The Folded Clock Read online

  My tap handle—according to my artist friend, and also to Breton—was the invisible but present object, invisible in that I could not perceive its use or meaning, but I always needed it around. My friend’s husband’s maybe-infidelity was also the invisible but present object. My friend did not want her suspicion—which sustained the possibility that her husband both was and was not having an affair—to disappear by exposing it. She feared the lowering of hands. Still, I said to her as we drank beer, You are not crazy. You are not crazy. This is what she needs from me, I guess—the opportunity to perpetually wonder about her husband without the threat of ever knowing what, in a marriage, is or is not there.

  Today I was reading The Men’s Club by a California writer, now dead, named Leonard Michaels. (When I told a friend in the grocery store parking lot that I was reading Michaels, she said, “Talk about dead men in Berkeley we don’t like!” I can’t remember who the other dead man in Berkeley was we didn’t like.) Leonard writes, “Everybody has a doppelganger. You may sometimes catch a glimpse of him in the mirror, or in a storefront window. He is the one you fear, the other you.” For decades I never saw anything but my doppelganger when I looked in the mirror. In the house where I grew up, a huge mirror hung at the bottom of our staircase, where there was also a small landing. This landing functioned as a stage from which I would audition for my future role as a person. I kept waiting for the girl in the mirror to look like me. She never did. Starting in my late thirties, however, I no longer felt the same disconnect when I looked in a mirror. That’s your face! I would think. I mean, my face! This face was leaner and sharper, and suggested that when I was an old woman I’d resemble a kindly witch. At around this same time, men stopped checking me out on the street. This was fine by me, but it also made me confused. I was so beautiful now. Was I the only person who thought so?

  I wanted to ask one of my real-life doppelgangers what she thought about how we looked. Apparently there are many I could ask. I am always meeting people who say, “You look exactly like my cousin!” This has happened frequently enough that I’ve decided I am a generic type. I am everywhere. This explains why strangers are always asking me for directions. During the school year, when I live in New York, I am asked for directions almost every day. I’ve witnessed so many lost people in New York scan the pedestrian horizon and settle on me. They looked relieved. There. There is a familiar face. I’ve been lost in cities where I don’t live, and even then I’m asked for directions. I say, “I don’t live here. I’m lost too!” These pedestrians think I’m lying. They turn from me, disappointed. How small and ungenerous I am, pretending I’m a tourist in my own city, pretending not to speak German or Croatian, just to avoid helping them out.

  The other possibility: I am trusted by strangers because I am a teacher. I was informed by the psychic I saw for research purposes, You are a teacher. (She also told me that my three-year-old son would grow up to run a bed-and-breakfast.) In fact I am a teacher, but I think she meant it metaphorically. I am a person who guides other people. I share and impart knowledge. I can tell people where the nearest subway is located. I did not take the psychic seriously until I was stricken by a weird illness this past spring. When my friend advised me to see my affliction as an opportunity to become a new person, I decided that I’d give up writing fiction and become a different kind of teacher. A life teacher. I’d give directions to the nearest life subway. I’d say things like, “There is nowhere to be, only everywhere to go.” I’d become a guru. I honestly had a moment when I thought, This is why I got sick, because the world needs me.

  Then I got better.

  Once I met one of my doppelgangers. She was not some abstracted cousin; she was the good friend of one of my good friends. We spent a weekend together celebrating our mutual friend’s wedding engagement. Looking at her was like looking in the mirror when I was a kid—Is that really me? She thought I was her. She said, “It’s so weird! We really do look so much alike!” I wasn’t seeing it beyond the hair and eye color. It’s true that we emitted a similar vibe; at the onset, we presented as energy twins. But she is never self-deprecating (I am always self-deprecating), and always confident (I am confident, but not outwardly). As the weekend progressed, we looked less and less alike to me, then not alike at all. Which didn’t mean I didn’t like her. I really liked her. I politely agreed with her pronouncements that we resembled one another. I know, it’s so weird! It seemed impossible to deny our similarity without inadvertently insulting her (You? God no, I look nothing like you) or sounding bizarrely defensive, like a woman who has only recently come to resemble herself.

