The Folded Clock (7 page)

Today I took my kids to the cemetery to talk to E. B. White. E. B. White is buried next to his wife, Katharine Angell White, and their son, Joel White. I urge my children to tell E. B. what a great writer he is, because writers can never get enough reassurance about the importance of their work (even among dead writers this is true). Also E. B. White was a man of great humility; it is a privilege to live, for part of the year, a quarter of a mile from his grave, and to contribute to his eternal renown by remembering certain lines he wrote, for example these:

This afternoon, however, we were here to deliver a different message. Tonight there would be a reading in E. B. White's honor. This reading was meant to raise scholarship money for a local school—a private school—even though White, when he moved to Maine from Manhattan, sent his child to the local public school. I wanted to alert him, not to this irony, but simply to the fact that people would be reading from his work, and in not just one place, but in two. The Odd Fellows Hall was also hosting an E. B. White night. He was being remembered all over the place.

After I told him this, however, I felt horrible. Katharine, his wife, who is buried two feet from her husband, was a writer, too. She met E. B. when she was an editor, but she wrote a
New Yorker
column about seed catalogues and published a great gardening book. I hastened to compliment her as well. I told Katharine that she was also a great writer. But I'd already screwed up. My gaff was extra unforgivable because I am also married to a writer, and I am highly sensitive to the insensitivity of people who treat my husband as a writer in my presence while failing to treat me as one, even if they do consider him to be the better/more valuable/deserving of eternal renown. I never do this to other writer couples, no matter if I think one is superior to the other. If I ask one writer about her work, I ask the other writer about his work. When writer couples ask about or refer constantly to my husband's work and never inquire after mine, I begin to view their behavior as malevolent. One couple does this nearly every time we see them. Afterward, my husband tries to make me feel better by saying, “They probably think you're so confident and secure that you don't need their approval,” and “Their behavior has no basis in reality.” I argue that their assumptions about my confidence are eroding my confidence; that their reality is my reality when we're with them.

To be fair to this couple, this nerve is easy to strike with me. I am competitive with my husband, healthily so. He makes me push my brain to always be better. I perform the same function for him. But he is much less threatened by social inequalities than I am. He's not threatened by them at all. I do not often give him much of a chance, granted. When people start talking about my work in front of him, I quickly steer the conversation in another direction. It makes me uncomfortable to be complimented, but
especially in front of him. I think,
I don't want him to feel bad
, even though there's been not a single indication that he's ever felt bad when people talk about my work in our presence, and not his. Only I feel this way.

My career competitiveness extends to my male friends. Once I overheard one of my best writer friends (a male) talking to another of our best writer friends (also male). The first friend observed to the second friend about a third writer (male),
He's not a threat
. Theirs was just harmless boy banter; my friends are too old to play organized sports, so their competitive energy must be rechanneled onto the athletic field of short-story writing. But it got me thinking. Did they talk to each other about me that way? Later I asked the first friend,
Am I a threat?
I asked it in jest but I was not kidding. I wanted to know, even though the question was, in some ways, moot. Obviously I love and admire my friend; obviously I am not out to threaten him or his career. But what I was asking without asking was this:
Do you feel endangered by the possibility that I might be as good as, or even someday more successful than, you?
And though I pushed him to answer the question using the same language he'd used with our other friend, my friend would only say, “Of course I admire your work. Of course I think you're great,” but he couldn't say,
“You're a threat
,” I guess, because, on a fundamental level that has both something and nothing to do with writing, I am not one. Has any female writer ever been considered a threat by a male one? Aside from possibly Susan Sontag (surely someone had the good sense to feel threatened by her), I couldn't think of a single instance. We circled around and around the topic of threats, both of us feeling uneasy. Finally we agreed to stop talking about it.

Today I brought some objects to the Museum of Modern Art. Among them

This was not a hostile takeover on my part; I'd been invited to do something, to read or perform or something, in the museum. I put my objects in the gallery where an exhibit called
Inventing Abstraction
was being shown; to get to this gallery, you must walk through a doorway over which appears the Kandinsky quote “We must now, then, renounce the object.” The first time I visited the show, I misread the quote as, “We must
not
, then, renounce the object.” I thought this was so balanced and open-minded of Kandinsky; even while penning a perception-altering manifesto, he was committed to seeing all sides and including everyone, even those idiot still-lifers clinging to their skulls and their rotting fruit.
It's okay, you people who love your objects
—
you're included in our revolution, too
.

Later I realized what Kandinsky had actually written. And I felt insecure. And then hostile. My mistake reminded me that I am not by nature a manifesto writer, in that I do not want to hurt people's feelings or make anyone feel left out. I once wrote a manifesto, in which I tried
so hard to be unbiased and fair. I suspect now that if I'd been rabidly biased and wickedly unfair, I'd have been better heard.

