The Folded Clock

by Heidi Julavits

  Then I chatted with the director of The Mount (this is the name of Wharton’s house), and she had shark fatality—type numbers at her fingertips about Wharton, and she seemed mildly appalled I should know so little about the house to which I’d been invited, other than that Wharton had lived in it. Finally I escaped. I found a writer I’ve always thought to be very beautiful and affixed myself to her. This writer has a serene face, and no other writer I know is serene at all. Especially their faces are not serene. Because of her face, I remember very clearly the first time I saw this woman. This was, give or take, late 1997 or early 1998. I was waitressing at a restaurant owned by a former actress who required me to French-braid my hair. One night this writer came in for dinner. Everyone glowed in this restaurant—the lighting was incredibly flattering, and the customers always looked marriageable, which was probably why a good many of them came here to become engaged—but she glowed differently. Beatific, I suppose, is the word for her type of glow. Her glow was the glow of her spirit or her soul or something that went deeper than skin and diet and lighting.

  At the time I hadn’t published anything. I was too inhibited to introduce myself to people who I thought would have no interest in knowing me. I could give them a reason to talk to me by saying, I am just such a huge fan of your work, but that’s brownnosing where I come from, even if you truly mean the compliment. For this reason I didn’t introduce myself to Joan Didion, whom I’d waited on, and I didn’t introduce myself to Bret Easton Ellis, whom I’d also waited on. I didn’t say to Didion, “I can quote lines from your work.” I didn’t say to Ellis, “I snorted honorific lines off your book jacket.” I said to Didion and to Ellis, “Would you like to see the dessert menu?”

  I also didn’t introduce myself to this beatific woman. I’d read her work in magazines. She counted as a star sighting for me. And she glowed, she was really so glowy. She was glow atop of glow. I remembered her so vividly I half doubted, now that I was seeing her again, that this encounter had happened at all. I have come to that point in my life where my memories have begun interbreeding. I’d seen her, somewhere, true, but maybe not at that restaurant, and the glowy nimbus surrounding her, maybe that was just more postproduction touch-up.

  So I talked to this woman at Wharton’s house. She told me about the smart life choices she’d made, which made me realize that she wasn’t inherently serene, she was purposefully and strategically so, meaning somehow serenity wasn’t an oxymoronic pursuit like it was with me, because I just get so stressed out when I’m trying to fit yoga into my day. We exchanged numbers so that we could go out to dinner the following night with the other Wharton celebrants. We decided to drive to the restaurant together. I picked her up. It felt like a first date. After dinner, after we’d had some drinks, and as I was driving her back to her hotel, we did the friend version of parking. We kept the car running, and we sat in the dark and we talked. I confessed to her that I remembered the first time I’d seen her, or I thought I had. I didn’t want this to sound creepy; I wanted it to sound complimentary. I remember the first time I ever saw you! But maybe I don’t remember seeing you—maybe I just imagined it! Maybe I have a fantasy about the first time I ever saw you! I was growing creepier by the contingency. But when I mentioned the name of the restaurant, she stared at me differently. She said she remembered that night, and she also remembered seeing me. We had seen each other! Maybe she was having a false memory inspired by my false memory, who knows.

  She obviously worried that her remembering me also sounded a little creepy—why would a semi-famous person remember a waitress?—so she explained her memory by saying, “You’re just so distinctive looking.” Which no one has ever said to me before, certainly not all of those people who claim that I look like their cousin.

  Regardless, I started to think about women who look at women and not because they want to sleep with them. Some women some other women like to look at. My first husband used to say, sort of jokingly, that women deem other women beautiful only when those women aren’t really. He believed that women are sometimes so competitive that they can’t admit that the beautiful women are beautiful; they can only call beautiful the not-really-beautiful ones. But I don’t agree. The women I find beautiful are so beautiful that I never forget the first time I saw them. I wait for years to see them again.

