The Folded Clock (23 page)

Today I am reviewing
The Address Book
by the French artist Sophie Calle. Calle found an address book on the street in Paris. She contacted the people listed in this address book. She interviewed them about their friend, the book's owner. Some claimed to barely know the man.

I imagined someone contacting me about a person in whose address book I might appear. A person I might now barely know. I thought of an old boyfriend with whom I've had no contact since we broke up. I have heard nothing about or from him in over twenty years.

“Boyfriend,” however, is not the right word for what he'd been. He was the not-boyfriend I slept with when my real boyfriend moved to South America. Come midnight I knew which bar to find him in, and we'd spend an hour or so ignoring each other. Mutual neglect constituted foreplay. We were strangers hooking up every time, and even then, ambivalently. At some point one of us would give a sign and we'd inconspicuously leave together. I don't think I ever spent the full night at his apartment, or he at mine. After we had sex, whoever didn't live where we were went home.

This arrangement might make sense—if not in a moral sense, then in an erotic sense—if the sex was great. It wasn't. It was the least great sex I'd ever had in my life. Twenty years later the distinction holds. Maybe that's why I pursued a sexual relationship with him—I wanted to understand why I wanted to pursue a sexual relationship with him. The motivation was as cleanly circular as that. Whatever the reason, since this had never happened to
me before, this kind of fascinatingly terrible sex, I blamed him. He was a prude. He wasn't comfortable with his body. He was unimaginative and inhibited. I felt confident that the fault was entirely his, and thus never worried that he'd told his friends how bad the sex was. I figured he didn't know from bad. My bad was his good.

Eventually we stopped sleeping together. (I no longer lived where he lived.) A few months later I heard he was dating a girl I vaguely knew. She came from a family in which the sisters and cousins were beautiful and sought after but she was only pretty at a glance. I also heard that they'd had sex on a pool table. This wasn't a pool table in someone's home; this pool table was in a bar, or what passed as a bar. They'd had sex on a public pool table! I became insecure and paranoid. Clearly I'd been the one erotically inhibiting
him
; clearly he'd known the sex we'd had was bad, and he'd probably told people about it because its badness really was that remarkable. A few years later he married the pool-table girl. Last I heard, he was a banker in New York like his father. I heard that he really enjoyed being a banker. I heard that he'd said, “I'm really good at it.” This was edifying news. He'd never liked or been good at anything when we were together. He was smart yet adrift. I was honestly happy to hear he'd found a passion.

Then, for over two decades, I lost all track of him.

Today, inspired by Calle, I decided to find him. Was he still happy? I wanted to know. I Googled him by his given name. I Googled him by his nickname. No hits. I added to the search term. I added the town where he grew up, the college he attended. I added “banker.” This led me to his father. His seventy-year-old dad had his photo and bio on numerous financial sites, while his son appeared not even to have a Facebook account.

I added his wife's name to the search—she was also from a fancy family. I figured she and my ex-not-boyfriend hosted school fund-raisers or joined country clubs or sponsored auctions to benefit wildlife preserves.

Nothing.

Didn't he have a job? Didn't he have children who played Little League or soccer? Then I got nervous. Maybe he'd died years ago, before obituaries were posted online. His wife had remarried soon thereafter and had a new surname. Surely a total online absence suggests you are probably not alive.

But nor could I definitively conclude that he was dead. Maybe, I thought, I was looking for a
technically
dead person. This guy had not grown up to be the person I'd assumed he would be—the happy banker with the country club wife. That person was gone, but a new person had taken his place. How could I look for
that
person? I tried to imagine what he'd have become if not a banker. (His father had been priming him since he was in elementary school to be his clone. But he wasn't like his father, or this, at least, is what he'd repeatedly insisted to me. Much of the attraction I felt for him originated from this struggle. I was going to help him discover his true artist self. He'd chosen me to have bad sex with because, for once in my life, a man was coming to
me
to get a world.) Maybe he'd woken up one day and realized,
I hate banking, and I'm about to be thirty
. Maybe he told his wife that he was thinking of quitting his job and starting a nonprofit to help poor people in Africa gain access to better dental care. Maybe his wife thought he was joking, or simply freaking out about getting older, and maybe she didn't take his threats seriously until she realized he was serious. Maybe she warned her father-in-law:
he's making a move
.
Maybe, when approached by his son, the amply warned father refused to give him his inheritance; also he refused to invest any of his own money, thereby forcing his son to stay the course. Maybe when the son complained about his father to his wife, pointing out how his father always opposed him, not because he was right but because, like a gorilla in the wild, he couldn't pass up a single opportunity to assert his dominance, maybe the wife said, “Maybe your father
is
right.” And maybe my ex-not-boyfriend told his appearances-and-money-grubbing wife to go fuck herself, and maybe he appealed to his mother, who'd always believed her son had it in him to be someone other than a lesser version of his father, and maybe the mother gave him the money to start his nonprofit, and maybe he moved to Africa, and maybe he started a nonprofit that obviously hadn't done very well, given that I couldn't find any trace of it, or him, but maybe he'd at least met a girl, and made a satisfying life with her that wasn't newsworthy, but maybe it was proof of their uniquely sturdy happiness that it could not be dispersed and disseminated, not even by the Web.

