The Folded Clock Read online

  I bought it. I started reading. I thought I knew everything about Robert Chambers, but it turned out I didn’t. He’d been a drug addict and needle user. He’d been possibly bisexual in New York City in the ’80s. Had I known these things I might have practiced safe sex for once in my life. My three-fucks-away-from-Robert-Chambers status initiated a long night of death worry. I could have AIDS! Heritage AIDS! I decided I couldn’t stay in the airport, or I’d drive myself crazy, reading Wasted: The Preppie Murder by the half-light of the closed concessions, anxiously obsessing about my death, and also the death of my boyfriend (whom I would have basically killed with my dishonesty), and how, if my boyfriend didn’t break up with me for cheating on him and giving him AIDS, we’d have to forgo living in South America and instead spend our final days at an experimental treatment facility in Mexico, where we could still get married, and after our wedding, I would ideally die first, because I had, as a kid, read Love Story by Erich Segal upward of fifty-nine times, and I wanted my husband/boyfriend to be able to say at my funeral, “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?” and (even though I had given him AIDS), “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

  I made calls from a payphone using a credit card I’d failed to make any payments on for months, but which, by some glitch, worked. It was a Saturday night, but I found some friends at home. I took a cab to their apartment. We went to an Irish bar and got drunk. I slept on their couch. By the next morning, I was cured of my worry. I continued to sleep with the three-fucks-away guy for the rest of the summer and fall. This didn’t make sense to me then. It doesn’t make sense to me now. Despite what I learned in the airport, I didn’t get tested for AIDS for another three years. When I did, I was not positive.

  Today I realized that I am not in a bad mood. I am something else. I am someone else. This happens to me as it happens to everyone. You are not you for months at a time. When you become you again, you can actually greet yourself. You can welcome yourself back.

  In my mind my life was ending in small and big ways. I wasn’t despondent over these endings; instead I was energized by them. Because of the joke I made about three-way sex in class yesterday, I was going to lose my job, and so I must start thinking of a new career. Because I am not myself, my husband would leave me in search of a woman who more closely resembled the one he married. Because my babysitter and I parted on strange terms, and because she still has the house keys, she was going to enter the apartment at night and kill our children as we slept, so I needed to protect them. When I told my husband why I was sleeping with our children and not with him, I expected him to understand my reasoning and appreciate my prudence. Because he is an incredible human, he did.

  What is interesting about these alternate states of being, however, is that they never seem crazy once exited and viewed from a more sober location. Even when I return from wherever I’ve been, I understand why, when not myself, I do what I do and believe what I believe. I consider myself highly sane and competent for exhuming the possibility that my children might be killed from the lulling blandness of everyday life. I congratulate myself for my foresight. I think: I want that person on my team. She has all the angles covered. In her brain she runs a computer program to evade dooms no one has even considered. There’s nothing she hasn’t thought of, and thought of and thought of, poor woman.

  Today I was seated at a dinner beside the sister-in-law of a friend. We talked about self-destructive New Age healers and whether or not old Hasidic men in Brooklyn speak to you only if they think you’re a Polish prostitute, and she showed me pictures of her dog before she showed me pictures of her baby. Then we discussed the bath salts epidemic in Maine. My husband and I first learned about the bath salts epidemic through a local newspaper we’d purchased for the purpose of starting a fire in our woodstove. My husband held up a front page with a photograph of a distraught woman and the headline, “Husband Hasn’t Been the Same Since He Started Doing Them.” “Guess what he’s been doing?” my husband asked. I guessed coffee liqueur. I guessed Sudoku. “Bath salts,” he said. Bath salts? We imagined a man lying in a tub filled with scented water, unable to get out. Within a week he’d have lost his job, and his wife would be despairing. She’d cry at the foot of the tub in which he floated, serenely pink, as the house was repossessed and the children taken by social services.

