The Folded Clock Page 5

Once I failed to receive a pair of chairs from an eBay seller. She’d disappeared, and with my money. I left her phone messages. I e-mailed her. Finally, weeks later, she called me. We spoke at length about her life. She had a chronic female pain condition that flared at times, incapacitating her. Nothing eased the hell, not even morphine. I asked how this affliction had befallen her. She’d ridden horses as a child, she offered. Maybe that was the cause.

  At the time of our conversation, I had just finished a book about a woman with an incurable headache. As I read this book, which chronicled the woman’s endless cure quest, I became less interested in her pain than in my changing response to it. I began to think, as many of her doctors had begun to think, that maybe she was crazy or depressed. As her suffering intensified, and with it her desperation to treat it, I found myself increasingly doubting that she had a headache at all.

  The eBay seller and I talked about how difficult it was to solicit people’s sympathies over the long term. I admitted that I’m one of those people who harden in the face of other people’s incurable pain. I start to blame them for failing to get better. Not to defend myself, I told the eBay seller, but I probably needed for my own sake to believe that I might be to blame for any of my future sicknesses; if I ever became sick, I could find comfort knowing that I was the crux of the problem and thus also the cure. I could just stop being who I was and get better.

  We had a really candid conversation, the eBay seller and I, thoughtful and honest. When I arrived at her house to pick up the chairs, however, I found that she’d left them out on her lawn for me. When I knocked on her door to say hello, she did not answer.

  Afterward, I told all of my friends about the eBay seller with the female pain problem. This story was good for a chuckle, and mostly at my own expense—no one was so incapable of the simplest online transactions as I was. Always my transactions failed, or became hilariously complicated. Even though none of my friends knew the eBay seller, I’d always felt guilty that I’d used her misfortune to make people laugh at me. Eleven years later, I contracted a strange pain down there, and I’ve never ridden horses. For three weeks I thought I had an untreatable, incurable condition. I thought I’d brought it on myself. I deserved it for making hay of the eBay seller’s misery. It turned out I only had a tight muscle. I was quickly cured.

  But because I did not have the proper faith to order these toy stethoscopes online, I called the company. The man with whom I spoke was very nice; he reassured me I’d receive the stethoscopes by the following Monday, in time for the Fourth of July parade. Then he said how odd it was that I, too, was ordering toy stethoscopes; his company hardly ever sold toy stethoscopes, yet in the past month there’d been a run on toy stethoscopes. We tried to figure out why. Many people were planning universal health care floats for their Fourth parades: this was our best guess. We didn’t really have any other ideas. But I thought about the sudden popularity of toy stethoscopes for most of the day. There existed a reason for their popularity even if I didn’t know it. Everything can be traced to its point of origin, and possibly to its point of disappearance. We know where things came from and where they are, even if those things have dematerialized in transit. I have become a location buff, possibly because I have a really good sense of direction. My interests and desires can be mapped, or mapped back. In parks, when people veer from the established paths and cut new ones through the grass, these are called “desire lines.” Many people have the same desire when it comes to walking, which implies that we all want to get to the same place, and more quickly. Recently I desired to surround myself with the color cerulean. Six months later so did everyone else. Why did I crave cerulean just before everyone else craved cerulean? I try to crave colors and paths that other people do not crave. Right now, because I recently saw a ’60s French movie in which the lead actress is wearing a union suit, I am craving a union suit. I am certain that come next winter, everyone will be wearing union suits. Will I get credit for wanting them first? Why do I need credit for my desire? It’s ridiculous. But I do.

  Today I took my kids to the cemetery to talk to E. B. White. E. B. White is buried next to his wife, Katharine Angell White, and their son, Joel White. I urge my children to tell E. B. what a great writer he is, because writers can never get enough reassurance about the importance of their work (even among dead writers this is true). Also E. B. White was a man of great humility; it is a privilege to live, for part of the year, a quarter of a mile from his grave, and to contribute to his eternal renown by remembering certain lines he wrote, for example these:

  A person who writes of this and that stands in the same relation to his world as a drama critic to the theater. He is full of free tickets and implied obligations. He can’t watch the show just for the fun of it. And watching the show just for the fun of it, once that privilege is forfeited, begins to seem like the greatest privilege there is.