  Today I heard an ambulance siren. In New York, sirens are no cause for alarm, but in Maine they are cause. If you hear an ambulance siren, the odds are fairly high you’ll know the person for whom the ambulance has been called. One morning a few summers ago, the town was crazy with sirens. Because we live close to the town center, we received texts from friends who live on the periphery. What the hell is going on? I drove to the post office to investigate. The postmistress told me that a kid had been hit by a car. “She’s the daughter of a family that’s visiting some summer people,” she said.

  I suspected from her description: the girl was my friend’s niece. I drove to my friend’s house. My friend and her children stood on the stoop watching the emergency workers pack up their stretchers and machines. The trauma was elsewhere now; here was just the trauma’s queasy hangover. Everyone was too stunned to say much. The girl who’d been hit was unconscious. The man who’d hit her was very old, but the fault wasn’t his; the girl had run across the street from behind a parked delivery van. The old man, in shock, had, on the spot, suffered a heart attack.

  For two days the girl remained unconscious. Then she woke up and was fine. The old man who had the heart attack was also fine. As a result of this near tragedy, our town decided to hire a sheriff to lurk in the church parking lot and hand out speeding tickets (even though the old man, when he hit the girl, had been driving ten miles under the limit). One of the most vocal supporters of the sheriff got two speeding tickets in one day. My husband also got a speeding ticket. Now when the sheriff’s in town, people text us to let us know he’s been spotted, and to warn us not to speed. Sometimes when I’m driving toward the church, a local will flash his lights at me, alerting me that the sheriff’s ahead. This incident has brought our town closer, but in a perverse way. We agreed to hire a good guy to keep our children safe from speeding cars. Now we’ve joined forces against the good guy to keep ourselves safe from speeding tickets.

  Still, when I hear a siren, or when anyone in this town hears a siren, the kneejerk fear is, Somebody’s kid got hit.

  Today when I heard the siren, I’d just sent my kid and her friend on bikes to the store. They’re seven and eight, but the road is busy, and the trucks drive recklessly. So I didn’t think, Somebody’s kid got hit, I thought, Maybe my kid or her friend got hit. I wondered if I should stop working and drive to the store to check on them. But I have so little time to work these days. A few hours at most. Chances are the siren was for somebody else. But what if it wasn’t? What if, in order to guarantee fifteen more minutes of work time, I forfeited the chance to hold my daughter’s head in my lap for the last three minutes of her life?

  Instead of getting into the car to check on my daughter and her friend, I “checked” on them by devising a hypothetical scenario to test my preparedness for what might be awaiting me. If there were an accident, and if I were forced to choose one child to survive, would I pick my daughter or her friend?

  I chalkboarded the problem thoroughly. This friend, a boy, is the only child of one of my friends; to take my friend’s one child from her would mean she’d suffer far more than I would, in theory, since I have two children. I’d still be a mother; she’d be the widow equivalent of a mother. This is what the Israelis I know would recommend if consulted. If I used my theoretical lifeline to call an Israeli. You must sacrifice your child, they would say, because you have another one. The transplanted Israelis I know in New York are calmly practical when describing the reasons Israelis have so many kids. Chances are one or more of these kids will be killed while serving in the army, or by terrorist attack. Wise, thus, according to these Israelis, to have a lot of them.

&nb
sp; I once ran the Israeli theory past a comedian I know who, when not being funny, can be usefully thoughtful. I was, at the time, interviewing everyone I knew about whether or not to try to have a second kid. The comedian sided with the Israelis. He claimed he had two children because, “if you lose one child, what remains is still a family.”

  But hadn’t he seen Ordinary People? I countered. (Two brothers, one played by Timothy Hutton, are stranded on an overturned boat during a storm; the non-Timothy Hutton brother drowns.) The family would still be a family after one kid dies, true, but the remaining members would be fucked beyond any pretense of future normalcy. The parents would come to hate and blame each other like Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore came to hate and blame each other. The surviving sibling would try to kill himself like Timothy Hutton did, or, best-case scenario, claw his way back to semi-functional lugubriousness with the help of a therapist like Judd Hirsch.

