Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

Today I trespassed at twilight. Twilight is the ideal time for pretending you live somewhere you don’t. The sky guard is changing, security is relaxed, and everyone’s just had a cocktail. In the gloaming, there is slippage. In this particular gloaming, I pretended to live in a Maine summer colony that’s in my town. Maine has many summer colonies, most of them built at the turn of the last century, most of which resemble adult camps. Each house has a decrepit porch with hard wooden chairs in which relaxation is meant to occur. The words that spring to mind when I look at these cottages are “backgammon” and “wife-swapping” and “gin.” Families have been swapping wives over backgammon and gin for generations. They are heritage families, I suppose. I know some of these heritage families. Heritage families tend to fray, and fight, and go spectacularly broke. They fail to fix rotting sills or replace window screens. This adds to the charming unattainability of such properties. You cannot purchase a century of hostility and neglect; you cannot purchase houses in which first editions of 1984 and old family letters are left unprotected, even when the houses are rented to strangers, as many are, in order to fund the most urgent repairs and the paying of taxes. To care so little for history raises the value immeasurably.

My friends are renting one of these houses; ergo we’d established a trespassing foothold. Just before the moon rose, we decided to walk to a nearby cottage we’d heard was for sale. My friends called it the Boston Marriage cottage because it was once owned by two women of independent means. We walked down the dirt lane carrying wineglasses so that we could pass as well as trespass. Open container strolls marked us as natives. We wondered about the origin of the term “Boston marriage.” Even though we had iPhones in our pockets, we preferred to hazard guesses. It would not be passing of us to Google a term we’d presumably used so many times without knowing what it meant that we no longer harbored any curiosity about its origin.

The Boston Marriage cottage was located on Mandalay Lane. Mandalay! Colonialism was so predictable. Manderley , the name of the house in du Maurier’s Rebecca , seemed the shrewder and more literary fit, with its haunting of the new generation by the old, also its themes of passing and identity concealment. We were all the second Mrs. de Winter that night.

There was no “For Sale” shingle in front of the Boston Marriage cottage, which made us wonder if it had been sold, or if it had never been for sale in the first place. My friend, who hails from a multigenerational family of landowners in a historic area outside of Philadelphia, assured us that a sign would be gauche, or an indication of financial vulnerability. Their neighbors in the colony would gossip condemningly. Who would bother selling such a worthless thing? Only the desperately desperate.

We walked around the Boston Marriage cottage and peered into the windows. We sat on its deck and enjoyed the view. We guessed at the problems given its age and location. A complicated septic situation. Rot, infestation, unbearable neighbors. These seemed minor disincentives given the price, which we’d heard was reasonable. We guessed at the future problems that might mar this cottage were my friends to buy it. Men who never wanted to come and weren’t handy. Close-quartered children who quarreled when the fog parked in the harbor for days. My friends — both are women, best friends since girlhood — began scheming to buy this cottage together. They both had husbands. But they had yet to replace one another. Who ever replaces their friends with a lover? These two women took nearly all of their vacations together. Their individual families coexisted as a larger, extended family, headed by two matriarchs. We finished our drinks on the porch. My two friends reasoned that they were the cottage’s heirs apparent. “We basically have a Boston Marriage,” they said.

Today I tried again to read the Goncourts. I know I said I’d definitively given up on them, but this is the beauty or the lameness of me — there’s no shortage of second chances. Every petty, embittered person should want to date me. Every petty, embittered person should write a book I hate because I’ll keep trying to read it.

It has been a few months since I gave up on the Goncourts; today I thought about them, Maybe they’d changed . Or maybe I’d changed. I reread books to measure my degree of difference from myself. During my twenties and thirties the book I reread most often was a biography by Jean Stein, edited with George Plimpton, called Edie: An American Biography . Edie Sedgwick, often described as “one of Warhol’s factory girls” (this is my description — a shocking number of people do not know who Edie Sedgwick is), lived a fast, sad life, dead at twenty-eight of a drug overdose. Despite my PhD-level familiarity with all extant images of Edie Sedgwick, the images that appear in my head when I think of her are two: (1) with a peroxided pixie cut, doing a ballet move atop a coffee table in black tights; (2) head cocked like a cute dog, hair long and brown, looking up at the camera, wearing a flowered, normal dress. Between those two images exists the identity spectrum she traveled during her life, though this does not take into account certain images further out on the spectrum, for example, stills of her topless and drugged out at the bottom of an empty swimming pool (from the film Ciao! Manhattan ), or shots of her immediately following the Chelsea Hotel fire, her burned hands wrapped in dirty gauze, looking like a boxer wearing too much eye makeup and also, though not by human forces beyond herself, defeated.

I first read Edie in college. My roommate found a copy in a dingy, low-rent part of Vermont, a part that hugs the railway lines and the river, a part where it is always, psychically speaking, mud season. Among the old towels and the kitchen tin she found this book. It was out of print. So far as we knew, there was only one remaining copy in the world. My roommates and I all read it. We all wanted to move to New York and be lauded and exploited by an artist and wear black tights and little else. Ambitious though we were, this one time we dreamed about becoming famous for having produced or accomplished nothing.

Also, Edie and I shared a birthday. This coincidence was the equivalent, in my mind, of a knighting; clearly, I was destined to be Edie’s successor. This also meant Edie, like me, shared a birthday with Hitler. Somewhere within our essences, the ones determined by constellations, we might harbor a dormant evil. A mutation of circumstance could set it off. Could we safely endure for a lifetime without waking it?

Edie maybe didn’t think so. I felt it was important to study her and to learn, perhaps, how to better cope with our cosmic birthday inheritance. But really what I studied was how I might fulfill a fantasy I never knew I had until I read Edie: I wanted people to want to photograph me because I represented energy. Cultural energy. I wanted to possess and transmit cultural energy that, ideally, wouldn’t produce another national socialist movement. I guess, thinking more broadly, Edie didn’t produce or accomplish much, but she did exude . Why get hung up on production and material accomplishment? Let’s look at what Hitler produced and accomplished, and let’s wish he had slightly less of a production and accomplishment fetish. Who cares about a bunch of books. Edie left spooky and beautiful images of herself. That is more than I’ve managed to do.

Later, when the Internet happened, I bought my own copy of Edie . It remained my practice to regularly read it because every time I did my reaction was different. I could use it as a barometer of who I no longer was. Early twenties: I want to be Edie. I want to be a drug addict. I want to end up at the bottom of a swimming pool with a male model cooking my dirty underpants in a cauldron. Midtwenties: These earlier goals start to seem somewhat less like “goals.” Late twenties: Edie and also Warhol are starting to bug me. I covet only Edie’s body and her earrings. Thirty: I decide that all of Edie’s problems are because she comes from old money, and I’ve been developing theories about money and how money, especially old money, can be bad for children, even though all I ever wanted as a child was to come from old money. Early thirties: I feel guilty for thinking so harshly of Edie. I see her as pitiable, a product of bad parenting, because a seriously crazy bunch of humans raised that girl. Her father was vain and also possibly/probably/definitely molested her. He was an obsessive tanner. His nickname was Duke. The children called him Fuzzy. One of her brothers killed himself; another died in a motorcycle accident.