Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

After a drink I felt much better. I walked down Park Avenue and decided that I was on a spiritual quest. Since I’d failed to find a guru to follow, maybe I needed a god. I entered a church, an actual church, but I couldn’t seem to get past the gift shop. I considered buying an academic book on spirituality, then I considered buying a pop culture book on spirituality, then I noticed, across the street from the gift shop a restaurant called Le Relais de Venise. I’d never seen this restaurant before, though I’ve lived twenty years in this city. Just the sight of this restaurant made me afraid. It took me back to that semester in France, which was also my first time out of the country. I’d been dreaming, as I’ve said, of going to France for years, in fact I’d pestered my parents (neither of whom had been to Europe) so regularly that my mother, when she put me on the plane, said, with pride and sadness, “I always thought I’d get to Europe before you did.” She didn’t, which was why I felt so terribly that I’d had no fun. I’d found Paris typified by these Le Relais de Venise-type brasseries, the lamps polished to a cornea-stabbing sheen and the red pleather upholstery and the wryly indifferent vibe, like maybe Sartre was the manager. I remember drinking vanilla tea in these brasseries and everything stunk of old tobacco smoke and there was never a sun in the sky, only a horizon-wide tarp that lifted slightly to allow the light in at noon and then lowered again at three p.m., returning the city to gloom. This wasn’t happening now — until suddenly, again, it was. The Relais de Venise, this catalyst of remembered Parisian despair, started to infect New York. I imagined Lexington Avenue as a street in Paris, and this formerly familiar point of geography unpinned itself from the familiar and suddenly I was standing in the middle of a strange city, with no idea what came after this street, where it led, and how it connected to the bridge that connected to the highway that connected to the street where I’d grown up. How much of my daily life in New York, even now, is made possible by the fact that I have, in my head, a clear map to take me back?

And yet. An innocence is lost when the path becomes too clear. I still remember the first time I ever came to New York. I’d wanted so long to escape from Maine and finally, for the length of an April vacation, I did. I rode into town on a Greyhound bus, alone. I was eleven. The bus pierced the outmost rim of the city, it seemed, an hour before we reached Port Authority. By the time we unloaded at the gate, I felt I’d been wound downward into the gears of a sooty clock. I would never find my way out. I felt spooked and happy at the thought of being so lost. Now I am never lost in New York. Whatever mastery I feel is instantly undone by the suspicion that I have ruined my capacity for awe.

Speaking of awe. A few days ago — I am spinning time now (it is ten months later than “today”) — I was in Rome with my family for the children’s school vacation. I had not been to Rome in twenty-five and a half years. The last and only time I’d been to Rome had been in the spring of 1988, after my semester in France. I’d been reunited with the boyfriend whom I’d imagined dying every night before I fell asleep. It was spring, and we’d lain on a grassy hill near the Piazza del Popolo, and watched dogs chasing one another, and we felt the thrilling expansiveness, or at least I did, of our futures.

This was my expansive future. I was in it. My boyfriend was not. My children by a different man, though soaked and cold, were uncomplaining as we walked past this same grassy hill. Our family, though we ought to have been cursing the wet skies, was happy. I should have felt mastery over the weather and also the many fates and also over myself, but instead I felt nothing. I experienced, as I passed that same slope, not a single trace of that girl. She was no longer — because it was cold and wet and almost three decades later — lying in the grass. I wanted to show myself and say to her, “This will be you someday!” She might have been relieved to know — it all worked out. But we could not connect. It felt like losing a child. Not to death but to adulthood. I suppose this is more or less what happened to her. She lost herself to me.

Speaking of lost. I seem to have lost “today.” Now it is six months earlier than it was when I started this entry. I am in Maine, and it is a year since I began this book, and I am trying to finish it. I have just spent the weekend with my parents. I am convinced that it is impossible to temporarily visit people with whom you used to permanently live. We cannot tap back into the old ease of cohabitation. We try and we try, and I don’t want to call these attempts futile, because for every million misses there exists a single success. I had a success five days ago. I rowed to an island with my father and my son. My son ignored us — he set mussel shells afloat and then sunk them with a raining hell-fire of pebbles. My father and I, meanwhile, admired the rocks balanced atop other rocks. In Maine, on islands, rock manipulation is a form of tagging. We were here . The rock manipulation feats of our predecessors were daunting, almost spooky. They were supernatural acts of object levitation. A tall, thin rock balanced on its narrowest point, like a saltshaker on a pile of salt. I thought we could never practice this variety of beach sorcery, but we tried and we did. We were either extremely skilled or what we were attempting was not, despite appearances, very hard. Regardless, the activity consumed us. My father and I, we walked along the shoreline and searched for rocks. We tried to find the right combination of hollow here and jag there. Though we’d never before performed such precarious and optically illusory balancing acts, the activity felt familiar to us both. I had spent many summer days as a kid trying to lose myself to fun on islands. My father had spent many summer days — and winter days, and fall and spring days — trying to lose himself to fun with me. We were at the mall. We were spinning tops. We were drilling downward. The disappearance of the invisible but present object — time — is how we fall back into love with people we never, according to language at least, stopped loving. E. B. White once wrote, “The whole problem is to establish communication with one’s self.” Sometimes the self I return to loving belongs to me.

But to return to “today.” The today when I was in Manhattan. I walked back to the church gift shop. I almost bought the academic book on spirituality, but then I realized I would never read it, and that I would feel bad both for wasting money and for failing to pursue what others pursue so passionately and with such discipline. I stood on the subway platform and wondered, when would I become a regularly, rather than erratically, spiritual person? Probably never. One cannot orchestrate an aperture. One cannot plan a feeling. One can plan for other things, however. One can plan for trains.

The best I could manage, on this day, was to plan to plan for the unplannable. I had to have faith that someday I’d be doing rock tricks on beaches with my father and my son. I did not know at that time that I’d be doing this in exactly 166 days. Such math was not available to me on that platform and likely never will be available, but who can say anymore what we’ll someday easily know. Instead of reading the spirituality book I didn’t buy, I watched the countdown on the monitor. Like the British guy in the Oyster Bar, I found this improvement brilliant. I had no uncertainties about time this time. I knew exactly when my train was coming.

Heidi Julavits is the author of four critically acclaimed novels ( The Vanishers, The Uses of Enchantment, The Effect of Living Backwards , and The Mineral Palace ) and coeditor, with Sheila Heti and Leanne Shapton, of the New York Times bestseller Women in Clothes . Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s , and The Best American Short Stories , among other places. She’s a founding editor of The Believer magazine and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Manhattan, where she teaches at Columbia University. She was born and raised in Portland, Maine.