The Folded Clock (6 page)

Today I biked to a vintage store. I bought

I also bought a garnet and rhinestone necklace. It's costume, from the '40s, not valuable, and it matches nothing I own, but what swayed me was the weight of it. I brought it home. I preferred looking at it to wearing it. I kept it spread over the top of my dresser as interior decoration. Then I considered giving it to my mother for her birthday. She was about to turn seventy. My husband and I were throwing her a fancy dinner, and turning our house into a three-star restaurant run by children. But was this enough? I worried that I needed to give her an object to commemorate her birthday. A dinner party was too ephemeral a gift. She wouldn't catch accidental sight of it and remember…Me? That she'd turned seventy? Neither of these are things she's likely to forget.

Still, the tradition with landmark birthdays is to give a gift that presumes the receiver needs reminding that they remain beloved and alive. I thought I'd give my mother this necklace. But while I never wore it, I found, for whatever reason, that I didn't want to give it away. I told myself,
You didn't buy it
for
her, and it's not a true present if you didn't buy it with the person in mind
. This gift was technically a regift, from me to myself, and from myself to my mother.

I concluded: I definitely should not give her the necklace. And yet I still couldn't firmly commit. I changed my mind daily. I thought,
She's turning seventy—does she really want an old necklace? Wouldn't she prefer something more fun and modern? If I give her this necklace, won't I offend her by implying that she's no longer young enough to wear fun and modern jewelry?
I thought,
I'm a vintage-wearing person, but she is not a vintage-wearing person. Maybe the
objects of dead people freak her out
. I thought,
If I like it, she probably
won't
like it, because we don't have the exact same taste in jewelry. I have given her jewelry in the past that I've never seen her wear (and that I would wear), and she's given me jewelry in the past that she would wear (but that I never would). By this logic, I should not give her the necklace. Except that I didn't ever wear the necklace. This suggested that she
would
like it and thus I should give her the necklace
.

I did not give her the necklace.

The night of her birthday dinner, I dressed up. Because I was still uncertain about my decision to keep the necklace, I wore it. I thought to myself,
If she doesn't comment on my necklace, it means she doesn't like it, and I made the right choice
. But I often compliment people on items of clothing they're wearing because those items look great on them, not because I think they would look great on me. I compliment a woman on her ring when I can sense that she is proud of or excited to be wearing it. I want her to know that her positive feelings about herself are effectively communicated to me through the object transmitter she's put on her body.

If my mother complimented me on my necklace, it could mean that she herself desired to wear it, or it could mean that she appreciated how
I
wore it. If she said nothing, of course, this would mean unequivocally—she did not like it, not on me, not on her.

We met for cocktails on the front porch as the child staff readied our table. My mother said, almost immediately, “What a pretty necklace!” I tried to divine how she meant this comment. It was pretty on me? It might have been pretty on her? I demurred. “It's just some cheap thing I found at a vintage store.” It was cheap. But I was trying
to make it sound less desirable to her, and also to reassure myself—I hadn't been cheap when I'd failed to give it to her.

Today I realized it was July 19. This hasn't been the case in pretty much forever. For years I've gone days without knowing the date. I exist in relation to dates I've missed. Suddenly I am forty. Suddenly I was forty a long time ago.

The same is true with minutes. The first occasion I had to notice minutes was when I worked briefly as a hostess in a restaurant. The owner was Lebanese; he spoke French and rode a motorcycle and told me that my outfits weren't sexy enough for me to capably say, “Your table is ready.” I hated working there for many reasons, but mostly I hated my time responsibilities—I could never lose myself in the work; I could never look at my watch and be amazed that three hours had passed. Quickly passing time stressed me out, because if time passed too quickly then people wouldn't have time to order dessert and time to pay their checks, and
come time
there would be no tables for the 8:45 reservations. I obsessively monitored the clock leading up to each seating—7:25, 7:26, 7:27, 7:29, 7:30. I never didn't know what time it was, not for one single minute did I not know. This made the shift crawl by. One night lasted a week. I quit after two days. A few years later I heard that the owner was killed on his motorcycle.

