared. She narrated in detail her sickness to everyone who would listen. Now she is better, sort of. She’d lost her innocence. Health, she now understood, is the pause between afflictions.

  I’d recently lost my innocence as well. I was an illness iconoclast until I wasn’t. At the age of forty-four, after decades of health so entrenched it was mistaken for chronic, I, like her, became sick.

  The word “sick,” however, doesn’t accurately describe what befell me. I had pain. I had pain all the time. I was informed by doctors that I would have all-the-time pain for the rest of my life. They used the phrase “pain baseline.” I’d played basketball and tennis in high school. I felt as though I was being initiated into a strange endurance sport, one without a clock or any means to keep score and end the match.

  I did not deal with this news well. I asked my husband if he would mind if I killed myself. I tried to sell him on the benefits of my suicide; this stricken, whining person, who wants her around? I described to him the far greater damage I’d inflict on our children by living. By insisting on living, rather than taking an elegant bow (the elegant particulars had yet to be worked out). To insist on living, I lobbied, was sheer selfishness.

  I did not want to be selfish.

  Eventually I stopped thinking about suicide. Instead I became regularly beset by deep topics like time. I said to my husband, “Perhaps I am meant to be one of the great convalescents.” By which I meant writers who popularized the lap blanket or wrote in bed, and whose literary greatness was proportionate to their physical misery.

  So I filled my time with thoughts about my possible future greatness, and about time. Time, since my getting sick, had assumed a new shape. It was no longer linear; it did not cut through my day like a road. I did not see time ahead of me. I experienced time on top of me. I experienced time underneath me. Time became a hollow, vertical enclosure. I moved up and down inside this enclosure; occasionally I would remain stationary, or stable, at a fixed altitude that might be called “the present.”

  But because of the pain, I was vulnerable to sudden and extreme altitude shifts. As I dropped or ascended through the enclosure—my tube—I registered the change in air pressure physically. My stomach lifted to my throat. I often experienced my life in fast-forward, as though hurtling toward my death. Not that I cared about dying. What I could not bear to witness was the previews of other deaths that would, if I chose to stick around, precede mine. The eventual death, for example, of the affection my young son feels for me. Suddenly he wasn’t next to me spinning tops. Suddenly he was grown. I did not experience the incremental shifting of his fondness toward me as he became four, and then five, and then twelve, and then thirty-six; I experienced it in a fraction of a second. I experienced it like a stabbing. This little boy whom I was, in the present, gamely entertaining with toys. He was already gone.

  The same with my daughter, and my husband, and my parents, and my career, and the tree outside my window. Everything around me sped up and vanished and then, when my altitude stabilized, reappeared, but something had changed. Everyone and everything existed as a future ghost to me. This sounds unpleasant. It was. However, I was so acutely alive during those four weeks. The pain of my aliveness was occasionally unbearable. I’m not referring to physical pain, though I experienced that too. I’m referring to emotional pain. To the emotional intensity that the passing of time should incessantly inspire; to the sickening countdown that every person should be registering every moment of her so-called aliveness, but is she? Until I got sick, I wasn’t. How had I been so immune?

  And then—I got better. I’d been misdiagnosed. With distressing quickness, time resumed as a road along which I traveled unthinkingly; when I had a spare reflective moment, and I rarely did, I’d turn my head to the side to admire the blur.

  I am no longer immune, however, to the occasional plummet in time altitude. A plummet happened the other night. I found myself lying in bed and thinking about Mexican wineglasses, the green kind with the air bubbles. They are the size of goblets. I’d put a lot of identity stock, at one time in my life, in Mexican wineglasses. I’d bought some in my twenties, and they represented a pinnacle achievement in self-realization. Thinking of these wineglasses reminded me of a trip I’d taken through Mexico with a boyfriend when we were both in our twenties; we’d driven a two-piston rental through mountain ruts. We slept in fields. We emerged in a town with white walls and cafés, and were there also Mexican wineglasses? Did I buy mine there? I don’t think so. I only remember a photo I took in that town of a white adobe wall and, rising above it, a crucifix atop a church dome. I was not religious, yet the photograph was so religious that I felt I shouldn’t or couldn’t be as fond of it as I was. But now, lying in bed and thinking about wineglasses, I found myself thinking of this phot
o, and the girl who took it, and that town—I’ll never know its name—and I felt the kind of longing for that girl/town/photo I feel for my children at night when they are asleep.