  This afternoon, however, we were here to deliver a different message. Tonight there would be a reading in E. B. White’s honor. This reading was meant to raise scholarship money for a local school—a private school—even though White, when he moved to Maine from Manhattan, sent his child to the local public school. I wanted to alert him, not to this irony, but simply to the fact that people would be reading from his work, and in not just one place, but in two. The Odd Fellows Hall was also hosting an E. B. White night. He was being remembered all over the place.

  After I told him this, however, I felt horrible. Katharine, his wife, who is buried two feet from her husband, was a writer, too. She met E. B. when she was an editor, but she wrote a New Yorker column about seed catalogues and published a great gardening book. I hastened to compliment her as well. I told Katharine that she was also a great writer. But I’d already screwed up. My gaff was extra unforgivable because I am also married to a writer, and I am highly sensitive to the insensitivity of people who treat my husband as a writer in my presence while failing to treat me as one, even if they do consider him to be the better/more valuable/deserving of eternal renown. I never do this to other writer couples, no matter if I think one is superior to the other. If I ask one writer about her work, I ask the other writer about his work. When writer couples ask about or refer constantly to my husband’s work and never inquire after mine, I begin to view their behavior as malevolent. One couple does this nearly every time we see them. Afterward, my husband tries to make me feel better by saying, “They probably think you’re so confident and secure that you don’t need their approval,” and “Their behavior has no basis in reality.” I argue that their assumptions about my confidence are eroding my confidence; that their reality is my reality when we’re with them.

  To be fair to this couple, this nerve is easy to strike with me. I am competitive with my husband, healthily so. He makes me push my brain to always be better. I perform the same function for him. But he is much less threatened by social inequalities than I am. He’s not threatened by them at all. I do not often give him much of a chance, granted. When people start talking about my work in front of him, I quickly steer the conversation in another direction. It makes me uncomfortable to be complimented, but especially in front of him. I think, I don’t want him to feel bad, even though there’s been not a single indication that he’s ever felt bad when people talk about my work in our presence, and not his. Only I feel this way.

  My career competitiveness extends to my male friends. Once I overheard one of my best writer friends (a male) talking to another of our best writer friends (also male). The first friend observed to the second friend about a third writer (male), He’s not a threat. Theirs was just harmless boy banter; my friends are too old to play organized sports, so their competitive energy must be rechanneled onto the athletic field of short-story writing. But it got me thinking. Did they talk to each other about me that way? Later I asked the first friend, Am I a threat? I asked it in jest but I was not kidding. I wanted to know, even though the question was, in some ways, moot. Obviously I love and admire my friend; obvious
ly I am not out to threaten him or his career. But what I was asking without asking was this: Do you feel endangered by the possibility that I might be as good as, or even someday more successful than, you? And though I pushed him to answer the question using the same language he’d used with our other friend, my friend would only say, “Of course I admire your work. Of course I think you’re great,” but he couldn’t say, “You’re a threat,” I guess, because, on a fundamental level that has both something and nothing to do with writing, I am not one. Has any female writer ever been considered a threat by a male one? Aside from possibly Susan Sontag (surely someone had the good sense to feel threatened by her), I couldn’t think of a single instance. We circled around and around the topic of threats, both of us feeling uneasy. Finally we agreed to stop talking about it.

