Today I am reviewing The Address Book by the French artist Sophie Calle. Calle found an address book on the street in Paris. She contacted the people listed in this address book. She interviewed them about their friend, the book’s owner. Some claimed to barely know the man.
I imagined someone contacting me about a person in whose address book I might appear. A person I might now barely know. I thought of an old boyfriend with whom I’ve had no contact since we broke up. I have heard nothing about or from him in over twenty years.
“Boyfriend,” however, is not the right word for what he’d been. He was the not-boyfriend I slept with when my real boyfriend moved to South America. Come midnight I knew which bar to find him in, and we’d spend an hour or so ignoring each other. Mutual neglect constituted foreplay. We were strangers hooking up every time, and even then, ambivalently. At some point one of us would give a sign and we’d inconspicuously leave together. I don’t think I ever spent the full night at his apartment, or he at mine. After we had sex, whoever didn’t live where we were went home.
This arrangement might make sense—if not in a moral sense, then in an erotic sense—if the sex was great. It wasn’t. It was the least great sex I’d ever had in my life. Twenty years later the distinction holds. Maybe that’s why I pursued a sexual relationship with him—I wanted to understand why I wanted to pursue a sexual relationship with him. The motivation was as cleanly circular as that. Whatever the reason, since this had never happened to me before, this kind of fascinatingly terrible sex, I blamed him. He was a prude. He wasn’t comfortable with his body. He was unimaginative and inhibited. I felt confident that the fault was entirely his, and thus never worried that he’d told his friends how bad the sex was. I figured he didn’t know from bad. My bad was his good.
Eventually we stopped sleeping together. (I no longer lived where he lived.) A few months later I heard he was dating a girl I vaguely knew. She came from a family in which the sisters and cousins were beautiful and sought after but she was only pretty at a glance. I also heard that they’d had sex on a pool table. This wasn’t a pool table in someone’s home; this pool table was in a bar, or what passed as a bar. They’d had sex on a public pool table! I became insecure and paranoid. Clearly I’d been the one erotically inhibiting him; clearly he’d known the sex we’d had was bad, and he’d probably told people about it because its badness really was that remarkable. A few years later he married the pool-table girl. Last I heard, he was a banker in New York like his father. I heard that he really enjoyed being a banker. I heard that he’d said, “I’m really good at it.” This was edifying news. He’d never liked or been good at anything when we were together. He was smart yet adrift. I was honestly happy to hear he’d found a passion.
Then, for over two decades, I lost all track of him.
Today, inspired by Calle, I decided to find him. Was he still happy? I wanted to know. I Googled him by his given name. I Googled him by his nickname. No hits. I added to the search term. I added the town where he grew up, the college he attended. I added “banker.” This led me to his father. His seventy-year-old dad had his photo and bio on numerous financial sites, while his son appeared not even to have a Facebook account.
I added his wife’s name to the search—she was also from a fancy family. I figured she and my ex-not-boyfriend hosted school fund-raisers or joined country clubs or sponsored auctions to benefit wildlife preserves.
Nothing.
Didn’t he have a job? Didn’t he have children who played Little League or soccer? Then I got nervous. Maybe he’d died years ago, before obituaries were posted online. His wife had remarried soon thereafter and had a new surname. Surely a total online absence suggests you are probably not alive.
