The Folded Clock (26 page)

Today I fought with my husband. He is on a diet, not for vanity's sake but because of a recent encounter with a scary illness. A person might think—given my own recent encounter with a scary illness—that I would unreservedly support his wellness pursuit. I do not. Until today I have
acted
supportive, but beneath my support a dark undertow lurked. I'd kept this undertow a secret from him. Instead
I confessed my baffling hostility toward his diet to my female friends. All of them, I was surprised to learn, are or were once involved with men who'd experimented with diets for reasons of health. I discovered that the male diet is a potent relationship disharmonizer. “Threatened” is the word that arose most frequently when I spoke to women about their male dieting partners, as in “I am/was threatened by his diet.” The obvious interpretation of our reaction was this: we feared that our husbands desired to look slimmer and healthier because they'd met another woman and planned, once their transformation was complete, to leave us.

But we weren't scared of being left. Maybe we should have been, but we weren't. We were resentful. The dieting man does not eat the same food as the rest of his family—the diets we were speaking about were not “eat more healthy foods” diets. These diets required extreme abstinence and often had a cultish whiff to them. The adherents of these diets made YouTube videos that were both compelling and disturbing. People lost so much weight that their skulls shrank.

We tried to parse our feelings of endangerment. Was gender primarily to blame? By being on a diet, our husbands were (albeit for very different reasons) behaving like so many of our female friends, some of whom developed eating disorders and became incredibly boring. I was one of those women for a year. Luckily I was able to escape what is often, tragically, inescapable. When I emerged from my brief anorexia incarceration I thought:
Well
that
was a very huge waste of my time
. The monomaniacal dedication of brain activity required to maintain an eating disorder was an inexcusable squandering of one of my best brain years. Plus the obsession was inherently perverse.
Even though I was fixated upon nothing but my body, my brain was somehow totally disengaged, save intellectually, from its singular concern. My body, despite the molecular-level attention paid to it, belonged to a faraway creature, a numb, gray sylph.

Also I did not tell my friends, but to myself I admitted: I was jealous. I was jealous of Dr. Fuhrman, the man who masterminded the diet my husband is following. My husband seems to believe most everything Fuhrman says, and this affronts me because my husband doesn't believe most everything I say. My husband approaches my claims with a loving but skeptical eye. He doesn't
not
question what I say, but occasionally he believes certain ridiculous statements I make because I have probably exhausted him into a place of acceptance. Fuhrman's claims do not exhaust my husband, even though Fuhrman advocates something called “the Nutritarian Food Pyramid,” which sounds to me acceptable only under circumstances of extreme exhaustion. Also my husband is not as sensitive as I am; he does not understand the title of Fuhrman's book
—Eat to Live
—as just so bitchy and rebuking.

“Because I'm eating to die,” I said to my husband.

My husband is an alarmingly smart man; he's a unique thinker to his bones. He is, as a friend once said, a monk or a holy person who might better live in a tower or the desert. He thrives on discipline and solitude. Despite the fact that he has a family and a job and a wife who is always planning parties that he must cook for and attend, he manages to maintain his iconoclastic integrity. Most remarkably he can, without compromising this integrity, happily follow the occasional diet mastermind like Dr. Fuhrman. He has followed a few masterminds since we got married (these are not whimsical switches; he keeps up on the research
and responds in kind). While I take pleasure (when I'm trying to reason him out of his health pursuits) in pointing out how, for example, he is able to endorse the belief “fruit is bad, never eat fruit,” and then, after a mastermind shift, “fruit is great, eat as much fruit as you want,” what I'm really expressing is insecurity. He can weather a belief reversal—one based on science, granted—without doubting the soundness of his faith or his mind.

