The Folded Clock Read online

  We took a cab to MoMA. En route we passed some police installing crowd rails along Fifth Avenue. We quickly deduced: these were preparations for a fancy ball that night. In prior years I would have spun meaning from this confluence of the German artist and me passing a red carpet event in a cab. I would have spun a message from the universe: someday I would be famous like the artist and I would be invited to a ball. When I was twenty and visiting Florence and not yet a writer, I had received such a message. I’d planned to eat at a restaurant where all the renowned Florentine writers ate (ask me to name a Florentine writer). One day of each year (I read in my guidebook) the restaurant was closed for a literary awards ceremony. The day I tried to go to the restaurant was the day it was closed for the literary awards ceremony. I couldn’t have been more thrilled. The universe was telling me: I was going to be an award-winning writer!

  Today I received no such message about my future.

  The German artist and I arrived at MoMA. We wandered around the show of another German artist, Sigmar Polke. I owned a book by Sigmar Polke, though to be honest I wasn’t sure if Sigmar Polke was a woman or a man. I study so much, I read so much, yet there seems no avoiding these moments when the basics escape me.

  In MoMA it was unclear how much space the German artist wanted or did not want when looking at art, whether or not she wanted to be alone. I stayed close but tried not to hover. The German artist, unsurprisingly, knew a lot of people in the museum. She stopped to say hello to this person and that. I’d wander off and reconnect with her when she was by herself again.

  “He should be dead,” she said of one man with whom she’d just been speaking.

  This man was also an artist. Last she’d heard, she said, he’d been terribly sick. His appearance in this gallery, she seemed to imply, nearly qualified as a resurrection. Fittingly he’d been brought back to life not in a church but in a museum. Or maybe not so fittingly. Most artists I know hate MoMA.

  We stopped in front of a painting of socks. I proclaimed Polke to have a good sense of humor.

  “That man,” she said of the man who should be dead, “he told me that, in person, Polke wasn’t funny.” With the artist I could not tell: was she delivering a plain piece of information, or was she schooling me?

  We hurried through the rest of the show because MoMA was closing. The guards funneled us through a hallway where we re-encountered the man who should be dead.

  I asked the man who should be dead about Polke’s supposed lack of funniness. I wondered if maybe he wasn’t funny in the manner of certain Germans. As Primo Levi said of Germans, “They love order, systems, bureaucracy; even more, although rough and irascible blockheads, they cherish an infantile delight in glittering, many-colored objects.”

  The man who should be dead conceded—maybe, in that sense, Polke might be considered funny. He knew a lot of famous people, this man, because his family had run a hotel in the Alps; Picasso had stayed there, too.

  The German artist asked, Was Picasso funny?

  No, said the man, Picasso was a ladies’ man. He was not funny.

  We mused for a while on the topic of “Were They Funny?” Shakespeare, was he funny in person? Was Manet? Was Rilke? All of these dead people, were they funny or not? You couldn’t tell by their work what it would have been like to hang out with them in person. I couldn’t tell by the German artist’s work what it would be like to hang out with her in person. It was different than I’d expected for sure, and all day long I’d been managing the shortfall.

  After a stop in the MoMA design store, during which the German artist asked to see a Scandinavian juicer I liked, and which she clearly didn’t, we exited onto the street. On the corner of Fifty-third and Sixth, we parted ways. Our good-bye was unceremonious, as though we’d see each other in three days or never again. At this same intersection is a Hilton Hotel where, when I was twenty-three, I used to cash the paychecks I received from my temp job as a secretary. This corner signifies a time when I was young and I was broke and I was using a hotel as a bank, and yet I felt certain that my line was true. Now I no longer have strong gut feelings about rightness or wrongness. I lack quick conviction. I can no longer process the messages the universe is sending me, if it is sending me messages at all. I don’t even know whether or not today I made a friend.

  Today we climbed Blue Hill. Tonight we went to the Blue Hill Fair. The Blue Hill Fair is the fair E. B. White writes about in Charlotte’s Web. A blue moon rose over the animal barns. I’ve been told more than once what it means for a moon to be blue. A friend told me a moon is blue when it is the second full moon in less than a month. An excess of brightness is a blueness. All day I was blue. The weather is too beautiful. The summer was too beautiful. In two days we return to New York where, when the weather is beautiful, I become frustrated. What to do with this weather in the city? There is no good use for it.