But nor could I definitively conclude that he was dead. Maybe, I thought, I was looking for a technically dead person. This guy had not grown up to be the person I’d assumed he would be—the happy banker with the country club wife. That person was gone, but a new person had taken his place. How could I look for that person? I tried to imagine what he’d have become if not a banker. (His father had been priming him since he was in elementary school to be his clone. But he wasn’t like his father, or this, at least, is what he’d repeatedly insisted to me. Much of the attraction I felt for him originated from this struggle. I was going to help him discover his true artist self. He’d chosen me to have bad sex with because, for once in my life, a man was coming to me to get a world.) Maybe he’d woken up one day and realized, I hate banking, and I’m about to be thirty. Maybe he told his wife that he was thinking of quitting his job and starting a nonprofit to help poor people in Africa gain access to better dental care. Maybe his wife thought he was joking, or simply freaking out about getting older, and maybe she didn’t take his threats seriously until she realized he was serious. Maybe she warned her father-in-law: he’s making a move. Maybe, when approached by his son, the amply warned father refused to give him his inheritance; also he refused to invest any of his own money, thereby forcing his son to stay the course. Maybe when the son complained about his father to his wife, pointing out how his father always opposed him, not because he was right but because, like a gorilla in the wild, he couldn’t pass up a single opportunity to assert his dominance, maybe the wife said, “Maybe your father is right.” And maybe my ex-not-boyfriend told his appearances-and-money-grubbing wife to go fuck herself, and maybe he appealed to his mother, who’d always believed her son had it in him to be someone other than a lesser version of his father, and maybe the mother gave him the money to start his nonprofit, and maybe he moved to Africa, and maybe he started a nonprofit that obviously hadn’t done very well, given that I couldn’t find any trace of it, or him, but maybe he’d at least met a girl, and made a satisfying life with her that wasn’t newsworthy, but maybe it was proof of their uniquely sturdy happiness that it could not be dispersed and disseminated, not even by the Web.
After a half hour, I gave up. I stopped searching for him. I could have sent an e-mail to a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend; I could have made some phone calls. I did neither. I realized I’d be disappointed if I found him now. This was such a nice life I’d imagined him living.
Today my husband and I cleaned out our storage space. It is not news that we have mice. These mice have feasted on expensive baby clothing that no baby has ever worn; they have crapped on my first wedding album. These mice are opinionated in all the right ways—Why designer kimonos for an infant! Why the marriage to that unsuitable man!—and still we must kill them. First we must embargo their bedding supply. We swept and boxed and taped and stacked. These tasks always take longer than they should; while killing is the order of the day, it is impossible to fully extinguish one’s curiosity about one’s own shat-upon past.
Old pictures confirmed to me that I wore glasses that did not suit my former face. What I found most disconcerting about my old (i.e., younger) face, however, is that it suggests I might have become a different person from the one I am. That face wore a lot of vintage men’s outdoor gear. In general I look like I live in a place where it is always cold and about to rain, a place where fashion is a prophylactic against the elements and one’s body is never revealed until the moment of intercourse, if then. I should have been the wife of a dogsled musher (I was dating one at the time); I should have watched birds or studied lichen; my body and my face should have grown bigger and bigger, rather than shrinking, rather than appearing, as my body and face now appear, as though I’m a practicing self-cannibal. The point at which that person shifted trajectories to become this person was not photographed or documented in the evidence boxes. Where or how she happened could not be ascertained.
I also found a file folder of short stories I’d written in my twenties. I had the same reaction to these stories as I did to the photos of my old face. I didn’t immediately recognize the stories as mine. I had no memory of ever writing them. I thought they were copies of stories written by friends that I’d, for whatever reason, kept. But each
fictional scenario closely resembled a real-life scenario from my twenties. One story was about a woman going to Alaska over Thanksgiving with a boyfriend she didn’t love named Tom (I’d been to Alaska over Thanksgiving with a boyfriend I didn’t love named Jim). One was about a woman playing craps in Reno with her husband (I’d played craps in Reno with my boyfriend). Also, the file was labeled “Stories in Progress.” All signs pointed to the fact that these stories were written by me. But I had no memory of writing them. “In Progress” would seem to imply “failed” if the in-progress-ness has extended, without progress, over a twenty-year period. The struggle to make a story that’s inherently shitty into a story that’s inherently not, well, often the only good story to come from such a struggle is the story of the struggle itself. Yet I didn’t remember the struggles I’d had with the stories in this folder. I didn’t remember trying to fix these shitty stories in the loft I rented with my beautiful friend nicknamed the “Queen of Soho” and the Hollywood actor who wished instead to be a concert pianist. I remembered the actor’s noisy espresso making and piano playing, but I did not remember trying to fix these shitty stories. I remembered the Queen’s heavy footfalls and her incessant fax receiving, but I did not recall them as distractions from trying to fix these shitty stories. I remember weighing my hunger against the shattered concentration that would come from taking the scary freight elevator downstairs, and walking alongside the Holland Tunnel traffic, and buying a bagel from the corner store run by curt men from Beirut, but I did not remember doing so in service of fixing these shitty stories. I don’t have an exact equation by which to estimate the time it took for me to fail for the thickness of this file folder, but a decent guess would be years. Which means I did not remember years of failing to write a decent story, which is what I most wanted to do at the time. How could I possibly forget this?
