Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

“Ah,” he said. “You mean Mrs. Winston .”

He talked about how sweetly offensive these people could be without even knowing it. How they assume you’re one of them, just because you’ve made it to the party, so to speak. “They’re always talking about ‘us white people,’ in front of me,” he said, “without even realizing that I’m passing.”

Was he talking about passing as a summer person? Passing as a straight person? Passing as a straight summer person? Then he mentioned “passing” a second time. He referred to having longer, curlier hair, and much more of a beard. “And even then they didn’t know I was passing!” he said.

Now I was really confused. To my eye, this guy was white. I suspected, too, that he wanted me to ask him, “Wait, aren’t you white?”

I decided not to ask him.

As I was leaving, I saw a pair of pottery cups and saucers by a now defunct, once influential pottery studio. The old barn and workshop still existed in a town twelve miles from mine; my friend and I had snooped around the property a few weeks ago. The sign remained, and the studio appeared operational, full of dusty wheels and botched pots lining the windowsills, even though the place had been shut down for years. There were rumors (my friend had read somewhere) that you could tour the workshop and the barn. But we found no people and no signs. After trying all the doors, we left.

I told the man at the antiques store that I wanted to buy the two cups and saucers. He said, “They’re a very good price.”

Compared to the rest of his offerings, this was true.

“Do you know about that pottery?” he said.

I told him that I knew a little bit about it.

“And the woman who founded it,” he said, “she really was a remarkable woman.”

“She really was,” I agreed. I had no idea about this woman. I knew exactly not one thing about her. I’m sure hers was an interesting story, because these stories always are. This stretch of the coast attracts artists, lifestyle eccentrics, self-exilers.

I don’t know why I pretended I knew as much as he did when I knew nothing. I don’t know why I refused his offer. No doubt he’d met this woman, or knew her son, or could have provided excellent gossip about her odd habits, communicated through her old cleaning lady, whose daughter was now his cleaning lady, or some such connection. But I was late to get home. I figured I’d Google her later and learn for myself what made her so remarkable. I did this. I failed to learn much. Her name was Angelica Baker. The most informative was a piece written by the antiques dealer I’d just been talking to, but the article was more concerned with a modernist pavilion razed by a banker with traditional tastes. I clicked around and discovered that the antiques dealer kept a blog. (He’d written an article called “The Trouble with the Footmen: Servant Problems in Old Bar Harbor.”) I realized how much we had in common. He’s obsessed with mansions and wealth — his is the adult version of my kid obsession with Greenwich real estate — but he’s also struck mute by a simple white cape. I own a simple white cape that’s two hundred years old. Antique capes are modernist in their way, two or three cubes and rectangles stuttering across a field. The sight of one relaxes my whole body. On his blog he’d posted a picture of a white cape under a quote from Coco Chanel, “Elegance is refusal.” Was it a mark of elegance, my refusal to ask him about his background, my refusal to let him tell me a good story about a potter? Regardless, now I was far more curious about him. I vowed to stop by his antiques store more often next summer. I thought we’d get along.

Today I went to a Virginia Woolf reading. For some reason this reading was held at a law school. At the front desk I was asked by an old woman holding a hand-written sign that said VIRGINIA WOOLF, as though she was a chauffeur picking up Virginia Woolf at the airport, if I were going to the Virginia Woolf reading. I confirmed. She said, “I guessed that about you.” I got offended. Why I didn’t know. When I entered the library where the reading was being held I knew. I am of that age now where I am looking for the next age I will be. How will I dress? How will I act? Here were women in their last ages; they wore kimono blouses and ethnic scarves and had buzzed, asymmetrical hair. I felt like I was in a late-80s women’s studies class. I’d once admired women who looked like this; what had changed? I said to myself, They’re only dressing for women like themselves . I often claim that I dress for other women. But this crowd felt more insular and hermetic. There was a formula to belonging.

Since I am older but not yet old, I try not to judge even while, to protect myself, I’m totally judging. So trying not to judge, I surveyed these women and thought: Maybe when you get older you want to be part of a visually defined group. Maybe it is easier to be recognized and acknowledged as part of a group because to be acknowledged individually becomes harder over time . I’ve noticed that I have to look harder at older women in the face to see their faces. I stare and I stare and then suddenly — there they are. I have to look harder at my own face to see myself in it. My face was signifying me so well for a while; now, again, it is failing. When I look in the mirror I literally feel like I’m boring down through a surface that doesn’t catch the light, that isn’t quickly bouncing back a discernible message. I am starting to fail on the streets to communicate with my face because pedestrians don’t have that kind of time. They are in a hurry. Recently I started wearing a bone around my neck. It’s a seal vertebra I found on a beach that’s for sale; I hope, if a seal spirit sees fit to deliver unto me a massive windfall, that the beach will someday be mine. The bone makes pedestrians stare, not at me, but at it. This seems a good first step. Who is that woman wearing the bone? Who wears a large bone around her neck? This woman does. Please take the time to look at her.

Today I sat next to an eighty-nine-year-old man at dinner named Mr. Pym. He seems, like Dick Cavett, to have known all of the most interesting human beings of the twentieth century. He was not a name-dropper so much as a man who didn’t, by virtue of his lifestyle, know a single unfamous person save his own mother (who was, he thrice repeated in his Georgian accent, “a wonderful woman”; he was haunted, daily, he said, by the unkind words he’d said to her as a boy). When asked by an architect (seated to my other side) if he’d lived his life joyfully or angrily, Mr. Pym replied, “I should have been more angry.” He was too nice, he said, and primarily defined himself as an avoider of conflicts. He was too nice, even, to fire people, he said; “I just wait for them to die.” But then he confessed that he’d considered hiring a murderer from Russia to kill an employee who was making his life hell. “It would only have cost about $3,000,” he said.

For such a conflict-avoiding man, he revealed, through his stories, a fairly consistent aggressive streak. He was, he said, the only person whose advice the writer Mary McCarthy had ever taken. (McCarthy was not a person, apparently, to whom one gave advice.) He’d visited her house in Maine while doing a photo essay on her town and its buildings. (This was the same town with the white house ordinance where Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, and Elizabeth Hardwick lived.) McCarthy’s house was hidden by a pair of trees. He said to her neighbor, “If I had some overalls and a chain saw, I’d take these trees down myself.” His remark was reported to McCarthy. “He’s right,” she apparently said. The trees came down. Later Mr. Pym mentioned going to the theater with the poet Marianne Moore. Over dinner, this man told Moore about his mother’s house down south (also, it seemed, his house). He hated this house. He wanted to get rid of his mother’s house and move a house from a hundred miles away to the spot her house currently occupied. His own mother would be displaced while this house swapping occurred. He asked Moore what he should do. Live with the terrible house? Or destroy it, make his mother homeless, and truck in, from a distance, the house he desired?