  The article did nothing to correct this assumption of ours. (We eventually learned that bath salts are typically snorted, that the high is a cross between meth and acid, that they can inspire people to eat the faces off of other people.) For days we believed that poverty-stricken people in Maine would get into a warm bath one day and never get out. Did this seem so implausible? It didn’t to me. Bath salts are a dangerous temptation in our household. My husband and I take turns before dinner disappearing into a salted bath. There is never a compelling reason to get out, not for the first forty-five minutes at least, until the water starts to cool and you’re vaguely reminded that you like the life you’ve built with your spouse, at which point you consider the possibility that it might be worth leaving the tub in order to maintain it. But if your life sucks and you hate your spouse? Yes, I can see a bathtub being a perfect place never to leave.

  So this woman and I talked about the local bath salts epidemic. I didn’t know anyone who did them, but I’d once given a ride to a woman who’d been on them, I told her. She wanted to know the story of this woman. It was late at night, I said. My husband and I were returning from a dinner party and realized we were out of gas. We stopped at the automated pumps where there is always classic rock playing, where the lighting is always blue and bright, where it is always like an underage nightclub. On this night the pumps were playing Fleetwood Mac. I noticed another car parked just outside the illuminated area. One back door was open. The car appeared to have been abandoned, until, when I looked up again, I saw a lone woman zombie-shuffling toward the pump island.

  “Help me,” she said. She spoke from beyond the grave. “Help me.”

  I asked: How could we help her?

  “Help me,” she said.

  My husband and I exchanged a confused look.

  “Can we call anyone to help you?” he said.

  This time she heard us. She freaked out. Her face spasmed.

  “My dad will kill me if he finds out,” she said. “He will fucking kill me.”

  (I told the woman with whom I was having dinner: “Mind you, this woman was easily forty years old.”)

  We asked the woman where she lived, she answered vaguely, we calculated based on these vague descriptions that her house wasn’t too far out of our way. We offered her a ride, even though my husband worried, given the woman’s tenuous grip on her surroundings, that she’d never be able to locate her own driveway, and that we’d be carting her around all night.

  I drove. My husband sat in the back because he hates making small talk with strangers on street drugs with whom he is, by the laws of vehicular proximity, obliged to chat. We also figured he could restrain her from behind if she went nuts. We’d already shared a knowing glance—bath salts, clearly. Given we had no experience with the bath salt high, we thought we should be prepared for anything.

  Once we were driving, her brain notched into a manic groove. “You have no idea what happened to me tonight. You have no idea. You have no idea what happened to me tonight.” This refrain persisted for seven miles. She’d grabbed my husband’s hand over the back of her seat; she violently caressed it. “Shit Louie,” she said. “That’s what people say down south. Shit Louie. Shit Louie. Shit Louie. You have no idea what happened to me tonight.”

  At this point I wanted an idea. The reason I’d agreed to give this woman a ride was, yes, because she was in a bind, but the repayment for my generosity should be her story. What happened tonight? I half suspected there’d been a dead body in her car. She’d killed her boyfriend, maybe, for refusing to drive her home.

  As we neared the town where she lived, her energy c
hanged. She grew distracted. Her scatty brain got ideas it couldn’t articulate. She held her purse in her lap; she slid one hand inside of it. I sensed an impulsive act brewing. For the first time, I got scared. She was going to pull a gun—the gun with which she’d killed her boyfriend—and now she was going to kill me, or my husband, or herself. No target would prove compelling until, in a random millisecond, it became unbearably compelling. She started repeating, menacingly, “I owe you big-time. I owe you big-time. Shit Louie, I am going to give you the best present ever.”

  The ride ended uneventfully. She located her driveway. She lived in a trailer, a nice one. She hopped out of the car and suddenly seemed as harmless as a drunk teenager relieved to be home. “I am going to give you the best present tomorrow!” she said again, forgetting she had no idea who we were or where we lived.

  I concluded by saying to my dinner partner, “And for sure the woman was on bath salts!” I felt a little bit guilty having wasted so much time telling her this story. It starts promisingly, but the end tells nothing. “Very interesting true story but the ending is a letdown.” I hadn’t turned the deflation of events into a moment of unexpected revelation. I could see the woman trying to apply the right kind of curiosity, because I hadn’t properly directed it. Her curiosity passed over the bath salts woman and landed on me.

