Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

Also my crush on this guy working on my barn explained much that I’d formerly failed to understand about the social workings of our Maine town — how, over the course of a long Maine winter, husbands and wives manage to fall in love with other husbands and wives they’ve known forever.

However, as a believer in The Franchise, and as a believer in my own marriage, I feel the need to defend the attractions that can arise in deceptive environments. My husband, for example, is not the sort of man I would have been smart enough to date and marry until many more years of dating and marrying the wrong kind of man. Had it not been for the art colony and the intense exposure I had to my husband, who was so different from the husband I had at the time, I may never have fallen in love with him. And yet he is the perfect human for me. Had it not been for my own personal version of The Franchise, I’d have suffered many more years of mistakes.

Which does not explain much about the actual Franchise — for example, why the bachelors and bachelorettes always select to marry the hottest person, even if that person’s hotness is massively iced by their personality. I got really excited, for example, when I thought that Brad, the man-boy with abandonment issues from Season Fifteen, might reject the obvious, beautiful girl and choose the cute-enough girl with the cool father. I was really touched by the idea that Brad might marry a woman because he wanted her dad to be his dad too. Of course Brad chose the obvious, beautiful girl. Does that mean Brad didn’t love her, because she was obvious? I think he did love her, and I think she loved him. Sometimes we love obvious people. I also think that all of the rejected women who claimed to love Brad really did love him. Most of the men who claim tonight that they love Emily really do love her, even if they’ve barely spoken to her. Is this normal? No. But that doesn’t mean it’s dismissible as acting. Fakeness gives rise to realness that, granted, given The Franchise’s dismal marriage record (many of the engaged couples experience ugly breakups within a year), may not survive when the fakeness ends. But the contestants do, or did, experience real feelings as a result of fiction. The readers of novels experience real feelings as a result of fiction. And what about the characters? They don’t not fall in love just because a writer orchestrated it.

Today I was stung by a wasp. A wasp nest hangs over the door to my studio. The wasps fly in and out. I walk in and out. Thus far, our patterns of cohabitation have meshed peaceably. I’d been accepted as one of them. Once I found a wasp crawling on my shoulder and I didn’t kill it. I tricked it onto a piece of paper and freed it on the grass.

But today our nonaggression pact was proven to be a bit of sham faith on my part, generated to protect my cowardice (I do not want to deal with that nest). I was sitting at my desk. My phone rang. It was a painter inviting me to her gallery opening. I exited my studio. I climbed up the porch and back down it. I always pace when I talk on the phone. One night I paced my parents’ unlit living room for an hour, not knowing that I had a bleeding gash on the bottom of my foot. I turned on the lights when my call ended to discover thousands of stains on the rug, like a hiking trail dashed across a map. After my parents yelled at me, we marveled at the shape of my talking travels, the places in the living room I visited time and again, and the outlier areas to which I made only one or two forays, because the topography was more challenging, or the view less spectacular. We understood our living room differently after that.

Suddenly, I felt a sharp burn behind my knee. A wasp dropped from the bottom of my shorts. I continued to walk and talk to the artist about her opening. “I’ll be there!” I said. “What time?” I limped into the house. I waved to get my husband’s attention and mouthed the word “alcohol.” Meaning rubbing . I mimed what had happened. I said, “And where is it?” My husband returned with rubbing alcohol, but then understood why I needed it. “You need bleach, not alcohol,” he corrected. “On Main Street,” I said, “got it.” My husband returned with the bleach. The artist gave me the sort of micro-directions that are confusing in their micro-ness. I finally cut her off. I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll find you!” and hung up the phone.

“Why didn’t you just tell her you were stung by a wasp and had to get off?” my husband asked me.

I don’t know why. Or I kind of know. This woman is inundated by motherhood. Her career has been interrupted by people who need her. I didn’t want to interrupt her with my need. My behavior makes perfect sense to me. Just as my behavior on an airplane this past spring made sense to me. I was traveling on a red-eye from L.A. to New York. I always ask for an aisle seat because I am claustrophobic. Also, when a task becomes difficult, my body develops an urgent need to regularly do it. It needs to regularly pee, especially when I’m in a window seat.

On this flight, I had a window seat.

I drank no liquids for hours before the flight. I peed just before boarding. My neighbor in the middle seat spoke Russian and wore a white tracksuit. He fell asleep before takeoff, his head whiplashing up and down. He’d clearly taken a sleeping pill in the waiting area. Nothing would wake him. In the aisle seat was a woman about my age, wearing chic black workout clothes and neon sneakers. She was unrumpled, with a pre-moisturized sleep face and neatly stored long hair. She arranged her space as though she were an organized temp secretary, placing on her desk a few personal items she’d brought to work in her purse.

I tried to make eye-friends with the woman in the aisle seat. I wanted her to acknowledge me, and for us both to recognize, and express surprise over, the man sleeping so soundly between us. Should I, in a few hours, need to use the lavatory, I’d be able to ask her with a glance. But she was not making eye-friends on this plane. We took off. I listened to music and counted the number of songs it took for the lights of L.A. to completely disappear behind us.

The woman in the aisle seat put on her eye mask.

Less than an hour into the flight, I needed to pee. I shifted positions; I took a Xanax. The urge grew worse. I started to panic; I took another Xanax.

I became more awake than ever.

I tried to override my body with meditation. I failed. I thought I’d distract myself with a movie, but the backseat monitor was broken. Reading was too interior an activity; it only brought me closer to the irritation site.

I tried to outsmart the situation. How could I pee without leaving my seat? My options were limited. Really there was but one option: to pee in the airsickness bag. This seemed a very sound plan. It was so sound I was surprised it wasn’t usual practice. Airsickness bags are water resistant. An airsickness bag could be folded neatly and stored under the seat until I could get to the lavatory to dispose of it (I would never hand it to an air steward).

I was not wearing the ideal clothing for this maneuver, the ideal being no clothing. I was wearing jeans. Fortunately, I had a big sweater — I draped this over me, performed a shimmy, and then rested, naked to the knees under my sweater, while I planned the next move. I needed to crouch between my seat and the seat in front of me, but there was not enough room for this. I turned sideways, which meant my face was basically pressed into the lap of the white tracksuit guy. But he was so totally asleep! This incipient blow-job position would embarrass no one but me.

I hunched between the seats. I put my face inches from the Russian guy’s crotch. I opened the airsickness bag. I waited for relief. None came. I sat back in my seat. I rested, I refocused on the task, I tried again to practice my version of meditation, also known as self-bullying. Who cares about all of these people? They are asleep! No one is looking at you! You can do this! The situation was quickly becoming less about peeing into a bag to avoid disturbing strangers; now I wanted bragging rights. I wanted the accomplishment high.