The Folded Clock (13 page)

Today we had dinner at the German villa in which we are living until December. (Technically, my family and I are not living in the villa; we are living in a small cottage by the gate. We do, however, eat meals at the villa.) This villa was built in the late 1800s and has a WWII-related story I've been told secondhand; roughly it involves the Jewish family who once owned the place and the gratitude they felt toward the avenging Americans, who, after the war, used it as a rec house for military personnel and filled it with Ping-Pong tables. When the Americans left, the family, in order to ensure a future of continued German
American ideas exchange, donated the villa to an American ambassador who turned it into an academy (minus, sadly, the Ping-Pong tables). This story, or some slightly more accurate version, is how the villa came into my country's possession; this is how I am being served a fancy dinner in it.

Most everyone living at this villa is an expert on foreign policy, on American and European intellectual history, on international economic issues, and on other topics I know nothing about. For months, my husband and I have worried that we'll have nothing to say to the experts at the many meals we're meant to share with them. Here is a good example of why we are worried. Last night my husband and I, in bed, Googled
WW1 why did it happen
.

At breakfast the other day, I chitchatted with an expert who was trying so hard to relate to me on my turf, such as he understood it; he said how much he appreciated having writers around because they added levity to the usually grave proceedings. But he also had such respect for writers! He brought up the fact that UNESCO had recently awarded
Das Kapital
a distinction, or maybe it was a prize. I asked if UNESCO only named nonfiction books as winners of this distinction or prize, and he replied, “Oh no, they've also named…” and he cited a very long title in German. I admitted that I had never heard of this book. He repeated the title. I said, “I'm sorry, I don't know it.” And then he said, “It's the incredibly famous Middle High German epic on which Wagner based
The Ring
series.” I said, “Oh, right,
right
!” The expert seemed a little crestfallen. He could forgive me for failing to be an expert in his area of expertise; he seemed slightly less willing to forgive me for failing to be an expert in my own.

(I have just looked up the UNESCO distinction/prize
the expert mentioned. It's an international program called the “Memory of the World,” the stated goal of which is as follows: “to safeguard the documentary heritage of humanity against collective amnesia, neglect, the ravages of time and climactic conditions, and willful and deliberate destruction.” What the Memory of the World program does not safeguard against is the failure of seemingly very educated and memory-loss-aware people to have read or even heard of these works to begin with. It does not safeguard the documentary heritage of humanity against people like me.)

By the night of the first dinner—today's dinner—my anxiety about socializing with these experts was chart-breaking. I figured the best I could do was make jokes and then more jokes. Or I would—since I'd recently started taking longish swims in the Atlantic Ocean—talk about sharks. I would cite shark attack statistics for the lake we could see through the dining room windows (
since before the beginning of time, no shark attacks on humans have been reported in this lake
). Fortunately, I was seated near an architect (I could talk buildings) and the fourteen-year-old son of a Chinese foreign policy expert (I could talk
Hunger Games
). I was also seated near a man in a banker's suit who was probably younger than me but who felt, categorically speaking, like a no-fun uncle. He introduced himself as the villa's CFO; we talked grounds, we talked improvements and expensive plumbing disasters. I decided to introduce the topic of the automatic mowers. The villa's property has a pair of automatic mowers—each is a three-wheeled robot the size and shape of a small ottoman. They are otherworldly to some—my son calls them “the zombie mowers”—and too human to others—my daughter and I have given them names and noted their different personalities. The mower who works the grass patch on the upper
grounds we've named Schultz; Schultz is lazy and spends a great deal more time in his recharging hut than does the mower we named Greta, who tirelessly works a hilly, and much vaster, grass patch on the lower grounds. She is always mowing, even on weekends. She is dogged and uncomplaining, but my daughter and I have sensed her world-weariness. Greta long ago accepted her lot in life. Schultz, meanwhile, does the absolute minimum to get by.

I brought this up to the CFO; I thought he might want to know, from an insider's perspective, how certain of his employees were performing.

He said, “Well that's very interesting,” and proceeded to tell me that in fact
Schultz
had been performing much better than Greta. And not only that, but Greta and Schultz were in competition with each other; this was their trial period. When the period concluded, only one of them would get the job. (Not one of
them
. Technically, two mowing companies were in competition for the villa's mowing contract.) At the moment, it appeared that Schultz had it in the bag. As people say of slam-dunk job candidates,
It was his to lose
.