  At the top of the Ferris wheel you can see the ocean as though from a plane that is flying away from it. Usually my daughter and I ride in the same carriage, and we say good-bye to the ocean together. But now my daughter is eight. She wants to ride the Ferris wheel with her friends. My husband lobbied for us to ride as a family. I fought for her to be apart. I said, “She wants to ride with her friends.”

  We rode the Ferris wheel separately. I didn’t say to her, “Be sure to say good-bye to the ocean!” I didn’t need a cohort. I could say good-bye to the ocean alone, and probably that would be for the best. Come the end of August, I grow pathetic. In the air I experienced the accumulation of time traumas as we spin around and around. I am twelve years old at the top of that Ferris wheel and I am equally ninety.

  A few cars behind me, my daughter laughed and feigned terror with her friends. I am the only ridiculous person left in my family now, I realized. I am the only one crying on a carnival ride.

  We disembarked. We stood in the dust and contemplated our next snack. My daughter walked with me to the cotton candy. “Did you say good-bye to the ocean?” she asked. I tried not to hug her. I told her that I did say good-bye to it. She told me she did too. I was so thrilled that she was laughing with her friends while remaining true to her blueness. We are bright and we are blue, my daughter and I. We are excessive and we hide it. We are too often full.

  Today I flew home from Italy after living for a month with a ghost. This Italian ghost and I had a not-so-great relationship, though arguably I got along with her better than did the others at the art colony. One man, the father of four children who famously, and to the presumed irritation of his wife, never had insomnia, the ghost woke up every night at four a.m. A woman fell down a flight of stone stairs and landed on her face. Another woman was beset by a monthlong headache. Another had a nightmare in which the ghost sat on the edge of her bed and unfolded a letter containing bad news about her kids. Another was sent to the hospital for a week with a hemorrhage (she’d been trying for years to have a baby).

  If pressed to say a little bit about this ghost and her issues, I’d wager she had a problem with children. Maybe her objections were aesthetic, i.e., maybe she felt toward them as the German artist did—she simply disliked them and found boring people who had them.

  Or maybe (given she was a ghost, clearly an unhappy one) her children had died before she did and she still, understandably, hundreds of years later, wasn’t over it. I honestly couldn’t tell if she was malicious or just incapable of keeping her emotions to herself. Like a few alive people I know, she unwittingly contaminated everyone who entered her radius. Regardless of her motives, the energy she generated and dispersed made me, for the month I was living in proximity to her, afraid for my children. Every moment I spent in this castle, I did not consciously believe but on some less conscious level totally believed, would increase the likelihood that they would die while I was gone.

  A few weeks into my stay, I woke up in the middle of the night (I did not check the time) to see the ghost—a woman, black and opaque and wearing a long dress—floating horizontal above m
e, as if the poor thing were wondering what it might be like to lie down and go to sleep. She looked at me. I looked at her. I should have been scared, I guess, but instead I was calm. She and I shared a silent moment of interspecies respect. We wordlessly agreed, as I have agreed with bears I’ve come upon in the woods, not to mess with each other. Then she disappeared.

  After our encounter I was no longer so worried about my children. But I remained (though living in the hills of Italy and being fed two incredible Italian meals a day with unlimited access to a very fine Italian espresso machine) exhausted. I suffered from a low-grade, unspecified malaise. Was it emotional? Was it physical? The symptoms were impossible to sort. They felt barometric in nature. My mind/body had become a gadget obliged to record the heaviness of the atmosphere. I felt put-upon, overtaxed. I did not hemorrhage like the other woman, but my female problem, the muscle down there, dormant for two years, tightened up. I stopped reading books. My personality, as it had when I’d last had that pain, went into hiding. But it wasn’t just the pain that oppressed me. Emotionally, I was a muffled version of myself. I was a jam jar inside an aquarium. Between me and the world were many thick panes of glass.

