Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

The same with my daughter, and my husband, and my parents, and my career, and the tree outside my window. Everything around me sped up and vanished and then, when my altitude stabilized, reappeared, but something had changed. Everyone and everything existed as a future ghost to me. This sounds unpleasant. It was. However, I was so acutely alive during those four weeks. The pain of my aliveness was occasionally unbearable. I’m not referring to physical pain, though I experienced that too. I’m referring to emotional pain. To the emotional intensity that the passing of time should incessantly inspire; to the sickening countdown that every person should be registering every moment of her so-called aliveness, but is she? Until I got sick, I wasn’t. How had I been so immune?

And then — I got better. I’d been misdiagnosed. With distressing quickness, time resumed as a road along which I traveled unthinkingly; when I had a spare reflective moment, and I rarely did, I’d turn my head to the side to admire the blur.

I am no longer immune, however, to the occasional plummet in time altitude. A plummet happened the other night. I found myself lying in bed and thinking about Mexican wineglasses, the green kind with the air bubbles. They are the size of goblets. I’d put a lot of identity stock, at one time in my life, in Mexican wineglasses. I’d bought some in my twenties, and they represented a pinnacle achievement in self-realization. Thinking of these wineglasses reminded me of a trip I’d taken through Mexico with a boyfriend when we were both in our twenties; we’d driven a two-piston rental through mountain ruts. We slept in fields. We emerged in a town with white walls and cafés, and were there also Mexican wineglasses? Did I buy mine there? I don’t think so. I only remember a photo I took in that town of a white adobe wall and, rising above it, a crucifix atop a church dome. I was not religious, yet the photograph was so religious that I felt I shouldn’t or couldn’t be as fond of it as I was. But now, lying in bed and thinking about wineglasses, I found myself thinking of this photo, and the girl who took it, and that town — I’ll never know its name — and I felt the kind of longing for that girl/town/photo I feel for my children at night when they are asleep.

Today I read a book written by a man I used to know. When I’d known him I was a certain kind of woman, or girl, that I’m not very proud of having been. I was a woman who used men. I used them quite knowingly. I didn’t ever try to fool myself that I wasn’t using them. Nor did I feel bad about my behavior. I felt that it was my due, though I don’t know why I felt I was due anything. Men had done nothing to make me feel owed. Men had mostly been nice to me.

When I met this man, I had just moved to New York. I was temporarily crashing with an old friend who lived in a narrow three-story house located in the middle of a block in Little Italy. To get to this house we had to walk through an apartment building, out the other side, and into the courtyard where the slender house seemed to break through the cobbles like a tree. My friend and I shared a bed, and the bed was white, and a white sheer curtain billowed weakly over us at night, because there was a heat wave, and the house had no air-conditioning, and the windows, despite the staler air in the courtyard, were always open. Meanwhile, on the lower levels of the house, people drank red wine and did coke until morning. I just wanted to sleep. I’d moved to New York to become serious. Soon my friend and I would find a very serious artists’ loft together. (We would have to interview with the loft’s banker landlords to prove that we seriously were, or seriously wanted to be, artists. We would have to sublet the extra bedroom to an actor from a teen movie with a serious cult following, and who desired instead to be a serious concert pianist.)

I was not planning on having a New York boyfriend because I’d left a serious boyfriend in San Francisco. We were in love and intended to spend the summer together. But this meant I would have to survive in New York for the bulk of the year alone. I did not function well alone. I had not been alone since I started dating in third grade. I could count my alone days on two hands. I always had friends; I was never alone . But whenever I didn’t have a boyfriend around I panicked. My future unspooled blurrily and I was felled by psychological vertigo, it was like standing on the sill of my loft windows overlooking the Holland Tunnel and the Hudson and the old printing press in the building opposite mine that respected no work hours — it was just on and on and on and on.

The man who wrote the book I read today had the misfortune of becoming the designated New York person who made me less fearful and lonely that year. I was never unaware that he wanted to be my boyfriend, and I was never dissuading him of his desire. I needed that level of devotion from him; a mere friend would not do. I gave him the hope that if he waited for the countrywide distance to dull my affection for my real boyfriend, he was next in line. He’d get the rest of my heart and all of my body.

He would get neither. He was one of those men I wanted to want to fuck. He was never a temptation even though we found ourselves in erotically and romantically charged situations where the minor sticking point of “attraction” should have been immaterial. Once when he was house-sitting for a friend with a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park, we decided to drag a mattress onto the roof and sleep outside. Nineteen years later, I recall that night as one of the most magical nights I’ve spent in the city. And yet there was no sex. I experienced no desire. It was just me and a boy on a mattress in the air, the noise and the heat of the city billowing beneath us, keeping us afloat, and what a waste it was.

Also he was fun and funny and he had excellent friends. Oh, the poor men who have excellent friends. This man was friends with writers who were older, and already ruined by booze, with sloppily intricate bohemian approaches to love and to work. Once they had a Super Bowl party, not an ironic one. (These were sporty-spirited bohemians.) At halftime we went to the park and played touch football. We divvied into teams. My team captain had boyish hair and a boyish way of rousing us to achieve the highest possible level of sportsmanship, despite the fact that we would certainly be crushed. I recall thinking what a great dad he’d be someday — a fun and self-deceivingly optimistic dad, not one of those grumpy dads, the ones for which everything appears as an impossibility. Even a sandwich is impossible.

Eventually, when my California boyfriend and I split up, I started dating this future great dad. I did not date the man who thought he was next in line to date me. I did him the even greater disservice of dating a man he’d introduced me to, because he’d so thoughtfully included me in his life when I didn’t have much of my own. All of it was shitty, so very shitty. And yet I did not feel shitty. Neither did any of my friends feel shitty when they used men like I did, and worse. One of my friends who got a lease in an uninhabitable factory tempted a man with great plumbing and electrical skills to fall in love with her. She kept him hooked on hope until he’d renovated her space, then stopped returning his calls. If I judged her, perhaps it was because I was trying to make myself feel less guilty for not feeling guilty when I’d behaved similarly. I’d never gone that far, I told myself. I’d never used a man to do something I might have paid another to do. I could not pay a man to be my friend and to introduce me to fun people. I could not pay a man to make me feel less alone. That was different, wasn’t that different?