  “I can’t believe you gave her a ride,” she said. “That says a lot about you as a person.” I thought she was going to compliment me on my selflessness, and I would then counter with the usual demurrals. She was so desperate! Anyone would have done what I did!

  “Either you’re stupid,” she said, “or you’re just really nosy.”

  Today my friends and I swam the entire length of the harbor, and out into the Reach, and around the point, and to the beach where my friends are staying. As we swam past the docks, we chatted with the people on them. “George,” we said, as we neared the first dock. “When’s your daughter arriving?” George replied, “Late tomorrow night. Would you like to take a rest here? Can I get you a drink?” We demurred. We had places to be! People to visit! As we stroked past I thought I saw George growing older and older. His grandchildren beside him grew older, too, taking his place before being replaced themselves by their children. It was like a trick of stop-time photography, everyone shading into everyone else. (It helped that I didn’t have my glasses on, and that the members of George’s family are tall and thin and slightly stooped, even the young. At a squint, they blend.) Near the yacht club dock we exchanged pleasantries with the commodore. “Where are you going?” he asked. “Out into the Reach!” we said. We swam and we swam. We waved to people on boats and deflected, with good cheer, their slightly concerned disbelief regarding our swimming project. Eventually, we reached our destination, and all of us were blue, and all of us concurred, “That might have been a little shorter, that swim.” We lay on the hot rocks. We each drank a beer. Time passed. Time passed. I started to doze. The cold water had slowed our pulses but everything else spun at great speed. I worried I would awake to find myself an old woman, my husband dead, my daughter grown and turned into me. But life, when I woke up, was as I’d left it.

  Today I had a dinner party. I did not tell the people I’d invited who else was coming. I didn’t want anyone to pre-Google anyone. I don’t know why I wanted to control what my friends did or did not know before they arrived to my house. I do know that I treat the Internet as an oracle that one consults, like Laius, father of Oedipus, at his peril. Must I know my son will grow up to kill me? Or that my Amazon star ranking is on the wane? For this reason I limit my visits. I don’t ask questions I feel I cannot handle the answers to.

  I feel others should exercise similar caution.

  A few years ago, when my son was in day care, I met the father of one of his playmates. I did not know at the time, but I would soon learn via parental gossip, that the man’s wife had died when his daughter was two months old. “Gossip” is maybe the wrong word to describe how I came to know his history. No malice was intended. The chatter was in the service of protection. It prevented the unwitting from asking the father, “Do you and your wife live around here?” or asking the little girl, “Is your mother picking you up today?”

  The gossip gave rise to further curiosity and speculation on my part, especially since I’d become somewhat acquainted with the man. I so badly wanted to know how his wife had died. Had she committed suicide? Had she been killed in a car accident? The man is an actor and his wife was a director of documentary films; they were, in other words, slightly more Googleable than other people. But Googling him seemed invasive; also, to learn the details about his wife would put me in the position, when he eventually told me these details, of pretending I didn’t already know them. Unlike him, I am no actor.

  I did not Google him. After a few more weeks of walking together and spending time in playgrounds, during which time he still hadn’t told me about his wife, I considered that he possibly hoped I’d look him up online (as my friend having the affair with her married coworker had possibly hoped I’d look up her lover’s identity online), as this would remove the burden of his having to tell me. He’d let the Internet do the disclosing for him.

  I still did not Google him. My loyalty paid off. Finally, six months into knowing him, he told me what had happened to his wife. We were at a party. The ambient noise was such, however, that I couldn’t hear him. What he was telling me was no doubt extremely heartrending, and so it seemed rude to say, repeatedly, “Sorry, what?” I pretended, for politeness’ sake, to understand. I expressed regret and sadness and said, repeatedly, “Wow,” and, “Oh my God.” Then I went home and Googled him.

  The Googling that might occur before dinner parties, however, confuses me more than the Googling of dead wives, especially since I prefer to have dinner parties where nobody talks about their careers. Isn’t that the mark of a failed dinner party? When the conversations resemble job interviews? Wouldn’t it actually be preferable, thus, to request that everyone Google the other guests beforehand so our tedious biographies won’t need teasing out in person?

