The Folded Clock Read online

  Coincidentally, three children and I had visited his wife’s grave earlier that day. We’d gone to the cemetery to bring flowers to a number of people: E. B. White and Katharine White; also the “youngest person in the cemetery” (given the youngest members tragically warranted little more than an INFANT tombstone, this superlative status proved impossible to determine); and the grave of the bootlegger whose name I stole to give to my daughter. I’d specifically shown the kids the writer/editor’s wife’s grave, because, since last summer, it was new. He had a matching grave beside hers. It was also new. I suggested his wife might qualify as the “youngest” in the cemetery (in that she was the newest member) and was probably deserving of flowers. She got some. Then the kids noticed that the writer/editor’s grave did not have a death date on it yet. I explained that this was because he was still alive. I explained that people sometimes buy and erect their tombstones before they die. This confused them. The existence of a tombstone for a not-yet-dead person wasn’t the source of their bewilderment. What bewildered them was the etiquette involved. They had put flowers on his wife’s grave. Should they put flowers on his grave too, even though he was not yet in it?

  A brief discussion ensued. “It’s rude to put flowers on the grave of a person who’s not dead,” declared one kid authoritatively, putting the matter to rest.

  I wanted to tell the writer/editor about our earlier visit to his wife’s and his future grave, but I wasn’t sure the story would come off as I wanted it to. Because I was wearing a bathing suit, I wasn’t confident in my ability to walk the line between respectful and inappropriate. Would it make him happy to know that a few strange children had, just two hours earlier, put flowers on his wife’s grave? Would he find it cheering or depressing to know that he had not met the requirements for flowers? I’d heard that he’d been bereft since his wife had died. That it was “a matter of time” before he joined her. I told him that we’d put flowers on his wife’s grave, but didn’t tell him that he had not yet qualified. Sometimes, I figured, people don’t need reminding that they are still alive.

  Today we tried to socioeconomically identify the people whose house my friend is renting for the week. My friend is an artist, England-born, contrarian. He paints representations of historically seismic thought shifts. His ability to contextualize data, and divine from it a visual map, is applied, in his off hours, to his immediate surroundings. He decided that the family from which he was renting his house was anti-intellectual, conservative, and Francophobic. The books in the house, he said, supported his theory, which he delivered as though it were the third law of thermodynamics (one of his favorite laws). I defended the family, knowing them not at all; bookshelves of summerhouses are filled with dishy nonsense, I said. They indicate how a person understands time that is meant to be wasted.

  He fetched from the shelves a novel that appears in many houses around here because the novel is about this town, and the writer wrote about real people and changed their names, and so everyone bought the novel to see if and how they’d been portrayed. He read the first sentence aloud. “All places where the French settled early have corruption at their heart, a kind of soft, rotten glow, like the phosphorescence of decaying wood, that is oddly attractive.”

  This proved everything and nothing, and led to a conversation about la tendresse, which the artist refused to define, save to say, “If you don’t know about la tendresse, you’ll understand nothing about nineteenth-century French literature.” Another friend explained la tendresse as the sexual education of French daughters by French mothers. Education of actual sexual techniques? we asked. Or just wiles? What class of French women inculcated their daughters via la tendresse? And what did this say about the man we knew who’d married and then divorced a millionaire and built a boat named Tendress?