  Today I read a book written by a man I used to know. When I’d known him I was a certain kind of woman, or girl, that I’m not very proud of having been. I was a woman who used men. I used them quite knowingly. I didn’t ever try to fool myself that I wasn’t using them. Nor did I feel bad about my behavior. I felt that it was my due, though I don’t know why I felt I was due anything. Men had done nothing to make me feel owed. Men had mostly been nice to me.

  When I met this man, I had just moved to New York. I was temporarily crashing with an old friend who lived in a narrow three-story house located in the middle of a block in Little Italy. To get to this house we had to walk through an apartment building, out the other side, and into the courtyard where the slender house seemed to break through the cobbles like a tree. My friend and I shared a bed, and the bed was white, and a white sheer curtain billowed weakly over us at night, because there was a heat wave, and the house had no air-conditioning, and the windows, despite the staler air in the courtyard, were always open. Meanwhile, on the lower levels of the house, people drank red wine and did coke until morning. I just wanted to sleep. I’d moved to New York to become serious. Soon my friend and I would find a very serious artists’ loft together. (We would have to interview with the loft’s banker landlords to prove that we seriously were, or seriously wanted to be, artists. We would have to sublet the extra bedroom to an actor from a teen movie with a serious cult following, and who desired instead to be a serious concert pianist.)

  I was not planning on having a New York boyfriend because I’d left a serious boyfriend in San Francisco. We were in love and intended to spend the summer together. But this meant I would have to survive in New York for the bulk of the year alone. I did not function well alone. I had not been alone since I started dating in third grade. I could count my alone days on two hands. I always had friends; I was never alone. But whenever I didn’t have a boyfriend around I panicked. My future unspooled blurrily and I was felled by psychological vertigo, it was like standing on the sill of my loft windows overlooking the Holland Tunnel and the Hudson and the old printing press in the building opposite mine that respected no work hours—it was just on and on and on and on.

  The man who wrote the book I read today had the misfortune of becoming the designated New York person who made me less fearful and lonely that year. I was never unaware that he wanted to be my boyfriend, and I was never dissuading him of his desire. I needed that level of devotion from him; a mere friend would not do. I gave him the hope that if he waited for the countrywide distance to dull my affection for my real boyfriend, he was next in line. He’d get the rest of my heart and all of my body.

  He would get neither. He was one of those men I wanted to want to fuck. He was never a temptation even though we found ourselves in erotically and romantically charged situations where the minor sticking point of “attraction” should have been immaterial. Once when he was house-sitting for a friend with a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park, we decided to drag a mattress onto the roof and sleep outside. Nineteen years later, I recall that night as one of the most magical nights I’ve spent in the city. And yet there was no sex. I experienced no desire. It was just me and a boy on a mattress in the air, the noise and the heat of the city billowing beneath us, keeping us afloat, and what a waste it was.

  Also he was fun and funny and he had excellent friends. Oh, the poor men who have excellent friends. This man was friends with writers who were older, and already ruined by booze, with sloppily intricate bohemian approaches to love and to work. Once they had a Super Bowl party, not an ironic one. (These were sporty-spirited bohemians.) At halftime we went to the park and played touch football. We divvied into teams. My team captain had boyish hair and a boyish way of rousing us to achieve the highest possible level of sportsmanship, despite the fact that we would certainly be crushed. I recall thinking what a great dad he’d be someday—a fun and self-deceivingly optimistic dad, not one of those grumpy dads, the ones for which everything appears as an impossibility. Even a sandwich is impossible.

  Eventually, when my California boyfriend and I split up, I started dating this future great dad. I did not date the man who thought he was next in line to date me. I did him the even greater disservice of dating a man he’d introduced me to, because he’d so thoughtfully included me in his life when I didn’t have much of my own. All of it was shitty, so very shitty. And yet I did not feel shitty. Neither did any of my friends feel shitty when they used men like I did, and worse. One of my friends who got a lease in an uninhabitable factory tempted a man with great plumbing and electrical skills to fall in love with her. She kept him hooked on hope until he’d renovated her space, then stopped returning his calls. If I judged her, perhaps it was because I was trying to make myself feel less guilty for not feeling guilty when I’d behaved similarly. I’d never gone that far, I told myself. I’d never used a man to do something I might have paid another to do. I could not pay a man to be my friend and to introduce me to fun people. I could not pay a man to make me feel less alone. That was different, wasn’t that different?