  Today, or rather tonight, my husband and I will be watching “The Men Tell All.” This is the penultimate show of The Bachelorette, Season Eight. On “The Men Tell All,” the men whom the bachelorette, Emily Maynard, has rejected over the course of the season are interviewed by Chris, the host of what my husband and I call “The Franchise.” The Franchise comprises three shows: The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, and Bachelor Pad. It is my husband’s contention that everyone on the planet will eventually be part of The Franchise. We dream of this happening.

  On “The Men Tell All,” the guys don’t dish on Emily; they dish on the other guys. They dish about inter-guy relations. The guys live in a house called “the house,” and “the house” remains the name for their communal living situation, even if “the house” is a hotel suite in Dubrovnik. In the house there are assholes, there are sweetly misunderstood wallflowers, there are asshole wallflowers, and, on “The Men Tell All,” everyone accuses everyone of being exactly what they are, and a studio audience boos when jerky guys refuse the mantel of jerkhood, and applaud when the jerks are called out by the narcs, who would probably be jerks themselves if the bigger jerks hadn’t been around to fill the role.

  I am asked by apparently more sensible people why I watch this show. It’s so fake, the sensible people say; it’s totally rigged. The contestants are actors. They just want to become famous. To enjoy the show, to these people, is to fail to remember this, and to be swept up by a fiction you think is not one.

  But I believe there are a few more floors to the house of fiction/reality than these people, and maybe even the contestants, realize. I honestly believe that people fall in love on these shows. I do. Here is why: Crushes thrive in small spaces. Humans must be programmed to respond positively when faced with a small sampling of other humans in, say, caves. You’re stuck in a cave with three other people—all mankind, presumably, was hidden away in such tiny groups during the winters until the thaw—and so, in order for the species to thrive, you must biologically be compelled to fuck at least one person in your cave, despite the fact that, when surrounded by a plenitude of Neanderthals at the Neanderthal summer barbecue, none of them struck your fancy. Without the element of choice, and in conjunction with captivity, you find love, or at least you find lust.

  This has happened to me many times. It happened to me on a canoe trip; the minute we returned to civilization, I recanted my crush on the guy I’d angled to sit next to at the nightly campfires. I have been so cognizant of this phenomenon, and its inevitability, that I got nervous in college while waiting to hear where in France I was to spend my semester abroad, because I knew that a guy my friend was dating, someone I’d always found abstractly cute, was also going to France. Fortunately we were sent to different cities. Had we been in the same city, I am certain we would have fallen in love, or the sort of love that occurs in those situations, call it what you will, probably a mistake. This is also why I get nervous about going to art colonies, especially now that I am happily married to a man I met at an art colony. I don’t want to fall for anyone else—I am pointedly not looking to fall for anyone—but these situations conspire against our best intentions. Art colonies, often located in remote woods or on beautiful estates, are communities in which all the residents sever ties to the real world within hours of arrival; they are like singles mixers for the married or otherwise spoken for. (I was married whe
n I met my now-husband, who was otherwise spoken for.) When I arrive at a colony these days, I take a measure of the room, I identify the potential problems, I reinforce my weak spots, and then I relax.

  Even the larger world can conspire to trick its inhabitants with caves of a sort. A few summers ago I developed a crush on a guy working on the barn outside my studio in Maine. For many hours a day we worked in the same approximate space. I’ve known him for years; he and his partner are good friends of ours. My point is that this crush had no basis in reality or in my imagination; it had so little basis in either realm that I couldn’t even fantasize about a next move. He was just a fun reason to go to work each day, and he reminded me how, during the eighteen months that I had a real job, i.e., an office job and not a waitressing or teaching job, I had to develop a crush in order to want to go to work. My office crush was a very capable and married Norwegian. He once joined a rescue mission in the Sierra Nevada Mountains to find our lost coworker. He later told me he’d spent two grim days stabbing his ski poles into snowdrifts, looking for a body.