  This discussion, such as it was, dovetailed with a tendresse-related conversation I’d had two nights previous. In August, in Maine, it can sometimes seem that everyone everywhere is having the same conversation between the hours of five and eight p.m. The summer bleeds into an extended talking twilight. I was discussing with two women how best to raise a girl so that she won’t become anorexic and won’t approach sex guiltily, because many of us had mothers who came of age during an era when to have casual sex with a guy was thereby to inspire his disrespect, and to subsequently be seen as a woman of low morals, i.e., unmarriageable and worthy only of fucking. I admitted to telling my eight-year-old daughter, who has a great body but is no waif, that she shouldn’t wish to be really skinny, because in my experience (I told her) once you start dating, you’ll get a lot of action if you’ve got meat on your bones. I didn’t say “if you look fuckable,” but that’s what I meant. I was insecure about my non-waify body when I was a teenager, but I had a boyfriend who guaranteed me that my body was “fuckable,” and this seemed a decent runner-up distinction if I couldn’t look like a model. I then emphasized to my daughter that her self-worth should have nothing to do with what other people thought (thereby contradicting myself); that she had to believe her body to be fuckable, i.e., if only she wanted to fuck it, that would be ideal, and that would make other people, girls or boys or whatever, want to fuck it more. Again I communicated all of this using none of these words. I admitted to my friends that maybe it was totally screwed up to mention this stuff to my daughter, and that I basically really didn’t know how to talk about it at all. But now this conversation with my daughter could be viewed, more nobly, as my attempt at la tendresse Américaine. Set a good example. Want to fuck yourself so that others want to fuck you too.

  Today I wore a coat I haven’t worn for years. My husband and I were headed downtown on the subway. I said to him, “I wonder what’s in the pockets.” I use my clothing as storage for important and unimportant paper scraps I might paste into a book if I were more organized. The contents of my pockets are like the diary I have, until recently, failed to keep. In pockets I have found movie stubs, plane tickets, to-do lists, e-mail addresses written on grocery receipts, business cards from people I have no memory of meeting, reminders that I used to have far more money in my savings account than I currently do, jotted-down directions (what was at 457 7th Avenue? Who was in Suite 23?). According to my pockets, I’ve been all over this city. I could mark these destinations on a map using pushpins, showing the shape of my travels over the past twenty years. These are my hunting grounds, though I have no memory, now, of what I was hunting.

  Sometimes there is money.

  So today I said to my husband, “I wonder what’s in the pockets,” thinking I would pull out the usual handful of oblique data points. Instead I found a folded piece of 8½ x 11 paper. I assumed it was the Robert Frost poem I’d read at our friend’s daughter’s bat mitzvah. (I encounter this poem every two years or so. I keep it in a spring coat; I never can remember which one.) I was surprised to unfold the paper and discover our wedding vows.

  “It’s our wedding vows,” I said to my husband. We’d been married in our backyard in Maine, and, yes, I recalled, when it had grown colder that afternoon, I’d put on this coat. This was now ten years ago.

  I tried to read the vows but found I couldn’t. I felt embarrassed, maybe because we were on the subway and in close proximity to many strangers, but then again we’d gotten married in front of strangers, people we’d literally just met when we’d moved, a month earlier, to Maine. We invited the strangers to our wedding, but I did not—out of shame, because I’d been married before and not successfully—invite my own family. I was trying to make a very small deal of this wedding. I thought I was being so sensitive by failing to include them in this really (I told myself) quite insignificant event. It wasn’t worth the plane fare, I reasoned, plus I figured they’d wish to be spared the shame of witnessing their daughter or sister promise to unfalteringly love yet another man. Then the morning of the ceremony I realized how much this wedding meant to me, and how much I needed my family there, and how insanely thoughtless and stupid it was to think I could get
married, especially to this man, without them. I wept on the phone to my mother while the wind blew and the sun shone and the yard was readied for a ceremony that she would, because I’d wished to spare all of our feelings, miss.

  In the subway car I handed the vows to my husband. He tried to read them. He also grew uncomfortable. Why was this? We’d been married by an Internet-anointed, ex-fighter-pilot-turned-mussel-farmer; it had been up to us to provide the ceremony’s entire script. So maybe we were made uneasy by what we’d written because we are writers. What writer can look at something he or she wrote ten years ago and not feel that back then he or she knew basically nothing about language or life? Or maybe my husband, like me, experienced a little bit of personal mortification regarding “our affairs.” Though we’re both highly capable and responsible people in other areas (job, family), we’re unable to file our taxes without an extension. We’re unable to keep track of our Social Security cards or birth certificates or car registrations or any of the official documentation one is called upon, with erratic infrequency, to produce. When we recently needed our marriage certificate to prove my spousehood to the Germans, we were so uncertain of its location that we began to doubt we’d ever owned a copy. Then my husband stumbled upon it in a cabinet used to store lightbulbs and chafing dishes. He put it in a more sensible place and immediately forgot where that was.