After a half hour, I gave up. I stopped searching for him. I could have sent an e-mail to a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend; I could have made some phone calls. I did neither. I realized I'd be disappointed if I found him now. This was such a nice life I'd imagined him living.

Today my husband and I cleaned out our storage space. It is not news that we have mice. These mice have feasted on expensive baby clothing that no baby has ever worn;
they have crapped on my first wedding album. These mice are opinionated in all the right ways—Why designer kimonos for an infant! Why the marriage to that unsuitable man!—and still we must kill them. First we must embargo their bedding supply. We swept and boxed and taped and stacked. These tasks always take longer than they should; while killing is the order of the day, it is impossible to fully extinguish one's curiosity about one's own shat-upon past.

Old pictures confirmed to me that I wore glasses that did not suit my former face. What I found most disconcerting about my old (i.e., younger) face, however, is that it suggests I might have become a different person from the one I am. That face wore a lot of vintage men's outdoor gear. In general I look like I live in a place where it is always cold and about to rain, a place where fashion is a prophylactic against the elements and one's body is never revealed until the moment of intercourse, if then. I should have been the wife of a dogsled musher (I was dating one at the time); I should have watched birds or studied lichen; my body and my face should have grown bigger and bigger, rather than shrinking, rather than appearing, as my body and face now appear, as though I'm a practicing self-cannibal. The point at which that person shifted trajectories to become this person was not photographed or documented in the evidence boxes. Where or how she happened could not be ascertained.

I also found a file folder of short stories I'd written in my twenties. I had the same reaction to these stories as I did to the photos of my old face. I didn't immediately recognize the stories as mine. I had no memory of ever writing them. I thought they were copies of stories written by friends that I'd, for whatever reason, kept. But each fictional scenario closely resembled a real-life scenario
from my twenties. One story was about a woman going to Alaska over Thanksgiving with a boyfriend she didn't love named Tom (I'd been to Alaska over Thanksgiving with a boyfriend I didn't love named Jim). One was about a woman playing craps in Reno with her husband (I'd played craps in Reno with my boyfriend). Also, the file was labeled “Stories in Progress.” All signs pointed to the fact that these stories were written by me. But I had no memory of writing them. “In Progress” would seem to imply “failed” if the in-progress-ness has extended, without progress, over a twenty-year period. The struggle to make a story that's inherently shitty into a story that's inherently not, well, often the only good story to come from such a struggle is the story of the struggle itself. Yet I didn't remember the struggles I'd had with the stories in this folder. I didn't remember trying to fix these shitty stories in the loft I rented with my beautiful friend nicknamed the “Queen of Soho” and the Hollywood actor who wished instead to be a concert pianist. I remembered the actor's noisy espresso making and piano playing, but I did not remember trying to fix these shitty stories. I remembered the Queen's heavy footfalls and her incessant fax receiving, but I did not recall them as distractions from trying to fix these shitty stories. I remember weighing my hunger against the shattered concentration that would come from taking the scary freight elevator downstairs, and walking alongside the Holland Tunnel traffic, and buying a bagel from the corner store run by curt men from Beirut, but I did not remember doing so in service of fixing these shitty stories. I don't have an exact equation by which to estimate the time it took for me to fail for the thickness of this file folder, but a decent guess would be years. Which means I did not remember
years
of failing to write a decent story, which is what I most wanted to do at the time. How could I possibly forget this?