  Which was my long way of rationalizing: when weighing whether to sacrifice my daughter or her friend to this probably nonexistent car accident, the fact of a sibling did not, in my mind, disqualify my daughter from the survival trials. In fact, the reason my friend’s son was at our house was because my friend was at the hospital for a prenatal appointment. Assuming all went well, she’d be giving birth to another kid in four months. Meaning, wouldn’t it be traumatic to fewer people if my daughter lived? Because if my daughter died, her younger brother would end up like the Timothy Hutton character, while my friend’s unborn baby wouldn’t know what he or she was missing if his or her brother died. He or she would be burdened by the ghost of this dead brother, true, and that probably wouldn’t make for the lightest of childhoods, but the dead brother would be romanticized as the best brother ever, and he or she would mourn the brother’s loss unconditionally, whereas if the brother survived, he or she would probably find regular reasons to hate him. Some siblings are thick as thieves through adulthood, but how many really? The percentage is low.

  Now I was bored with this exercise. Now I was just worried. Having wasted far more than fifteen minutes trying to make a decision that no one needed me to make, I got in the car. I drove to town. A mile later I passed the kids on their bikes, headed home. They stared at me disbelievingly. My daughter looked flat-out pissed. The reason I’d made them bike to town in the first place was because I’d claimed to be too busy to give them a ride.

  Today I received a text from a woman I have never met. She is the ex-girlfriend of the current girlfriend of my London friend, and this woman and I had both received free tickets to see perform in Berlin the girlfriend of my London friend’s really close friend. We are thickly connected total strangers, in other words. We needed a vector diagram like the one outside the MoMA abstraction show to understand exactly how we did yet didn’t know each other.

  We planned, via text, to meet before the performance for a drink. I wrote, i will text you outfit deets once i have them—then you can find me. This is how strangers find strangers in my experience: I will be wearing a plaid coat, I am short/tall/pixie-haired/will be carrying a red umbrella. I am always curious to see how a person’s self-description is or is not helpfully accurate. It is the primary appeal of meeting up with total strangers.

  Two seconds later, I received a text. It said:

  This is what I look like….

  Beneath the text was a photo of her face. I could see her apartment’s pink walls and black curtains. I saw the corner of a pine bedframe. She wore a sweatshirt.

  I was horrified. I actually recoiled. A line had been crossed! Etiquette breached! You do not send a total stranger a picture of your face!

  Then, of course, it seemed so logical that she would send me her picture, and so bizarrely coy and parlor gameish and prim of me to dangle the promise of a Haiku of my future outfit.

  Still. I was miffed all day. I was miffed at myself for being miffed. I was like an old person crabby at an ATM machine for knowing my name. My process had been queue-jumped. I prefer to meet the constructed person first. Her photo jarred me so deeply that, once I got to the concert venue—far into a neighborhood I’d never before visited, reachable by a train called “the Ring” that ran in a circle around the city in both directions, and the act, on the platform, of committing to one direction over the other had already been such a draining leap of faith—I realized I was never going to find this woman. I scrutinized her text photo again. This picture of her face, I realized, was completely unhelpful; it was useless, in fact. She had shortish dark hair, pale skin, and no makeup, but who knew what she now had on her face or on her head? Her lips could be metallic; she could be wearing a chef’s toque. I stood on the sidewalk and stared at other people milling around the entrance. She could have been any number of them. I failed at finding her like I’ve failed so many multiple-choice tests. I failed with glee. A, B, C, D, I could argue with equal conviction for the rightness of each—and, because the form so irritates me, find myself feigning jubilant outrage at the limitless possibilities for rightness. She could be that woman or that woman; she could, at a squint, be that fucking man. I had to really stare at people and search in the dark for their faces. I felt like an identity pickpocket, rummaging through the nightclub’s exterior shadows to pull from people what many, for whatever reason, kept hidden beneath hats and hoods. If I’d known she was wearing a raincoat, or that she was tall or short, or that she’d be carrying an I ♥ BERLIN tote, I could have narrowed her down; I could have, less molestingly, better sorted her from these other strangers. I tried for fifteen minutes. But I could not find her.