This upset me. I couldn't help but think:
How typical
. First, how typical that a man (Schultz) does no work at all and is considered the superior candidate, and the woman (Greta) works and works and works yet is still not “good enough” to get the position. Greta's dedicated hard work even seemed, to this CFO, a strike against her; what a shitty mower she must be if she can't accomplish the job in half the time, and spend the rest of her day in her recharging hut, sucking down electricity! (I am failing here to interrogate the fact that it was my daughter and I who assigned gendered names to these mowers. I honestly cannot remember if we did it before or after we got to know their different personalities.)

I said to the CFO, “I don't see how your data is remotely reliable.” I pointed out that the two mowing jobs were hardly comparable; Schultz was responsible for a small, flat, cleanly geometric patch of lawn, while Greta's patch was three times the size, irregularly shaped, and half overtaken by a steep hill. “If you're going to compare them, you must switch their spaces. You must make Schultz mow the big and hilly lawn, and give Greta the flat, small one. It's otherwise not fair.”

I almost said, “It's practically inhumane!” This villa takes its humanitarian concerns very seriously. Many of the experts invited here have dedicated their lives to improving conditions for humans. To let such a travesty occur just beneath the vast windows of the dining room in which many Nazis had once dined (also directly across the lake from the Wannsee Conference house, in which some famous Nazis met to discuss the “Final Solution”) and where we were currently enjoying chanterelle consommé, well, I didn't have to rub his nose in the irony.

The CFO looked at me. He said, “You're right to point that out.”

I felt proud of myself. I honestly thought he might offer to hire me (another job won), or tell me that my true talents were being wasted as a writer—I should be in human resources or business management. Now Greta would have her chance, and she would succeed, or she wouldn't, but regardless, I hadn't stood passively by while she was passed over. I had saved her from injustice! Then I realized I'd accomplished no such feat.
You're right to point that out
. The CFO's statement was without content; it held no promise or reassurance or compliment. In fact, it was a total brush-off; possibly even his sentence contained some hidden irritation.
What do you, a writer, know about
groundskeeping budgets?
His statement was the discomforting equivalent of what certain people say after I give a reading at a library or a bookstore or wherever. They are politic. They are careful to deliver messages so hollow that they beg to be filled with unstated criticisms. These people do not say,
I love your work
, or
That was so great
. These people say,
How wonderful it was to hear you read
.

Today the weather in New York was drizzly and cold, and I was reminded of a semester I once spent in France. When I was nineteen I lived in a French town called Blois, and for four months the weather was rainy, gray, densely cold, the kind of cold that penetrates to the body's core and must be leached out by a hot bath. Fire won't do. Clothing is useless. Once your bones have been breached, hot water is the only cure.

While I'd been scheming for years to get to France, I'd had a miserable time that semester and the weather was only partially to blame. I'd left in America a boyfriend to whom I was more attached than I otherwise might have been because I'd gotten pregnant a few months earlier. When a nineteen-year-old good-college-attending girl gets pregnant, she tells herself she has no option but to undo her mistake. She is pro-choice (she's driven many hours to attend rallies), but she prefers, because it is easier on her conscience, to think of herself as choiceless. Her life trajectory, such as she understands it, decrees: abortion is the sole outcome of this scenario.

No girl I knew, in other words, had babies, but more
than a few had had abortions. I'd attended two abortions before my own. I'd been invited along to do the driving, and hold the hands, and sit afterward in the bars and fetch the drinks. The boyfriends, though informed of our activities, were never present. Abortions are women's work, I guess.

Regardless, in France I was more fragile than usual. I missed my boyfriend to the point of illness. I talked to him weekly on the phone in the cold French house I inhabited with a man named Girard and a woman named Marie. I lived in a basement room that was doubly cold and also damp. After I hung up with my boyfriend I'd descend to the basement and lie on my bed and feel the weight of the house pressing down. It would be months before I'd see him. I felt so homesick I might have been five years old. I'd halfheartedly tried to find a love substitute in France among the twelve students on my semester abroad program, I discreditably had. But the cutest guy was pretentious and insecure, and the second cutest guy was Austrian and impenetrable. Instead I developed a close relationship with our TA. Halfway through the semester, she let me wear her best sweater basically every day. We'd each been wearing the same small suitcase of clothes for weeks at this point; other people's clothing was, more than it usually is, a break from ourselves. Our identities had been winnowed to four shirts, two sweaters, a pair of jeans and a skirt and one pair of boots, all of which stunk of nightclub cigarette smoke. The TA's sweater was nicer (in our opinion) than any other sweater worn by a foreign exchange student in Blois—and maybe in all of France—that winter; we each coveted it. That she'd awarded it to me was the equivalent, if we were still at our American college, of an older boyfriend giving a girl his torn and stained canvas jacket to wear, the one everyone knew, by the unique pattern of destruction,
was his. In my mother's generation, men gave women their school rings, or their varsity jackets, if they were athletes, in order to claim ownership, and women wore them, well, I don't know why. To prove they were desirable enough to be claimed? When I was in high school, I borrowed and wore my father's clothing more than I wore my mother's. At the time I saw my preference for my father's clothing over my mother's as a logical extension of a tomboy childhood. But maybe it wasn't just about that.

