The Folded Clock Page 3

  Today I spoke with a person about a book we’d both read. The book had been billed to him as “original” and he was complaining about how not-original this book was. I personally thought the book was original enough; besides, what does it mean to be original anymore? Hasn’t originality obsolesced? Worrying about originality is like worrying about the best place to hang your wall phone.

  This person said, of the book’s unoriginality, “I mean, we all read Walden in college.”

  I did not read Walden in college. I did not read Walden ever, though I recently pretended to a Spanish translator of Walden that I had read it. I have been to Walden Pond; I’ve toured Thoreau’s cabin where he wrote Walden. As a result of that visit (and after reading a few online excerpts), I’ve felt okay occasionally describing my diary as a “contemporary take on Walden.” Like Thoreau, I am pretending that I wrote this diary over the course of a year, when in fact I wrote it over the course of two years, two months, and two days (give or take). Like Thoreau, I wanted to “live deliberately” and was worried that if I did not I might, “when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Like Thoreau, I wanted to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”

  Unlike Thoreau, I have no fondness for sparse living. I do not covet hardship. I liked the idea of Walden, however, because it was written in a cabin in the woods. It’s a sort-of nature book that took place (at least the writing did) inside. Interiors are where I do my exploring. Interiors are my nature. I am an outdoorsman of the indoors. In the summer, when the teaching is done and I’m in Maine, I work in a studio that was once a chicken shack and is now scarcely better than one, that is unheated not by design but because it’s too catawumpus to support much modern infrastructure. When I am there I am happiest. In my outbuilding I am sucking out optimum marrow.

  New York, however, is not so full of marrow-sucking places, not for me. I am the one being sucked empty in New York; I am harried, I grow thin, I develop face rashes. I persist in staying there for nostalgic reasons; I always dreamed of living in New York, and I am intent on realizing (and realizing and realizing, to the point of total body dissolution) this dream. At a certain point, you ask yourself, “Is this where I am going to die?” and the answer is yes. You have, without realizing it, committed your body to a plot.

  But I have found one place in New York that calms me. Café Sabarsky is in the Neue Galerie, itself in an old mansion on Fifth Avenue. Café Sabarsky invokes the ’20s intellectual and artistic Austro-Hungarian wildness before all the real hell broke loose. My great-grandfather was from Austro-Hungary, anecdotally, “the Hungarian part.” His wife came from Vienna. This great-grandfather, once he relocated to America, ran the employee cafeteria at the Royal Typewriter factory in Hartford, Connecticut. He wasn’t an intellectual, but he fed people who made the typewriters on which intellectuals (maybe? a handful?) worked. He was a gourmand; he preached, via his food, the fatty, pickled gospel of the old empire. He made my father, when he was a child, for lunch, green tomato and pork sandwiches. He used an old meat grinder—I own it now—to grind dill pickles and bologna before mixing them with mayonnaise.

  The connection, I realize, is super slim, but it’s enough to permit me to visit Café Sabarsky and believe that I am entitled to sit in an Adolf Loos chair beneath the Josef Hoffmann ceiling lights and eat a weisswurst mit brezen. These are my people, people. My fondness for cured meats and sauerkraut (in college, broke, I ate it with my fingers from a can), my object lust for Vienna Secessionist/Bauhaus anything, these are not superficially nostalgic graspings for the debauched and brainy scene we (as in We of Café Sabarsky) wish we’d experienced. This is my true heritage speaking through my hunger.

  Only very recently—like last month—did I learn that my great-grandfather was not of Hungarian origin. A Croatian set me to rights when he asked about my name, and I told him it was Hungarian. Julavits is not a Hungarian surname, he told me. Julavits is likely Bosnian, this Croatian concluded after some research. Here, more thoroughly, is what he found.

  That -its is a Hungarian way how to write the end of the south Slavic surnames

  So your grand-grandfather was (or his father etc.) emigrant also in Hungary…. Maybe his identity was in some way unclear also to him. I would say that your surname probably originally was Đulabić (read: Julabich)

  Đul means rose and

  Đulab (Julab) is, some said, red sweet apple (Turkish-Persian word).