So maybe there was a tiny bit of hostility and insecurity involved because I'd been retroactively disinvited to the secession that happened, granted, decades before I was born. I am an object person. I cling to things. As a child I clung. Not for status reasons. Plain anchor reasons. Those objects that provided me with stability were rewarded with my protection. My bedroom lamp, for example. It broke. Possibly it was fixable, who knows; my parents were not handy. They fully knew what they were never doing. A broken lamp would stay broken. Better to remove the failed object from the premises. We removed lots of failed objects. A large porch, for example. Easier to tear off a giant, wraparound porch that was as sizeable as a cruise ship deck than to fix it. (To be fair—
fair
—there was no money. Removal was the only option.)

But when my lamp broke, and when I knew it would be thrown away, I put it in my bed. I slept with the lamp until I was promised: the lamp would not be thrown out. Lamps are shaped like people; they have heads. The sight must have been Duchampian (or Dalí-ian)—a wife lying in bed next to her husband who has been turned into a lamp! And the wife back into a girl!

My mother agreed not to throw away the broken lamp. As mentioned, I've won nearly all the domestic battles in my life. Perhaps this was the first.

So Kandinsky. MoMA. I decided to bring my objects to the abstraction show, fuck Kandinsky. Times had changed. Sure, in Kandinsky's day, the ability to speak via telegraph and then telephone, the ability to dematerialize yourself or to move your body (by trains) at higher
speeds to distant places, this was an exciting life enhancement. The quickness with which words and people traversed time and space helped spread abstraction as an idea. (Next to the exhibit entrance was a huge diagram—it resembled the route maps that airlines print in the back of their in-flight magazines—consisting of points and lines, showing who had spread the idea on which continent and to whom.) Swifter connection represented possibility and promoted thought contagion. It still represents possibility and promotes thought contagion, but things have become endangered. Literally,
things
. Extinctions loom everywhere. “Evacuation of the object world” is how the curator of the MoMA show described what the abstractionists were up to. Once this felt exciting and liberating. To be free of all that weight and volume, and from the hell of what a friend of mine calls “object management.” But now the whole world is being evacuated of things. Who needs abstraction now? Each day brings another tsunami wipe, or it can, on certain days, feel that way. Recently I picked up a book of matches and thought,
Soon we'll be saying, “Remember when we used matches?”

Before bringing my objects to MoMA, I took them to a psychic because I wanted her to tell me about their histories. There's a practice called psychometry that purports to read the energy film left by former owners on the objects they once possessed or simply touched. I brought my objects to a woman named Durga. We sat across from each other at a fluorescent-lit table as though she were about to do my nails. She was blunt and no-nonsense; when I gave her an object to read and she wasn't receiving, she'd say, “I'm not getting anything,” or, more crankily, “What do you want me to tell you about this?”

We also talked about synchronicities and how, the day
before I contacted her, a friend had given her my novel. That a psychic should be reading my novel was not so strange for me (my novel was about psychics); flipped, however, the scenario did seem synchronistic. Imagine you are a psychic and suddenly the author of the book you've just received calls you out of the blue.

“Even for me,” Durga said, “this is an unusual degree of synchronicity.”

By the time I met her she'd read part of my book. She had some factual bones to pick. For example, she told me that the psychic ability to see numbers was very rare (one of my characters psychically receives a serial number). “Numbers have very low numinosity,” she said, which sounded so oxymoronic. (I later looked up “numinosity”: it means “of or relating to a numen.” I looked up “numen”: it means “the spirit or divine power presiding over a thing or place.”) “Only one psychic could see numbers,” she said. She'd forgotten this famous psychic's name.

Two weeks later she wrote me an e-mail:

Because this e-mail arrived from a psychic, I thought it might contain a hidden message. What was Durga really saying? What synchronicities were encoded here? Ingo Swann died on 1/31/13, and the number 13 (as well as any
numeric variations including 1s and 3s) is a meaningful one to me, and has been since the late '80s, before Taylor Swift's mother probably even began menstruating. The book party at which, arguably, my career as a paid writer began happened at a club called “13.” But probably the only secret message the e-mail contained was this: people can seem to be meaningfully near you, you can seem fated to meet them, but the connection, even today, maybe even more so today, because we assume the likelihood of connection, can fail to be made. Durga was connecting me to her failed connection. As is frequently my response when a person reaches out to me, and this reaching out deeply touches me, and even honors me, I do not reciprocate. I never responded to Durga. Whatever connection she sought, I did not allow it.