Once, however, I remember knowing what time it was for every minute, and yet this made time feel uncatchable, like a fistful of twenties the wind blew out of my hand.
(This happened to me once. My first three years in New York, I lived on an avenue lined with factories and through which the wind tunneled at high speeds. This was also the only time in my life I had fistfuls of twenties because I worked, after quitting my hostess job, as a waitress paid with tips.) I'd met up with a friend in L.A. She lives in London, and at that point we'd e-mailed each other many times a day for a year, but we'd only seen each other twice, for about three days each. Nonetheless, we'd fallen into an intense friendship. We were so intense in L.A. that people mistook us for lovers. We drove to the desert for the weekend, and stayed at a very small spa hotel where all the rooms faced inward toward a thermal pool, and the high desert wind, though hot, blew through our rooms and made air-conditioning seem silly, or at least unhealthy, so we left all of the windows open. The wind was so strong it blew the water glasses off the table. It blew open our books and sped-read the pages. A marine from the local base, on leave with his wife, stayed in the room opposite ours. He liked me because I am blond and marine-friendly. He did not take to my friend, who is darkly elfin, androgynous, and wicked. We decided to mess with him. I had a very good time flashing my wedding ring and talking about my husband while rubbing my friend's shoulders suggestively. Soon he started avoiding me. When I got into the thermal pool, he got out of it. The wind continued to blow. It blew through the days. It blew through the nights. Suddenly it was time to drive my friend back to the airport, and put her on a plane, and then probably I would not see her again for six months or even a year. On the way to the airport, she pushed to stop at a museum to see Christian Marclay's
The Clock. The Clock
—some call it an art installation—is also a twenty-four-hour-long movie that's a fully functional
(and visual) timepiece. Every minute of a twenty-four-hour day is accounted for by a preexisting film clip, in which a clock or a watch appears (often during a dramatic moment, or what feels like a dramatic moment, in whatever film is being sampled—there is something breathless-making about time), showing the appropriate minute (1:22, then 1:23, then 1:25, and so on).

I drove speedily—we didn't have much time to see
The Clock
, and the more quickly I drove, the more time we'd have at the museum, but also the more quickly, it seemed, I'd be dropping my friend on the LAX curb. We arrived at the museum, parked, ran inside, discovered a terribly long ticket line, somehow located another not-so-terribly-long line, found a spot on a couch in the dark screening room, and watched. We'd decided beforehand that we had to leave at 3:45 for her to catch her flight. We passed our dwindling time together watching a visual representation of our dwindling time together. It confused my desire mechanism, and maybe rightly, because my desire mechanism was pretty confused. The movie made me so excited to see how the next minute (3:29, 3:30, 3:31) would be portrayed (what film clip would it be? Would I recognize it?), but I didn't want the time to pass because then we'd have to leave, and then I'd have to say good-bye, and then I wouldn't see my friend again for what felt like an eternity if measured by the time standards we encountered on that couch. Time crawled. Time flew. We broke our vow and stayed until 3:58.

Today I ordered ten toy stethoscopes from a party supply company. I did this over the phone. Toy stethoscopes did not seem to be the sort of items that, if you ordered them online, would come. I often order things online that fail to come. I ordered a birth tub once. It disappeared in Tennessee. I tracked it like an air traffic controller does a plane that vanishes over the Bermuda Triangle, a series of regular blips that suddenly, like a heartbeat, stop. This was a very large item, not the sort of thing one could easily lose. Nor, though expensive, did it seem to be massively desired yet under-available. There is not a black market infrastructure built around birth tubs. Yet no one could account for the birth tub's whereabouts. My birth tub had dematerialized in transit.

This happens to me quite a lot, as I've said. Sometimes I'll place an order online and make my husband click the
CONFIRM PURCHASE
button, because he is confident and believes in ways that I don't, whereas the online commerce universe can sense my faithlessness. When I order things online, I am expressing my desire for an item I have never touched or experienced as a 3-D object, and to trust in the process requires the suspension of something I cannot fully suspend, even though I understand perfectly how online commerce works. As the object travels from the warehouse to me, it gains matter. Presumably it gains matter. But because I am faithless, my objects do not.