  I found small willage in Bosnia near Tuzla called Đulabići, from where seems the surname coming.

  The Croatian also discovered this, written by the wife of my grandfather’s brother, and posted on a lineage website I had never visited:

  My father-in-law came from “Vezprem” (all he ever told us) in 1905 at the age of 17. Came to Ellis Island, then Hartford, where he catered the Colt Firearm Factory restaurant. He said he left a mother, who borrowed money to send him to the States, because he was going to have to serve in the German army. His father, a jaeger (woodsman) was killed in 1894 when a tree fell on him.

  Does this mean my great-grandfather didn’t work at the Royal Typewriter factory but at a gun factory? (This would explain why his old typewriter—also in my possession—is a Corona.) Does this mean he maybe was more Hungarian than not (Veszprém is in Hungary)? Does this mean he was Jewish? (“Joseph Julavits” does not appear on any of the Ellis Island ship manifests; the closest match is a person named Harry Judovitz, arrived in 1905 from Budapest, denoted as “Hungarian; Hebrew.”) Who knows. The Croatian speaks the truth: Maybe his identity was in some way unclear also to him. In the midst of such uncertainty, I cling not to what I know, but what I feel. I feel I belong in Café Sabarsky. An inexcusable nostalgia drives me there, I confess it; I have no nobler claim. I went there for lunch a few years ago when I suspected I was pregnant. I told myself, “If I am pregnant, and if it is a son, I will give him the middle name of Sabarsky.” I was not pregnant. When I did eventually have a son, I gave him the middle name Dabelstein, the maiden name of my maternal grandmother. His full name is now basically that of a law firm, but fuck it. Mine is now maybe the name of a Bosnian. I recently asked my other grandmother about her mother-in-law, my Viennese great-grandmother who made strudel and remains, despite the meddlings of the Croatian, 100 percent Viennese. What was her maiden name? Where in Vienna did she live? “Her maiden name was Korny,” my grandmother said. “Her family was so poor, they lived seven days in a ditch.”

  Today I spun tops with my son. We did this for six straight hours. So much of the pleasure of hanging out with children is successfully losing yourself, if only for a minute or two, in the activity with which you’re both engaged. Suddenly, I am drawing a shoe that makes us both happy. The cogs of the day smoothly and quickly turn. Once I’ve finished the shoe, however, I am back to wondering—how can this day not mostly involve my waiting for it to be over? Yet when this day has ended my child will be older and I will be nearer to dead. Why should I wish for this to happen any sooner than it already will?

  But I genuinely had fun spinning tops with my son. I did not have to concentrate so hard in order to effortlessly enjoy myself, and to forget the admittedly stupid things that otherwise preoccupied me. I wondered what it was about tops, and why they were so engrossing, and why spinning them so relaxed me. After I put my son to bed, I decided to watch a documentary about famed modern designer couple Charles and Ray Eames. I thought theirs would be the story of a happy marriage (it wasn’t entirely). I thought a movie about their lives would be like watching The Bachelorette finale but with better furniture. In this documentary, a short film made by Charles is mentioned, a film called—I couldn’t believe it—Tops. The film is all about tops and the eternal appeal of tops. I found the film on YouTube, but I didn’t watch it. It was late and I was tired. Besides, I knew what I needed to know about tops, i.e., that one of the most respected design minds of the twentieth century had validated, on film, my experience. The Eameses were into the complex beauty of the
everyday object. (“The Eameses saw beauty in everyday objects, like the tumbleweed they hung from their living room ceiling.”) A day, like a top, can be an everyday object. A day, like a top, can be a time-skewing device. A day can also move downward, not only across, as it spins.