  Finally, it was time to leave. I rode a van to the nearest town. I boarded a train. My friend from London, who’d joined me for my last night at the castle, scrolled through the photos she’d taken. I’d shown her the bedroom where the woman had dreamt of the ghost reading the letter containing bad news about her children. In this place, laughingly (because neither of us wanted to admit that we believed in the ghost), my London friend had snapped a photo of me. On the train we looked at this photo and could not believe what we saw. My body was in focus and so was the room. But my head, the right side of it, was a pixilated mess. It looked as though a snake were exploding out of my skull.

  My London friend and I freaked out. We freaked out all the way to Rome. We wondered if I were possessed. Among other things, this presented certain legal problems. Would I have to declare my “possession” on my customs form? I’d considered smuggling truffles back in my suitcase, but then I’d heard the fine could be $10,000 for transporting meat or produce into the United States. Did a ghost count as a vegetable or meat? What kind of fee would my government exact from me for running over its borders a ghost?

  I soon stopped worrying. In Rome my personality reengaged with a vengeance, suggesting the ghost had chosen not to emigrate. I endorphin-surfed like a person who’d escaped death, because I had. I’d been hanging out with a really blue dead lady who’d maybe lost her children, and over the long term, what a drag that had been. Now I was back among the living. I felt synaptically dangerous; after all of these weeks with my hubs blunted, I was extra-sensitive, like all I needed to do was desire a connection and it would happen. I chatted with our waiter at dinner and learned that he and I shared a birthday. I’d planned, while in Rome, to find the apartment of a dead French actress I wanted to write a book about, but now it seemed certain that she would find me. Every vintage store I entered, I expected to find photos of her or old movie posters with her on them or old clothing with her name tag sewed into the laundry. (This didn’t happen.) I thought of the landscape architect I’d met in Rome a few months earlier—she was literally the only person I knew in the city—and felt confident, even amidst the millions of summer tourists, that we would cross paths. We didn’t, but the next day on the airplane back to New York, I sat in front of a chatty American man. His seatmate was also American and chatty. I listened to them get to know each other. He mentioned, at one point, the landscape architect. He’d just visited her studio in Rome; he said, kind of bitchily, “She’s from a competing firm” (he was also a landscape architect) and that her most recent project was “basically just maps on a wall.” Then his seatmate, who turned out to be a novelist, told him about studying with a woman I’d just been living with for the past month in the castle.

  If I’d failed to get along with the ghost, I’d really failed to get along with this woman. I have no idea why. She was brilliant and lovely but something between us grated. We never had our bear-in-the-woods moment. We never silently agreed to tolerate each other. In her erudite presence I talked only about reality TV and trashy novels and the Amanda Knox case. Whenever we spoke about the most benign topic—the pleasure of small rooms, for example—it seemed that we were, in fact, engaging in a not-so-veiled battle. Even though I am a professionally certified conflict avoider, with her I was unable not to take the dangled bait (and unable to see her plain conversation as anything but bait). I left our encounters mystified. I was willing to accept that maybe I just rubbed her the wrong way, and she me. Later I would write to this woman, feeling bad about how I’d behaved toward her at the castle. I apologized for being so sensitive and demented, and blamed it on the crazy semester I’d had, the deadlines and the intense barometric pressure of my regular life. She wrote back an incredibly gracious note and confessed to having had a similar experience a few years earlier. “The exhaustion made me very vulnerable to people around me, who, I’m sure, meant no harm, but everywhere I saw insults and infamy!”

  Maybe this was also true of the Italian ghost. She meant me no harm. Possibly she didn’t even exist. I’d mistaken my exhaustion for a long-dead woman who’d lost her children. To be melancholy is to be self-haunted, and among the many reasons this is an unsatisfactory explanation for living inside a jam jar inside an aquarium, foremost among them is that there are no good stories to tell of your bleak time in a beautiful place, and no specter to blame for the fact that happiness, though it should have been inescapable, evaded you.

  Today I browsed for skirt suits online. During the summer this qualifies as an unusual event, sort of like not cracking a beer at 3:55 p.m. My studio is located just beyond the winds of our house’s Wi-Fi signal. The occasional gust will blacken my signal delta, and my e-mail will ping into my in-box, but this is rare, an accident of weather. Even at their strongest the signal’s bands are adverse to multitasking. If someone is sending an e-mail, another someone cannot shop for wool jumpers on eBay. A week after arriving, I come to understand the Internet as I understand my well water. You cannot bathe and do laundry. You cannot stream and shop. Resources get taxed beyond the limits of recovery. By sundown, the pumps are sucking air.