  Another possible explanation for our discomfort: my husband and I, on this day, were going on our first date together in months. We’ve rarely been in the same city for the last year and a half. I recently met him on the street to exchange the kids when I was returning from a trip and he was leaving on one, and the time window was so narrow that we had to rendezvous on a corner, and hug hello and good-bye, and he took his suitcase and got in my cab, and I took my suitcase and wheeled it home with our children. So maybe it was because we were just getting to know each other again after a few trying years of what my husband called “corporation co-management.” It was a bit like having amnesia and being introduced to a total stranger and told, “You’re in love with this person. You’ve been in love with them your whole life!” It’s not that we weren’t in love, but we’d grown shy around each other. I think we were slightly embarrassed by the baldness of the love proclamations we’d written in our vows.

  Or maybe it wasn’t the baldness of our love proclamations so much as the inadequacy of them. These words we’d written were sweet and hopeful and well intentioned, but they didn’t come close to capturing the actual future we’d built in the subsequent years. (Also we’d watched too many episodes of The Bachelorette together. I fear we’ve been forever ruined for love language by that show.) The vows made me think of our barn. Our barn is built on top of a pile of rocks. Basically someone just threw some big rocks on the ground a few hundred years ago and built a barn on top of them. People walk into our barn and they can’t believe how quiet and vast it is; it’s got a hand-hewn, holy feeling that a friend once compared to an old Swedish church. When you peer underneath the barn sills you can see the light streaming through from the other side. The whole thing appears to be levitating on these inadequate supports that once functioned as vows for the future. (Here there will someday be a barn.) The engineering is inexplicable; it’s a beautiful mystery. Our barn no longer needs those rocks, if it ever did.

  Today I took a bus with some secular pilgrims to the top of a Tuscan hillside. We were here to see a famous, pilgrim-enticing fresco I’d never heard of called the Madonna del Parto. Our head pilgrim told us why we should seek to see this fresco. Because it is one of the very few images of a pregnant Mary. Because it was painted by a man named Piero della Francesca. Because Piero was big on math and so, behind his expressive faces there is not emotion but the math of an emotion. He discovered the perspectival equations for happiness and worry and fear.

  Like all good modern-day pilgrims in Italy, we prefaced our visit to the Madonna by eating and drinking and seeing ourselves into a stupor. We’d already visited (before our lunch of three pastas) a church and two museums. Our head pilgrim talked about the art we saw. She performed a very graphic mime of a fresco painter slicing a yolk sac with a razor blade. I’d taken notes on the back of a museum ticket that, a day later, would prove inscrutable to me. (wear a hood—against germs—also so that you cannot be seen and thanked.)

  The point is: I was not primed to feel anything much at the sight of the Madonna except exhaustion and a little guilt from having done too much with my face that day (eaten and drank and talked and seen with it), but nothing with my head. Technically today had been a workday. I was supposed to be working; I am in Italy at an art colony and away from my children to work. For the past six months I have been swamped by deadlines and by job stress. I have had such job stress that, even while home these past months, I spent so little time with my children that they started to call me “dad.” If I am not working, and getting ahead of the work and the deadlines, and by implication freeing up some future time I might be able to spend with them, I feel that I do not deserve to be in Italy. Also, my children are on the verge of not needing me at all. They no longer need me to read to them. They don’t beg as much for me to sleep with them. To leave them for a month is to force them over a threshold they might otherwise cross more gradually. They will realize while I am gone that I am not much missed. When I get home, I will only be their maid.