  Today I went to the Columbia library for the first time in four months. Despite my regular absences, I have two spots I consider permanently mine. Both are located in a catwalk; both are desks separated from other desks by tall bookshelves. In the bookshelves of the first spot (where I am today) is a series of large bronze volumes called Germanstik. Best I can tell (I do not speak German) this is a Who’s Who in Germany, scanning the years 1960–2007, after which the library’s subscription ran out, or nobody was anybody in Germany anymore. There is a book called Shadows in the Attic, which I thought might be a V. C. Andrews title. I would have so much respect for the Columbia University library if it could count V. C. Andrews among its holdings. But Shadows in the Attic is “A Guide to British Supernatural Fiction” from 1820 to 1950. According to this book, one of the enduring themes of supernatural fiction is “the little people,” which I did not know, but which explains Murakami’s 1Q84 to me a bit better (there are characters in the novel called “the little people”). Shadows in the Attic is useful for other reasons as well. It is highly recommended (by me) as a source for character names and story titles. The following is a list of real authors who, depending on their spiritual disposition, may haunt you from beyond the grave if you repurpose their names for use on fictional characters:

  Oliver Onions

  Harrington Hext (pseudonym for Eden Phillpotts)

  Ernest R. Suffling

  Nina Toye

  Allen Upward

  Weatherby Chesney (pseudonym for C. J. Cutliffe Hynde)

  John Gloag

  W. P. Drury

  Here are some excellent book and story titles that, if appropriated for reuse, may come with the same risk:

  “The Persecution Chalice”

  “A Carnation for an Old Man”

  “In the Cliff Land of the Dane”

  “Another Little Heath-Hound”

  “Uncle Phil on TV”

  “A Blue Pantomime”

  “The House Which Was Rent Free”

  “The Weirdale Assize”

  “A Strange Christmas Game”

  The Carpet with a Hundred Eyes

  “The Haunted Physician”

  “The Case of the Thing That Whimpered”

  Jorkens Borrows Another Whiskey

  I have stolen names and I have stolen titles, two at this point; I intend to steal more. (I will, at a future point, steal the title of this book from my daughter. We will be at lunch following a visit to an Egyptian museum in Berlin; we will have bought a book on hieroglyphics. We will be trying to learn the picture letters, one of which is based on a drawing of folded cloth. “Folded clock?” my daughter will ask. “Folded cloth,” I’ll correct. And then I’ll pickpocket her accident.)

  Once I stole the name of a fetus. I was at a baby shower for a friend, and the table talk came around to names. My friend wasn’t disclosing the names she and her husband were considering; she revealed only that they’d winnowed the choices to two, and each of them had a favorite. She was trying to convince her husband to back her top name candidate. He was trying to do the same to her. I wondered what sort of campaigning was involved. And then I didn’t. In most couples there is the person who wins and the person who doesn’t. The winner isn’t necessarily stronger or smarter or righter. The winner is the person who won’t give up, and the non-winner (“loser” is not the correct word for the person who does not win), at a certain point, realizes the battle is a silly one, and the spoils are not worth the extended warfare. I am the winner in my relationship, which is why I have so much respect for the non-winner. The non-winner, i.e., my husband, doesn’t give a shit whether or not he’s going to win the fight over the new dishwasher’s load capacity, or how to best teach children to calculate military time. I wish I were not always the winner. But this is like wishing I were not a girl.

  The pregnant woman at the shower was the winner in her relationship. Whatever name she wanted, such would be the baby’s name. This did happen. At the shower, however, since she wasn’t disclosing either name candidate, we talked about the names other people she knew were considering for their babies. One of her friends, whose last name was Sheidegger, wanted to name her daughter Violet.

  Violet Sheidegger was the best name I’d ever heard. I urged her to tell her friend (whom I did not know) to name her daughter Violet. The name Violet Sheidegger inspired me to write the short story that gave me my first big publishing break, and which subsequently inspired a person in publishing to pay me a stunning sum of money for my partially finished (actually scarcely begun), and really not very good, first novel. Since I didn’t know this Sheidegger woman, and would likely never meet her, and lived 3,000 miles from her, I didn’t consider it stealing to use a name she hadn’t committed to using, and which, in fact, she did not use.