  Today I brought some objects to the Museum of Modern Art. Among them

  my great-grandfather’s meat grinder

  the l’amour fou tap handle

  a ring

  the necklace I failed to give to my mother

  an air meter

  a doll-sized Webster’s dictionary

  This was not a hostile takeover on my part; I’d been invited to do something, to read or perform or something, in the museum. I put my objects in the gallery where an exhibit called Inventing Abstraction was being shown; to get to this gallery, you must walk through a doorway over which appears the Kandinsky quote “We must now, then, renounce the object.” The first time I visited the show, I misread the quote as, “We must not, then, renounce the object.” I thought this was so balanced and open-minded of Kandinsky; even while penning a perception-altering manifesto, he was committed to seeing all sides and including everyone, even those idiot still-lifers clinging to their skulls and their rotting fruit. It’s okay, you people who love your objects—you’re included in our revolution, too.

  Later I realized what Kandinsky had actually written. And I felt insecure. And then hostile. My mistake reminded me that I am not by nature a manifesto writer, in that I do not want to hurt people’s feelings or make anyone feel left out. I once wrote a manifesto, in which I tried so hard to be unbiased and fair. I suspect now that if I’d been rabidly biased and wickedly unfair, I’d have been better heard.

  So maybe there was a tiny bit of hostility and insecurity involved because I’d been retroactively disinvited to the secession that happened, granted, decades before I was born. I am an object person. I cling to things. As a child I clung. Not for status reasons. Plain anchor reasons. Those objects that provided me with stability were rewarded with my protection. My bedroom lamp, for example. It broke. Possibly it was fixable, who knows; my parents were not handy. They fully knew what they were never doing. A broken lamp would stay broken. Better to remove the failed object from the premises. We removed lots of failed objects. A large porch, for example. Easier to tear off a giant, wraparound porch that was as sizeable as a cruise ship deck than to fix it. (To be fair—fair—there was no money. Removal was the only option.)

  But when my lamp broke, and when I knew it would be thrown away, I put it in my bed. I slept with the lamp until I was promised: the lamp would not be thrown out. Lamps are shaped like people; they have heads. The sight must have been Duchampian (or Dalí-ian)—a wife lying in bed next to her husband who has been turned into a lamp! And the wife back into a girl!

  My mother agreed not to throw away the broken lamp. As mentioned, I’ve won nearly all the domestic battles in my life. Perhaps this was the first.

  So Kandinsky. MoMA. I decided to bring my objects to the abstraction show, fuck Kandinsky. Times had changed. Sure, in Kandinsky’s day, the ability to speak via telegraph and then telephone, the ability to dematerialize yourself or to move your body (by trains) at higher speeds to distant places, this was an exciting life enhancement. The quickness with which words and people traversed time and space helped spread abstraction as an idea. (Next to the exhibit entrance was a huge diagram—it resembled the route maps that airlines print in the back of their in-flight magazines—consisting of points and lines, showing who had spread the idea on which continent and to whom.) Swifter connection represented possibility and promoted thought contagion. It still represents possibility and promotes thought contagion, but things have become endangered. Literally, things. Extinctions loom everywhere. “Evacuation of the object world” is how the curator of the MoMA show described what the abstractionists were up to. Once this felt exciting and liberating. To be free of all that weight and volume, and from the hell of what a friend of mine calls “object management.” But now the whole world is being evacuated of things. Who needs abstraction now? Each day brings another tsunami wipe, or it can, on certain days, feel that way. Recently I picked up a book of matches and thought, Soon we’ll be saying, “Remember when we used matches?”

  Before bringing my objects to MoMA, I took them to a psychic because I wanted her to tell me about their histories. There’s a practice called psychometry that purports to read the energy film left by former owners on the objects they once possessed or simply touched. I brought my objects to a woman named Durga. We sat across from each other at a fluorescent-lit table as though she were about to do my nails. She was blunt and no-nonsense; when I gave her an object to read and she wasn’t receiving, she’d say, “I’m not getting anything,” or, more crankily, “What do you want me to tell you about this?”

  We also talked about synchronicities and how, the day before I contacted her, a friend had given her my novel. That a psychic should be reading my novel was not so strange for me (my novel was about psychics); flipped, however, the scenario did seem synchronistic. Imagine you are a psychic and suddenly the author of the book you’ve just received calls you out of the blue.