  But when I stepped over the threshold of the building in which the Madonna was kept—“kept” really was the word; she was hung on a wall and sealed off from the air and the humidity by a layer of glass and then another layer of glass, resulting in a viewing experience described by our head pilgrim as “trying to see a jam jar inside an aquarium”—I felt overcome. (The poet Jorie Graham wrote of Piero’s Madonna, “This is / what the living do: go in.”) “It was believed,” said the head pilgrim, “that contemplation of the Madonna’s face could change the outcome of your pregnancy. It could change the outcome of your life.”

  Fortunately, the Madonna was preserved like a nocturnal zoo creature in a dark room. I could, unseen, fight to control my own face equation while the head pilgrim talked about the Madonna’s ermine-lined tent, the open lacings on her maternity dress, the color-coded angels.

  The head pilgrim said that you could gauge the length of time it took to paint the fresco by the giornate—the days of work. You counted the giornate by the round swipes of plaster Piero put on the wall each day before he started to paint. It took Piero seven days of work.

  I listened and looked and tried to distract myself. I still could barely keep my shit together. Why was I so undone? I did not want to change the outcome of my life (if “outcome” is understood to mean “my life right now”—i.e., I am currently in my outcome). People had written prayers on paper scraps and left them under the Madonna; weekly, the church burned the scraps so the smoke could deliver their messages to God. Many of these people were praying for a child. I wanted to leave, not a prayer, but a note of gratitude. I have my children, but I didn’t want to feel about the Madonna as I did about my doctor who died before I could thank him. It seemed not unwise to deliver to the Madonna a retroactive prayer containing the hope that she could someday give me what I now had.

  In the gift shop, I bought a postcard of the Madonna’s face. I saw it as an insurance policy in case “outcome” refers not to the life I’m in but to the one I’m eventually due. Who knows, in that case, whether or not I might need to change it. More than usual, my future concerns me. Since arriving in Italy, I have been beset by anxiety about my children’s welfare. I am certain something terrible is going to befall them while I’m gone. It does not help that my husband is driving them a long distance for an upcoming weekend, and that I am particularly afraid of car accidents. I’ve begged him not to travel with them, though everyone in the family likes to point out that I’m the hazardous driver, not him. If anyone will kill our children with a car, it will be me. But I see things he doesn’t. He might unwittingly kill them by failing to s
ee! One of Piero’s other fresco subjects, Saint Julian, whom the head pilgrim had taken us to view before lunch, had been jinxed as a baby by pagan witches; the jinx ordained that he would grow up to kill his parents. When older, Saint Julian left home, presumably to avoid this fate. He became a famous hunter. If you are hoping to escape a murderer prophecy, I’m thinking you should probably not put yourself in regular contact with weapons. Whatever. He did. He much later mistook his parents—sleeping in his bed—for his wife and her lover. He killed them.

  Saint Julian was not seeing the future properly. He was not thinking ahead like I do. Maybe, thinking ahead, I really should have left a prayer under the Madonna. Regardless, I have the Madonna’s postcard face. If needed, I can meditate upon it. Behind her face hides the mathematical equation for worry that, if I study it hard enough, perhaps I can solve for myself. How to leave my children behind without this constant anxiety that they will disappear in my absence? Because of course this worry is founded; I will not return in one month to find the same children I left. They are growing older by the hour, by the minute. The head pilgrim told us of a time when the Madonna was packed into a truck to be shipped to the Met in New York for an exhibit. The women of the town freaked out. Without the Madonna—even temporarily—the crops would fail, and the families would fail. It’s the women who fret about luck and how to keep it safe. It’s the women who worry, behind protective glass, about future outcomes, their worry protected from dampness or mathematical dismantling. It’s the women who foresee doom and take extreme measures to battle its approach. To prevent the Madonna from leaving, the head pilgrim said, the women of the town lay down in the street.