  I later heard that my friend disapproved of what she considered my “theft.” She believed I’d invaded this stranger’s privacy; I’d stolen what was hers to use or not, as she chose.

  Four years later I also had a daughter. I found her name on a tombstone near our Maine house. I stole it, I guess. This name is not in my family. I have no rights to it or to the story that accompanies it (the woman on the tombstone died unmarried; she was, according to my neighbor, a bootlegger). I thought using her name was an interesting way for my family to take part in the history of our town, but not everyone agreed. My neighbor didn’t accuse me of stealing. He didn’t get mad at me. He just found the whole thing strange.

  Not long after my daughter was born, my husband and I disseminated not only the fact of her birth but other relevant statistics, such as what we intended to call her. My disapproving friend’s husband, the non-winner in the battle to name his daughter, wrote me a congratulation note. He revealed, somewhat mournfully, that his first choice had been the same name I’d chosen for my daughter. He did not accuse me of stealing the name. And I hadn’t, of course, at least not from him. Given his wife’s discretion, I’d had no idea what he’d failed to name his daughter four years ago. But I worried, though this time I was mostly innocent, that I still somehow qualified as a thief.

  Today we marched in our town’s Fourth of July parade. Our float was by far the best—a team of ten (mostly under eight years old) doctors performed a rescue on a sick dolphin, played by a boat builder whom we’d sewn inside a few sheets of sound insulation. The sound insulation had the hand-feel of blubber. It was very realistic to the touch and helped us take our roles seriously. Unfortunately our dolphin became enamored of the crowd and swam very far ahead of our “ambulance,” and did headstands in the middle of the street, and did not appear in need of rescue. Tired of cartwheeling, the dolphin would finally drop to the ground. We’d blow our whistles, run to him with stethoscopes, roll him onto a pair of canvas firewood carriers, and heft him into the back of the ambulance. Then he’d swim off, ready to do cartwheels again. We were the crowd favorite. We were definitely winning first prize in the float contest.

  The judge did not agree. The judge awarded us a second place tie. (Our prize—a $20 bill—was handed to us without pomp at the post-parade BBQ.) Who won first place? We asked the judge. First place, he said, went to the farmers market float.

  The farmers market float consisted of three old men driving three old tractors.

  “I was impressed that they got those old tractors running,” said the judge.

  We shared our second place distinction with the Girl Scout float. The Girl Scouts did nothing but ride in a truck until it was parked and the parade was over, at which point they danced atop the flatbed to “Funky Cold Medina.”

  We smelled a rat. Two of the judge’s daughters were on the Girl Scout float! Coincidence? The farmers market takes place on the judge’s front lawn!
Coincidence? No and no. We drank beer out of rubber work gloves and bitched about the judge. Oh, the corruption! This judge must be deposed! I spent the rest of the day polling everyone I saw, including the woman who works in the general store about the float situation. She’s a native Mainer who doesn’t speak much, or at least she doesn’t speak much to me. When I arrive each summer, I’ve decided that the most respectful way to greet her is to fail to greet her at all. But I solicited her opinion on the parade outcome. She seemed to agree that we’d been screwed. “Yeah,” she said. “Who cares about a bunch of tractors?”

  I felt vindicated—there is no higher word in our land than that of the woman at the general store—until I remembered: The judge is a controversial figure in our town. Her desire for us to win might more accurately be described as her commitment to never, ever side with the judge. The judge had arrived from a big city with big ideas about how to fix everything that was wrong here, in his opinion. He was going to install a ferry system to bring tourists from the national park that was eleven miles away by boat (sixty by land). He wanted to build low-income housing on his back property. (Not even the low-income people in town liked this idea.) I believe at one point he talked about starting a university here. Then he almost burned his barn down by leaving a bag of live stove ashes on the floor. This gave everyone permission to officially discredit him, and then to ease up on him a bit. Now that he’s been proven incompetent, he is tolerated.