Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

So it was awkward in the bookstore because I’d yet to e-mail this woman back about her abortion, or my abortion, or why her mother didn’t get an abortion like I did, and why she was born and her baby was not, and my baby was not, and etc. Instead we made small talk about the Oscar nominations, the announcement of which I’d missed. I hadn’t seen any of the movies, anyway. Then, somehow eager to make this girl feel that I listened to her, and respected her opinion, even when I failed to write her back about a personal disclosure that I’d, technically, elicited, I said, “I just went to the art show you recommended.”

“Oh!” she said. “Was I right or was I right? It was totally amazing, right?”

At times like this, when the stakes are so low and still I cave, I wonder how I can consider myself an honest or a brave or even a good person.

“It was,” I said. “That show was totally amazing.”

Today I received an e-mail from a friend who might introduce me to some people he knows. He and I once spent a summer together in Morocco twenty years ago. I requested these introductions because I want to offer these people some work. I realized, however, that I was not just asking to be introduced; I was asking to be recommended. He and I are both academics and so even innocent introductions have a whiff of putting one forth or putting one up (tenure language) about them. Character evaluations are required.

My friend said he would introduce/recommend me to the people I wanted to meet. Then he related a story about Paul Bowles, the cultish American writer of The Sheltering Sky who lived most of his life in Tangier, and about whom this friend had been writing his dissertation the summer we lived in Morocco. Every weekend he’d take the train from Fez to Tangier to hang out with Bowles.

He wrote, “Did I ever tell you the story of when I asked Paul Bowles to write a letter of introduction for me to William Burroughs?” I told him he had not. He described the encounter.

ME: I mean, I think it would kind of, like, help if you could write a letter of introduction.

PAUL B: Now?

ME: No, like when you had time.

Next day, after about two hours of chitchat.

PAUL B: Oh, I wrote that letter to Bill Burroughs for you.

ME: You did? (Thinking: OMG!! What will it say?)

PAUL B: Yes, it’s over there on the table.

I begin searching, on my hands and knees for about an hour. Under Bowles’s bed, among the detritus. Nothing. Never found it.

I thought this was such a great story — I laughed about it quite a bit. Then I stopped laughing and wondered: did this mean he wasn’t going to make the introductions I’d requested? Such is the inconvenience of e-mail. I could not dig beneath his bed for proof of what he maybe had not written.

Today I was searching online for a place to stay in the Bavarian Alps. Ask me where the Bavarian Alps are located (beyond “in Europe”) and I could not tell you. A few months ago I might have claimed that “Bavarian” is just a snowier synonym for “German,” but I recently had the occasion to learn a little bit, not much, about German states. I’d Googled frankfurt what german state , because I was making an e-mail joke to my new agent about posing as my husband’s mistress while he was in Frankfurt. My agent is savvy about Europe and presumably also those ancient feudal European subdivisions about which most Americans know nothing. His suits suggest as much. He is a man whose suits say of him, “I know quite a lot about kingdoms.” I initially wrote that I was my husband’s Bavarian mistress, but then I wondered — why was I not his Tyrolian mistress? Or his Thuringian mistress? To claim to be his Bavarian mistress when really I was his Tyrolian or Thuringian mistress (in this joke formulation, at least) might reveal me to be the Old World-ignorant American I totally was and preferred to appear not to be. (Frankfurt, it turns out, is in the state of Hesse, and therefore I was my husband’s Hessian mistress. I have begun to fact-check my e-mail jokes, and my e-mails generally, even though I do not use capital letters or proper punctuation. “we write everything lowercase in order to save time,” said Herbert Bayer — herbert bayer — of the Bauhaus school. When I discovered this quote I felt so reassured. I’d always worried that I’d naturally defaulted to lowercase letters because I lacked courage or conviction or a healthy sense of self-worth. But in fact it was because I was so busy writing functional and unornamented sentences. I just needed to save time.)

But the Bavarian Alps. Wherever they are, I want to go to them soon. I was trying to find an inexpensive lodge where I might stay; a travel article named a promising sounding place and included a link that led instead to a warning.

PAGE NOT FOUND. This page is unavailable, it might have been deleted or worse: it could never have existed!

I couldn’t tell if this warning was sincere or if it was meant to be cheeky. The hotel (to which this unfound page was attached) seemed capable of boutique cheekiness (there was an oversized service bell on the front desk), and, given, the hotel was French — somehow my “Bavarian” search term landed me at a French hotel — and the French are not typically cheeky, well, it would make sense if their cheekiness might unintentionally read, despite their best efforts to loosen up, as philosophical.

Perhaps it was a matter of language. Ideas stated in French sound more dignified than they do in English. I translated. Page non trouvée. Cette page est indisponible, il aurait été supprimé ou pire: il n’aurait jamais existé!

French did not clarify matters. The problem was not the language but the punctuation. The exclamation point drained all gravity from the sentiment. It rendered it bouncy and nonthreatening. It never could have existed! Wheeeeeee!!!! Once exclamation points were scary and loud; they made you jump. You were in trouble when the exclamation points came out. They were the nun-chucks of punctuation. They were a bark, a scold, a gallows sentence. Not any longer. The exclamation point is lighthearted, even whimsical. If someone responds with an exclamation point you can be sure that you failed to make a lasting impression on her. If your friend says, I love it! she means she was temporarily but forgettably energized by the photo you attached or the e-mail observations you so carefully fact-checked before sending. Your contribution to her in-box is the equivalent of a whippet hit. If she says, however, I love it , she means she has been soothed by your quotidian display of greatness into a state of contemplation. I wanted to soothingly contemplate the question of whether it was worse never to have existed than it was to be deleted; I love (as in love , no exclamation point) an existential reckoning moment with an auto response. But my only possible responses to this auto response (which I understood as a question —is it better to never have existed?) seemed to be Yes! or No! These were not convictions so much as they were hiccups in my attention span. No, I want another whippet, I mean what I meant is — sorry, yes! Please, I want another.

Today I was walking to class when I heard a couple fighting on the sidewalk. The other pedestrians and I craned our necks to eyeball the participants, but cautiously, so we wouldn’t get busted. Looking is impolite. Space is tight in this city; loved ones have to take it to the streets, sometimes. They deserve a little privacy.

The two fighting people quickly rumbled into view; they resolved themselves into one person fighting with herself. She wore a giant maroon sweatshirt advertising a mid-western college and a sagging pair of chinos. Despite her other-college varsity gear, her rant was about Columbia. “Fuck Columbia University! Fuck Columbia University!” It was her fight song. If only all cheerleaders suffered from psychotic breaks , I thought. They might help their teams to win more games .