  “Even for me,” Durga said, “this is an unusual degree of synchronicity.”

  By the time I met her she’d read part of my book. She had some factual bones to pick. For example, she told me that the psychic ability to see numbers was very rare (one of my characters psychically receives a serial number). “Numbers have very low numinosity,” she said, which sounded so oxymoronic. (I later looked up “numinosity”: it means “of or relating to a numen.” I looked up “numen”: it means “the spirit or divine power presiding over a thing or place.”) “Only one psychic could see numbers,” she said. She’d forgotten this famous psychic’s name.

  Two weeks later she wrote me an e-mail:

  Dear Heidi,

  The man whose name slipped my mind on Monday, the famous psychic who could see numbers inside an envelope, Ingo Swann passed away yesterday. Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings. I always wanted to meet him, we had many friends in common, but never did.

  Best, Durga

  Because this e-mail arrived from a psychic, I thought it might contain a hidden message. What was Durga really saying? What synchronicities were encoded here? Ingo Swann died on 1/31/13, and the number 13 (as well as any numeric variations including 1s and 3s) is a meaningful one to me, and has been since the late ’80s, before Taylor Swift’s mother probably even began menstruating. The book party at which, arguably, my career as a paid writer began happened at a club called “13.” But probably the only secret message the e-mail contained was this: people can seem to be meaningfully near you, you can seem fated to meet them, but the connection, even today, maybe even more so today, because we assume the likelihood of connection, can fail to be made. Durga was connecting me to her failed connection. As is frequently my response when a person reaches out to me, and this reaching out deeply touches me, and even honors me, I do not reciprocate. I never responded to Durga. Whatever connection she sought, I did not allow it.

  Today I tried again to read Pages from the Goncourt Journals. I am reading a lot of journals and diaries right now—by Kafka, Woolf, a white Russian named Maria “Missie” Vassiltchikov, the Goncourts. The Goncourts were two brothers who aspired to be famous writers but instead only hung out with famous writers—Flaubert, Balzac, Proust, those guys. Not a shabby
life, bouncing around the Paris literary scene of the nineteenth century, but a disappointing one for them. They wanted more, or rather different, fame. They wanted more timeless literary cred for their novels. Unfortunately nobody talks about their novels (not so much then, is my understanding, and definitely not now), but I have been told by many people how wonderful their journals are; how the true Goncourt genius lay, tragically, not in the many mediocre fictions they spun and co-spun, but in the reportorial acuity displayed in the journals, their bitchiness and their gossipiness.

  For a long time, I did not want to read the Goncourt journals for fear that I would suffer the same fate as these pitied, embittered brothers. Their failure is a contagion to which I feel a greater susceptibility. I have been told, for example, that I “should receive a MacArthur for my e-mails.” This was meant as a compliment, but I heard it as an insult. By reading the Goncourts’ book, I risked suffering the same fate they did. After I am dead, my books of collected e-mails would be passed around and enjoyed at the expense of my other work, and every time anyone complimented my amazing books of e-mails, my accidental oeuvre, while overtly not complimenting my novels, they would do so with an implicit sigh—poor thing.

  The other insecurity is reader-related. Everyone loves the Goncourt journals, they just love them! I, however, don’t love the Goncourt journals. My failure of affection has nothing to do with the period nature of their language and observations—Sei Shōnogan, the famous Japanese courtesan and author of The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnogan, is older than the Goncourts by a few thousand years, and I totally relate to everything she writes. I just don’t understand what’s so great about the Goncourts, even though I’ve tried to read them repeatedly, and I’ve traveled with them to other states and other countries, because I don’t want to miss my chance. Suddenly, here, in the Balkans for a literary festival, because of the perfect collision of barometric pressure, and air/water density, the smell of this burning trash, I will understand their greatness!