Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

Today I talked with a woman about ghosts. We were sitting in the shadow of a large building that is reputedly full of them. We wondered if people mistook for ghost sightings what was, in fact, a primal fear response to poorly arranged rooms. The appearance of a ghost was really just the cave brain responding with a potent visual alarm. The cave brain whipped up a ghost when a room lacked escape options, or when it featured too many unprotected entrances through which a saber-toothed tiger or a rapist might prowl in the dark.

I told this woman about a room in which I repeatedly, or so I believed, saw a ghost. The room’s bed, I conceded, was in the dumbest place. The door was to the right of my head; when I was lying in the bed, the door was actually, by a few inches, behind me. I’d awaken every night in a state of panic and look to the door, where I saw a figure briefly coalesce from the darkness, then vanish. But I understand now (or think I understand) that I saw no ghost in that room; my brain was just keeping me alert to bad possibilities, tigers or rapists or whatever.

Then I told this woman my theory about rooms, and why some rooms immediately feel like home while others, no matter how long you live in them, never do. Maybe ghosts are to blame, or a lack of egresses, but possibly, too, there was, I had recently decided, the issue of light. Growing up, I slept in a room that faced west. From the age of four to the age of eighteen, I opened my eyes to the same message: something better was happening elsewhere. I had to seek out the sun (presuming there was one); otherwise I had to wait for it to come to me. All sorts of bogus long-term psychological effects could be generated from such regular conditioning. To awake to the west has, maybe, imprinted me with certain personality traits. I am always thinking: where I am is not as good as where I could be. I must, from the moment I open my eyes, be on the move.

This sounds like an optimistic mind-set. It’s not. It’s neurotic. It’s crazy-making. Especially since I don’t particularly like the morning sun I feel so compelled to seek. Regardless, I only feel at home in places that face west. I currently live in an apartment that faces east. Despite my best attempts to comfortably inhabit this apartment, I have failed. I’ve faulted the gray paint I chose (“November Rain,” clearly formulated for seasonal depression junkies or, more damningly, per a decorating blog, “for the sage green set”), the window treatments (there are none), the fact that our books are kept in the guest room and so sometimes it looks like nobody interesting lives in our home. There’s sun upon waking, yes, but it feels like a reward I do not deserve and don’t want.

Probably it’s due to some combination of light and egresses and ghosts, but for sure I experience a panicked flight reaction when I enter certain interior spaces. I told the woman about a room to which I recalled suffering an immediate allergic reaction. I had just married my first husband. We’d blown all of our money on the wedding and had just a few hundred dollars left, and so we decided to spend it at an old inn in Camden, Maine, with cheap off-season rates. My first husband called these three days our “mini-moon.” The moment I entered our mini-moon room, however, I needed to leave it. For no apparent reason I felt on the verge of hysterics. Or maybe there was a reason. The room had been renovated so that, while legitimately Victorian, it now vibed faux-Victorian. I worried that this room would reify what I already felt — I did not belong in this marriage. I was faux to my core. If we stayed in this room, I thought, my first husband and I would be divorced by sundown. I made up a story about how I needed a bathtub and not a shower with massaging jets. The porter showed us a second room, one that still had its old clawfoot tub, and one that didn’t make me think, We are doomed . This room faced west.

Still, the west-facing room could not protect me from all bad omens, and Camden, in late October, plagued by rain, was full of them. My first husband and I read books each afternoon by the fire in the inn’s library, and drank tea. I was reading a biography of Edith Wharton. Wharton, I learned, married a man she did not love because she felt societal pressure to do so. (I didn’t feel societal pressure to marry my first husband, but I did feel pressure, most of it self-inflicted.) She had a fulfilling life despite her bad marriage, and, besides, she wrote many novels, which is what I hoped to do. Maybe, I reasoned with myself, I hadn’t made a terrible mistake. Maybe a bad marriage would prove good for my career, too.

Aside from wedding decompression, my one goal in Camden — a town with many used bookshops — was to locate an out-of-print memoir. Published in the 1940s by a woman who never wrote another book, this memoir detailed the story of a wife (the author) and her husband, who fled Manhattan to homestead in Maine. The husband came from a wealthy banker family; he had artist ambitions, as this variety of black sheep usually does. Their remote, falling-down house — on a point of land accessible only by boat — became, after the adrenaline high of their escape subsided, the site of their marriage’s unraveling. Only the seeds of the unraveling are present in the memoir. On the last page, they are still happily married. In the hermetic world of the book, their love persists. In reality, they grew miserable. I know because Maine is a tiny state and the couple’s decline into unhappiness remained gossip nearly sixty years later. The friend who’d told me about the book had met the husband, by then in his eighties and a widower, at a dinner party. She found him scary, she said, broody and embittered. So great was the couple’s marital misery in the remote house, in fact, it was rumored the husband had murdered the wife (she died under mysterious circumstances).

On the third rainy day of our mini-moon, I decided to search for this book in the local used bookstores. The first bookstore didn’t have a copy of the book on the shelves, but I figured I’d ask the salesperson if she knew of a copy lingering in one of the many unpacked boxes. When I told her the book’s title, her eyes — they were white-blue, the irises seemed to spiral toward the vanishing point of her pupils — got really wide. She didn’t have a copy, she said. But she knew the book very well and had read it many times herself, because the woman who’d written it was her aunt.

I couldn’t believe it. The woman, also stunned, nonetheless seemed so excited to talk to me about the book. Yet she didn’t say a word. She just stared at me expectantly, as though I were the person who might enlighten her about her own relative, and her eyes spiraled more quickly, and the whole situation grew surreal and uncomfortable, and without learning anything more about her aunt, I left.

We did eventually, due to our own growing misery, get divorced, my first husband and I. The end of our marriage came as no surprise to either of us, though he and I maintained different perspectives on the cause of death. He blames this and that marital moment of callous disrespect or unintended harm as the cause. I take the more deterministic view. Our divorce seemed at the time, and still seems to me, to have been fated from the outset, though I know this fate is unrelated to Edith Wharton, or to randomly meeting the niece of a woman who might have been murdered by her husband, or to the fact that we were supposed to spend our mini-moon in that first, terrible room.

Today we had dinner at the German villa in which we are living until December. (Technically, my family and I are not living in the villa; we are living in a small cottage by the gate. We do, however, eat meals at the villa.) This villa was built in the late 1800s and has a WWII-related story I’ve been told secondhand; roughly it involves the Jewish family who once owned the place and the gratitude they felt toward the avenging Americans, who, after the war, used it as a rec house for military personnel and filled it with Ping-Pong tables. When the Americans left, the family, in order to ensure a future of continued German American ideas exchange, donated the villa to an American ambassador who turned it into an academy (minus, sadly, the Ping-Pong tables). This story, or some slightly more accurate version, is how the villa came into my country’s possession; this is how I am being served a fancy dinner in it.