Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

I noticed a few people on the sidewalk, despite themselves, smiling. Columbia University is the gleaming beneficiary but also the occasional victim of its city circumstances. The students and faculty fight like everyone in New York fights for money and for space. Also the university was expanding into a new neighborhood, igniting local protests. Most of the pedestrians on that sidewalk had probably thought at one time, or were thinking right now, Fuck Columbia University!

This woman was the voice of the people.

I crossed Broadway. I was far enough away that I could now safely look at her. She was just another anonymous and lumpily dressed outraged person until she wasn’t. The body was foreign to me, and so was the voice, but I recognized the face. The face belonged to a student of mine from many years ago, a woman who’d come to my office and was so depressed that when she cried, her tears moved slowly down her face, her whole being enervated to the point where even gravity failed to have an effect on her.

I stood on the street corner. I thought about chasing after her, but she was churning swiftly through the neighborhood — she was already almost a block away — so instead I entered a coffee shop. This is why I was on the street. I was going to a coffee shop, and I was buying a coffee, and then I was walking to class, and then I would teach, and then during office hours I would reassure the students who needed reassuring, and I would be tough on the students who could take it, and if someone cried in my office for reasons unrelated but maybe sort of related to the imperfect short story they’d written, I would tell them that fiction makes you cry, the fiction you read though more often it’s the shitty fiction you write that makes you cry, and I would also be thinking, You poor person, you have no idea what awaits you . A life awaits you, like a serious fucking life. This is what I would want to say. And then I would go home to my serious fucking life, and it would be so ridiculously unserious; it would involve soup spills and dirty dishes and lengthy logic proofs meant to coerce tired, inarticulate people to bed, and I would think how lucky I was to have this unserious life, i.e., to be forced to do somewhat or even thoroughly banal things every day. Because what awaits you if you don’t? What kind of life awaits you then? A life where you don’t calmly think, as you’re scraping up the crystallized juice rings before showering before getting dressed before buying coffee before teaching class before reassuring people their hard lives would only get harder, Fuck this whole existence . You’re running down the street and you’re screaming at a university to which you no longer belong, you’re wearing a sweatshirt not even branded with the insignia of the university on which you blame your breakdown, the university to which you are no longer affiliated, because you are so deeply unaffiliated that you are barely even affiliated with your own face.

Today I thought I might educate my husband about birth control pills. I said, “You probably don’t know how birth control pills work,” and he replied, “Actually, I do.” By “work” I didn’t mean that I understood how they keep a person from getting pregnant. I had no idea about that. By “work” I meant that every month a person can predict what day she’ll get her period. It turned out he knew this much about birth control pills; he knew even more than I did. And yet I had never, until recently, been on the pill during our time together. So this knowledge of his, it predated me, and to predate me meant he’d learned about the pill well over fifteen years ago. What else did he know that I did not know he knew? I thought about how, now that we know each other so well, we rarely talk about the time before we met. Every once in a while we still talk like there is more to discover about each other’s past. Often this happens on car rides. When it does, it’s so exciting, it makes me feel like we’re dating again, and presenting, for inspection to one another, our personal narratives that have been practiced on the lovers that preceded us. I especially want — even now, after hearing it all — to hear again about his ex-girlfriends. Every man I’ve been involved with, his past girlfriends have played a great part in my falling in love with him. I can’t explain it except to say that I have felt with these women a blood connection; these women have parted with a valued possession and now it has fallen to me. I am the beneficiary of a bequeathing. If I’d dated this man before they had, he would not be this man. And so I feel kinship, and gratitude. Also curiosity. I love to meet ex-girlfriends when such meetings are desired and appropriate, and even when they’re not. Once, when my husband and I were first dating, I spotted his ex-girlfriend on the train platform. I had already thoroughly interrogated him about her because she, in particular, fascinated me. I had scrutinized pictures of her, I had reclined on pillows she’d sewn, I had admired her artwork, still on his walls. She was a key part of our courtship. And here she was! Standing beside me, waiting for the train! I was still a secret; she had no idea about me. But I knew everything about her. I knew her so well that I was scared to stay in the same car with her for too long. For sure she would feel this strange woman knowing her. Yet I half wanted her to notice and wonder about me. I half wanted us to be forced to contend with one another. Right before exiting at the next stop, I half wanted to put a hand on her shoulder and say, one subway stranger to another, Thank you .

Today I got stuck in an airport due to weather. Formerly, this situation would inspire me to action. I would rent a car. I would drive rather than wait for the fog or rain or snow to clear. Now I have learned the rewards of waiting. I wait.

In my thirties, I did not wait. Once I was stuck in Nashville due to an impending blizzard. The people at the airport were so pessimistic about the chances of us ever leaving. Like ever . More than the pessimism of the weather, I could not stand the pessimism of these people. I decided, rather than waiting for their attitudes to improve, that I would to drive to New York.

On the concrete island waiting for any rental car shuttle to appear, a man approached me. Was I on the canceled flight to New York? He asked. I was. He suggested we could do some sightseeing in Nashville together, since we’d probably be stranded here until tomorrow.

“Screw that,” I told him. “I’m driving home.”

He thought about this.

“Want some company?” he said.

He seemed decent enough, a short-haired man in innocuous clothes. What harm could he really do to me? You can’t rape a person while they’re driving.

He told me — he sensed I needed swaying — that he was a cop in Staten Island. This meant I was safe from assault and murder but not, as it turned out, dullness or misogyny.

I agreed.

We rented a car. We started driving. He drove. I’m bad with maps so instead I hosted. I instilled our car with a party mood. I asked him questions. Eventually it emerged that this man, whose name might have been, or might as well have been, Tom, was not technically a cop. He was a rent-a-cop, and even then hardly ever. Primarily Tom made his living as a stunt diver for movies. Not a diver from the sky, but a diver in the water. He only worked in New York. I didn’t imagine there was much movie work for stunt scuba divers in New York, but he reassured me that there was. He’d played a Navy SEAL in a movie I’d never heard of, and an underwater cat burglar in a movie I’d never heard of.