So I wanted to talk to an actual person about the stethoscopes. Conversations with strangers are so touching
and intimate these days. Maybe it's simply that any conversation with a stranger, since such conversations are more and more rare, represents something you almost didn't do.
I almost didn't call you about toy stethoscopes
. Every item I've ever bought online represents a conversation with a stranger I didn't have. It's only when the system fails that you talk to people. Or exchange heated e-mails. I once bought some boots online that didn't fit, and I tried to return them, but I no longer had the original box. Because I no longer had the original box, I could not return the boots. I engaged in a lengthy e-mail discussion about this box. The box was worthless—it cost maybe two dollars at most—while the boots cost five hundred dollars. I had never before spent close to this amount of money on any article of clothing; this made me panic, and then become deranged. I wrote the online seller many deranged e-mails. Why should the boots become worthless because of a two-dollar box?

Once I failed to receive a pair of chairs from an eBay seller. She'd disappeared, and with my money. I left her phone messages. I e-mailed her. Finally, weeks later, she called me. We spoke at length about her life. She had a chronic female pain condition that flared at times, incapacitating her. Nothing eased the hell, not even morphine. I asked how this affliction had befallen her. She'd ridden horses as a child, she offered. Maybe that was the cause.

At the time of our conversation, I had just finished a book about a woman with an incurable headache. As I read this book, which chronicled the woman's endless cure quest, I became less interested in her pain than in my changing response to it. I began to think, as many of her doctors had begun to think, that maybe she was crazy
or depressed. As her suffering intensified, and with it her desperation to treat it, I found myself increasingly doubting that she had a headache at all.

The eBay seller and I talked about how difficult it was to solicit people's sympathies over the long term. I admitted that I'm one of those people who harden in the face of other people's incurable pain. I start to blame them for failing to get better. Not to defend myself, I told the eBay seller, but I probably needed for my own sake to believe that I might be to blame for any of my future sicknesses; if I ever became sick, I could find comfort knowing that I was the crux of the problem and thus also the cure. I could just stop being who I was and get better.

We had a really candid conversation, the eBay seller and I, thoughtful and honest. When I arrived at her house to pick up the chairs, however, I found that she'd left them out on her lawn for me. When I knocked on her door to say hello, she did not answer.

Afterward, I told all of my friends about the eBay seller with the female pain problem. This story was good for a chuckle, and mostly at my own expense—no one was so incapable of the simplest online transactions as I was. Always my transactions failed, or became hilariously complicated. Even though none of my friends knew the eBay seller, I'd always felt guilty that I'd used her misfortune to make people laugh at me. Eleven years later, I contracted a strange pain down there, and I've never ridden horses. For three weeks I thought I had an untreatable, incurable condition. I thought I'd brought it on myself. I deserved it for making hay of the eBay seller's misery. It turned out I only had a tight muscle. I was quickly cured.

But because I did not have the proper faith to order these toy stethoscopes online, I called the company. The
man with whom I spoke was very nice; he reassured me I'd receive the stethoscopes by the following Monday, in time for the Fourth of July parade. Then he said how odd it was that I, too, was ordering toy stethoscopes; his company hardly ever sold toy stethoscopes, yet in the past month there'd been a run on toy stethoscopes. We tried to figure out why. Many people were planning universal health care floats for their Fourth parades: this was our best guess. We didn't really have any other ideas. But I thought about the sudden popularity of toy stethoscopes for most of the day. There existed a reason for their popularity even if I didn't know it. Everything can be traced to its point of origin, and possibly to its point of disappearance. We know where things came from and where they are, even if those things have dematerialized in transit. I have become a location buff, possibly because I have a really good sense of direction. My interests and desires can be mapped, or mapped back. In parks, when people veer from the established paths and cut new ones through the grass, these are called “desire lines.” Many people have the same desire when it comes to walking, which implies that we all want to get to the same place, and more quickly. Recently I desired to surround myself with the color cerulean. Six months later so did everyone else. Why did I crave cerulean just before everyone else craved cerulean? I try to crave colors and paths that other people do not crave. Right now, because I recently saw a '60s French movie in which the lead actress is wearing a union suit, I am craving a union suit. I am certain that come next winter, everyone will be wearing union suits. Will I get credit for wanting them first? Why do I need credit for my desire? It's ridiculous. But I do.