Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

I would like to learn other means.

My friend teased me for being such a timid, neurotic freak. She did it good-humoredly. We got in the car. The tunnel doors opened. The roads remained roads and did not cede to air. Back in town, we made a sunny lunch of cheese and bread we’d stolen from the breakfast buffet, and drank vodka, and grew giddy. We’d survived! We ran through the town like lunatics. We’d survived! We hiked up a hillside and peed in a sheep barn. We ended up at a store that sold sweaters. We made the shopkeeper drink with us. We asked her lots of questions about herself. Who was she, no really, who? She was Danish, not Swiss. She ran a bed-and-breakfast with her (also Danish) husband. She said, after a time, “I like your scarf.” I was wearing a striped knit scarf. I told her that I’d bought it a few weeks ago in Berlin. I told her that I’d Googled the designer afterward to see what else she made, and everything was ugly, and this made me wonder if maybe I shouldn’t love my scarf as much as I did.

The woman asked to see the tag. “Ah,” she said. “I know that woman. She used to sleep with my husband when we lived in Copenhagen. It’s true, her stuff is shit.”

We wanted to ask — when did the designer sleep with her husband? While he was her husband? Before he was her husband? We left the shop in a whirl of questions. The day was not yet over — our outcomes, in theory, had yet to be decided. There could be an avalanche! My friend could get another stupid idea! But I suspected we were safe. We’d already had our unlikely coincidence, our moment of synchronicity or recursion. The machine had run its course. Our deaths would not be the likely outcome today.

Today I met for coffee a friend who, a few years ago, told me the most perplexing lie. She told me she was having an affair with a married man at work. (This part was true.) The only other details I gleaned from her confession — offhandedly mentioned — were these: The man lived in Connecticut. He had three children. She told me enough about him, in other words, that I could sleuthily Google her small company and discover his identity if I wanted to. Was I supposed to do this? I wasn’t sure. To be safe, I didn’t. I would respect, as she apparently wanted me to respect (since she hadn’t outright told me his name), both his and her privacy.

A week or so later, however, I decided oppositely. She’d felt bound by discretion but, at the same time, badly wanted me to know. Maybe she’d made a promise to the man, who was married and obviously trying to keep things under wraps, not to tell anyone, not a soul. She’d given me the search terms so that she could tell me without telling me. Obviously she expected me to Google her love affair. I did. The only man at her company who lived in Connecticut with three children was named Ryan. Ryan, I now knew without her needing to break her vow of secrecy, was the man in her office with whom she was sleeping.

A few months later, I was shopping with this same friend. (Obviously we are not such close friends that we see each other frequently.) I asked her how “things” were going. She said she was in love but miserable, and that the situation had become really complicated with Nick’s wife.

“Nick,” I said. “Who’s Nick?”

She seemed surprised that I shouldn’t know who Nick was.

“Nick’s the guy,” she said, leaving the rest unspoken. Nick’s the married guy I’m having the affair with.

We kept shopping but I was quietly confused. I’d Googled all of the men in her workplace. I knew enough about Nick, in other words, to have confidently excluded him as a suspect. Nick lived in Brooklyn and had two kids. And yet she’d told me that the man with whom she was sleeping lived in Connecticut with three kids. Ryan was her only coworker who lived in Connecticut with three kids. So she’d known that if I Googled her affair using the data points she’d provided, that I’d be steered toward the wrong man. Had she done this on purpose? Was this a test? If so, had I passed or had I failed? Years later, I still don’t know.

Today we are assessing the damage from the hurricane. We have brown water flowing from our faucets but we do have water. We have lights and heat and Internet. We no longer have half of what was once a whole tree outside our windows. To bemoan the partial loss of a tree when others have lost whole homes is ridiculous, but I am bemoaning its loss (I’ve told myself) as an object lesson to my children, who cannot understand loss on a grand scale and so must learn to comprehend it in smaller increments. They must learn about loss through a tree.

The tree is the reason we moved into this apartment; I have said many times, “Without this tree I do not want to live here.” I have spent nights worrying that something will happen to the tree; it will grow sick and die, a taxi will lose control and mortally wound it. The latter worry is not far-fetched. Our windows overlook a cursed T intersection. A girl was killed by a falling chunk of cornice at this intersection. A man in a helmet catapulted from his motorcycle and landed facedown in the intersection, many yards from the point of impact, and appeared to have dropped from the sky. A taxi lost control and rear-ended a FedEx truck and took out a pedestrian waiting to cross the intersection. The intersection is the site of many car accidents. While cleaning the kitchen or making the beds, I have often heard the sound of brakes and crunching metal. The tree protected our home from the chaos. It filled our windows with white, or green, or red, or a hatching of bare sticks like the fingers you put over your eyes during the scary parts of horror movies. We had to crane our necks to see the bodies.

But now half of the tree is gone. During the storm, a large part of it lay in the street like the man hurled from his motorcycle. I didn’t even realize it was our tree —I thought it was a weaker sapling, hauled wholesale from the roots. When I ascertained that it was ours, I wanted to go outside and investigate even though the hurricane was still raging. My husband observed, “If you die out there, your death will be so stupid.” I waited until the wind subsided a little. I ran out to see what remained of our tree. Not a lot.

This morning I prepared my daughter and son for the possible death of the tree. I tried to make them understand how long the tree had been there, and how old they would be before, if in fact we lost it, another tree could grow to be as large. How to make people who don’t understand time feel a loss that is best measured in time? It proved tricky. The only way to demonstrate the loss was to dramatize it. When the tree crew arrived to remove the half-tree from the street, I stood on the windowsill in my pajamas and watched. I acted sad because I was sad. Our tree would never be the same. It might even die. The damage wasn’t insignificant. I wanted to be the conduit of sadness — and of passing time and mortality — by interpreting the significance of the potential loss of the tree for my kids. I could tell this wasn’t happening. I could tell they were more interested in my reaction to the tree. I thought ahead to a point in time when this behavior might become symbolic of who I was or, depending on my life status, am. I do not think it unwise to view all children as future tattletales. Such a perspective forces you to better (and with greater care) behave , lest your conduct be chronicled later, and prove revealing in ways you did not intend. If and when my daughter told her own children about her memories of the big hurricane, maybe the only takeaway she’d recall would involve me. I was the object lesson. My mother was undone by the possible death of a tree .