  Also my crush on this guy working on my barn explained much that I’d formerly failed to understand about the social workings of our Maine town—how, over the course of a long Maine winter, husbands and wives manage to fall in love with other husbands and wives they’ve known forever.

  However, as a believer in The Franchise, and as a believer in my own marriage, I feel the need to defend the attractions that can arise in deceptive environments. My husband, for example, is not the sort of man I would have been smart enough to date and marry until many more years of dating and marrying the wrong kind of man. Had it not been for the art colony and the intense exposure I had to my husband, who was so different from the husband I had at the time, I may never have fallen in love with him. And yet he is the perfect human for me. Had it not been for my own personal version of The Franchise, I’d have suffered many more years of mistakes.

  Which does not explain much about the actual Franchise—for example, why the bachelors and bachelorettes always select to marry the hottest person, even if that person’s hotness is massively iced by their personality. I got really excited, for example, when I thought that Brad, the man-boy with abandonment issues from Season Fifteen, might reject the obvious, beautiful girl and choose the cute-enough girl with the cool father. I was really touched by the idea that Brad might marry a woman because he wanted her dad to be his dad too. Of course Brad chose the obvious, beautiful girl. Does that mean Brad didn’t love her, because she was obvious? I think he did love her, and I think she loved him. Sometimes we love obvious people. I also think that all of the rejected women who claimed to love Brad really did love him. Most of the men who claim tonight that they love Emily really do love her, even if they’ve barely spoken to her. Is this normal? No. But that doesn’t mean it’s dismissible as acting. Fakeness gives rise to realness that, granted, given The Franchise’s dismal marriage record (many of the engaged couples experience ugly breakups within a year), may not survive when the fakeness ends. But the contestants do, or did, experience real feelings as a result of fiction. The readers of novels experience real feelings as a result of fiction. And what about the characters? They don’t not fall in love just because a writer orchestrated it.

  Today I was stung by a wasp. A wasp nest hangs over the door to my studio. The wasps fly in and out. I walk in and out. Thus far, our patterns of cohabitation have meshed peaceably. I’d been accepted as one of them. Once I found a wasp crawling on my shoulder and I didn’t kill it. I tricked it onto a piece of paper and freed it on the grass.

  But today our nonaggression pact was proven to be a bit of sham faith on my part, generated to protect my cowardice (I do not want to deal with that nest). I was sitting at my desk. My phone rang. It was a painter inviting me to her gallery opening. I exited my studio. I climbed up the porch and back down it. I always pace when I talk on the phone. One night I paced my parents’ unlit living room for an hour, not knowing that I had a bleeding gash on the bottom of my foot. I turned on the lights when my call ended to discover thousands of stains on the rug, like a hiking trail dashed across a map. After my parents yelled at me, we marveled at the shape of my talking travels, the places in the living room I visited time and again, and the outlier areas to which I made only one or two forays, because the topography was more challenging, or the view less spectacular. We understood our living room differently after that.

  Suddenly, I felt a sharp burn behind my knee. A wasp dropped from the bottom of my shorts. I continued to walk and talk to the artist about her opening. “I’ll be there!” I said. “What time?” I limped into the house. I waved to get my husband’s attention and mouthed the word “alcohol.” Meaning rubbing. I mimed what had happened. I said, “And where is it?” My husband returned with rubbing alcohol, but then understood why I needed it. “You need bleach, not alcohol,” he corrected. “On Main Street,” I said, “got it.” My husband returned with the bleach. The artist gave me the sort of micro-directions that are confusing in their micro-ness. I finally cut her off. I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll find you!” and hung up the phone.

  “Why didn’t you just tell her you were stung by a wasp and had to get off?” my husband asked me.