I, however, am often insecure about what I believe. So, most of the time, is my husband. “Insecure” is maybe not the right word to describe us. We are avid second-guessers because, though we are both professors and thus must act as authorities in certain situations, we find certainty a turnoff. We love to take a conviction we might, for a moment, entertain, and then turn it on its head and make a joke about it. This joking is our form of the Socratic method. Our jokes are interrogations that help us to figure out what we care about, and where our faith, at the moment, lies.

His unfailing certainty about his diet, thus, made me feel isolated. I was making jokes no one got but me. I was making jokes that weren't, technically, jokes. They were criticisms driven by the fear that he was abandoning me to interrogate our future uncertainties alone.

Still, I tried to act supportive. Today I failed. I failed to act my best or at all. As my husband prepared his healthy dinner, and I prepared my moderately healthy one, I had what is best described as a tantrum.

Afterward I lay on the couch. My husband sat in a distant chair. I tried to explain why, when he was on a diet to manage his pain and secure his longevity—why, when he was trying his best not to more rapidly and miserably die—I was being so totally mean. I talked about how,
as a woman
, I'd spent literally decades around other women
(myself included) who cared too much about food. Who obsessed over what they ate, and adhered to bib-lettuce-and-vinegar-only diets, and who became, over time, unhappy and sexless and dull. After watching for decades what I ate, I finally didn't give a shit. I'd been freed from the female curse of perpetual self-dissatisfaction and pleasure denial. His caring about what he ate posed a threat to my enlightened, non-caring state.

I then confessed that I was jealous of Dr. Fuhrman. I further confessed that really I did not give a shit about Dr. Fuhrman; my issues were related to my feeling excluded and subsequently rejected by my husband. He'd found a passion I could not share. He believed and I didn't. Once we spent an entire summer making and eating elaborate banana splits. Now we prepared side-by-side meals. We parallel cooked and I couldn't help but extrapolate that soon we would parallel
live
, and that our vectors would someday permanently cease to cross. It turned out that (contrary to what I'd said to my friends) I
was
scared of his leaving me, but I worried he would do so by never breaking up with me and never moving out.

My husband listened. He confessed that he'd been unceasingly aware of my ambient enmity (my secret had not been such a secret, it seems). He understood, now that I'd explained myself, why. I think we are both worried about the perils of parallel living because we share so many parallels. We are so alike that we pursue the same passion and work at the same university and raise the same children and have the same sense of humor. At the dinner parties I force us to throw more often than is probably healthy for either of us, we are often the only two people laughing. No one makes me laugh more than he does. But we both worry, I think, that we are so alike that we might start to
take for granted the health of our marriage, as we have, until recently, taken for granted the health of our bodies.

Today I found a Rolodex in a trash can at JFK. I was about to enter the security check when I remembered the half-full water bottle in my bag. I needed to dispose of it before I held up the security line and became the scourge of Terminal B. I found a tall, space-age trash can. Its smoothly rounded mouth resembled a portal. Before throwing the bottle into it, I looked inside. I saw a Rolodex of family photographs. I was in a hurry and didn't have time to wonder
Why is there a Rolodex in the trash can at JFK?
I only knew that the Rolodex made me feel bad to the bone. No matter what I decided to do with the Rolodex (return it to the trash can; keep it), I was in a bind. The statement “The situation demanded something of me” felt extremely applicable. How would I respond to the situation?

Situations have demanded something of me before. Once, in my twenties, when I was studying in France, I was with a group of Americans approached by a con artist looking for money. The con artist, an American who was clearly not a student or a tourist, beseeched us, his fellow countrymen, for help. His wallet had been stolen! Also his father had died! He needed money to catch a train to his plane, which left from Paris tomorrow, and which he had to make so that he could attend his father's funeral!
Thank God I have found some Americans!
He repeatedly said. We all knew the guy was conning us—he wore leather shoes in an era when Americans wore nothing but big white
sneakers—but none of us wanted to be the first to call bullshit to his face. The situation demanded a choice. Who did we want to appear to be? To give him money was to appear stupid in front of our friends. To not give him money was to appear heartless. Most people, publicly at least, choose looking stupid over appearing heartless. Or most of the people I know would choose to look stupid.

