Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

Finally Tom stopped leaving messages. Around this same time, my wallet was returned. The clerk at the gas station in the Blue Ridge Mountains had sent it to the address on my driver’s license, no longer my address, and it had been forwarded to my new apartment. I marveled at how strangers are such decent people. I lose my wallet nearly once a month, and always it is returned to me, and always with the money still inside.

Today we are in Rome because our children, ostensibly in school in Berlin, have nothing but vacations. The weather has turned dour in Germany, and we cannot stay for so many days inside our little house without people going mad. One can play only so many card games and eat so many wet crackers before the collective familial humor flags. This was our thinking when we bought cheap plane tickets and headed to Rome. Better to be in sunny Rome than to be in wet, cold Berlin. Unfortunately Rome was equally wet and cold. Our sightseeing consisted of running from shelter to shelter.

Now it is night. Our shoes are balanced upside down atop the electric heater. Our socks are dry and hard. The kids are asleep and my husband and I are in bed watching YouTube videos of gurus. We watched Werner Erhard, founder of est, interviewed on The Tonight Show by John Denver. We marveled at how we were able to do this. Here we are in Rome in 2013, and we’re watching a video of Werner Erhard and John Denver from 1973! Meanwhile, the TV in our room doesn’t get more than two channels. All the news is from today. This seemed so limited, suddenly, such a narrow notion of news.

After John Denver we watched a video of a woman from the Landmark Forum (what I understand to be the corporate offspring of Erhard’s est) pitch her wares on a national morning talk show.

She said, “It all comes down to these three questions.”

Then we watched a video of my best friend’s guru, the one who was enlightened by the sight of a mouse.

The guru said, “It all comes down to these four questions.”

My friend’s guru was soft-spoken and spacey; maybe she was stoned. She stared at her interviewer as though dopily in love or trying to hypnotize him. She wore what might have been robes. The interviewer asked her many more than four questions; she feigned deep thoughtfulness at each and then replied, as though the answer had never before occurred to her, yes .

I was shocked. As I’ve said, this guru had really improved my friend’s life. I’d been hoping, when I got around to it and had the time, that I’d let her improve my life, too. But this guru, she had no game . She was like a zombie on pain pills. When I someday follow a person, I want to be impressed by their effortless bullshit passing and dribbling and slam-dunking; I want them to be a Harlem Globetrotter of rhetoric and presentation and spin. I want them, like that world-famous pickpocket (whose YouTube videos we watched in order to learn how to avoid being robbed at the Colosseum), to so deeply understand me, and how I perceive the world, that I can be uniquely distracted, fooled, and fleeced. I would happily pay with my wallet (and my watch and my wedding ring) to be understood as deeply as this pickpocket understands his marks.

I’d hoped this guru would understand me like that pickpocket. But to do this she would have to touch me, fondle me, reach into my front pocket, press her leg against my thigh. Maybe in person she does this. I was not, to be fair, experiencing her in person . But in person I could not imagine she would be much different than the human I experienced on my computer screen. We were at an impasse, this guru and I. Maybe I was at an impasse with all gurus. Maybe I was looking to the wrong people for answers and clarity. I turned instead to a guidebook for guidance. A real guidebook. Someone had left it in the common bookshelf of our hotel’s dining room. It was called Getting Along in Italian . According to Getting Along in Italian , one can ably survive a vacation and probably a whole life knowing how to ask and answer a few pages’ worth of questions. I narrowed the options down to these essentials:

Are you alone?

Where is my key?

This is a violation.

I have pain in my chest.

There is a mistake in the bill.

Where are the lifeboats?

Did anyone call me?

Did anyone come for me?

I want a felt hat.

I want a novel.

I want a priest.

Today I almost told a woman I barely know that I loved her. This woman is the mother of my son’s friend. She and I are also sort of friends. It’s hard to make new friends at this stage of life, but she and I are trying. I always want new friends, but I know what it takes to make a good one. It takes years, decades, and back when I was younger I had hours and hours of those days of those years of those decades to dedicate to getting to know a friend. Now I have minutes of hours of days of years of decades. To acquire a new friend under these time restrictions would require three consecutive lives.

To compensate for the time we don’t have, this woman and I use the time we do have deeply. We tunnel in. We confess to the hand jobs we gave during our intern years to executives on commuter trains; we confess to coke habits. We talk about anxiety and marital confusion. We know such strange details about each other given the basic details that remain unknown. Are her parents alive? Where did she get married? What is her job?

The commonplace details we do discuss involve child logistics. I will get the boys and bring them here and I will leave them for an hour and then you can pick up yours and bring mine home unless you don’t have time to bring mine home in which case my husband can pick mine up and if you can’t pick up yours it’s no big deal because my husband can take yours home with us and you can pick yours up whenever and we can even feed yours dinner.

These conversations often become extremely confusing. She thinks out her hypotheticals aloud, and I can’t tell what is process and what is proposition. Sometimes I stop listening. Sometimes I hold the phone to my ear and make food with the other, or read e-mail, or fold laundry while she is working through the many permutations of tomorrow. Sometimes, when she starts to say good-bye, I have no idea what we’ve decided.

Today we were having one of these phone conversations. She talked, I emptied the dishwasher; she kept talking, I boiled water. Then she said good-bye. I started to say, “Bye, I love you.” The words were half out of my mouth before I stopped them. I hung up, panicked. What would have happened if I hadn’t caught myself? So many rules would have been violated. You cannot tell a person you love them too early. You shouldn’t tell a person you don’t love that you do. More shamefully she’d surmise, after the awkwardness, that I’d stopped listening to her, and that I’d entered that rote response zone, and I’d told her I loved her because I thought she was my husband. She’d know that I don’t always listen to my husband when we’re on the phone together, and that when I say “I love you,” it sometimes means I am too distracted by our home life to listen to him right now, because he’s out of town and I am not, and I am doing the work that he is not here to do (and which he does for me when I am not here to do it), and so I am really so busy that I don’t have time to hear about his day. I just want to say, “I love you,” which I do mean, I do love him, but I need him to be quieter so I can keep our house and family in order. I sometimes say, “I love you,” not to open up an emotional vein but to cauterize it, keep it full of blood.