Today we had a dinner party at our small German house. We live up by the gate in what was once the gardener’s shed. The house is so snug that my work desk is in the kitchen which is also basically our bedroom. While people ate cheese and drank beer, they examined the books on my desk. “This is a beautiful edition,” said one woman of a book. “You’re reading this?” said a man (a German) of another. The book the German man picked up was Leni Riefenstahl’s memoir (called Leni Riefenstahl). Many years after her death, Riefenstahl remains, to understate matters massively, a controversial character. She was a film director (most famously of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will) and a dancer, and a first-class mountaineer. She might have ranked as one of the twentieth century’s most bad-ass humans except that she was, as bluntly articulated by one of the “Gypsy” extras Riefenstahl used in a film before sending her off to a concentration camp, “friends with Hitler” and (again, to massively understate matters), “not a good person.” For sure Riefenstahl is a curious case study of what people disallow themselves from knowing when that knowledge is incriminatory or inconvenient. I told the German I’d stopped two-thirds of the way through Riefenstahl’s memoir. Her narcissism began to grate, also the tragically comic omissions, the alternating tone of self-aggrandizement and self-pity. Theatrically flawed people are fascinating, but only to a point. For me that point was page 459.
The man told me that his company—he owns a film production company—was making a movie about Leni Riefenstahl. (His was not the first Riefenstahl biopic project, he said. A famous and reputedly “intellectual” actress had been involved in an earlier Riefenstahl project; she’d finally quit because of the script.)
“What was wrong with the script?” I asked.
What was wrong with her script, he said—and what was wrong with his script, and what made Riefenstahl a tricky character to portray—was the character’s failure to change.
“She was the same her whole life,” he said. “She was just the same person.” She only ever cared about making films. She only ever cared about her career. She was always arrogant, narcissistic, unrepentant.
Certainly I understood how this could be boring; hadn’t I stopped reading her memoirs for similar reasons? All the same, the criticism struck me as a failure of imagination. (To be fair to this man, it was less his personal failure than a failure of the audience’s or the “market’s” imagination, to which, as the owner of a production company, he is beholden.) I countered like the teacher I usually am when I’m not with my husband on his fellowship in Germany.
Wasn’t Riefenstahl’s failure to change, despite the fact that so much change was happening around her, of potentially great moral and dramatic interest? Could you argue that she might be the more fascinating and enigmatic character than the character who, predictably, changed? Thomas Mann, for example, changed. At the beginning, yes, Mann failed to behave in a terribly brave or upstanding manner; he was timid in the face of the Nazi rise. Maintaining his career meant more than speaking out on behalf of his friends and colleagues—some of whom were deported—or even supporting his children, who were actively anti-Nazi, and from whose activism he initially distanced himself. But after Mann was forced to leave Germany he made twenty-five radio broadcasts for Germans on behalf of the Allied forces, all of which began, “German listeners!” and which were scathingly anti-Nazi.
Mann’s an example of the morally understandable and also the morally reassuring character. From personal experience, I can attest that it’s uncomfortable to confront dramatic situations in which the “protagonists” are not redeemed, in which they are so self-absorbed that nothing penetrates their shell of self-interest and self-promotion, not even mass murder. But why must that make for a bad script?