  A face, I thought to myself with some satisfaction, is not the best way to identify a person.

  I gave up. I texted her. long + blonde + glasses + standing under a bright light.

  I could have said “green coat” or “black bag” or “only idiot wearing heels.” To admit that I was long-haired and blond, I realized immediately after I sent the text, was to admit to being the last thing I usually want to be. I am not rebellious enough or daring enough to attempt prettiness in an unconventional way. But “long + blond + glasses + standing under a bright light” conveyed precisely how I felt on this particular sidewalk on this particular night. Glaring and out of place at a Berlin nightclub. Far from home, riding a train that travels in circles.

  Today I went to the doctor for a physical. I took tests to discover if I had diseases I am certain I do not have. Like AIDS. Even during the ’80s, I never, save one time, worried that I’d contracted it, even though my friends had regular freak-outs and disappeared to the health services clinic to have their blood drawn after long nights of death-worry. In part I was not worried about becoming sick and dying because I never worried about becoming sick and dying. Hypochondria, until my recent health scare, was not a tempting velodrome for my neuroses.

  But primarily I never worried about getting AIDS because I slept with extremely straight straight people. None of them used needles. None of them had been in moped accidents in Kenya, and so none of them had received sketchy blood transfusions in huts. I cavorted, or so I believed, with a low-risk crowd.

  Thus, in my nearly thirty years of sexual activity, I’ve had only one long night of AIDS worry. This night was spent at LaGuardia Airport in New York. It was summer. I was trying to get back to New Hampshire, where I and fifteen other people slept on floor mattresses in a house hanging over a river. I’d been in Oregon visiting my boyfriend, who’d been living in South America for the year. He’d returned to see his family for a week, and we reconnected in his hometown like the devoted couple we were, though unbeknownst to him I’d been having sex with another guy. My boyfriend and I didn’t have an open relationship, but I considered the vast distance (time zones and miles) between us as license to sleep with someone else temporarily, especially since I planned eventually to move to South America to join him. Especially since I planned eventually to marry him. I was totally committed to him while sleeping with another guy. This made sense to me then. It makes sense to me now. />
  Moreover I didn’t love this other guy. He was more like a conquest. A class or maybe a social clique conquest. He was from Greenwich. His girlfriend prior to me—she’d grown up in Manhattan—had been dating “the Preppie Killer” Robert Chambers when he accidentally-or-not strangled Jennifer Levin in Central Park during a bout of rough sex. I continued to sleep with this guy I didn’t love because he made me feel I was part of a world I desperately wished, at that time, to be part of. If it took sleeping with a man who slept with a woman who slept with a murderer, so be it. Now I was only three fucks away from Robert Chambers. Now I was practically at Dorrian’s Red Hand, the Upper East Side bar that had served alcohol to underage prep schoolers the night Chambers and Levin hooked up. I had practically seen them leave the bar together. I had practically turned to my best friend, whose family owned a private plane and a captain’s house on Nantucket, and said, Something terrible is about to happen! (Even when I fantasized about being on the scene that night at Dorrian’s Red Hand, I was still little better than an outsider; i.e., if I managed to have any value at all in that world, it would have been as a spooky, future-predicting witch.)

  So I was at LaGuardia. I had just left my boyfriend in Oregon and was returning to my not-boyfriend in New Hampshire. The heavens protested. They heaved a lot of lightning around. My flight was canceled. This tart would be spending the night in the airport, forced to confront her deceitful ways until dawn.

  The best way to pass an overnight in an airport is with a junky book. I’d buy a mystery before the newsstand closed. That was my plan, but then I saw a copy of Wasted: The Preppie Murder by Linda Wolfe, the true crime account of Robert Chambers and Jennifer Levin. I’d heard about this book. I’d been dying to read this book. (Published in 1989, it has a goodreads ranking. One woman gave it three stars and wrote, “Very interesting true story but the ending is a letdown.”)