The Folded Clock Read online

  Today I got stuck in an airport due to weather. Formerly, this situation would inspire me to action. I would rent a car. I would drive rather than wait for the fog or rain or snow to clear. Now I have learned the rewards of waiting. I wait.

  In my thirties, I did not wait. Once I was stuck in Nashville due to an impending blizzard. The people at the airport were so pessimistic about the chances of us ever leaving. Like ever. More than the pessimism of the weather, I could not stand the pessimism of these people. I decided, rather than waiting for their attitudes to improve, that I would to drive to New York.

  On the concrete island waiting for any rental car shuttle to appear, a man approached me. Was I on the canceled flight to New York? He asked. I was. He suggested we could do some sightseeing in Nashville together, since we’d probably be stranded here until tomorrow.

  “Screw that,” I told him. “I’m driving home.”

  He thought about this.

  “Want some company?” he said.

  He seemed decent enough, a short-haired man in innocuous clothes. What harm could he really do to me? You can’t rape a person while they’re driving.

  He told me—he sensed I needed swaying—that he was a cop in Staten Island. This meant I was safe from assault and murder but not, as it turned out, dullness or misogyny.

  I agreed.

  We rented a car. We started driving. He drove. I’m bad with maps so instead I hosted. I instilled our car with a party mood. I asked him questions. Eventually it emerged that this man, whose name might have been, or might as well have been, Tom, was not technically a cop. He was a rent-a-cop, and even then hardly ever. Primarily Tom made his living as a stunt diver for movies. Not a diver from the sky, but a diver in the water. He only worked in New York. I didn’t imagine there was much movie work for stunt scuba divers in New York, but he reassured me that there was. He’d played a Navy SEAL in a movie I’d never heard of, and an underwater cat burglar in a movie I’d never heard of.

  Soon, not too far into the Blue Ridge Mountains, we started to talk about his love life. I asked Tom if he had a girlfriend. He didn’t, not really, but he did have an ex-wife about whom he spoke rancorously. She was beautiful, and selfish, and a cheat. In the divorce she “stole” his house, the one he’d bought with his hard-won savings as a stunt diver before he married her. Now he lived in a small apartment and was broke.

  Given the depth of his bitterness and his anger toward this woman, I suspected that she was not the first to disappoint him. Maybe I so intuitively arrived at this suspicion because he qualified his ex-wife’s every evil move by “that’s just what women do” and “she’s a bitch like the rest of them.” I encouraged him, diver that he was, to do some deep dives into his romantic past. I appointed myself his co—scuba therapist. I quickly identified his problem. He was dating the wrong kind of girl. By his estimation (and using his glossary terms), he exclusively dated “skeezers” and “cheats” and “bitches.” No wonder he thought poorly of women.

  Tom, however (or this is what I told him, on hour three of our twenty-hour drive), wanted to love someone who wasn’t a skeezer; he just didn’t know how to identify these women. Furthermore, I told him, I was uniquely qualified to give him advice on these matters, because I’d been him once, dating and marrying the wrong men. My current husband, when I’d met him, admittedly “wasn’t my type,” nor was I his. I’d shown him photos of the even younger me and he’d said, “I never would have dated you.”

  I made it my project to teach Tom how to reset his erotic compass, as my husband and I had reset ours. I was so confident I’d succeed in turning Tom that I projected into the future. I’d rid the world of misogynists one glum, angry dude at a time. I’d do it surreptitiously, since misogynists wouldn’t know that they needed my services. I’d have to trick them into a cure. I’d prowl airports during poor weather and prey on the quietly furious. I’d lock them into lengthy car rides, and then I’d preach my gospel.

  And so I made it my project, on this car ride, to teach Tom the glories of certain women. I would act out the prototype. Funny! Self-deprecating! Curious and witty! Not remotely a skeezer yet still worth fucking! What might have been an interminable and hellish trip acquired a purpose. We were having a high time, and I was making lots of gender correction headway.

  Until I wasn’t. We pulled into a McDonald’s after eight hours in the mountains, at which point I discovered my wallet missing. I’d paid for the last round of gas, four hours back. I’d left my wallet at the station. I freaked out. Not because I’d lost my wallet (this was nothing new). I freaked because I now had to rely on this man, this angry man, to get me home. I had to rely on him to feed me.

  We worked out the terms. He’d keep a running tab of what he spent on me, and I’d send him a check when we got back to the city. But already his attitude had started to sour. I was just another mooching woman. Did I think he was an idiot? Did I think he was so easy to fool again?

  He went inside the McDonald’s and reappeared with hardly any food. I swear he ate virtually no dinner so that he had an excuse to spend no money on mine. In the parking lot, we each consumed a one-patty hamburger and a small container of fries. He paid for another tank of gas. We got back on the highway, neither of us very chatty.

  We were still in Tennessee.

  We were still in Tennessee when we became too tired to drive. No hotels emerged from the extended darkness until finally one did. Unfortunately this hotel had only one room. I pushed the clerk—was he certain he didn’t have another? My experience is that hotels always have more rooms than they’re willing to admit.