  I don’t know why. Or I kind of know. This woman is inundated by motherhood. Her career has been interrupted by people who need her. I didn’t want to interrupt her with my need. My behavior makes perfect sense to me. Just as my behavior on an airplane this past spring made sense to me. I was traveling on a red-eye from L.A. to New York. I always ask for an aisle seat because I am claustrophobic. Also, when a task becomes difficult, my body develops an urgent need to regularly do it. It needs to regularly pee, especially when I’m in a window seat.

  On this flight, I had a window seat.

  I drank no liquids for hours before the flight. I peed just before boarding. My neighbor in the middle seat spoke Russian and wore a white tracksuit. He fell asleep before takeoff, his head whiplashing up and down. He’d clearly taken a sleeping pill in the waiting area. Nothing would wake him. In the aisle seat was a woman about my age, wearing chic black workout clothes and neon sneakers. She was unrumpled, with a pre-moisturized sleep face and neatly stored long hair. She arranged her space as though she were an organized temp secretary, placing on her desk a few personal items she’d brought to work in her purse.

  I tried to make eye-friends with the woman in the aisle seat. I wanted her to acknowledge me, and for us both to recognize, and express surprise over, the man sleeping so soundly between us. Should I, in a few hours, need to use the lavatory, I’d be able to ask her with a glance. But she was not making eye-friends on this plane. We took off. I listened to music and counted the number of songs it took for the lights of L.A. to completely disappear behind us.

  The woman in the aisle seat put on her eye mask.

  Less than an hour into the flight, I needed to pee. I shifted positions; I took a Xanax. The urge grew worse. I started to panic; I took another Xanax.

  I became more awake than ever.

  I tried to override my body with meditation. I failed. I thought I’d distract myself with a movie, but the backseat monitor was broken. Reading was too interior an activity; it only brought me closer to the irritation site.

  I tried to outsmart the situation. How could I pee without leaving my seat? My options were limited. Really there was but one option: to pee in the airsickness bag. This seemed a very sound plan. It was so sound I was surprised it wasn’t usual practice. Airsickness bags are water resistant. An airsickness bag could be folded neatly and stored under the seat until I could get to the lavatory to dispose of it (I would never hand it to an air steward).

  I was not wearing the ideal clothing for this maneuver, the ideal being no clothing. I was wearing jeans. Fortunately, I had a big sweater—I draped this over me, performed a shimmy, and then rested, naked to the knees under my sweater, while I planned the next move. I needed to crouch between my seat and the
seat in front of me, but there was not enough room for this. I turned sideways, which meant my face was basically pressed into the lap of the white tracksuit guy. But he was so totally asleep! This incipient blow-job position would embarrass no one but me.

  I hunched between the seats. I put my face inches from the Russian guy’s crotch. I opened the airsickness bag. I waited for relief. None came. I sat back in my seat. I rested, I refocused on the task, I tried again to practice my version of meditation, also known as self-bullying. Who cares about all of these people? They are asleep! No one is looking at you! You can do this! The situation was quickly becoming less about peeing into a bag to avoid disturbing strangers; now I wanted bragging rights. I wanted the accomplishment high.

  I tried again. Again I failed. Everything I know about my body I learned from a book written by a home-birth midwife. I channeled her wisdom. Of particular use is her Sphincter Law, which is applicable to all muscles, even those belonging to nonpregnant people.

  Sphincter muscles open more easily in an atmosphere where the woman feels safe.

  The muscles are more likely to open if the woman feels positive about herself.

  The muscles may close if the woman feels threatened.

  But I didn’t feel threatened! And I did feel positive about myself! I was actually feeling incredibly positive about myself that I’d (a) come up with this solution and (b) dared to implement it. I tried a third time, and a fourth. I failed. I failed to pee into an airsickness bag while eight strangers slept within a two-foot radius of me.

  Whenever I’ve told this story to friends, I lose the sympathies of certain reasonable people. “I would have just woken them up,” these people will say. “Fuck them, you had to pee.” I’ve defended myself as I define myself: I am a person who never wants to put another person out. I did not know these people, but I did know how terrible it is to be woken from a hard-won sleep, especially one that permits you to endure an awkward experience without experiencing it, like flying with total strangers through the night.