On the morning of 9/11, my husband and I were charged with caring for the girlfriend of my sort-of cousin. While the towers burned and the death count, at that point, was estimated at ten thousand, she arrived at our house with a meditation candle and dessert. She worried all day about her relationship with my cousin. Did he love her enough? She just wasn’t sure if he did. She pestered us with questions about my cousin as we walked to a clinic, as we tried to give blood. What did we think? What did we know? Did we think their relationship could last? Did we think he really loved her? Her character was so inconceivable even though it was standing right in front of us. We finally left her in our apartment and went to someone else’s apartment. We had to escape her because she was so disturbingly unchanged. How could that be? How could she be? We didn’t and still can’t make sense of her. Our inability to understand makes her a regular character in our couple narratives, the ones we tell about the weirdness we’ve weathered together. We talk about the woman who, when the city was burning around her, stopped to buy dessert. Probably her life would also make for a bad script. Yet I don’t think there’s a story we’ve told more often to others than hers.
Today I got an e-mail that said, “Good luck, pursecake!” This was the nicest e-mail I’d received in months. Who knew me as “pursecake,” besides myself? And not even really myself? I’d had to change my usernames recently, because my old ones no longer worked. I chose “pursecake” because it makes me think of my daughter, for whom we once made a purse-shaped cake, sort of but not entirely because she loves money.
But who was wishing me luck? And luck with what? With my hearing test at the ear doctor’s? With the swanky party I was attending later that day, and where I hoped not to make myself look a fool? With remembering to pay my speeding ticket before my license was suspended?
I checked to see who had sent me this e-mail. eBay had sent it. eBay was hoping that I’d win a vintage tuxedo shirt I’d bid on. Good luck, pursecake!
I should have felt deflated or idiotic, but I didn’t. It didn’t matter that the e-mail came from eBay, and that eBay was not a person. People’s sincerity is sometimes not totally sincere. There are complications, modulations. People who wish you luck in winning don’t always totally want you to win. eBay wanted me to win. eBay also wanted other people to win. eBay wants everybody to win! When eBay really wants everybody to win, the real winner is eBay. The sent
iment was sincere. eBay wanted me to win this shirt. I did.
Today instead of working I watched YouTube interviews. For no particular reason I watched all of the interviews I could find by a singer I like and know nothing about. Now I know quite a lot about him. Before he became a songwriter and singer he was a drunk and a drug addict. Now he responds to interviewer prompts such as, “It’s interesting that, in this song, you don’t judge the teacher who raped you and then later killed himself,” with stock recovery responses. I was angry at others as a way to express my anger at myself. Now I’ve accepted who I am and no longer need to blame other people for my shortcomings.
Until this year, I was not the sort of person to find sentences like these profound.
My best friend from college recently started saying such sentences. After years of psychotherapy, she’s switched gears, found a guru. This guru has, as gurus must, an origin tale, a story tracking her path to enlightenment. Roughly it goes like this. Before she became a guru, she valued what people tend to value—love, money, real estate. Her first marriage failed. Her second marriage failed. She became a shut-in, subsisting on ice cream and pain pills. One day she awoke on the floor of her bedroom and saw a mouse crawling across a foot. She was filled with joy. She saw it as her job to love everyone and everything unconditionally, but her conviction was still challenged by old anxieties that cropped up every once in a while. She created a series of questions to ask herself whenever she felt tempted by real estate, or jealous of other people’s money, or self-pitying, or hopeless, or if she could not find beauty in even the most agreed-upon beautiful things, never mind a mouse.
These questions she asked herself are now an official product, a mental map you can buy or a head dance you can be taught. I am sounding dismissive here, but I really don’t view this guru’s work dismissively. She has measurably helped my friend. I was hoping she might help me. I did not feel entirely ready yet to be helped, but I did feel open to the possibility—maybe this guru could make my life better, too.
The Folded Clock Page 16