  “Well,” the clerk said, “we do have another room, but I wouldn’t recommend staying in it.” The last resident had stayed there for two weeks with his cat, and the cat had peed everywhere. “We haven’t had a chance to replace the carpets yet.”

  Tom said we’d take the room. Oh gallant Tom! My heart warmed toward him again. Sometimes, I thought, macho guys are a bonus to have around; they can be counted on to behave chivalrously, and to sleep in the cat piss room. For all of my gender trailblazing that day, I was conveniently happy to be a female who needed saving.

  The desk person showed us to the cat room. It stank from the hallway. It stank so badly that I am smelling that room right now. Fermented animal urine is as sharp as industrial ammonia. The smell made my eyes water. The room was so uninhabitable, I figured that Tom would chicken out, thus forcing us to sleep in the same room.

  But Tom stayed strong.

  “You can sleep here,” he said.

  I was so tired I almost started crying in the hallway. I didn’t. He was no stereotypical man, and I was no stereotypical woman. I waited until I was lying in the disgusting bed to cry, even though by then I was so pissed I no longer felt like crying. But I forced myself to cry and to keep crying because I figured crying would exhaust me and help me pass out despite the fact that I was basically shut inside a bottle of smelling salts. I lay in that stinking room and hated Tom. What a stingy fucking asshole he was! I understood the story of his marriage quite differently now. No wonder his wife stayed out late with her girlfriends and slept with other men. Tom was not only bitter and angry, he had a charcoal heart. His ex-wife probably took his house in the divorce as compensation for the deprivation she’d endured during their marriage. He’d lorded over her his every act of “generosity.” He’d probably loved her parsimoniously, too. He’d given her the barest minimum and then blamed her for taking everything.

  I raged myself to sleep. I awoke in a milder mood. I drank bad lobby coffee, I still hated the fuck out of Tom, but as we drove within a hundred miles of New York, and the future of our relationship could be measured in minutes, I found it in my heart to pity him again. In the southern wilds of New Jersey, I made one final attempt to rectify his misapprehensions about women. By the time we arrived at his house at Staten Island, we were buddies once more. As we were saying good-bye, he said, “I’ve never met anyone like you,” probably
meaning, “I’ve never met a woman who, after I made her sleep in a room soaked in cat piss, was so nice to me the next morning.” What a miracle I was. He gave me his address so I could mail him the money I owed. I gave him my phone number so we could meet for a drink in the city and revel in our comedy of errors. Among the many ironies of our trip, New York, when we arrived, was snowless.

  And then what happened? I sent Tom a check right away. I was no mooch. He left a message to thank me, and asked me to call him back so that we could schedule that drink. I didn’t return his call immediately. Would I have ever returned it? I’m not sure. Regardless, he called again. Again I didn’t call him back. He called a third time, and a fourth, his messages growing increasingly angry. I understood why. He felt hurt and betrayed. I’d been so nice to him, so responsive and so giving and so concerned about his life. He’d told me, a stranger, his secrets, and now I was blowing him off.

  It was true. I was blowing him off. I couldn’t deal with Tom, or the problem of Tom. He’d ceased to interest me as a project. He was doomed to a life of romantic dissatisfaction. He was a waste of my time. I blew him off knowing that, in doing so, I was confirming his worst beliefs about my gender. I took an inexplicable pleasure in knowing that I’d probably intensified his darkest suspicions. I’d given him hope. Find a woman who’s smart and funny, rather than one who is obsessed by money and looks, I’d told him, and you’ll be so much happier. And then I’d behaved as deceitfully as the skeeziest of skeezers, who, to their credit, were at least up front about their low designs. I’d pitched myself, and my kind, as dependable and caring and forthright. I’d probably proved to be the most deceitful woman of all.

  Finally Tom stopped leaving messages. Around this same time, my wallet was returned. The clerk at the gas station in the Blue Ridge Mountains had sent it to the address on my driver’s license, no longer my address, and it had been forwarded to my new apartment. I marveled at how strangers are such decent people. I lose my wallet nearly once a month, and always it is returned to me, and always with the money still inside.

  Today we are in Rome because our children, ostensibly in school in Berlin, have nothing but vacations. The weather has turned dour in Germany, and we cannot stay for so many days inside our little house without people going mad. One can play only so many card games and eat so many wet crackers before the collective familial humor flags. This was our thinking when we bought cheap plane tickets and headed to Rome. Better to be in sunny Rome than to be in wet, cold Berlin. Unfortunately Rome was equally wet and cold. Our sightseeing consisted of running from shelter to shelter.

  Now it is night. Our shoes are balanced upside down atop the electric heater. Our socks are dry and hard. The kids are asleep and my husband and I are in bed watching YouTube videos of gurus. We watched Werner Erhard, founder of est, interviewed on The Tonight Show by John Denver. We marveled at how we were able to do this. Here we are in Rome in 2013, and we’re watching a video of Werner Erhard and John Denver from 1973! Meanwhile, the TV in our room doesn’t get more than two channels. All the news is from today. This seemed so limited, suddenly, such a narrow notion of news.