The Rolodex, like the fake American tourist, was a lose-lose situation that nonetheless demanded a choice. No one was around to publicly shame me, but I am perfectly able to shame myself. And worse—around myself it is not a matter of
appearing to be
stupid or heartless; instead I confirm to myself that I am definitively one or the other.

To keep the Rolodex was to be stupid; to discard it was heartless.

I kept it.

In the security line, I worried. Wasn't I a version of the gullible traveler who acts as an unwitting mule of illegality, i.e., the person who transports, as a kindness, a kilo of heroin hidden in a knitting bag for an innocent-seeming granny? If asked, how would I answer the question,
Did a stranger give you anything to carry?

The situation gave me a Rolodex. The situation demanded of me that I carry it.

Maybe there was an explosive in the Rolodex. Maybe a suicide bomber suffered a crisis of faith or nerve at the security line and ditched the bomb and went back to Queens. Maybe the photos were acid tabs or coated with cocaine that, following a crafty extraction process, would yield enough to net me a life sentence in an Italian jail. (I was headed to Italy to go to the artist colony.) What if, while going through customs in Rome, a dog smelled the drugs on my Rolodex?

It was already becoming
my Rolodex
.

I made it through security. If the Rolodex contained a bomb, it was a good bomb. Maybe, instead of cocaine, the photos were coated with a bioweapon designed to release at cruising altitude. I called my parents to say good-bye. (I hoped it wasn't
good-bye
.) I told them about the Rolodex. My dad said, “Someone in those photos must have really pissed someone off.” I'd also considered this possibility; the cursedness I'd sensed originated from anger or hate directed at a person in the Rolodex photos. Somebody needed to release himself from these bad feelings. He'd thrown the photos away, betting on the psychic exorcism of a landfill burial.

I'd screwed up the process. I'd kept live what should have been dead. Many of the photos had captions. Whoever chose the moments to be memorialized in the Rolodex was obsessed by accidents. There was a photo of a violently shredded white picket fence with the caption “Accident, 1965.” There were photos of trees upended in various hurricanes. There was a photo of the Maidstone Club after a fire destroyed the cafeteria. There was a photo of a road hugging a cliff. The caption read, “Dubrovnik, 1971: Accident going down this coast (to Greece),” after which appeared a photo of a man in a hospital bed (“Belgrade—Yugoslavia”) reading James Michener's
The Drifters
.

I countered my dad's theory with what was—bombs and drugs and anger aside—the likeliest theory. Many of the photos were taken in nearby Long Island. Probably the owner of the Rolodex had recently died. The children—from the photos, I guessed them to be in their sixties by now—had flown in from wherever they lived to clean out the family museum, long docented by the lone surviving parent. Nobody wanted the Rolodex, but nobody could justify
throwing it away. One sibling insisted to another sibling, “You take the Rolodex!” The situation demanded that the sibling not refuse. The sibling who took the Rolodex—it was heavy, and an awkward size, and the photos, in my bag at least, kept sliding out of their plastic jackets—had probably been struggling to find his or her ID to go through security, and the fucking Rolodex was in the way, and it had started to come apart, and in a fit of annoyance the sibling dumped it. He or she had been praying all along for a good excuse to get rid of the Rolodex, just like I'd been praying for an excuse to divorce my ex-husband years ago and was so relieved when he provided me one by spending our savings on the sly. He misbehaved in a way that would hold up in a court of public opinion. It would also hold up in my court of private opinion. I would not appear heartless to the court or to myself by divorcing him. The Rolodex had likewise misbehaved. The sibling was so relieved when it obstructed his basic ability to properly identify himself, find his ticket, and board a plane. He was so relieved to discover it was broken. In all good conscience, the sibling had probably thought to himself:
Finally I am justified in ditching this thing
.