  At my dinner party, however, I quite purposefully prevented any pre-Googling. To this dinner I’d invited a couple I didn’t know very well along with some close friends, one of whom is a well-known writer. I didn’t tell the new couple that this writer would be at the dinner. I thought I was omitting this fact as a means of showing how unimpressed I was by literary celebrity. I’m so unimpressed that when the new couple arrived to the party, I didn’t disclose his identity, not even when I introduced him. (I said, “This is my neighbor.”) To state his name, or so my thinking went, might be seen as name-dropping; there is little else in the world that I hate more. I went so far out of my way not to name-drop that I accomplished something even more pretentious. I also told myself that I was doing the new couple a favor. Fame basically prohibits casual conversation. What’s your opening gambit with George Clooney? It’s all so fucking awkward.

  I also viewed my act of nondisclosure as an experiment. I wanted to see how many minutes or hours would pass before the new couple figured out who this writer was. What if they never did? What a great party that would be if we all just made jokes and shared no personal information, not even our names.

  Predictably, there was much awkwardness. A lot of confused small talk eventually led to the writer’s occupation and then his identity being revealed. By the end of the night, it was still unclear whether I’d done the couple a favor or a disservice. It was unclear whether they left that evening thinking that I was merely an eccentric hostess or a deeply messed-up person.

  Today my husband and I watched the finale of The Bachelorette, Season Eight. The bachelorette, Emily, is a bright yellow blonde with fake boobs and a polite, little-girl demeanor. She has a daughter by her former fiancé, a racecar driver who died in a plane crash. (Her story, and maybe it checks out, and maybe it doesn’t, and I don’t care either way, is that she discovered she was pregnant a week after her fiancé was
killed.)

  We’ve known Emily, my husband and I, for two full seasons. We first met her on The Bachelor, Season Fifteen; she competed with seventeen other girls for the heart of Brad, such as it was. Even though she was chilly, and unforthcoming, and appeared to be one of those pretty women who’d never once had to make an effort in bed, and thus hadn’t, she won Brad’s heart. She took it home, she found it small and defective. Wisely, Emily ditched it.

  Though she frequently demurred that the constant tabloid attention wasn’t for her, she returned to TV a year later as the star of her own show.

  Initially, we were disappointed in The Franchise’s choice. Emily was pretty and likable, but she wasn’t smart enough to be interesting or dim enough to be an accidental genius. We feared that she would sit around in a sparkly dress and let men fawn over her, even the asshole-ish and the ill-intentioned. This would be the dramatic highlight, we figured, her failing to understand that some men, just because they liked her, aren’t good people.

  But Emily surprised us. She proved to be a much tarter apple. She had wit and sharp retorts, she gave men shit as a way of flirting with them (and some men were so thick they neither understood that she was giving them shit nor that she was flirting with them), and she totally knew who the scumbags were.

  Tonight, on the final episode of her season, Emily had to choose between Jef, a boyish entrepreneur whose family owned a gazillion-acre ranch in Utah, and Arie, a handsome racecar driver. The obvious choice was Arie because Emily wanted to fuck Arie, and historically the bachelors and the bachelorettes choose to marry the people they most wanted to fuck, even if that person is despicable.

  Emily, meanwhile, had zero chemistry with Jef—they bird-pecked when they kissed; they had nothing to say to each other—but she wanted to want Jef. Her desire marked her either as a climber and a gold digger, or as an ambitious woman who privileges over sex and love not money per se (though Jef was certainly rich, and also a Mormon whose mysterious socioeconomic situation—the big house, the many children and women—The Bachelorette found it wise to represent in general yet in its specifics ignore), but exposure to new experiences. Arie’s career as a racecar driver meant he’d be traveling much of the time; in effect, she’d still be a single mother. Also, as noted, her dead fiancé, the father of her daughter, was a racecar driver. While dating him, she’d hosted her own cable show about car racing. I imagined her thinking about Arie and the future he offered her: done that. She wanted to try something new. Emily is a beautiful enough and smart enough woman who can have any man she chooses, and also, via these men, any life she chooses. She chose a life over a man. She chose Jef. (Cue my grad school friend, women expect a world.) Wasn’t this so ambitious of her? Wasn’t this savvy and self-knowing?