  Today my friend told me about her gay male therapist crush. The crush seems mutual and for obvious reasons safe for all involved. Their relationship sounded so enviable. Recently, after a ten-year hiatus, I’d decided to go to therapy again. I made this decision abruptly, at two p.m. on a Thursday. I left the library. I went home and checked my insurance’s website. I found an eligible provider within walking distance. I called her. She answered. She said, “Can you be here in an hour?”

  The therapist, I’d discover, was a 1950s-era bohemian now in her seventies. She lived in a massive rent-controlled apartment on Riverside Drive that smelled of mothballs. She wore plaid shirts and jeans; she had wispy honey-colored hair that she seemed not to have brushed for decades, and that she’d twisted into a tiny knot atop her head. She had a crisp Katharine Hepburn properness to her speech.

  She was also possibly senile. She seemed always to have left something she needed in another room. In the middle of our first session, her doorbell rang. It was a girl in her late teens. I heard the therapist whispering with her in the foyer. When the therapist returned, she told me that she’d forgotten she’d scheduled an appointment with the girl during my time slot. “But that was weeks ago,” she said, as if it were the girl’s fault for booking so early. She told me that the girl had abandoned college after less than one semester; that she was confused by life. The therapist did nothing to hide her disdain for this girl’s problems. She seemed to be suggesting that we were working on much more vital and complicated problems. Adult problems.

  I quickly understood that I would never tell this therapist much of anything that mattered to me. I’d talk, but I would not seek her counsel or advice. Our hour crept by. The hour felt like three hours. I had to tell her about my “family of origin,” and she drew facile connections between my behavior and my relationship to my parents. At the end of each of our four sessions—I saw her only four times—she would pronounce that I needed medication, and that talk therapy was pointless for people like me, at least until I was on drugs.

  I also sensed she didn’t like me. Or maybe it wasn’t that she didn’t like me—she felt overwhelmed by me. In truth I was pretty unstrung. Normally it takes me months to reveal any emotion to a therapist, if I ever do; I once had a therapist who accused me of treating our sessions like a cocktail party encounter. This was not an inaccurate description of how I viewed our meetings. I adored this therapist. I joked that I paid her by the hour to be my pal. I wanted to be the patient she most looked forward to seeing; I strove always to be entertaining and never to be a drag. I took tissues from the box next to her couch only when I had a cold.

  Meanwhile, I showed up to my second appointment with this new therapist in hysterics. I’d been buying a coffee
at the Cuban place around the corner from her apartment when I’d received some bad news that shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it did. I left the Cuban place without my coffee. I tried not to cry until I made it to her apartment. Then I lost it. I said crazy, nonsensical, not-entirely-true shit. I spun for her the most negative and hopeless account of my life and its prospects. I voiced interconnected paranoias. Once I started I couldn’t stop. I gave myself permission to be the darkest, most repellant version of myself. It was liberating not to care, for maybe the only time in my life, what another person thought of me.

  The two appointments that followed were awkward. I was embarrassed by my breakdown. To compensate I was chatty and witty and entertaining. I told stories about my most outrageous family members; I told stories. Not lies, exactly. But I emphasized the interesting and salacious parts. She asked me at one point, “Do you love your mother-in-law?”

  The fifth time I went to her apartment, she didn’t answer her door. I’d arrived that day with an ulterior motive. I’d brought a single shoe that I wanted to photograph on her couch. A German artist I admire often violates other people’s houses with her personal belongings. She put her nightgown in a friend’s closet and her diary under another friend’s pillow. Her art is a form of burglary where she adds things instead of subtracting them. I planned to do this when my therapist left me alone in her living room to retrieve something she’d forgotten in her kitchen.

  When she failed to answer the door, I wondered: did she somehow guess what I’d planned to do on her couch? Then, more logically, I figured, given her track record, had she forgotten our appointment? I rang again. Nothing. I went home. I thought she’d realize her mistake and call me to apologize and reschedule. She didn’t. I started to worry that maybe she’d died. I Googled her name + “dead”; I found nothing. Maybe, I thought, she’s just expecting me to show up next week, at which point she’ll explain what happened. The day of my appointment I couldn’t decide whether or not to go. I could have called her, but I didn’t want to risk talking to her. (She was the only therapist on the planet who answered her phone.) I didn’t go. Certainly, I thought, she’d call me now. After our first session I’d signed a contract committing me to pay in full if I ever missed an appointment without twenty-four-hours’ cancellation notice.