  After John Denver we watched a video of a woman from the Landmark Forum (what I understand to be the corporate offspring of Erhard’s est) pitch her wares on a national morning talk show.

  She said, “It all comes down to these three questions.”

  Then we watched a video of my best friend’s guru, the one who was enlightened by the sight of a mouse.

  The guru said, “It all comes down to these four questions.”

  My friend’s guru was soft-spoken and spacey; maybe she was stoned. She stared at her interviewer as though dopily in love or trying to hypnotize him. She wore what might have been robes. The interviewer asked her many more than four questions; she feigned deep thoughtfulness at each and then replied, as though the answer had never before occurred to her, yes.

  I was shocked. As I’ve said, this guru had really improved my friend’s life. I’d been hoping, when I got around to it and had the time, that I’d let her improve my life, too. But this guru, she had no game. She was like a zombie on pain pills. When I someday follow a person, I want to be impressed by their effortless bullshit passing and dribbling and slam-dunking; I want them to be a Harlem Globetrotter of rhetoric and presentation and spin. I want them, like that world-famous pickpocket (whose YouTube videos we watched in order to learn how to avoid being robbed at the Colosseum), to so deeply understand me, and how I perceive the world, that I can be uniquely distracted, fooled, and fleeced. I would happily pay with my wallet (and my watch and my wedding ring) to be understood as deeply as this pickpocket understands his marks.

  I’d hoped this guru would understand me like that pickpocket. But to do this she would have to touch me, fondle me, reach into my front pocket, press her leg against my thigh. Maybe in person she does this. I was not, to be fair, experiencing her in person. But in person I could not imagine she would be much different than the human I experienced on my computer screen. We were at an impasse, this guru and I. Maybe I was at an impasse with all gurus. Maybe I was looking to the wrong people for answers and clarity. I turned instead to a guidebook for guidance. A real guidebook. Someone had left it in the common bookshelf of our hotel’s dining room. It was called Getting Along in Italian. According to Getting Along in Italian, one can ably survive a vacation and probably a whole life knowing how to ask and answer a few pages’ worth of questions. I narrowed the options down to these essentials:

  Are you alone?

  Where is my key?

  This is a violation.

  I have pain in my chest.

  There is a mistake in the bill.

  Where are the lifeboats?

  Did anyone call me?

  Did anyone come for me?

  I want a felt hat.

  I want a novel.

  I want a priest.

  Today I almost told a woman I barely know that I loved her. This woman is the mother of my son’s friend. She and I are also sort of friends. It’s hard to make new friends at this stage of life, but she and I are trying. I always want new friends, but I know what it takes to make a good one. It takes years, decades, and back when I was younger I had hours and hours of those days of those years of those decades to dedicate to getting to know a friend. Now I have minutes of hours of days of years of decades. To acquire a new friend under these time restrictions would require three consecutive lives.

  To compensate for the time we don’t have, this woman and I use the time we do have deeply. We tunnel in. We confess to the hand jobs we gave during our intern years to executives on commuter trains; we confess to coke habits. We talk about anxiety and marital confusion. We know such strange details about each other given the basic details that remain unknown. Are her parents alive? Where did she get married? What is her job?

  The commonplace details we do discuss involve child logistics. I will get the boys and bring them here and I will leave them for an hour and then you can pick up yours and bring mine home unless you don’t have time to bring mine home in which case my husband can pick mine up and if you can’t pick up yours it’s no big deal because my husband can take yours home with us and you can pick yours up whenever and we can even feed yours dinner.

  These conversations often become extremely confusing. She thinks out her hypotheticals aloud, and I can’t tell what is process and what is proposition. Sometimes I stop listening. Sometimes I hold the phone to my ear and make food with the other, or read e-mail, or fold laundry while she is working through the many permutations of tomorrow. Sometimes, when she starts to say good-bye, I have no idea what we’ve decided.

  Today we were having one of these phone conversations. She talked, I emptied the dishwasher; she kept talking, I boiled water. Then she said good-bye. I started to say, “Bye, I love you.” The words were half out of my mouth before I stopped them. I hung up, panicked. What would have happened if I hadn’t caught myself? So many rules would h
ave been violated. You cannot tell a person you love them too early. You shouldn’t tell a person you don’t love that you do. More shamefully she’d surmise, after the awkwardness, that I’d stopped listening to her, and that I’d entered that rote response zone, and I’d told her I loved her because I thought she was my husband. She’d know that I don’t always listen to my husband when we’re on the phone together, and that when I say “I love you,” it sometimes means I am too distracted by our home life to listen to him right now, because he’s out of town and I am not, and I am doing the work that he is not here to do (and which he does for me when I am not here to do it), and so I am really so busy that I don’t have time to hear about his day. I just want to say, “I love you,” which I do mean, I do love him, but I need him to be quieter so I can keep our house and family in order. I sometimes say, “I love you,” not to open up an emotional vein but to cauterize it, keep it full of blood.