During our school holiday, my TA and I traveled together to the South of France and Spain and Mallorca. We were living off of our respective summer job earnings, and to make the earnings last we subsisted on chocolate bars and baguettes and shared a hotel bed. The TA had the same taste in architecture as I did. We chose shabbily romantic places, the evocative atmospheres of which made me miss my boyfriend so much that, when trying to fall asleep each night, I imagined his plane crashing when he eventually flew to France to meet me in May. I stayed awake until three a.m. worrying this hypothetical into existence. Every day I despaired at sundown. In a few hours, I had another appointment with scenes of his demise.

One night when the TA and I were in Nice I awoke to find her sobbing in our bed. She refused to tell me why. I started guessing. I thought maybe if I stumbled upon the trigger for her distress she'd be spared the burden of articulating it. We'd both been reading a Jean Rhys novel called
After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie
, about a depressed woman who stays home and drinks and grows yet more depressed. I was so emotionally destroyable at the time that I thought it wise to stop reading it. My TA had bravely finished the novel earlier that week; the dysphoric aftereffects were still lingering, perhaps? Also she had a sort-of boyfriend she'd
left in the States. Possibly she missed him? Possibly he'd failed to write her or call her enough? I knew the damage that night could do to a boyfriend.

These were not the reasons. Finally she said into her pillow, angrily, “You look so much prettier in my sweater.”

I didn't know how to respond because I knew, even then: She was lying. She was one of those women who did not compare herself to other women; she just confidently
was
. Also, we were not competitive over looks or over anything. We both knew: She was more beautiful than I was. She was also smarter, and funnier, and more mischievous and braver and way better at French. She was better at all languages, even nonexistent ones. We often killed time in train stations pretending to be people we weren't. I'd pretend that I was her mute sister, and that we were from Estonia or Finland or some country with a language no one in France was likely to speak. She'd engage in conversation French men at station cafés, and then “translate” for me what they were saying into “our” language, i.e., her very plausible-sounding gibberish. My passive role was not to laugh, a role that proved not so passive, a role that was arguably the harder of the two. We once tried our ploy with the roles reversed, with her as the mute, me as the chatty sister. But speaking fake languages is as hard as speaking real ones. It required grammatical and sonic improvisational skills I didn't possess, and this failure proved to us, yet again, that she was my superior. She was my TA in school and in life.

Which was why I knew she was lying. What did she care how I looked in her sweater? Regardless, I didn't press her. We fell asleep. We awoke to a mild awkwardness that dissipated by breakfast. We never spoke of the incident again. We don't speak anymore about anything. We had a falling-out ten years ago, when my first husband and I got
divorced, and I didn't tell her before I left him that I was leaving, and I didn't tell her where I'd be disappearing to for a few months. She left messages that grew increasingly angry. I got angry at her anger. In retaliation, I didn't call her back. I knew I'd be seeing her at a wedding in a few months. We could resolve our differences wearing formal dresses in an atmosphere padded by mandatory joy. At the last minute, however, she canceled. Not even the bride knew why. Eight years later I ran into a mutual acquaintance on the sidewalk who gave me her e-mail address. I sent her an e-mail. She never wrote back.

Years after the night in Nice, my TA became a lesbian, which was no great surprise to anyone, or it wasn't a surprise to me.

The friends to whom I tell the Nice story, a story that now concludes with my TA's and my “break” and her eventual gayness, jump to the obvious interpretation. “She was clearly in love with you,” they say, and I lead them to conclude this. I would never say it myself, but I like to hear it said. I would never say it because I don't believe it's true. When I remember what my TA said and the anger with which she said it
—You look so much prettier in my sweater
—she was angry that the sweater didn't turn her into the person she still, given her strict family and also, frankly, the times, hoped she'd be—straight like me. She had everything on me but this: I was a straight girl who'd had an abortion and missed her boyfriend. I was a straight girl looking pretty in her sweater.