  Each June, when we arrive in the Internet-challenged wilderness, I adjust to my new deprivation pretty seamlessly, much as I adjust to showering once every five days. The first week in my studio I was miffed that I couldn’t search for the nautical flag alphabet while writing a piece that had nothing to do with nautical flags. I almost needed to know so badly that I unplugged my computer and walked it around to the north side of the porch, and crouched under the Bee Tree (a tree filled with so many bees that it hums like a cavity drill), and Googled nautical flags. I struggled with my desire. How badly did I need to know this? Not that badly, I decided. Within a few minutes, I’d lost the urgency. I remain curious about nautical flags—like, right now, I’m curious again—but it’s been seven weeks since it first occurred to me to be curious, and here I am, still not knowing.

  This makes me sad. It worries me. I want to want to know things (or at least those things that don’t involve shark sightings in Maine). I want to want the urgency. I am always wanting urgency. The best part of being pregnant is how urgent your desires become. You need to eat right now. Not thirty seconds from right now. Thirty seconds from now will not do. My husband didn’t immediately understand this. Once I picked a stupid fight with him while I was trying to feed myself. He was talking to me and wanting me to talk back (really! He expected me to talk to him!) while I was trying to push a knife through a loaf of locally crafted spelt bread. My thirty seconds expired. I pitched the spelt loaf at him. I hit his hand. Spelt loaves in these parts are no joke. They weigh as much as cement blocks. I drew blood. I was unapologetic. You do not mess with my need. I am usually so flexible. I am usually so quick to sublimate my desires. Here was a desire my mind could not override. Politene
ss and conflict avoidance were no longer compelling end goals. I found this fascinating and full of future potential (except that my husband threatened, after I threw the bread at him, to divorce me). My future identity, I momentarily thought, might operate on an entirely different premise. Not How can I be selflessly of service to you, the people of the world? but Fuck you all, this is what I need.

  Internet curiosity is an area of my life where my needs can always come first. These needs often come at the expense of other needs (the need to do my work), but I can, and I do, become more and more impetuous and insane as a form of luxurious desire fulfillment. I rewatched Fatal Attraction and thought I must search for Anne Klein ’80s wool overcoats. This type of search usually nets me a random object—a pair of vintage silver knife rests shaped like foxes—regardless, my intense need to search and find, even if I locate something I didn’t know I was looking for, this is a satisfaction in and of itself. This is proof that I am giving myself what I need, when I need it. This is proof that I experience need in the first place.

  When I have been off the Internet for a while, however, I forget how to need. I forget how to be urgently curious. Today I took my computer to a friend’s house so I could work while the kids swam. The wireless at this house is abundant. I felt it on my skin, in my hair. I realized I could go online and my bandwidth consumption wouldn’t even register. Theirs was a Korean bathhouse of bandwidth. I opened my browser. And then I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t have a hankering for anything. I thought maybe I might replace some of my grandmother’s Buttercup Spode dinner plates, one of which is unfixably cracked, but my heart wasn’t in the hunt. What about gossip? What about celebrities, what about politics? I skidded through the usual websites, but my clicking was obligatory.

  I recalled being a kid and my mom taking me to a plant nursery called Skillins. I hated Skillins. As a child I was gifted at finding objects to desire. To take me to basically any store was to court my begging for items I had no business wanting. It was desire for the sake of desire. The plant nursery, however, confounded my meta-desire mechanism. I tried and I tried, but I could never find a single thing to desire at Skillins, not even in the room with the ceramic frog planters. I didn’t want anything, and because I didn’t want anything, Skillins made me anxious. In Skillins I experienced what it was to desperately want to want something, and to find nothing to want. Even as a kid, this struck me as the worst possible way to feel. I sometimes think this is why I became a writer. Here was a way to regularly exercise my desire. I could desire to do this thing that no one does perfectly, and by doing it and doing it I could learn how to desire more, and better. Here was an activity that would always leave me wanting. When I want something—that to me is not youth exactly, but the opposite of death. That to me is a way to always feel like I am nowhere near the end.